Joseph Andrews — Henry Fielding

Your landlord's lawyer sends a letter threatening you with a court case that, if you actually read it carefully, has no basis at all. Fielding wrote exactly that scene into a novel nearly three hundred years ago, when Lady Booby sends for a lawyer to threaten her own servant, Joseph Andrews, with prosecutions that do not exist in law. The scene is comedy, but the target is real: lawyers who will draft a threat for anyone who pays them.

In two minutes

In Joseph Andrews, Fielding uses the exchange between Lady Booby and the unscrupulous Lawyer Scout to satirise lawyers who invent legal threats to serve a client's private spite, and Parson Adams's plain honesty to expose how flimsy those threats are once someone actually questions them.

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