Station 30 in the Don Quixote Exhibit

Don Quixote Exhibit - Station 30


The quality and quantity of the translations of Don Quixote in eighteenth-century England had an undeniable impact on the increasing sophistication of prose fiction. Cervantes' work was no longer viewed as simple farce or comedy, but as a model of serious satire to be imitated. If the purpose of satire is to correct and reform , the figure of Don Quixote was particularly appropriate: He sought to correct the delusions of a social order based on a nostalgic conception of the past, and at the same time his obsession to right every social wrong turned him into a victim of his own reformist enterprise. He was a kind of Everyman, according to Motteaux, and not merely some foreign lunatic: "Every man has something of Don Quixote in his Humour, some darling Dulcinea of his Thoughts, that sets him very often upon mad Adventures. What Quixotes does not every Age produce in Politics and Religion, who fancying themselves to be in the right of something, which all the world tells 'em is wrong...?"

Fielding, Henry. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. London, 1742.

From the collection of the George Peabody Library
Collection number: 823 F459A 1742


Motteaux's remarks could easily describe the figure of Parson Adams in Henry Fielding's The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews And of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. Written in Imitation of The Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote. Parson Adams, like Don Quixote, is intent in reforming the world, but he seeks to do so not because of his misreading of chivalric romances, but because of his obsession with Apostolic charity.