Fielding wrote Joseph Andrews to reflect the time of his writing—England in the mid-18th century, in the grip of the Enlightenment. The story unfolds in London and the English countryside, and Fielding makes these settings home to a ruthless satire of the various vices of the English upper class and the stuffy conventions of English literature at the time. Fielding takes aim at his contemporary writers, with the poet laureate of the United Kingdom at the time, Colley Cibber, and the writer Samuel Richardson taking the brunt of his mockery.
The Enlightenment Period was marked by an ongoing rediscovery of classical art and literature, and Joseph Andrews contains a constant strain of allusion to the great classical writers and thinkers—and writes much of his prose in an affected, formal, mock-classical literary style that pokes fun at classical poetry's tendency to employ convoluted syntax and overwrought metaphor to describe even the simplest things, like the weather or the time of day.
This story is necessarily a product of Fielding's time: the Enlightenment brought about a valorization of the individual and the common man and made stories like that of Joseph Andrews—a footman who blunders his way to love and contentment—worthy of exploration in popular literature.
