joseph andrews hypocrisy

Peter Pounce, whose welcoming Adams into his coach leads to a comical exchange between innocence and hypocrisy, is more sharply characterized, and he provides a vital contrast to Mr. Adams. Peter has a dilemma: fearing the schemes and envy of others, he feels compelled to downplay his own fortune; simultaneously, however, he is proud of his success as a part-time finance capitalist and likes to hear people marvel at how well he has done for himself. His default pretense, in which he begins the scene, is a show of contentment with his "little" fortune. As the discussion proceeds, however, Adams's mention of charity triggers Peter's defensive mode, and he begins to rail against charity and wonder aloud where people imagine he can have gotten all the money they seem to think he has. Adams, characteristically, assumes that Peter is complaining in good faith and, thinking to commiserate with him, confides that he never found the reports of the steward's wealth credible, given that "your Wealth is your own Acquisition." The parson has blundered into a sore spot by reminding Peter that his wealth is new rather than inherited, deriving from business rather than from land, and thereby not especially prestigious. It only gets worse from there, as Adams sees Peter frown over the estimate of his fortune at £20,000, construes Peter's unhappiness as arising from modesty (in fact, Peter is worth well over £20,000), and assures him that he personally never thought him worth half that much. The exasperated hypocrite then casts off his pretense of contented poverty and derides both Mr. Adams and the decadent gentry class, revealing his true nature in the process. Peter's attitude to money is dehumanizing: it causes him to be savage toward the poor and prompts him to speak in such locutions as "how much I am worth," as if the value of a man's life could be measured in monetary units. Mr. Adams, by contrast, shows that he has no clue of the value of money; it is a form of ignorance that he has displayed on many previous occasions but perhaps never so appealingly as here. In the presence of his polar opposite, a hypocritical miser, Adams stands out in his most essential qualities and we are reminded that, for all its drawbacks, his unworldliness remains a positive value and a moral touchstone.

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