Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded

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Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in the English countryside in the 1730s; published in 1740.

SYNOPSIS

In letters exchanged with her parents, a teenaged servant girl recounts how her gentleman employer falls in love with her, has her kidnapped, and ultimately marries her.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

Samuel Richardson is among the most unlikely masters of English literature. He was born in 1688 in London and apprenticed to a printer at the age of 17. He worked hard, married his master’s daughter, and eventually became head of the printing house. In time he was made Printer of the Journals of the House of Commons. Richardson did not write imaginatively until the age of 50. While composing a book of model letters for semiliterate people, he heard the story of a servant who married her aristocratic employer; the conjunction of these two factors seems to have inspired Pamela. The novel was published to great acclaim in 1740 and the aging printer found himself with a new career: novelist. Pamela was followed by the sequel Pamela in Her Exalted Condition (1741) and by Clarissa (1748) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753). While Clarissa is designated as Richardson’s masterpiece, Pamela has achieved distinction as the work that created the modern English novel.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The rise of literacy

Somewhat unusually for a servant girl of the time, Pamela is both literate and well-read in Richardson’s novel. She has been given not just one but two routes to literacy: her deceased mistress encouraged her to read, and her parents ran a school before economic reversals thrust them into poverty. In fact, neither of these routes was open to most servants. England in 1740 remained a place of limited literacy—exactly how limited is debatable since the figures are elusive. Broadly speaking, adult male literacy rose from 25 percent in 1600 to 75 percent in 1800; the unspecified female rate lagged behind (Hunter, p. 61). It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that most working-class men and women could read and write.

The total number of literate adults was rising gradually in the early 1700s. By 1750 only about half of all brides and grooms could sign their names, a criterion of literacy. Various types of schools existed—charitable, endowed grammar schools; parish schools; and “dame” schools (so called because the teacher was a single elderly woman). But education was neither compulsory nor always available. There were in fact employers like Pamela’s mistress in the novel who took an active interest in their servants’ education. In real life, a Dr. Claver Morris sent one of his maids to a local “dame” school to learn to read, as shown in his The Diary of a West Country Physician, a.d. 1684-1726. For most servants, however, economic pressures could make attendance difficult, and in retrospect employers such as Dr. Morris seem to have been more the exception than the rule.

Still, to observers of the early 1700s, England appeared to be in the throes of a reading explosion. This was the age of the newspaper, the cheap pamphlet and broadside, and the first stories that would be acknowledged as English novels. (Before Pamela, there were around 100 stories written in the form of letters; Pamela was revolutionary among them because of its focus on a unified central action—the romantic relationship.) There was, then, a proliferation of material for a reading public that was growing but still small.

Two factors may account for the sense of a reading explosion. First, most popular works would have a relatively small number of readers but countless listeners, as groups of the illiterate or semiliterate gathered to hear a literate friend read from the latest work. Second, such increases in literacy as occurred were especially noticeable because they involved groups that had never been primarily associated with literacy: upper-and middle-class women, the middle classes generally, and even some members of the urban working poor.

The growth of literacy had important, eventually world-changing, consequences. The new readership lacked the classical education that was the eighteenth-century standard for full literacy; thus, its members were much less likely to glorify Greek and Latin forms and styles than were the more thoroughly educated. In time the growth of literacy quashed the close relationship between modern European and classical culture, which had been central to literary production for more than a thousand years. The new readership preferred fresh types of works: most importantly, novels and romances. Among the first fruits of this trend, Pamela signaled a change in the literary culture of England.

Master and servant

By the early eighteenth century, all that remained of the feudal system that had characterized medieval English society were the great families and estates of the gentry and aristocracy. As modern culture evolved, the powers of the great landowners shrank, but they did not entirely disappear. The ideal of chivalrous honor survived; and, in the management of servants on large estates, so did some echo of the feudal relation between master and peon.

