Parody alone could not satisfy Fielding's irritation with Richardson. He wanted to show that there was another way of writing which would free ‘virtue’ from the purely sexual connotation, show that passions were not confined to desire, and place the ideals and actions of men and women in the wider context of the world. He would replace the static scenes, curtained rooms, walled gardens, locked houses – the boxes within boxes of Pamela's world – with the road and the inn, open to all, and give us mixed humanity instead of pure heroine and black villain. In the process he would uncover the flaws that he found in Richardson's work and in contemporary society – the mistaking of surface for depth, the gulf between outer and inner worth.

Shamela caused a stir in 1741 and was then ignored (swept under the carpet by Fielding's Victorian admirers as too crude, too bawdy), until it was reprinted in 1926. By contrast, Joseph Andrews, Fielding's second assault on Pamela, grew in reputation, acclaimed as the first English comic novel. ‘The novel’ in various forms, was far from new: Elizabethan prose fiction had been followed by translations of dense, fantastical multi-volume romances from France and Spain; Defoe had introduced a moral quasi-realism in the fictional biographies of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), while the vogue for epistolary romance, exploited by Eliza Haywood and others, had been given a new, bourgeois twist by Richardson. Fielding knew, however, that he was springing something unexpected on the public with this ‘comic-epic Poem in Prose’. He was moving from popular, visual, theatrical burlesque into a form addressed to a more literate, predominantly bourgeois public; a shift, as Judith Frank has shown, which affected the attitudes, as well as the aesthetics, of his writing. Forestalling confusion, Fielding warns that readers accustomed to existing fictions may ‘expect a kind of Entertainment, not to be found, nor which was even intended, in the following Pages’ and introduces his book as ‘a kind of Writing which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language’ (JA/S 53).

The reversal of expectations (of both readers and characters) is the novel's basic tactic, at once structural, critical, and moral. The starting-point is an inversion of Pamela.