Pamela

by Samuel Richardson

  There is a more subtle kind of comedy, involving mixed effects, in the scene by the pond where the antagonistic lovers begin to become truly reconciled. We should look at the changes rung throughout the scene on words like ‘sincere’, ‘frank’, ‘honest’. In a proper love story, this scene would be tender and straightforward; instead, it is full of odd little comic curlicues of play–acting and illogicality. Mr B. promises to be ‘sincere’ for the present– with the right to change tomorrow; he thinks sincerity can be taken up provisionally, and he is trying to use the power of ‘sincerity’ to sound Pamela’s feelings. Mr B. promises to be sincere, believes he is so, and at once becomes histrionic, egotistical and demanding. The characters’ conversation in this scene goes round in circles; logically, it gets nowhere. The hero explains why he can’t marry the heroine, and the heroine asks to go back to her family. Apparently, nothing has changed, yet in fact a great deal does happen in the dialogue of feelings rather than of logic. Sincerity does bring them together, even with all the falsehood, posturing and evasion involved in their attempts. When human beings start being ‘sincere’ with each other, a lot of sludge inevitably comes up from the sacred fount – but in human affairs, Richardson suggests, nothing is unmixed, nothing is statically ‘pure’.

  This is a hovel deliberately created out of mixed languages, impure effects, awkward gestures, failures and inelegant self–revelation. It is also for these reasons a humane and generous book, kind to human imperfections and hopeful for human growth. The silliness, delusion and egotism which cling to human thought and actions like flesh to bone are redeemable, may even have in themselves the seed and motive of virtue. Everything is growing and changing and developing — like the seeds of the beans Pamela planted, or the seed of the child which is growing in Mr B.’s wife at the end of the novel. No process ever comes to an end, as long as life lasts, because consciousness doesn’t come to an end, nor the natural world whose impulses it shares. The novel has a sense of the inexhaustible in life. There is no reason for an end to the story.

  Richardson defies the conventions of ‘an ending’ by running right past it The wedding of Mr B. and Pamela is not an end, but a beginning, and also a continuation of their lives before. Mr B.’s marriage was at first a secret affair, but he has to come to terms with it as an aspect of his whole self, which includes his social being. He has to bring it to the light What is private has to become public before it is fully itself, just as imagination has to become articulate. Mr B. has to connect his present with his past, and Pamela is now drawn into sharing his past, his memories and affections — a process which involves her in an encounter with his violent sister, horrified at the misalliance, and produces other shocks as well. She and Mr B. never finish learning about each other or themselves.

  Marriage does not put an end to the eternal process of living and being surprised. There are forces in Nature itself always pushing us forward, and in this novel (as not in Clarissa) Nature is in sympathy with the higher spiritual force within the psyche which makes us desire development, a larger and nobler identity, even if that nobler identity is never finally realized. The novel is telling us that human beings are sacred, even with their shortcomings. Sacredness and absurdity are consubstantial, as they are in Pamela’s letters, those sacred imperfections.

  FURTHER READING

  BIOGRAPHY

  Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Samuel Richardson’, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 39, British Novelists, 1660–1800, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Gale Research Company, 1985), pp. 377–401.

  John Dussinger, ‘Samuel Richardson’, New DNB, forthcoming.

  T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Clarendon Press, 1971).

  Alan Dugald McKillop, Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist (University of North Carolina Press, 1936; Shoestring Press, 1960).

  GENERAL WORKS

  Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political Reading of the Novel (Oxford University Press, 1987).

  David Blewett (ed.), Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson (University of Toronto Press, 2001).

  Harold Bloom (ed.), Samuel Richardson, in the series Modern Critical Views (Chelsea House, 1987).

  Elizabeth Bergen Brophy, Samuel Richardson (Twayne, 1987).

  Lois E. Bueler, The Tested Woman Plot: Women’s Choices, Men’s Judgments, and the Shaping of Stories (Ohio State University Press, 2001).

  John Carroll (ed.), Samuel Richardson: A Collection of Critical Essays, in the series Twentieth-Century Views (Prentice-Hall, 1969).

  — (ed.), Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson (Clarendon Press, 1964).

  Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford University Press, 1974).

  —, ‘Samuel Richardson: Fiction and Knowledge’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 90–119.

  —, ‘Saying “No”, Saying “Yes”: The Novels of Samuel Richardson’, in The First English Novelists: Essays in Understanding, ed. J. M. Armistead (University of Tennessee Press, 1985), pp. 67–108.

  — and Peter Sabor (eds.), Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  Carol Houlihan Flynn, Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters (Princeton University Press, 1982).

  Stephanie Fysh, The Work(s) of Samuel Richardson (University of Delaware Press, 1997).

  Tassie Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender (Stanford University Press, 1993).

  Jocelyn Harris, Samuel Richardson (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  Cadierine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  Mark Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist (Methuen, 1973).

  Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

  Allen Michie, Richardson and Fielding: The Dynamics of a Critical Rivalry (Bucknell University Press, 1999).

  Valerie Grosvenor Myer (ed.), Samuel Richardson: Passion and Prudence (Vision Press, 1986).