This is not to say that interactions between landowning masters and their servants were feudal in any direct way. Eighteenth-century servants earned wages, and tenants paid rent rather than provided services. Neither was bound to the land the way their medieval ancestors had been; both were free to go when they had satisfied their contracts. And the reverse was also true—masters had fewer obligations to their subordinates and could dismiss them almost at will. On the other hand, landowner masters enjoyed less power than before. Their legal authority was almost gone, eradicated by the growth of central administration. Although landowners often served as justices of the peace for their areas, they now had to follow the laws of the land.

In spite of these vast changes, the relationship between masters and servants remained sentimentally feudal. From the Renaissance to the Victorian era (early 1500s-early 1800s), the domestic staff was considered part of the household, and the relationship between servant and master could resemble that between parent and child. A gentlewoman like Pamela’s deceased mistress might want her servant to be a surrogate daughter rather than to just make the beds and set the table.

In addition to wages, masters were generally responsible for feeding and clothing their employees (one reason why wages tended to be low); if a servant’s parents had not provided education, as few were able to do, it was up to the master to equip the servant with whatever education was necessary for the completion of tasks. For maidservants, hired mostly to execute simple domestic chores, such education was generally minimal; Pamela is a great exception. Her mistress seems to have valued her company, and therefore to have expanded her mind with reading, playing musical instruments, and dancing to make her a better companion. In this regard too, her fate differed from that of most domestics of the day. Their lives, while arguably easier than those of fieldworkers, were spent in a daily round of cleaning, serving, or cooking. And their social life tended to be centered on other servants in the household, especially when their employment was a distance from the parental home.

Theoretically servants were protected from their masters by the laws referred to earlier and by common decency; in actual practice, servants’ dependent state left them exposed to the whims and desires of their masters. To disoblige one’s master, even justly, was to risk losing one’s hard-earned place; and, to the extent that an employer’s recommendation was crucial to securing a new place, a dismissal could be devastating. An eighteenth-century handbook for servants recommends that a servant recognize “that God meant he should be very exactly observant of all his master’s orders … that he should shrink from none of them, without a certainty that he would sin if he obeyed them; and must even then, with modesty and sorrow, express the great difficulty he is under, and the mighty concern he feels, in being forced to be disobedient” (Seaton, p. 76).

Many cases of rape took place between masters and servants. For the most part, society dismissed the ravishing of a maid by a master, regarding his behavior as only a minor sin. Few maids braved all the obstacles to take cases of rape to court, and one who did stood a small chance of having the jurymen believe her over her master. “To do so would set at risk the entire fragile nexus of authority, obedience, and deference” upon which upper-class society was built (McLynn, pp. 107-108). So, while it is true that the power of the landed gentry had waned much by the early eighteenth century, it still dwarfed the resources and actual rights of servants. Those with a grievance against their master generally found the courts, the neighboring gentry, the state, and sometimes even the Church unwilling to intervene. Such wronged servants required the wits of a Pamela Andrews to survive without damage to person or purse.

Two models of marriage

Pamela reflects a conflict between two very different conceptions of matrimony. The older conception was rooted in social and economic imperatives; according to this model, romantic love was a secondary consideration, nice if it happened but certainly not essential. By the middle of the sixteenth century, however, a new model grew prominent, one that stressed the emotional link between husband and wife and that idealized their relationship as the center of adult life.

The relative, sliding nature of these two conceptions must be stressed; neither was during Pamela’s day the sole lens through which English society viewed marriage. In part the social view of marriage rested on the assumption that a husband and wife could grow to love each other after marriage. In many cases, even supporters of marriage as a love match believed that considerations of class and wealth and to be taken into account. Nevertheless, by the time of the novel there was a striking cultural shift in favor of the emotional component, as reflected by developments in Pamela.

