FIELDING, Henry.

£12,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, And of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. First edition, a superb copy of Fielding's scarcest novel from the library of the Duke of Montagu. Joseph Andrews is the first comic novel in English - a new species of writing that Fielding in his Preface called "a comic Epic-Poem in Prose" - featuring the Quixotic exploits of his most memorable character, Parson Adams. Fielding had already burlesqued the epistolary form and naïve moralism of Richardson's Pamela in An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741), but he quickly realised that he had the foundation of a much more ambitious work, embodying an alternative conception of the art of fiction and effectively a new genre in English.The courtier John Montagu, second duke of Montagu (1690-1749), was one of the quirkiest characters of his day, a kind-hearted man of a whimsical, fun-loving bent. "He seems to have believed that the quest for happiness was the main purpose of life and that the struggle for wealth, honours, fame, and power simply destroyed a more generous nature. With this as his guiding principle he became a lover of the practical joke and a creator of hoaxes... He was a man of many parts: philanthropist, a patron of the opera and drama, the protector of freemasonry, and the proponent of a gentler way of life, all hidden under a devil-may-care attitude and style of life" (ODNB). In short, Fielding's ideal reader. Latterly in the library of the renowned American bibli

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