Joseph Andrews and other books, or The development of the novel

Hello friends, fans, and foes, I have just returned from Berlin. Joseph Andrews and Parson Adams were my companions on the work trip. Let’s jot down some thoughts. 

1/ The English novel is said to have two founders in the 18th century: Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. As my friend Tom (Wuthering Expectations) explained, there were two major tracks: Richardson – Fanny Burney – Jane Austen – etc. and Fielding – Smollett – Dickens – etc. This divide seems to fit Himadri’s brushstroke metaphor: the Richardson novelists paint with small brushstrokes and focus on subtle things; the Fielding writers use broad brushstrokes and vivid colours, and have great vigour. 

As I’m interested in tradition and influence, I read Joseph Andrews and think of 19th century literature and find that the novelist closest to Fielding seems to be Thackeray. Just compare. Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot… don’t particularly sound like Fielding. But if you look at Fielding and Thackeray, both Joseph Andrews and Vanity Fair are not very visual; both novels are not rich in metaphor; both novels have a warm, good-humoured narrator who constantly addresses the reader. Even Dickens feels further apart: he is visual (who doesn’t remember the fog in Bleak House?), and his novels abound in metaphors. 

I love Vanity Fair, I’m enjoying Joseph Andrews. Both have vitality.

Then if you look back chronologically, Joseph Andrews owes its existence to two novels: Pamela and Don Quixote. Its starting point is to parody Richardson’s novel, as Fielding himself has done in Shamela: Joseph Andrews is a brother of Pamela and, like her, has to defend his chastity from an older employer. Joseph Andrews rejects Lady Booby and thus loses his job, because he only loves Fanny. 

But that’s only the starting point. Joseph Andrews grows into something else, and even without the acknowledgement on the title page (“written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote”), the influence would still be obvious. I’m gonna have to revisit the Fielding section in Fighting Windmills, the book about the greatness and influence of Don Quixote (how annoying to borrow books from the library and not have them right at hand for a quick check). Fielding takes from Don Quixote not only the form of the picaresque novel, he also includes interpolated tales, has a comic vision of life, and creates a quixotic character—Parson Adams is not a madman like Don Quixote, but he is naïve and absent-minded and idealistic, and he too is a combination of goodness and ridiculousness. 

(Isn’t it cool that many 18th century writers loved and took something from Don Quixote? I’m gonna have to read The Female Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and Humphry Clinker). 

Unlike Cervantes, Fielding doesn’t play with multiple narrators and unreliable narrators, but he expands the role of the narrator—like another character—something Thackeray later also does in Vanity Fair. 

2/ Pamela came out in 1740. Joseph Andrews, 1742. 

If we compare them to the works of 19th century novelists such as Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, George Eliot, and so on, they appear a bit primitive, in both character development and the novel form. I’m not denigrating Richardson and Fielding—their masterpieces are said to be Clarissa and Tom Jones—I’m saying that at this point they were developing the novel and trying new stuff so there were a few things they didn’t quite figure out till presumably later on. Pamela for example uses the epistolary form in a very clumsy, awkward way. Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos, perhaps the most well-constructed of epistolary novels, was published in 1782. 

As for Joseph Andrews, I will quote my friend Himadri (Argumentative Old Git): 

“… despite many fine things, Joseph Andrews does, it must be admitted, have its longueurs. In the later Tom Jones, the better qualities of Joseph Andrews are consistently in view, and the flaws entirely absent. For one thing, Fielding, when he came to writing Tom Jones, realised that the kind of novel he was attempting required an interesting plot: otherwise, the final chapters would merely provide resolution for a plot that the reader has long lost interest in, and become merely tedious; and the rest of the novel would become merely a sequence of more or less unrelated set pieces.” 

(The piece as a whole, I should say, is positive about Joseph Andrews—I just picked out the negative bit, as journalists do).

The thing I find strange and fascinating is that Don Quixote (Part 1: 1605; Part 2: 1615) does not at all appear primitive in comparison. Of course, the descriptions are a bit basic. Of course, writers didn’t quite see colours in the 17th century. Of course, the supporting characters aren’t very complex. But if you consider its form and techniques, Don Quixote is spectacularly innovative and ingenious, especially in Part 2—look at the multiple narrators and the concept of the unreliable narrator, look at the dazzling layers of lies and fantasy, look at the meta aspect. Next to Don Quixote, even masterpieces such as Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary come across as conventional. 

3/ Yesterday I came across The Daily Telegraph’s 1899 list of “100 Best Novels in the World”. 

I’m sure you all would have lots of opinions about the list. See for yourself. I’m just gonna make some brief comments. 

First of all, “the world” naturally means the West. This is to be expected—the list is from 1899—even the majority of “greatest novels of all time” lists today ignore non-Western novels, especially those written before the 20th century. On this particular list of 100 best novels, only 10 are in a language other than English (I know). 

Tolstoy’s on the list—only Anna Karenina, not War and Peace—Dostoyevsky isn’t. But we shouldn’t be so harsh on it. At this point, Crime and Punishment was available, but The Brothers Karamazov wasn’t translated until 1912. 

The list has Dumas, Hugo, Balzac, and Eugène Sue (who’s this?) but not Flaubert or Zola. Madame Bovary was available in 2 English translations at this point.  

The most shocking part is the exclusion of Don Quixote—what’s wrong with these people?

If we ignore all the stuff about “foreign languages” and translations, it is in many ways still a curious list. The Dickens novels on the list are Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Dombey and Son, and Oliver Twist—not Bleak House, not Little Dorrit, not Great Expectations. I’m not surprised that they name Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility for Jane Austen, rather than Emma or Mansfield Park, but to name Scenes of Clerical Life rather than Middlemarch as the George Eliot novel is absurd. The same about the three Thackeray novels not including Vanity Fair. Richardson isn’t on the list (I guess even in the 19th century, people didn’t read the over 950,000-word-long Clarissa), but Fielding is: Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. Melville isn’t included, which does not surprise me, but even Henry James is absent. Charlotte Bronte is on the list with two novels—Jane Eyre and Shirley—but Emily, the genius of the family, isn’t. 

A rather odd list. See for yourself. But now we see that Joseph Andrews had a very good reputation in 1899. I don’t think most people now, even those who read classic literature, know about Joseph Andrews—those who know about classic literature would mostly be familiar with Tom Jones.