The eighteenth-century socioeconomic view of marriage is most visible among the upper classes and the gentry, partly because there is more documentary evidence, and partly because the economic stakes were higher. What evidence we have suggests that marriage among the laboring poor was largely a matter of individual choice, and thus more likely of affection. But for families with any monetary interests at all, marriage generally involved negotiations, contracts, and exchanges of money. A beneficial marriage was one that profited both sides, financially and socially. It empowered the families in additional ways, cementing alliances between political factions or business interests, or signifying the end of a feud. If a marriage promised to achieve such ends, a young man’s or woman’s preferences could hardly be allowed to upset the process. Practical concerns took precedence over affection

MARRIAGE OR ADULTERY?

Pamela’s miraculous ascent into the ranks of the wealthy was, in terms of its times, almost purely a fairy tale. Sometimes servants did marry masters; Richardson, for instance, began as an apprentice under his future wife’s father. However, in that case there was no real difference of class, only an initial difference in status; as an apprentice, Richardson could hope to rise on his own. It was much rarer for a member of the gentry to marry a servant. Moreover, for the handful of cases in which this did occur, the elevated spouse had much more difficulty blending into “the high life” than Pamela. By far, the more common occurrence was the extramarital liaison, especially between male squires (wealthy landowners) and female servants. Apparently few young girls had Pamela’s mixture of piety, foresight, and self-discipline. Impelled by desire or threatened with dismissal, and often duped by false promises of marriage, many succumbed to gentle advances or to rough compulsion—with rapes turning into liaisons. If a pregnancy resulted, the best the girl could hope for was to be supported in genteel ignominy; at worst, she might be dismissed and abandoned. It is difficult to gauge how common such affairs were, although they were common enough to be universally known as a potential pitfall of servitude. No one in the novel is surprised to hear that Mr. B. has taken a liking to his mother’s chambermaid; they are shocked only when they hear of the marriage.

in these matches, which were generally engineered by parents. It was understood that spouses might have to look elsewhere for love; extramarital affairs, though not approved of, were tolerated as long as they were conducted discreetly.

The model of companionate marriage linked matrimony and emotional involvement. Many historians see the origins of this model in the Reformation, the movement led by theologians, called Protestants, who began to reject Catholicism in 1517. Protestant theologians valorized marriage and accused Catholics of a perverse emphasis on sexual abstention. More exactly, Protestants did not approve of the vows of chastity required of Catholic clerics: Martin Luther, the man who began the Reformation, married monks to nuns. By the time of the novel, this renewed focus on marriage had acquired an affective component in larger society. Manuals on devotion and conduct, such as The Young Ladies’ Companion (1740) and The Compleat Housewife (1734), paint an idyllic picture of husband and wife as helpmates in their spiritual, emotional, and working lives. Such ideals spread most quickly in the middle classes, those who worked for their money. As old feudal relationships evaporated and social life rebased itself on the single-family unit, new standards for gendered behavior emerged; this happened most quickly in the city, where people were furthest removed from the old rural kinship patterns. Men left their homes to work, and women managed the domestic sphere, where they took charge of home duties and child-rearing. The consequence was complementary roles in marriage; where the man left off, the woman picked up, and vice versa. Such ideals mandated that love, or at least affection, be the basis of a marriage.

Again, the two views of marriage—affective and economic—were entangled; thus, the shift from one to the other is hard to measure. The triumph of love in marriage is probably intimately connected to the political triumph of the bourgeoisie by the middle of the nineteenth century: marriage as an unadulterated economic alliance lost its preeminent position largely because the wealthy, high-society family had ceased to be so great a political or economic force.

The rise of the individual

The trend of companionate marriage reflects a more fundamental rise—a new importance attached to individual sensations, fortunes, and thoughts rather than those of a general human type or social class. Promoting this democratic approach were ideas recently introduced by English philosopher John Locke in Thoughts concerning Education and Essay on Human Understanding (also in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). While Locke acknowledged that individuals develop intellectual understanding to varying degrees, he leveled the playing field far more than ever before, positing, for example, that at birth everyone’s mind is a tabula rasa, or blank slate. In other words, we all start out equally, regardless of class or other social distinctions. (Pamela itself refers to Thoughts concerning Education, from which Pamela imbibes the concept of the young mind being a blank slate). Locke also concerned himself with individual identity, teaching that people get in touch with their separate identities by remembering their past thoughts and actions, as Pamela does in her letters and diary entries. She continually ruminates over her own actions to discover what is true and how it fits with her morals. Although Pamela is only a lowly servant, the novel elevates individual consciousness by bringing her personal identity to the fore.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

