The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his Friend Mr Abraham Adams by Fielding, Henry (1707-1754) - 1742

2 volumes. xix+[1]+306+[4 ad] pages; [4]+[1 ad]+320+[2] pages. Duodecimo (6 1/2" x 6 1/4") bound in Nineteenth century full leather by Francis Bedford with five raised bands with green labels in two compartments lettered in gilt and and cover edge ruled in gilt. Gilt edges and marbled end pages. Tipped to Volume 1 front end-leaf is a later 18th century newspaper clipping "Prologue to the New Farce of Joseph Andrews Spoken by Mr Bensley". First edition limited to 1500 sets.

The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, was the first published full-length novel of the English author Henry Fielding, and indeed among the first novels in the English language. Published in 1742 and defined by Fielding as a "comic epic poem in prose", it is the story of a good-natured footman's adventures on the road home from London with his friend and mentor, the absent-minded parson Abraham Adams. The novel represents the coming together of the two competing aesthetics of 18th-century literature: the mock-heroic and neoclassical (and, by extension, aristocratic) approach of Augustans such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift; and the popular, domestic prose fiction of novelists such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. The novel draws on a variety of inspirations. Written "in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, the work owes much of its humor to the techniques developed by Cervantes, and its subject-matter to the seemingly loose arrangement of events, digressions and lower-class characters to the genre of writing known as picaresque. In deference to the literary tastes and recurring tropes of the period, it relies on bawdy humor, an impending marriage and a mystery surrounding unknown parentage, but conversely is rich in philosophical digressions, classical erudition and social purpose. Fielding's first venture into prose fiction came a year previously with the publication in pamphlet form of Shamela, a travesty of, and direct response to, the stylistic failings and moral hypocrisy that Fielding saw in Richardson's Pamela. Richardson's epistolary tale of a resolute servant girl, armed only with her "virtue", battling against her master's attempts at seduction had become an overnight literary sensation in 1741. The implicit moral message — that a girl's chastity has eventual value as a commodity —, as well as the awkwardness of the epistolary form in dealing with ongoing events, and the triviality of the detail which the form necessitates, were some of the main targets of Fielding's parody. Richardson would continue to be a target of Fielding's first novel, but the Pamela phenomenon was just one example of what he saw as a culture of literary abuses in the mid-18th century. Colley Cibber, poet laureate and mock-hero of Pope's Dunciad, is identified in the first chapter of the novel as another offender against propriety, morality and literary value. The impetus for the novel, as Fielding claims in the preface, is the establishment of a genre of writing "which I do not remember to have been hitherto attempted in our language", defined as the "comic epic-poem in prose": a work of prose fiction, epic in length and variety of incident and character, in the hypothetical spirit of Homer's lost (and possibly apocryphal) comic poem Margites. He dissociates his fiction from the scandal-memoir and the contemporary novel. Book III describes the work as biography. As becomes apparent from the first few chapters of the novel in which Richardson and Cibber are parodied mercilessly, the real germ of Joseph Andrews is Fielding's objection to the moral and technical limitations of the popular literature of his day. But while Shamela started and finished as a sustained subversion of a rival work, in Joseph Andrews Fielding merely uses the perceived deprivation of popular literature as a springboard to conceive more fully his own philosophy of prose fiction.

Francis Bedford (18 June 1799 – 8 June 1883) was an English bookbinder. Bedford was born at Paddington, London, on 18 June 1799; his father is believed to have been a courier attached to the establishment of George III. At an early age he was sent to school in Yorkshire, and on his return to London his guardian, Henry Bower of 38 Great Marlborough Street, apprenticed him in 1817 to a bookbinder named Haigh, in Poland Street, Oxford Street. Only a part of his time was served with Haigh, and in 1822 he was transferred to a binder named Finlay, also of Poland Street, with whom his indentures were completed. At the end of his apprenticeship Bedford entered the workshop of one of the leading bookbinders of the day, Charles Lewis, of 35 Duke Street, St. James's, with whom he worked until the death of his employer, and subsequently managed the business for Lewis's widow. Bedford attracted the notice of William Bentinck, 4th Duke of Portland, who became a patron and friends. In 1841 Bedford, who had by then left Mrs. Lewis's establishment, entered into partnership with John Clarke of 61 Frith Street, Soho, who had a reputation for binding books in tree-marbled calf. Clarke and Bedford carried on their business in Frith Street until 1850, when the partnership was dissolved. Bedford respected margins, and was a skillful mender of damaged leaves. Many of his productions were imitations of the major French bookbinders of past centuries, for example the bindings of Samuel Rogers's Poems and Italy, of which he bound several copies in Morocco inlaid with colored leathers and covered with gold tooling in the style of Antoine Michel Padeloup.

Condition:

Rebacked retaining original back-strips, few small stains on covers, contents toned with scattered light foxing, point bumped and rubbed else a very good set.