  John J. Richetti, The English Novel in History, 1700–1780 (Roudedge, 1999).

  Albert J. Rivero (ed.), New Essays on Samuel Richardson (St Martin’s Press, 1996).

  James Grandiam Turner, ‘Richardson and His Circle’, in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John J. Richetti (Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 73–101.

  William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (University of California Press, 1998).

  Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Chatto & Windus 1957; Penguin, 1963).

  ON PAMELA

  Janet E. Aikins, ‘Pamela’s Use of Locke’s Words’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 25 (1996), pp. 75–97

  — ‘Picturing “Samuel Richardson”: Francis Hayman and the Intersections of Word and Image’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 14 (2002), pp. 465–505.

  Scarlett Bowen, ‘“A Sawce-box and Boldface Indeed”: Refiguring the Female Servant in the Pamela-Antipamela Debate’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 28 (1999), pp. 257–85.

  Joe Bray, ‘“Attending to the minute”: Richardson’s revisions of italics in Pamela’, in Ma(r)king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page, ed. Joe Bray, Miriam Handley and Anne C. Henry (Ashgate, 2000), pp. 105–19.

  Murray L. Brown, ‘Learning to Read Richardson: Pamela, “Speaking Pictures”, and the Visual Hermeneutic’, Studies in the Novel, 25 (1993), pp. 129–51.

  Terry Castle, ‘P/B: Pamela as Sexual Fiction’, Studies in English Literature, 22 (1982), pp. 469–89.

  Rosemary Cowler (ed.), Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Pamela: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1969).

  T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, ‘Richardson’s Revisions of Pamela’, Studies in Bibliography, 20 (1967), pp. 61–88.

&n
bsp; Robert Folkenflik, ‘Pamela: Domestic Servitude, Marriage, and the Novel’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 5 (1993), pp. 253–68.

  Philip Gaskell, ‘Richardson, Pamela, 1741’, in From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 63–79.

  Morris Golden, ‘Public Context and Imagining Self in Pamela and Shamela’, ELH, 53 (1986), pp. 311–29.

  Richard Gooding, ‘Pamela, Shamela, and the Politics of the Pamela Vogue’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 7 (1995), pp. 109–30.

  Thomas Keymer, ‘Reception, and The Rape of the Lock, and Richardson’, in Alexander Pope: World and Word, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 147–55.

  — and Peter Sabor (eds.), The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, 1740–1750, 6 vols. (Pickering & Chatto, 2001).

  — and Alice Wakely (eds.), Pamela (Oxford World’s Classics, 2001).

  Bernard Kreissman, Pamela—Shamela: A Study of the Criticisms, Burlesques, Parodies and Adaptations of Richardson’s Pamela (University of Nebraska Press, 1960).

  Peter Sabor, ‘Richardson’s Index to His Correspondence on Pamela’, Notes and Queries, ns 26 (1979), pp. 556–60.

  Kristina Straub, ‘Reconstructing the Gaze: Voyeurism in Richardson’s Pamela’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 18 (1988), pp. 419–31.

  James Grantham Turner, ‘Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s Pamela’, Representations, 48 (1994), PP.70–96.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Richard Gordon Hannaford, Samuel Richardson: An Annotated Bibliography of Critical Studies (Garland, 1980).

  Keith Maslen, Samuel Richardson of London, Primer (University of Otago, 2001).

  William Merritt Sale, Jr, Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographical Record of His Literary Career with Historical Notes (Yale University Press, 1936).

  —, Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (Cornell University Press, 1950).

  Sara W. R. Smith, Samuel Richardson: A Reference Guide (G. K. Hall, 1984).

  NOTE ON THE TEXT

  THE publication history of Pamela, like that of Richardson’s two subsequent novels, is complex. It was first published anonymously in two volumes in November 1740; a revised edition with a lengthy introduction was published in February 1741, and three further revised editions were published in that year. In December 1741 a two-volume sequel was published, written in response to numerous criticisms, parodies and spurious continuations of the original work. In 1742 a deluxe, illustrated octavo edition of all four volumes was published, in which the text was again revised and the much criticized introduction replaced with a voluminous table of contents summarizing each letter and journal entry. Two further revised editions of the first part of Pamela were published in 1746 and 1754, and shortly after Richardson’s death in 1761 another four-volume edition was published, containing what was subsequently assumed to be the final text of the novel.

  During the 1750s, however, Richardson had undertaken an extensive revision of Pamela, making numerous stylistic alterations while adding and deleting phrases, sentences, paragraphs and even lengthy passages of several pages. These changes were made in an interleaved copy of the octavo edition. Richardson did not print the resulting text during his lifetime, but it was preserved by his daughters after his death, and finally used as the copy text for an edition of Pamela published in 1801. The provenance of this edition was first demonstrated in an article by Richardson’s biographers, Eaves and Kimpel, of 1967; the interleaved copy text, however, is not known to have survived.

  There are, then, three principal versions of Pamela: the original, two-volume novel of 1740; the intermediate revised editions of 1741-61; and the last revised text of 1801.