Pamela comprises a series of letters between Pamela Andrews and her parents, as well as passages from her journals. Over the course of the novel’s 500 pages, Pamela’s letters grow so long and detailed that the reader wonders how she found the time to write them. The frame device is essential, however: it allows Pamela to describe events as they happen, without divulging whether her tale will have a happy ending. Because the story moves forward in spurts, the reader shares Pamela’s anxiety, and what is in effect a simple fairy tale develops with dramatic tension.

The story opens with a death. Pamela Andrews, a beautiful and intelligent servant girl, writes to her parents in a distant town to inform them that her mistress has died. This aged gentlewoman’s last words charge her son to “remember” Pamela. This son, called Mr. B. throughout the novel, soon gives hints of how well he will take care of Pamela: he gives her leave to write letters, read books from the library, and wear some of her mistress’s old clothes.

John, the servant who carries the letters to Pamela’s parents, brings back to her a disquieting letter, in which her father warns her to beware of Mr. B., whose kindness the old man distrusts. She is only a poor girl and can expect nothing from a wealthy squire like Mr. B. except to be seduced and abandoned. Pamela avows that she will heed this advice, even though she herself does not see anything suspicious.

The first sign of trouble appears in connection with Mr. B.’s sister, Lady Davers. Aware of Pamela’s beauty, Lady Davers wants to take the girl away. Mr. B. agrees but delays the departure and one day asks Pamela to stay. She says she would rather be with Lady Davers, and he responds by embracing and trying to kiss her. When she rebuffs him, he repents and orders her to keep silent about his advances.

Now Pamela makes a curious choice. Instead of fleeing the house, she decides she is safe enough to delay. She switches beds, though, and sleeps with the head housekeeper, Mrs. Jervis. The other servants get wind of what is going on; all of them side with Pamela, and show her as much support as possible. Meanwhile, Mr. B. has changed his approach; he criticizes Pamela and hints that he will cast her out. Discovering that she has not stayed silent but has told Mrs. Jervis of his indiscretion, he grows enraged.

Come in fool, said he angrily, as soon as he saw me; (and snatched my hand with a pull;) you may well be ashamed to see me, after your noise and nonsense, and exposing me as you have done. (Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, p. 28)

When he confronts Pamela, an argument erupts in which she handles herself well. Nevertheless, Mr. B. resolves to cast her out, and Pamela is happy to leave. She lingers, though, seemingly for no good reason; she wants to complete a waistcoat she is embroidering for the man she claims to hate!

The day before Pamela is to leave, Mr. B. announces he will visit his sister. That night, Pamela and Mrs. Jervis discuss the squire’s behavior as they fall asleep. Pamela hears a noise from the closet. As she rises to check it, out bursts Mr. B., who had concealed himself within. He claims to want only to talk, but Pamela does not believe him. She screams and faints. When she comes to, Mr. B. and Mrs. Jervis attend her solicitously, and from this moment until Pamela leaves, Mr. B. makes no more unseemly advances. He even suggests that he could arrange a marriage for Pamela with a young clergyman in his employ, but the girl refuses.

Finally the day comes when Pamela takes her leave. After a tearful farewell to each of the servants, she sets off in one of her master’s coaches. But if Pamela thinks she is going home, she soon learns otherwise; the coachman, Robin, drives her to Mr. B.’s other estate, in the isolated northern region of Lincolnshire. Richardson breaks the epistolary frame to report that Mr. B. sends a letter to Pamela’s father, in which he accuses Pamela of slandering his reputation; he also says she has been carrying on an improper intrigue with the same clergyman Mr. B. had offered her, and that he, Mr. B., has imprisoned her at Lincolnshire for her own good. Her father is so distraught that he walks all night to confront Mr. B., only to be poorly comforted by the squire’s assurance that he means the girl no harm. The father has little recourse: while Mr. B. does not have the legal right to kidnap Pamela, his wealth and connections make it all but impossible for the worried father to lodge a complaint. He returns home.

