On August 7th 1754, the author Henry Fielding left London for Portugal in search of a healthier climate. He had suffered from ill health for some time, but sadly his journey to Lisbon fails to ease his condition and he died there two months later.

During his lifetime, Henry Fielding wrote more than two dozen plays but his drama career ended when his satire Historical Register of the Year 1736 enraged the prime minister.

His first full-length novel, published in 1742, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams was also one of the first English novels. Fielding was melding and parodying the two major forces battling for control of the fiction of the time – the mock heroic, neo-classical tradition as practiced by Pope and Swift and the popular and populist fiction of the new novelists such as Defoe and Richardson.

Rufus Sewell reads The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams in an unabridged audiobook available only from silksoundbooks.com