  The present edition of the first part of Pamela, based on a facsimile reprint of the 1801 text (Garland Publishing Company, 1974), and incorporating corrections made to that text in an edition of 1810, makes Richardson’s final version generally available for the first time. Some emendations have been made for the convenience of the modern reader, according to the following principles:

  1. Richardson’s spelling has been retained, except that elliptical spellings (past participles ending in ’d, tho’, thro’, etc) have been expanded, and the long s (f) has been replaced by the modern s.

  2. Punctuation, similarly, is left intact, except that (a) quotation marks have been supplied where necessary, and the running quotation marks used by Richardson deleted; (b) large numbers of dashes, often used by Richardson to indicate a change of speaker, have been deleted, and others, used to introduce dialogue, have been replaced with commas. Dashes indicating interruption or agitation, however, have been retained.

  3. The setting-out of parallel passages has been rationalized.

  4. Obvious misprints have been corrected.

  5. Capitalization and italicization have not been altered.

  I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, who kindly made available their unpublished collation of the 1801 and 1810 editions; and to Christine Rees, Peter Dixon, Linda Cooke and Margaret Doody for their assistance and advice.

  ADVERTISEMENT

  TO THE FOURTEENTH EDITION

  THE Booksellers think it necessary to acquaint the Public, that the numerous alterations in this Edition were made by the Author, and were left by him for publication.

  It cannot be material to state here the reasons why the Work has not sooner appeared in this altered and improved form.

  But it may be proper, for the satisfaction of the Public, to mention, that they have been favoured with the copy, from which this Edition is printed, by his only surviving daughter, Mrs Anne Richardson.2

  March 30, 1801

  Facsimile of the title page of the 1801 edition

  PAMELA;

  OR,

  VIRTUE REWARDED,

  IN A

  SERIES OF LETTERS

  FROM A BEAUTIFUL

  YOUNG DAMSEL TO HER PARENTS:

  AND AFTERWARDS

  IN HER EXALTED CONDITION,

  BETWEEN

  HER, AND PERSONS OF FIGURE AND QUALITY,

  UPON THE

  MOST IMPORTANT AND ENTERTAINING

  SUBJECTS, IN GENTEEL LIFE.

  IN YOUR VOLUMES.

  VOL. 1

  PUBLISHED IN ORDER TO CULTIVATE THE PRINCIPLES

  OF VIRTUE AND RELIGION IN THE MINDS OF THE

  YOUTH OF BOTH SEXES.

  A NEW EDITION, BEING THE FOURTEENTH,

  WITH NUMEROUS CORRECTIONS AND ALTERATIONS,

  LONDON :

  Printed for J. Johnfon, G. G. and J. Robinfon, R. Baldwin, W. J. and J. Richardfon, F. and C. Rivington, Ogilvy and Son, Otridge and Son, P. Macqueen, J. Nunn, W. Lane, G. Wilkie, Vernor and Hood, Lackington, Allen, and Co. Cadell and Davies, C. Law, Longman and Rees, T. Hurft, and J. Wallis.

  1801.

  PREFACE

  BY THE EDITORS3

  IF to divert and entertain, and at the same time to instruct and improve the minds of the YOUTH of both sexes:

  If to inculcate religion and morality in so easy and agreeable a manner, as shall render them equally delightful and profitable:

  If to set forth in the most exemplary lights, the parental, the filial, and the social duties:

  If to paint VICE in its proper colours, to make it deservedly odious; and to set VIRTUE in its own amiable light, to make it look lovely:

  If to draw characters with justness, and to support them distinctly:

  If to raise a distress from natural causes, and excite a compassion from just ones:

  If to teach the man of fortune how to use it; the man of passion how to subdue it; and the man of intrigue, how, gracefully, and with honour to himself, to reclaim:

  If to give practical examples, worthy to be followed in the most critical and affecting cases, by the virgin, the bride, and the wife:

  If to effect all these good ends, in so probable, so natural, so lively a ma
nner, as shall engage the passions of every sensible reader, and attach their regard to the story:

  And all without raising a single idea throughout the whole, that shall shock the exactest purity, even in the warmest of those instances where Purity would be most apprehensive:

  If these be laudable or worthy recommendations, the Editor of the following Letters, which have their foundation both in Truth and Nature, ventures to assert, that all these ends are obtained here, together.

  Confident therefore of the favourable reception which he ventures to bespeak for this little Work, he thinks any apology for it unnecessary: and the rather for two reasons: 1st, Because he can appeal from his own passions, (which have been uncommonly moved in perusing it) to the passions of every one who shall read with attention: and, in the next place, because an Editor can judge with an impartiality which is rarely to be found in an Author.

  CONTENTS4

  I. To her Parents. Recounting her lady’s death. – Her master’s kindness to her. Sends them money.

  II. From her Parents. Are much concerned for her lady’s death: cautions her against having too grateful a sense of her master’s favour to her. Further cautions and instructions.

  III. To her Father. She resolves to prefer her Virtue to life itself. Apprehends no danger at present from her master’s favour.

  IV. To her Mother. Lady Davers praises her beauty, and gives her advice to keep the men at a distance. Intends to take her to wait upon her own person.