Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews
Introduction Literary scholars and historians of many kinds know they need to read The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abaham Adams. It’s that important. But they are not the readers Henry Fielding had most in mind when he wrote the novel. He knew they were there, of course. And he didn’t want to disappoint. He wasn’t just writing a shallow piece of entertainment to take advantage of the quickly expanding market of casual readers. He was a serious writer of comedy. His intellectual and literary roots went back through Milton and Shakespeare all the way to Aristotle and Homer. Being firmly set in the richest intellectual soil of the Enlightenment, he had a high moral and literary purpose. But he had plenty of other purposes too. And he knew, while he did what he could to pull the scholars in, that he had to draw the “mere English reader” into the virtual circus of his satire. They were the ones buying