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Unit 5: Joseph Andrews-IV: Detailed Study of the Text

youngest son has drowned. Joseph attempts to comfort Adams by employing many of the Notes
clergyman’s own arguments about the conquering of the passions by reason and grace, but
Adams is in no mood to listen. Before long, however, the weeping Mr. Adams meets his young
son running up to the house, not drowned after all. As it turns out, the child was rescued from
the river by the same Pedlar who delivered the travelers from one of the inns where they
could not pay their bill. Mr. Adams rejoices to have his son again and greets the Pedlar with
genuine gratitude. Once things have calmed down, Adams takes Joseph aside to repeat his
advice not to “give too much way to thy Passions, if thou dost expect Happiness,” but after
all this Joseph has lost patience and objects that “it was easier to give Advice than to take it.”
An argument ensues as to whether Joseph’s love for Fanny is of the same pure and elevating
sort as Mr. Adams’s parental love for his son, or whether intense marital love “savours too
much of the Flesh.” Mrs. Adams interrupts this conversation, objecting that Mr. Adams does
not enact his own disparagement of marital love: not only has he been a loving husband, but
“I declare if I had not been convinced you had loved me as well as you could, I can answer
for myself I should have hated and despised you.” She concludes, “Don’t hearken to him, Mr.
Joseph, be as good a Husband as you are able, and love your Wife with all your Body and Soul
too.”

5.1.1 Analysis
The opening chapters of Book IV lay the groundwork for the novel’s final conflict and eventual
resolution: the principal “good” characters have returned to the place of their origin, and their
primary adversary, Lady Booby, arrives back on the scene as well (along with Slipslop, her
subaltern and imitator). Book IV will turn out to be a more unified book than the preceding
three, in terms of both the place and the time of the action, as Fielding confines the events to
the Boobys’ parish and specifies the passage of a discrete number of days. The overall effect
gives a sense of coherent dramatic conflict, rather different from the diffuse picaresque plotting
of Books I through III.

A burgeoning cast of secondary characters also lends heft to the building action: the family of
Mr. Adams enters the story for the first time, as do the newly married Mr. Booby and Pamela.
The Pedlar turns up again, a Lawyer and Justice materialize, and an embodiment of the
vacuous fashionable world appears in the person of a would-be Bellarmine (whose name will
turn out to be Beau Didapper). These secondary characters, whose ranks will swell in succeeding
chapters, do more than fill out the stage; they also increase the tension between Lady Booby
and the lovers, as Lady Booby schemes to get all of these originally neutral players on her
side: Mr. Booby’s amiability, Pamela’s snobbery, Lawyer Scout’s unscrupulousness, and
Mrs. Adams’s fear of poverty all present her with opportunities for driving apart the lovers
and neutralizing their advocate, Mr. Adams; she even has plans for the selfish lust of Didapper.
The Pedlar, of course, remains an instrument of providence, and he will continue to perform
this role in the coming chapters.
The episode in which Mr. Adams again counsels Joseph against passionate attachments and
then, hearing of his own son’s supposed drowning, fails to practice what he has preached
reveals another dimension of Adams’s fallibility, though whether his weakness makes him
more or less sympathetic will be up to the eye of the beholder. This scene has had a precursor
in Book III, Chapter XI, when Adams, bound with Joseph to a bedpost, “comforted” his young
friend by urging him to give up the “Folly of Grief” and resign himself contentedly to the
cosmic plan that is about to subject “the prettiest, kindest, loveliest, sweetest” Fanny to “the
utmost Violence which Lust and Power can inflict”; the parson even construed the impending
rape of Fanny as an act of divine justice, a punishment of Joseph for the sin of repining. The
scene at the bedpost, then, revealed Adams as an inhuman sermonizer, failing to enact the

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