1. Book II, Chapters XIII through XVII. ___________ANALYSIS_____________
Starting in Chapter XIII, when Joseph assents to Adams’s requirement that the marriage be delayed
until the formal pronouncement of the wedding banns, Fielding puts the Joseph-Fanny romance plot on
hold and focuses on Adams and the comedy of his innocence; that comedy reaches a climax in the final
chapters of Book II. Homer Goldberg points out how Fielding designed the events of Book II to exhibit
a progression from examples Adams’s everyday absent-mindedness to increasingly dramatic evidence
of his benevolent naïveté regarding human nature. The ever-more-despicable behavior of those around
him fails to dispel his generous illusions until finally “the display of his essential simplicity culminates
in his vain defense of classical learning as the essential source of the knowledge of men.” When in
Chapter XVII Adams sits down with the Host and argues that the only knowledge worth having is found
in books, he finally states explicitly the unworldly attitudes that have been determining his outlook all
along.
Adams’s run-ins with Parson Trulliber and the false-promising Squire are each exemplary instances of
his innocent dealings with the world of affectation. In the case of Trulliber, Adams encounters the
epitome of the type of selfish clergyman to whom he has stood in contrast since his discussion with
Barnabas about the doctrines of Methodism. Trulliber would rather tend his hogs than care for souls
(indeed, he is better suited to the former task), and he treats Adams to some truly wretched
hospitality, gorging himself while giving Adams “a little of the worst Ale.” Eventually the two parsons
engage in a debate about the true nature of Christianity and the relationship between faith and works,
and it emerges that Trulliber believes that his duty as as clergyman and a Christian is simply to believe
certain religious tenets, not to conduct himself according to the behaviors enjoined by those tenets. In
professing immaculate Christian principles but abstaining from the performance of charity toward his
fellow-man, Trulliber shows himself to be the quintessential hypocrite, a devotee of self-interest
masquerading as a paragon of virtue. Nor is Trulliber merely a corrupt clergyman; he is also a bully, a
lover of power who is given to brutal intimidation of his wife. His authority within the parish derives in
large part from his ability to lord it over his parishioners, all of whom “lived in the utmost Fear and
Apprehension of him.”
Trulliber’s vices, then, are reprehensible, but what should be noted is that they are, as one may say,
natural -- they are extensions of the ordinary human desire to acquire things, such as money or power,
for oneself. With the false-promising Squire the case is different and rather bizarre: if Trulliber
responds too negatively when Adams approaches him for aid, the false-promising Squire approaches
Adams on his own initiative and deceives him with a gratuitous display of sham generosity. His sadistic
foible is to counterfeit that quality of spontaneous benevolence which is the substance of Adams’s
ethics and which Adams so constantly expects to find in those around him. The false-promising Squire
is, then, as exemplary a hypocrite as Trulliber, though in a stranger way. As Goldberg puts it, he
engages in “motiveless mischief”; his wickedness is unconventional in that it confers no obvious
benefit on him, and as a result, Adams takes a while to recognize and condemn it.
Only after the Host’s lengthy account of the Squire’s past wrongdoing does Adams concede that “he is
indeed a wicked Man,” though even then he protests that the Squire “hath in his Countenance
sufficient Symptoms of . . . that Sweetness of Disposition which furnishes out a good Christian.” The
Host’s rather worldly response, that to take people at face value in this way is to invite deception,
strikes Adams as too cynical, and it is telling that when the Host invokes his world travels in support of
his argument from experience, Adams counters by invoking his own wide reading. Adams insists that
his knowledge of books helps him to see the world clearly, but when he cites Socrates on behalf of the
false-promising Squire it becomes clear to the reader that Adams’s literacy also has the potential to
confirm the parson in his chosen vision of reality.
We have now reached the midpoint of the novel, and it would appear that, in a sense, Mr. Adams is
incapable of learning: his adventures have not served to make him any more realistic about the world,
and experience washes off him like the pig-slop from Trulliber’s sty. In another sense, of course, there
is nothing that Adams needs to learn, as he already embodies Fielding’s definition of goodness as
active charity. Perhaps, however, Mr. Adams’s goodness would be more effectual if he could
incorporate some of the Host’s practical wisdom; after all, the Host is no covetous misanthrope in spite
of his sober realism, for he has just taken a risk on Adams by extending credit to him when Adams has
admitted how difficult it will be for him to pay it back. Fortunately, Joseph, as Adams’s protégé, seems
to be incorporating experience into his parson’s Christian teaching rather effectively: he has suspected
the Squire as a phony from the start, and eventually he passes judgment on him with a maxim that is
the fruit of the accumulated wisdom of generations of footmen. Whereas at the beginning of the novel
Joseph could not believe that Lady Booby, being socially so superior, could ever condescend to
proposition her own servant, by now he has begun to look on the upper classes and the world with an
eye not cynical but definitely more experienced.