SOURCE: Potter, Tiffany. “Georgian Libertinism and the Reclamation of Virtue: Shamela and Joseph Andrews.” In Honest Sins: Georgian Libertinism and the Novels of Henry Fielding, pp. 74-82. Montreal: McGill University Press, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Potter argues that Shamela displays the coherent ideology of libertinism that Fielding embraced, with its rejection of contemporary standards of virtue, religious dogma, and vision of human behavior.

Shamela and Joseph Andrews form a transition between Fielding's dramatic career and his career as a novelist, and both works are informed by the developing Georgian libertinism. Shamela (1741) is a brief but brutally effective satirical revision of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740). It exposes what Fielding regarded as the moral complacency of the novel, particularly Pamela's conscious virtue, which is held up as a commodity that treacherous servant girls might exchange for marriage and high life. Joseph Andrews (1742) moves past the clever parody that informs Shamela and...