This brief non-epistolary excursion ends, and Pamela’s voice resumes. She describes how she was carried to Lincolnshire and imprisoned there. This estate is the mirror opposite of her old home; instead of the kindly Mrs. Jervis, the housekeeper here is an ugly, corrupt old woman named Mrs. Jewkes, who torments Pamela with hard rules and smutty jokes. Soon after her arrival, Pamela experiences another shock: John, the servant who has carried her letters to her parents, admits that he showed Mr. B. everything she wrote. Apart from the shock of discovering that her employer—a man who has already grievously invaded her privacy—has had access to her personal correspondence, Pamela is unhappy because her letters were filled with frank denunciations of him. From now on, she takes special care to hide her writing.

Mr. B. writes to say he will not come to Lincolnshire until the girl gives him permission, but Pamela knows how little she can trust this promise. She determines to find a way to escape before he changes his mind. Even though she is watched closely, she manages to contract a friendship with the neighborhood parson, Mr. Williams—the same clergyman Mr. B. had offered her in marriage. Between fights with Jewkes, Pamela carries on a secret correspondence with Williams. Though younger and less experienced than he, she is much cannier and finds herself directing the parson. He appeals to the local gentry, but they refuse to intervene. Because she is poor and without social status, they feel she is not worth helping. The parson himself offers to protect Pamela by marrying her. She refuses. When his attempts to free her are found out, he is roughed up and arrested by Mr. B.’s henchmen.

Pamela receives an angry letter from Mr. B., who, jealous of her friendship with Williams, accuses her of deceit and hypocrisy. She then reaches her lowest point. One night she tries to escape but falls from the garden wall. Distraught, Pamela throws some of her outer garments into a pond, hoping to make everyone think she has drowned. She considers, then rejects, suicide, and crawls to a woodshed to sleep, where she is found in the morning by a frightened Mrs. Jewkes.

This near-suicide brings Mr. B. to Lincolnshire, despite his promise. He and Pamela spend an evening together that is almost free of rancor. It is as if something has changed between them. Mr. B. clearly loves her, and she admits that she cannot hate him. But the squire is at war with his own snobbish unwillingness to marry a servant, and she will not accept him any other way. He makes her an offer that amounts to contractual concubinage, which she refuses indignantly.

What, sir, would the world say, were you to marry your harlot? That a gentleman of your rank in life should stoop, not only to the baseborn Pamela, but to a base-born prostitute? Little, sir, as I know of the world, I am not to be caught by a bait so poorly covered as this! (Pamela, p. 201)

He makes another attempt at rape, this one more comical than real; he disguises himself as a servant girl, Nan, and manages to sneak into Pamela’s and Jewkes’s room. Yet, despite his own hard language and Mrs. Jewkes’s encouragement, he does not rape Pamela. She faints, and he relents once more.

After this episode, the two combatants spend time together and grow closer. Mr. B. even hints that he will propose marriage. But while he is away on a trip, Pamela receives an anonymous warning that the squire is planning a mock marriage. This warning haunts her, but she does not tell Mr. B. of her doubts; instead, at the very moment when they should be closest, she withdraws. Enraged and baffled, he sends her away. She is sorry to leave but feels it cannot be helped.

At last free after months of confinement, Pamela is desperately unhappy. At her first stop on the road home, she is overjoyed to find a letter from Mr. B. imploring her to return. She happily obliges. Back in Lincolnshire, they make plans for their wedding; he quiets her fears about the sham marriage, admitting that he had in fact planned such a trick but then abandoned it. One by one, the old rifts are bridged: Mr. B. frees Williams from prison, and they are reconciled; Pamela and Mrs. Jewkes become as close as their different temperaments allow; Mr. B. introduces his fiancée to the local gentry who had refused to aid her, and she manages not to rebuke them. Pamela’s father arrives, and is overwhelmed with joy to find that his daughter’s glad tidings are correct.

