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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Joseph Andrews, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Hypocrisy
Lust vs. Chastity
Social Class
Religion and Charity
Summary
Analysis
The narrator muses about how the life of a good man can be a model that inspires other people to do better in their own lives. He laments, however, that many good men and women live in obscurity. While ancient writers wrote great biographies, modern people can no longer read their languages. However, there are to recent biographies that the narrator does recommend: one written about a Mr. Colley Cibber and the other about a Mrs. Pamela Andrews. Female readers in particular have learned a lot from books about Mrs. Andrews. The narrator, however, will instead tell the story of Mrs. Andrews’s brother, Joseph Andrews, who learned about virtue from his sister and added chastity to this list of virtues.
The opening of this book makes reference to the novel Pamela by Samuel Richardson, which likely would have been familiar to many early readers of Joseph Andrews, since it was very popular and published just two years earlier. It also references Colley Cibber, a real person whom Alexander Pope famously made fun of in a long poem called the Dunciad. It’s humorous that the narrator recommends both of these together, because Pamela is a flattering portrayal of its subject, while the Dunciad is a more critical portrayal. This establishes early how the narrator uses sarcasm and irony to tell the story.
Themes
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