This is the story of a good-natured footman's adventures on the road home from London with his friend and mentor, the absent-minded parson Abraham Adams.
The novel represents the coming together of the two competing aesthetics of eighteenth-century literature: the mock-heroic and neoclassical approach of Augustans such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, and the popular, domestic prose fiction of novelists such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson.
