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Fiction

Notes therefore recommends that the travelers stay in the inn after all. He then leaves them at the
inn, promising to send the coach and horses in the morning.
In the morning, however, a servant arrives with the information that his master’s horses are
temporarily out of commission because the groom has administered to them a course of physic.
Mr. Adams regrets that this Squire’s staff should inconvenience him so frequently. Joseph
raises the issue of their bill, which again they cannot pay, and suggests that Mr. Adams write
to their new acquaintance requesting funds. The answer they receive, however, is that their
acquaintance has departed on a long journey. Mr. Adams is shocked, but Joseph says that he
had suspicions from the beginning, since there is a saying among footmen that “those Masters
who promise the most perform the least.” The Host then enters and chaffs the travelers for
having been duped. Mr. Adams frets about their bill and says that even if the Host trusts them
to pay it later, they live at such a distance that they might never find an opportunity to send
the money; paradoxically, the Host says that Adams’s admission that they might never pay
has made him trust them more, since every failure to pay a debt has so far been preceded by
an ironclad guarantee.

Did u know? The Host therefore waives the bill and sits down for a drink with
Mr. Adams while the lovers go off into the garden.

Chapter XVII

The Host tells several stories of the false-promising Squire’s promising more than he meant
to deliver and gouging his victims as a result. The final story tells of the Host’s own career
as master of a ship and the false-promising Squire’s bogus promise to procure him an elevation
to the lieutenancy of a man of war. Mr. Adams regrets these evidences of the man’s bad
character but holds out hope for his redemption, especially given the signs that his face bears
of “that Sweetness of Disposition which furnishes out a good Christian.” The Host, with his
wide experience of the world, counsels against inferring a man’s character from his countenance.
Mr. Adams indignantly argues for his own wide reading as a form of worldliness and invokes
Socrates in behalf of his theory of moral physiognomy. This argument leads to a debate about
the relative merits of trade and the learned professions, but Joseph and Fanny soon interrupt,
and Adams and the Host part with less good humor than prevailed between them formerly.

3.3.1 Analysis

Starting in Chapter XIII, when Joseph assents to Adams’s requirement that the marriage be
delayed until the formal pronouncement of the wedding banns, Fielding puts the Joseph-Fanny
romance plot on hold and focuses on Adams and the comedy of his innocence; that comedy
reaches a climax in the final chapters of Book II. Homer Goldberg points out how Fielding
designed the events of Book II to exhibit a progression from examples Adams’s everyday
absent-mindedness to increasingly dramatic evidence of his benevolent naïveté regarding human
nature. The ever-more-despicable behavior of those around him fails to dispel his generous
illusions until finally “the display of his essential simplicity culminates in his vain defense of
classical learning as the essential source of the knowledge of men.” When in Chapter XVII
Adams sits down with the Host and argues that the only knowledge worth having is found
in books, he finally states explicitly the unworldly attitudes that have been determining his
outlook all along.
Adams’s run-ins with Parson Trulliber and the false-promising Squire are each exemplary
instances of his innocent dealings with the world of affectation. In the case of Trulliber,

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