Review: Joseph Andrews, Volume 2

Joseph Andrews, Volume 2 by Henry Fielding
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A genial comedy with a feeling of genuine fondness for its central characters, including the absurdly disheveled, forgetful, and sometimes too easily provoked clergyman who is the title character's mentor and friend. It makes full use of coincidence to first create, and then resolve, tension, but it also uses human agency to the same purpose, giving us villains to boo in the form of a venial and dissipated squire and his sinister henchmen, and getting the heroes through a number of adventures with the help of good-hearted people they happen to encounter, along with a number of ill-tempered and ungenerous characters and several other outright rogues.

Part of the satire, I think, is that everyone is a bit exaggerated, like a caricature in a political cartoon. And yet what Fielding is exaggerating in human nature is familiar to us even today, and certainly would have been familiar to his readers, so that his characters have a weight and heft to them. They're simultaneously types and memorable individuals.

Fielding is also well known as being one of the founders (along with his brother) of the Bow Street Runners, Britain's first properly constituted police force, and as a magistrate who sought to apply the law fairly and justly, and I was reminded of these facts when reading about the arbitrary application of the law by ignorant country justices of the peace, who could send poor people to be imprisoned or whipped for minor infractions with no recourse if egged on by more powerful people who had an agenda. Also, when reading about the criminals who were, apparently, often at large preying on travellers, and seldom caught and punished.

The author uses his authorial powers to make everything come out well in the end, though, and leaves us with a satisfactory conclusion for our heroes. While the long eighteenth-century sentences can be a bit challenging if you're reading it after a tiring day, it's not nearly so convoluted as other writing of the time, and I generally followed it easily and enjoyed both the journey and the people I encountered on it.

View all my reviews