Rumour assigned to Fielding's friend and neighbour at East Stour, the Rev. William Young, the honour of being the original of Parson Adams; and it is a pleasant coincidence that the legal assignment for Joseph Andrews, here reproduced in facsimile, should bear the signature, as witness, of the very man whose "innate goodness" is there immortalised. If there be any detractors of Fielding's personal character still to be found, they may be advised to remember the truism that a man is known by his friends, and to apply themselves to a study of William Young in the figure of Parson Adams.
Of the charming picture of rustic beauty and innocence presented in the blushing and warmhearted Fanny less need be said; for Fielding's ideal in womanhood was soon to be more fully revealed in the lovely creations of Sophia and Amelia. And honest Joseph himself, his courage and fidelity, his constancy, his tenderness and chivalrous passion for Fanny, his affection for Mr Adams, his voice "too musical to halloo to the dogs," his fine figure and handsome face, concerns us here chiefly as demonstrating that Fielding, when he chose, could display both virtue and manliness as united in the person of a perfectly robust English country lad.
These then, are some of the figures that Fielding loved to create, breathing into their simple virtues a vigorous human life, fresh as Coleridge said, as the life of a Spring morning. In these joyous creations of his heart and of his genius, the great novelist assuredly gives us a perfectly unconscious revelation of his own character. And among the changing scenes of this human comedy one incident must not be forgotten. In the famous episode of the stage coach, all Fielding's characteristic and relentless hatred of respectable hypocrisy, all his love of innate if ragged virtue is betrayed in the compass of a few pages: in those pages in which we see the robbed, half-murdered, and wholly naked Joseph lifted in from the wayside ditch amid the protests and merriment of the respectable passengers; and his shivering body at last wrapped in the coat of the postilion,--"a Lad who hath since been transported for robbing a Hen-roost,"--who voluntarily stripped off a greatcoat, his only garment, "at the same time swearing a great Oath (for which he was rebuked by the Passengers) 'that he would rather ride in his Shirt all his Life, than suffer a Fellow-Creature to lie in so miserable a Condition.'"
Much has been written concerning the notorious feud between Fielding and Richardson, a feud ostensibly based upon the fact that Joseph Andrews was, to some extent, frankly a parody of Richardson's famous production Pamela. In 1740, two years before the appearance of Joseph Andrews that middle-aged London printer had published Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, achieving thereby an enormous vogue. That amazing mixture of sententious moralities, of prurience, and of mawkish sentiment, became the rage of the Town. Admirers ranked it next to the Bible; the great Mr Pope declared that it would "do more good than many volumes of Sermons"; and it was even translated into French and Italian, becoming, according to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who did not love Richardson, "the joy of the chambermaids of all nations." That all this should have been highly agreeable to the good Richardson, a 'vegetarian and water-drinker, a worthy, domesticated, fussy, and highly nervous little man,' ensconced in a ring of feminine flatterers whom he called 'my ladies,' is obvious; and proportionate was his wrath with Fielding's Joseph Andrews, of which the early chapters, at least, are a perfectly frank, and to Richardson audacious, satire on Pamela. The caricature was indeed frank. Joseph is introduced as Pamela's brother; he writes letters to that virtuous maid-servant; and the Mr B. of Richardson becomes the Squire Booby of Fielding. But there can be hardly two opinions as to such ridicule being an entirely justified and wholesome antidote to the pompous and nauseous original. To Fielding's robust and masculine genius, says Mr Austin Dobson, "the strange conjunction of purity and precaution in Richardson's heroine was a thing unnatural and a theme for inextinguishable Homeric laughter." To Thackeray's sympathetic imagination the feud was the inevitable outcome of the difference between the two men. Fielding, he says "couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny cockney bookseller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern choruses, and had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands of empty bowls, and reeled home to chambers on the shoulders of the watchman. Richardson's goddess was attended by old maids and dowagers, and fed on muffins and bohea. 'Milksop!' roars Harry Fielding, clattering at the timid shop-shutters. 'Wretch! Monster! Mohock!' shrieks the sentimental author of Pamela; and all the ladies of his court cackle out an affrighted chorus."
Looking back on the incident it seems matter for yet more Homeric laughter that Richardson should have called the resplendent genius of Fielding "low." But the feud, it may be surmised, led to much of the odium that seems to have attached to Fielding's name amongst some of his contemporaries. Feeling ran high and was vividly expressed in those days; and when cousinly admiration for Fielding was coupled by an excellent comment on Richardson's book as the delight of the maidservants of all nations, personal retorts in favour of the popular sentimentalist were but too likely to ensue. Apart from this aspect of the matter the ancient quarrel does not seem a very essential incident in Fielding's life.
The lack of means indicated by Fielding himself, in his reminiscence of this winter of 1741-2 as darkened by the illness of himself, his wife and of a favourite child, attended "with other Circumstances, which served as very proper Decorations to such a Scene," received but little alleviation from the publication of Joseph Andrews. The price paid for the book by Andrew Millar was but £183, 11s.; and there is no record that Millar supplemented the original sum, as he did in the case of Tom Jones, when the sale was assured. The first edition appears to have consisted of 1,500 copies. A second edition, of 2,000 copies was issued in the same [summ]er, [2] and a third edition followed in 1743.
Fielding's formal declaration that he described "not men but manners"; his solemn protest, in the preface to this very book, that "I have no Intention to vilify or asperse anyone: for tho' everything is copied from the Book of Nature, and scarce a Character or Action produced which I have not taken from my own Observations and Experience, yet I have used the utmost Care to obscure the Persons by such different Circumstances, Degrees, and Colours, that it will be impossible to guess at them with any degree of Certainty"--represent rather his intention than the result. The portraits of "manners" by the "prose Homer of human nature" were too lifelike to escape frequent identification. Thus not only was the prototype of Parson Adams discovered, but that of his antithesis, the pig-breeding Mr Trulliber, was thought to exist in the person of the Rev. Mr Oliver, the Dorsetshire curate under whose tutelage Fielding had been placed when a boy. Tradition also connects Mr Peter Pounce with the Dorsetshire usurer Peter [Walter]. [3]
Two echoes have come down to us of the early appreciation of this novel. A translation of Joseph Andrews, "par une Dame Angloise," and bound for Marie Antoinette by Derome le Jeune, was placed on the shelves of her library in the Petit [Trianon]. [4] And, seven years after the appearance of Joseph Andrews, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when sixty years old, writes from her Italian exile: "I have at length received the box with the books enclosed, for which I give you many thanks as they amuse me very much. I gave a very ridiculous proof of it, fitter indeed for my granddaughter than myself. I returned from a party on horseback; and after having rode 20 miles, part of it by moonshine, it was ten at night when I found the box arrived. I could not deny myself the pleasure of opening it; and falling upon Fielding's works was fool enough to sit up all night reading. I think Joseph Andrews better than his [Foundling]." [5]
[CHAPTER IX]
THE Miscellanies AND Jonathan Wild
"Is there on earth a greater object of contempt than the poor scholar to a splendid beau; unless perhaps the splendid beau to the poor scholar."
Covent Garden Journal, No. 61.