ABSTRACT
Henry Fielding’s representation of Joseph Andrews is of the servant travelling without an employer, without recourse to some of the necessary precautions and thus more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of travel than his more affluent contemporaries. A textual precursor in terms of structure to Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews can also be seen in Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas, published in 1715. The narrative, for Fielding, is a journey, and its reader a traveller, echoing that familiar trope, noted by Joanne Shattock, of the ‘ancient and universal theme of the journey of life’. Barbara Korte likewise asserts that, ‘accordingly, readers of A Sentimental Journey learn almost nothing about France; the amount of factual information in the text is negligible’. The relationship between employer and servant in A Sentimental Journey, as in many of the fictions of the period, draws on a model from antiquity.
