7 - ‘There are Several Boobies who are Squires’: 1742–1745

Summary

With the exception of the chapter ‘wherein’ Parson Adams ‘appears in a political light’ (Book II, Chapter viii), it has been customary to discount the political significance of Joseph Andrews. ‘The sheer sparseness of political material (compared to its massive presence in his recent journalism) indicates his withdrawal from an arena that had proven as unprofitable as it was laborious’, Cleary asserts. ‘It is not a political work in any basic sense or in comparison with works that chronologically flank it’. Battestin seems to concur. ‘Whiggish though he was, Fielding was “no Politician”’, he argues, ‘and Joseph Andrews, one of the few works of the period in which he could afford to follow his own inclinations in this respect, is not in any important way a political novel’. Were ‘party-political’ to be substituted for ‘political’, this would appear unexceptionable. Given that Fielding, in Joseph Andrews, clearly privileges one mode of social behaviour over another, however, the position taken up by Cleary and Battestin strikes me as a difficult one to defend. Even before he attempts to focus the reader's attention on the faulty morality of those in positions of authority by making Adams remark in all innocence that ‘there are several Boobys who are Squires’(IV. xii), Fielding as narrator has already drawn attention to the ‘ticklish’ nature of the name, ‘which malicious Persons may apply, according to their evil Inclinations to several worthy Country 'squires, a Race of Men whom we look upon as entirely inoffensive, and for whom we have an adequate Regard’ (III. ii). In revealing the discrepancy between how, according to the ideology of benevolent paternalism to which he implicitly subscribed, landlords ought to conduct themselves, and the self-interested way in which, in reality, many of them actually appeared to behave, Fielding was making a political point.

That this is the principal thrust of Fielding's satire in Joseph Andrews is apparent from Lady Booby's failed attempt to seduce her manservant onwards. Even the opening chapters’ parody of the moral lesson of Richardson's Pamela has its part to play.