The marriage takes place, and all seems to be bliss. But there is still one more hurdle to cross. Pamela won the hearts of her husband’s neighbors, but her new sister-in-law, the proud Lady Davers, will not be so easily reconciled to the idea of having a servant girl for a relative. One day when Mr. B. is away, Lady Davers arrives at Lincolnshire. She abuses and torments Pamela, refusing to believe that her brother and the onetime servant are legally married. Finally Pamela escapes to a neighbor’s house.

The concluding chapters concern the reconciliation of Lady Davers to her brother and his wife. When Lady Davers tells Pamela that her brother already has a child from an illegitimate affair, Mr. B. is thrown into such a rage that he swears to break off all communication. Stricken with guilt, his sister relents. In the last scene, Lady Davers asks to read the letters that compose the novel itself. She senses that they will win her heart, since they played so large a role in winning Mr. B.’s.

Saint or sinner?

Plot summary can provide only the barest sense of what Pamela is about. The novel would be far shorter without the heroine’s extended comments on everything that occurs. Pamela is among the most relentlessly contemplative characters in literature; hardly a word or event passes without her ruminating on it and finding some lesson in it. In addition to his heroine’s many pages of moral commentary, Richardson appends to the novel a key of the moral lessons to be drawn from each character in the novel, major and minor. For instance, he writes, “The upper servants of great families may, from the odious character of Mrs. Jewkes, and the amicable ones of Mrs. Jervis, Mr. Longman, & c. learn what to avoid, and what to choose, to make themselves valued and esteemed by all who know them” (Pamela, p. 531). Richardson was clearly less interested in telling a rousing story than in providing positive examples. The struggle between Pamela and Mr. B. is as much a fight over morals as it is a love contest. The subtitle, “Virtue Rewarded,” indicates the lesson to be drawn: Pamela’s constant attention to moral propriety eventually overpowers Mr. B.’s illicit lust.

Richardson’s novel succeeded in becoming a moral model in the author’s time. Pamela became a byword for virtuous modesty, and the book was recommended from more than one London pulpit as edifying reading. Not everyone, however, was enchanted by Richardson’s upright ingenue. Within weeks of the novel’s appearance, she was at the center of a controversy that raged for years. For many readers, Pamela was not the forthright, pious girl she appeared to be, but rather a calculating hypocrite who hid her desire for Mr. B., admitting her love only when she was assured of the most favorable terms.

The first two years of the 1740s saw a stream of burlesques, pamphlets, and invective directed at Richardson’s pioneering novel. An anonymous poem on Mr. B.’s first attempted rape asks, “Tho’ odd the question may be thought/From one so very modest,/Yet that she would forgive the fault/To me seems much the oddest” (Kreissman, p. 24). According to such critics, Pamela mouths religion but acts like a market woman, holding out for the highest price for her only commodity: herself. And, in the eyes of these critics, Richardson himself was no better: he claimed to eschew the lascivious scenes common to earlier stories yet filled his work with luscious descriptions of Pamela and two scenes of attempted rape. Perhaps most damningly, though the novel itself says Pamela is a special case, not one to be imitated, critics argued that the romance would prompt gentlemen to think of marrying their chambermaids, and vice versa.

