1. Book IV, Chapters I through VIII.
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-beBellarmine (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 spontaneous, sympathetic good
nature that has generally distinguished him. He has a rationalistic side to his
personality; it is the part of him that responds to the literature of classical
stoicism with its injunction to transcend all human feelings and attachments.
In the opposition between the sternly sententious clergyman and the warm and
disconsolate lover, the former surely forfeits a great deal of the reader’s
sympathy. In Book IV, Chapter VIII, however, Fielding revisits this opposition and

2. may qualify it somewhat, depending on one’s interpretation. Here, Adams again
admonishes his parishioner to “divest himself of all human Passion”; this time he
is concerned that Joseph is too eager to get married, and he warns that if sexual
avidity is the motivation then Joseph is sinning, while if anxiety for Fanny’s
welfare is the motivation then Joseph ought to be putting his trust in providence.
Adams instructs Joseph to prepare himself to accept even the loss of his beloved
Fanny “peaceably, quietly, and contentedly,” “[a]t which Words one came hastily
in, and acquainted Mr. Adams that his youngest Son was drowned.” Suddenly, the
preacher who insisted that anyone who indulges in exorbitant grief is “not worthy
the Name of a Christian” begins lamenting his own personal loss. Like the biblical
Abraham, Mr. Abraham Adams has to confront the idea that the divine will has
demanded the death of his beloved son; in both cases, the apparent necessity of
the son’s death is a test of the father’s faith and resignation. Joseph urges the
parson to follow his own advice, resign himself, and look forward to a reunion in
heaven; Adams, with unconscious irony, refuses this counsel, so it is doubly
fortunate that Dick eventually turns out not to have drowned at all. As usual,
however, Adams fails to see when his weaknesses have been exposed, and he
quickly snaps back to his formal sermonizing mode.
Mr. Adams’s conspicuous failure by the lights of his own code has emboldened
Joseph: the young man points out his mentor’s inconsistency and observes that it
is “easier to give Advice than to take it.” Adams’s rather petulant response to this
challenge of his authority sharpens the issue for the reader, who must decide
whether the parson has revealed that all his supposed virtue is in fact just a
hypocritical penchant for arrogating a position of moral authority. Despite how
neatly this scene seems to fit into Fielding’s dominant theme of the exposure of
pretense, however, few readers are likely to take the condemnation of Adams as
far as this; Homer Goldberg articulates a sensible position when he observes that
"[a]lthough the incident is similar in structure to Fielding's unmaskings of
hypocrisy, the paradox of Adams's behavior is not that he is worse than he
pretends to be but that he is better than he knows." Indeed, the passiveresignation brand of Christianity that Adams has recommended in his stoical
sermonizing is by no means identical with the active charitable love of neighbor
that he elsewhere advocates and consistently enacts; his extraordinary goodness
takes its distinctive character not from his erudition or from his reason but rather
from his natural and spontaneous affections, of the sort that he keeps censuring in
Joseph. The proper attitude toward Mr. Adams is probably the one that Mrs.
Adams espouses near the end of the scene when, after expressing at length her
affection for the husband who is more generous that he will admit, she undercuts
his teaching authority by saying, “Don’t hearken to him, Mr. Joseph.” As Maurice
Johnson suggests, Fielding likely means for readers to follow Mrs. Adams in
regarding the parson as thoroughly lovable but not always a reliable moral
philosopher.
By FRKNIAZI