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Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) by Samuel Richardson is the first major English novel and one of the most consequential works in literary history — an epistolary novel about Pamela Andrews, a fifteen-year-old servant girl whose employer, Mr. B (for Booby — though Richardson withholds the name), attempts to seduce and eventually rape her, fails because Pamela resists every attempt with extraordinary determination and virtue, and eventually reforms and marries her. The novel was an immediate sensation: it was wept over, praised from pulpits, burned in public by those who considered it obscene, and parodied within months by Fielding (in Shamela, 1741) and by others who found its moral program hypocritical. It is both the founding document of the tradition of the psychological novel in English (Richardson's technique of 'writing to the moment' — having Pamela write her letters in the immediate aftermath of events while still in the grip of the feelings they produced — was a technical innovation without precedent) and the founding document of a debate about female virtue, class, and sexual politics that has continued to the present day.
Where to start
Pamela (1740)
Complete Pamela Book List
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Pamela
Samuel Richardson·1740
Pamela — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Pamela virtuous or calculating?
This is the question that Fielding's Shamela (1741) asks most directly — Fielding's Pamela is a scheming hypocrite who performs virtue while actually plotting to catch Mr. B. Modern critics have been divided: on one reading, Pamela is a genuine moral heroine who resists an overwhelming power asymmetry through nothing but her own determination. On another reading, her resistance is a negotiating strategy — she is calculating from the start what position of social advantage her virtue can achieve. Richardson clearly intended the former, and the novel's contemporary reception split between those who accepted the intended reading and those who couldn't help noticing that Pamela's virtue is rewarded, spectacularly, with exactly the social elevation she was too virtuous to scheme for. The ambiguity is probably the most interesting thing about Pamela's character.
Why was Pamela so popular?
Pamela appeared at a historical moment when a new reading public — increasingly female, increasingly middle-class — was looking for novels that addressed their experiences and aspirations directly. Pamela's situation (a young woman of lower social position who must navigate the sexual danger represented by a man of higher position) was recognizable to many readers; her method (writing, introspection, virtue) reflected values that the emerging middle class aspired to; and her reward (marriage to a gentleman) was the fantasy that the novel allowed readers to share. The epistolary form contributed to the intimacy of the reading experience — you were reading Pamela's actual letters, not a narrator's account of them, and the identification was correspondingly more immediate.
How does Pamela end?
Mr. B, after multiple failed attempts to seduce or force Pamela, is gradually converted by reading her letters (which he intercepts) to a genuine admiration for her virtue and character. He proposes marriage; Pamela accepts; the second half of the novel follows their marriage and Pamela's successful navigation of Mr. B's social circle and his illegitimate daughter Sally. The ending is the novel's most controversial element — the 'reward' of Pamela's virtue with marriage to her would-be rapist has struck many readers as disturbing rather than satisfying, and Richardson added material in later editions to address the criticism. The sequel, Pamela II (1741), follows the marriage and was much less successful than the original.
What is Richardson's 'writing to the moment'?
Richardson described his epistolary technique as 'writing to the moment' — having his characters write letters in the immediate aftermath of events, while still under the influence of the feelings those events produced. The effect is a kind of real-time access to emotional experience that had not been achieved in prose fiction before: Pamela writes her letters immediately after Mr. B's attempts, while her hands are still shaking, and the reader inhabits that immediacy. The technique produces the sense of reading someone's private diary rather than a narrator's organized account, and it was this effect — the illusion of unmediated access to consciousness — that Richardson's successors (including Laclos, Rousseau, and Goethe) recognized as his major innovation.
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