All such invective was topped by Shamela, the famous parody written by the well-educated gentleman, Henry Fielding, author of Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749; also in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). Shamela, more formally known as An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, is a masterpiece of parody: Fielding hones in on every aspect of his target that could possibly give a reader pause, from the smug letters of commendation with which Richardson prefaces his novel, to its insistent references to Pamela’s physical beauty. Most distasteful to Fielding was what he saw as Pamela’s crass, commercial conception of “virtue rewarded”—rewarded not with the simple joy of being virtuous, but rather with a fabulous marriage and incredible wealth. In this world, believed Fielding, nothing is for sure, and certainly not that virtuous actions will be justly rewarded; to suggest otherwise is not only misleading, but also directly counter to a morality centered on heaven. To highlight this, his Shamela is a crude harlot who uses a pretense of virtue to trap a Mr. B. (who gets a full name in this version—“Booby”). Her mother is a bawd and Mrs. Jervis is no better; Parson Williams is Shamela’s former lover, with whom she takes up again as soon as she is safely married. The exaggerated crudity is evident in this exchange between Booby and Shamela:

Yes (says he) “you are a d_____d [damned], impudent, stinking, cursed, confounded Jade, and I have a great Mind to kick your A—. You kiss [my] — says I. A-gad, says he, and so I will; with that he caught me in his Arms, and kissed me till he made my Face all over Fire.
(Fielding, p. 328)

Fielding closes his parody with a version of Richardson’s moralizing conclusion, in which he directly states his objections; Pamela is filled with erotic scenes barely draped in morality; it exonerates Mr. B. and Mrs. Jewkes, who commit immoral acts; and, worst of all, it presents a ludicrous mismatch as a wonderful thing.

Obviously there was much more at stake in the controversy over Pamela than mere interpretation of a popular novel; the book aggravated deeply ensconced class tensions. These tensions are reflected in the difference between Fielding—a gentleman of leisure and literature—and Richardson—a hardworking mercantile man. Fielding’s novels suggest an allegiance to the remnants of the social system that had organized England from its feudal beginnings. His father was the impoverished descendant of the earl of Denbigh; his mother, the daughter of a squire. Richardson represented the industrious middle classes, rising in wealth and power and impatient with the social dominance of the idle rich. In 1740 Richardson’s viewpoint was, to say the least, innovative and, at most, revolutionary. Much more traditional was the outlook that society can function properly only if everyone keeps his or her God-appointed place and fulfills the tasks of that place without envy or ambition. This did not mean forestalling all change; some reforms were considered salutary to society. It did, however, mean preventing the breakdown of social division and the concomitant redistribution of power. Fielding’s parody can thus be seen as an attack on the transgression of class borders. From this point of view, even a woman as bad as Shamela is acceptable in her place; it is her sudden elevation that makes her ridiculous, or even dangerous.

To be fair, Fielding’s novel does not give unlimited license to the gentry; his Squire Booby is as ridiculous for stooping as Shamela is for aspiring. Implicit in the view is an explanation for servant-master liaisons—the extramarital affair may have been preferable to marriage across classes. While the former threatens individual souls, the latter threatens the social order itself.

By contrast, in Pamela the idea of marrying into the gentry does not frighten the heroine at all. This and other details can be construed to render her a social climber. But in the eyes of many, such ambition did not make her a pariah—quite the contrary. For Richardson, as for all the self-made people he represents, social climbing was not blameworthy, but praiseworthy. Not tied to the land as farmers or enriched by wealthy ancestors, members of the middle class labored for their sustenance and tended to believe that their hard work, discipline, thrift, and caution would be rewarded—not only in heaven but with material advancement on earth.

By the 1740s, the middle class was beginning to dominate English political and social life. While the landed gentry retained a potent place in the cultural imagination, it was commerce, manufacturing, and their middle-class agents that made the nation rich. They were therefore unwilling to accept traditional obstacles to social advancement. The English gentry did not work for its wealth—it enjoyed its prestige by accident of heredity. Should not the fruits of life go to those whose personal virtues have earned them? Richardson’s novel does not indulge in bourgeois propaganda. Nevertheless, it is filled with unflattering images of the gentry: Mr. B. and Lady Davers are conceited, headstrong, self-centered, and impulsive. If Pamela ends up joining the very class she spent much of the novel criticizing, she does so only after reforming it: Mr. B. will be a rake no longer, and the proud Lady Davers is humbled. The mere fact that Richardson was able to write this parable of social change indicates how far the middle class had come. By 1740, capitalism was the engine driving English society; the land-rich gentry, while still socially preeminent, were being left behind. Richardson’s novel represented the future; Fielding’s response, the past.

