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Unit 4: Joseph Andrews-III: Detailed Study of the Text

thought it right to send Wilson £200, which sum she had enclosed with the note. Wilson was Notes
delighted not only to receive the money but especially to receive it from Harriet Hearty, for
whom he had long cherished a secret love. In their first meeting after his release from prison,
he professed his love, which he found the lady reciprocated, and they married shortly thereafter.
Wilson took her father’s place in the wine trade but soon began losing money at it due to his
refusal to adulterate his wine. Around this time he concluded that “the Pleasures of the World
are chiefly Folly, and the Business of it mostly Knavery; and both, nothing better than Vanity:
The Men of Pleasure tearing one another to Pieces, from the Emulation of spending Money,
and the Men of Business from Envy in getting it.” He then retired with his wife and their two
children to the countryside, where they have lived happily, except for the abduction of their
eldest son by gypsies.

Task Who had consequently lost his Job and why?

4.1.1 Analysis

Continuing a trend that began in the episode of the false-promising Squire, the character of
Joseph deepens and matures in the course of Book III. Rather than passively absorb the buffets
of fortune, as he largely did throughout the first two books, Joseph now asserts himself more
readily, both dissenting from Mr. Adams’s plans when appropriate and springing into physical
action against beatable adversaries. Thus, in the “ghost” sequence of Chapter II, the steady
and sensible Joseph checks Adams’s impulse to charge the sheep-stealers, carries Fanny safely
down the slope that tumbled Adams, and guides his companions to a bridge when Adams
would have waded through the river. Joseph, then, has emerged as a prudent foil for his
dreamy and impetuous pastor.
The character of Mr. Adams likewise undergoes a shift of sorts during the transition between
Books II and III, but in his case the change occurs not so much in his personality per se as in
Fielding’s presentation of it. Whereas previously Fielding has focused on the contrast between
Adams and the world, thereby endorsing his innocence over others’ affectations, now he
begins to measure Adams against other men who are just as virtuous but more prudent,
thereby highlighting Adams’s weaknesses and vanity. The first of these other virtuous men is
of course Joseph; the second is Mr. Wilson.
The story of Mr. Wilson’s reformation after a misspent youth occupies the center of the novel
for good reason. As one critic has said, “the mature Wilson functions as the novel’s central
norm of sensible humanity,” and his fitness for this role is apparent in his conduct toward the
three strangers who show up on his doorstep after their encounter with the “ghosts”: charitable
yet wary, Wilson welcomes the trio into his home but seeks a way of verifying that they are
who they say they are, and even then he only gradually warms to them as their good nature
becomes increasingly evident. He has seen “too much of the World to give a hasty Belief to
Professions”; unlike Mr. Adams, Mr. Wilson has learned something from his experiences of
the world. As Homer Goldberg observes, Wilson’s “satiric exposure of the moral state of the
world as it is forcibly points up the error of Adams’s persistent naïve vision of it as it ought
to be.”
Wilson’s biography presents “the World” with a capital “W”: it is a survey of the classic vices
that characterize the urban lifestyle of affectation, sophistication, and sensuality. (This Hogarthian
“rake’s progress” may also contain an autobiographical element, as the young Fielding was
himself a dissolute Londoner for several years before eloping with his beloved wife.) Physical
lust would appear to be the leading vice among these cosmopolitan types, if Wilson’s recurrent

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