Pamela (novel)

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded is an epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson, first published in 1740. It tells in the first person the story of the virtuous lady's maid Pamela and the modest and agonized delicacy, yet determination, with which she rebuffs and reforms her aristocratic would-be seducer Mr B and is rewarded with marriage to him. Told through Pamela's probingly introspective letters and diary, Pamela is widely considered a seminal influence on the direction the novel form was to take towards psychological analysis and self-examination.

The heroine, Pamela Andrews, is a maid whose master makes unwanted advances towards her. She rejects him until he shows his sincerity by proposing a fair marriage to her. In the second part of the novel, Pamela attempts to accommodate herself to upper-class society and to build a successful relationship with her husband.

Conduct books and the novel

When Richardson began writing Pamela, he conceived of it as a conduct book. (One could say that the eighteenth-century conduct book is the forerunner of today’s etiquette and self-help books.) But as he was writing, the series of letters turned into a story. Richardson then decided to write in a different genre, the novel. He attempted to instruct through entertainment. In fact, most novels from the middle of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century, following Richardson’s lead, claimed legitimacy through their ability to teach as well as to amuse.

Epistolarity

Epistolary novels, that is, novels written as a series of letters, were extremely popular during the 18th century and it was Richardson's Pamela that made them so. Richardson and other novelists of his time argued that the letter allowed the reader greater access to a character's thoughts; Richardson claimed that he was writing "to the moment," that is, that Pamela's thoughts were recorded nearly simultaneously with her actions.

In the novel, Pamela writes two kinds of letters. At the beginning of the novel, while she is deciding how long to stay on at Mr. B’s after the death of his mother, she writes letters to her parents relating her various moral dilemmas and asking for their advice. After Mr. B abducts her and imprisons her in his countryhouse, she continues to write letters to her parents, but because she is unsure whether or not her parents will ever receive them, they are to be considered both letters and a diary.

In Pamela, the reader receives mainly the thoughts and letters of Pamela, restricting the reader’s access to the other characters; we see only Pamela's perception of them, aside from a few letters from her parents and several transcribed correspondences from Mr. B. In Richardson's other novels, Clarissa (1748) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753), the reader is privy to the letters of several characters and can thus more effectively evaluate the motivations and moral values of the characters.

Richardson's revisions

The popularity of Richardson’s novel led to much public debate over its message and style. Richardson responded to some of the criticisms by revising the novel for each new edition; he even created a “reading group” of women to advise him. Some of the most significant changes that he made were his alterations to Pamela’s vocabulary. In the first edition her diction is that of a lower-class maid, but in later editions Richardson made her more linguistically middle-class by removing the lower-class idioms from her speech. In this way, he made her marriage to Mr. B less scandalous as she appeared to be more his equal in education.

Reception

Richardson’s novel was the bestseller of its time. It was read by countless buyers of the novel and was also read aloud in groups. For example, one apprentice might buy or borrow the novel and read it aloud to the others while they were working. The novel was also integrated into sermons as an exemplar. It was even an early “multimedia” event—fans and mugs, among many other items, were illustrated with Pamela themes.

While selling thousands of copies, Pamela also sparked controversy. It was widely mocked at the time for its perceived licentiousness and inspired many parodies, including two by Henry Fielding: Shamela (1741), which features Shamela (the parody of Pamela) as a conniving social-climber, and Joseph Andrews (1742), which exposes the sexual hypocrisy in Pamela by retaining the plot but switching the sexes of the protagonists.

Today, Pamela is widely studied in university academia.

Criticism

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Doody, Margaret Anne. A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel: 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

External links

1740 novels | British novels | Epistolary novels