Sources and literary context

Pamela is difficult to categorize. On the one hand, it is usually considered the first modern English novel; there is nothing quite like it in history, even though works of prose fiction, such as Thomas Greene’s Pandosto (1590) and William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1575) had been circulating in England for more than a century. Richardson’s status as the first modern English novelist rests on two accomplishments. First, he changed the focus of the novel from free-roaming, often risqué adventures to a sober tale of ordinary people contemplating marriage. Second, Richardson introduced realism into the novel: from now on, the mainstream novel would lack the element of the fabulous and magical so common in its predecessors, such as Sidney’s Arcadia (1590) and Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621). Clearly Pamela’s was the story of a particular person rather than of general human types, “as had been common in the past” (Watt, p. 15). Moreover, her circumstances were realistic and the plot was not episodic in nature, but concerned a single line of action—romance and marriage. From Frances Burney to Jane Austen to Charles Dickens and Charlotte and Emily Brontë, novelists would pick up the Richardsonian focus on marriage across social class in their works. Inasmuch as most subsequent novelists followed Richardson’s lead in these respects, Richardson created the modern novel in England.

Influences on Pamela are myriad, ranging from the epistolary format that had been in use for more than a century, to the books of model letters (including Richardson’s own Familiar Letters on Important Occasions) aimed at the semiliterate. There was also a longstanding tradition of literature that revolved around the fabulous marriage. Stories about such marriages hark back not only to fairy tales but also to Greek and European romance, in which a seemingly low-born child is eventually revealed to be a prince or princess in disguise. Richardson eliminates noble origins, but only to highlight Pamela’s innate nobility.

PAMELA’S NAME

In 1740 the name “Pamela” was not a common name; it was made popular by Richardson’s novel. But Richardson did not make the name up. He borrowed it from one of the heroines of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, a romance written in the 1580s. Sidney’s Pamela is a genuine princess, sent into disguise as a simple shepherd girl; despite this crucial difference, the two Pamelas share personality traits that make the name equally appropriate. Both are somewhat august, self-respecting personalities, quick to rebuke any assault on their dignity. More significantly, both have a tendency to launch into long speeches on virtue, honor, and the benefits of chastity, and both are placed in situations in which they must defend their honor by their own wits. Richardson uses nomenclature to align his work with a still-popular classic, but also to suggest the differences: Sidney created a world of singing shepherds and chivalric knights, while Richardson’s Pamela operates in a world of venal servants and embroidered waistcoats.

Finally, Pamela appeared at a time that saw the rise of sentimental literature. Championed first by Richard Steele, an essayist and playwright, sentimental works stressed moral propriety and discussed fine grades of feelings.

Reviews

Pamela was an astounding success; either loved or hated, Pamela Andrews was a name on everyone’s lips for years. The book was commended by preachers, moralists, and many critics, including the esteemed Samuel Johnson (see The Life of Samuel Johnson, also in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). Johnson praised the genuineness of emotion in Richardson’s writing, qualifying his praise:

[I]f you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.
(Johnson in Boswell, pp. 190-91)

On the other hand, Pamela was derided by moralists and by Fielding, and banned by the Catholic Church (presumably because of its lascivious scenes). It inspired plays, paintings, and spurious sequels. By the end of the century, the furor had died down. Richardson’s novel remained popular, but at a much lower pitch. The genius of succeeding novelists such as Jane Austen, the Brontës, and Charles Dickens made Richardson’s technique seem primitive and outdated. Occasionally, though, Richardson still found champions, among them Sir Walter Scott (see Rob Roy, also in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). In Scott’s estimation, “No one before had dived so deeply into the human heart” (Scott in Richardson, p. xii).

—Jacob Littleton