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Fiction Gowher Ahmad Naik, Lovely Professional University

Notes
Unit 2: Joseph Andrews-I: Detailed Study of the Text

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
2.1 Book I, Chapters I through VI

2.1.1 Analysis
2.2 Book I, Chapters VII through XII
2.2.1 Analysis
2.3 Book I, Chapters XIII through XVIII
2.3.1 Analysis
2.4 Summary

2.5 Keywords
2.6 Review Questions
2.7 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:
• Explain Joseph Andrews-I, detailed study of the text of Book I, Chapters I through XVIII
• Discuss analysis of Book I all chapters.

Introduction

The novel begins with the affable, intrusive narrator outlining the nature of our hero. Joseph
Andrews is the brother of Richardson’s Pamela and is of the same rustic parentage and patchy
ancestry. At the age of ten years he found himself tending to animals as an apprentice to Sir
Thomas Booby. It was in proving his worth as a horseman that he first caught the eye of Sir
Thomas’s wife, Lady Booby, who employed him (now seventeen) as her footman.
After the death of Sir Thomas, Joseph finds that his Lady’s affections have redoubled as she
offers herself to him in her chamber while on a trip to London. In a scene analogous to many
of Pamela’s refusals of Mr B in Richardson’s novel, however, Lady Booby finds that Joseph’s
Christian commitment to chastity before marriage is unwavering. After suffering the Lady’s
fury, Joseph dispatches a letter to his sister very much typical of Pamela’s anguished missives
in her own novel. The Lady calls him once again to her chamber and makes one last withering
attempt at seduction before dismissing him from both his job and his lodgings.

With Joseph setting out from London by moonlight, the narrator introduces the reader to the
heroine of the novel, Fanny goodwill. A poor illiterate girl of ‘extraordinary beauty’ now
living with a farmer close to Lady Booby’s parish, she and Joseph had grown ever closer since
their childhood, before their local parson and mentor, Abraham Adams, recommended that
they postpone marriage until they have the means to live comfortably.
On his way to see Fanny, Joseph is mugged and laid up in a nearby inn where, by dint of
circumstance, he is reconciled with Adams, who is on his way to London to sell three volumes

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