Hypocricy of the Rich vs Honesty of the Poor in the English Society of the 18$^\text{th}$ Century

Abstract

During the 18th century, life was unpleasant and disturbing due to the Horrible Plague and the Great Fire that attacked England and turned the English society upside down. There was a big gap between the rich and the poor. Violence and crimes were everywhere. However, along with all the misfortunes, 18th century was also a period of elegance for England. Education flourished, and the novel genre developed impressively along with fine music and theatre performances. During these times, the rich led a luxurious life, while the poor in extreme poverty hardly preserved their miserable existence. The whole atmosphere was that of contrasts between brightness and staleness, wellness and sickness, abundance and insufficiency, virtue and vice, along with charity and selfishness which, combined with other characteristic features of the English society, created a chaotic situation. Henry Fielding’s novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, often called Joseph Andrews artistically mingles all these contrasts on different levels of different aspects of life, depicting the age he lived in while giving credit to the poor and the abandoned, making the good successfully triumphant and the bad miserably overwhelmed until at the end he makes his characters reach poetic justice punishing the vicious and rewarding the virtuous. The article aims at revealing the chaotic situation of the 18th century England through H. Fielding’s novel in question and the writer’s critical attitude to it.