"And if our prayers shall be heard," continues Pamela, "and we shall have the pleasure to think that his" (her husband's) "advances in piety are owing not a little to them ... then indeed may we take the pride to think we have repaid his goodness to us and that we have satisfied the debt which nothing less can discharge."
Or, again, in the same letter, she exclaims anew:
"See, O see, my excellent parents, how we are crowned with blessings upon blessings, until we are the talk of all who know us; you for your honesty, I for my humility and virtue;" so that now I have "nothing to do but to reap all the rewards which this life can afford; and if I walk humbly and improve my blessed opportunities, will heighten and perfect all, in a still more joyful futurity."
Perhaps a more downright creed, not only of worldliness, but of "other-worldliness," was never more explicitly avowed.
Now, to put the whole moral effect of this book into a nutshell—Richardson had gravely announced it as a warning to young servant-girls, but why might he not as well have announced it as an encouragement to old villains? The virtue of Pamela, it is true, is duly rewarded: but Mr. B., with all his villainy, certainly fares better than Pamela: for he not only receives to himself a paragon of a wife, but the sole operation of his previous villainy towards her is to make his neighbors extol him to the skies as a saint, when he turns from it; so that, considering the enormous surplus of Mr. B.'s rewards as against Pamela's, instead of the title Pamela; or, The Reward of Virtue, ought not the book to have been called Mr. B.; or, The Reward of Villainy?
It was expressly to ridicule some points of Richardson's Pamela that the second English novel was written. This was Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, which appeared in 1742. It may be that the high birth of Fielding—his father was great-grandson of the Earl of Denbigh, and a lieutenant-general in the army—had something to do with his opposition to Richardson, who was the son of a joiner; at any rate, he puts forth a set of exactly opposite characters to those in Pamela, takes a footman for his virtuous hero, and the footman's mistress for his villainous heroine, names the footman Joseph Andrews, explaining that he was the brother of Richardson's Pamela, who, you remember, was the daughter of Goodman Andrews, makes principal figures of two parsons, Parson Adams and Parson Trulliber, the former of whom is set up as a model of clerical behavior, and the latter the reverse; and with these main materials, together with an important peddler, he gives us the book still called by many the greatest English novel, originally entitled: The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Abraham Adams.
I will not, because I cannot, here cite any of the vital portions of Joseph Andrews which produce the real moral effect of the book upon a reader. I can only say, that it is not different in essence from the moral effect of Richardson's book just described, though the tone is more clownish. But for particular purposes of comparison with Dickens and George Eliot hereafter, let me recall to you in the briefest way two of the comic scenes. That these are fair samples of the humorous atmosphere of the book I may mention that they are both among the number which were selected by Thackeray, who was a keen lover of Fielding generally, and of his Joseph Andrews particularly, for his own illustrations upon his own copy of this book.
In the first scene Joseph Andrews is riding along the road upon a very untrustworthy horse who has already given him a lame leg by a fall, attended by his friend Parson Adams. They arrive at an inn, dismount, and ask for lodging: the landlord is surly, and presently behaves uncivilly to Joseph Andrews; whereupon Parson Adams, in defence of his lame friend, knocks the landlord sprawling upon the floor of his own inn; the landlord, however, quickly receives reinforcements, and his wife, seizing a pan of hog's blood which stood on the dresser, discharged it with powerful effect into the good parson's face. While the parson is in this condition, enters Mrs. Slipshod—a veritable Grendel's mother—