A 1740 novel credited with being the first fully “character-oriented” novel. An “epistolary novel” told in the form of letters between a daughter and her parents and later, when letters are forbidden her, journal entries. The “point of view” is first person, occasionally slipping into third person, the narrator explaining a few pages on: “so and so told me all of this later…”
Some facts. At the novel’s opening, Pamela is fifteen years old. At its close, she is sixteen. Something less than a year has passed. At twelve, her poor but famously honest and good parents had sent her to work for a very rich lady who had just passed away when the story opens. A son, twenty-five years old, inherits all the wealth and, being something of a libertine, very much wants a piece of Pamela. Bear in mind the “age of consent” in England in 1740 was twelve!
Pamela is cast as humanity perfected in motive to serve God through her treatment of others—the Christian injunction to love God and his other children on Earth is taken very seriously by her to the point that her only lapse in perspective is fear of not loving God or others well enough. She is the sine qua non of virtue with grace, and also, we are told, exceptionally beautiful. The other point reinforced over and over again is Pamela’s fanatic determination to remain chaste at least until such time (if ever) as she should be married.
The son (known only as B___ or master throughout) makes several attempts at Pamela, eventually abducting her to a distant property where she is placed in the hands of a cruel housemistress. Her escape attempts are always thwarted. All she wants is to go home to her parents. Mr. B___ cannot believe that she is not being duplicitous for the sake of more and more material wealth that he offers her in exchange for becoming his mistress. Finally, Mr. B___ grows sick of trying and lets her leave. On her way to her parents (we are halfway through the book), Mr. B___ reads her journal (the cruel housemistress, by his orders, having kept the document) and realizes that far from duplicitous, Pamela has been sincere throughout. He sends a fast rider after her with letters begging her to return to him. He loves her (he claims) and will give her everything of his life and wealth, including marriage, which, up to this point, was precluded by her low-born status.
Is this another feint on Mr. B___’s part? Pamela isn’t sure, but she decides to go back to him anyway, and thus begins the second half of the novel in which both she and Mr. B___ become the happiest couple on Earth. The second half of the novel is the perfect complement to the first half. Not only Mr. B___, but the cruel housemistress and all the other servants—who didn’t already love her thanks to her first employment—come to love her. Even the snobish gentry recognize that she might just be the most beautiful and gracious woman in all of England!
Novelists are told to “show, don’t tell.” If you acquire a story by reading a journal, the story might be told, but you, the journal reader, are shown it through the journal’s frame. I think that is the whole point of the length of this novel. We simply could not grasp how extraordinary Pamela is, and the subsequent transformation of everybody (especially Mr. B__) without the detail (and repetition) contained in its inordinate length.
The story’s pacing is consistent throughout. There is no elaborate time management; one day mostly leads to the next. We never lack for detail, and must suspend disbelief that anyone can, by hand with a quill pen, write that much that fast on so little paper (Paper was a luxury item in the eighteenth century) as she is given.
At the beginning, I was intimidated. Did I really want to spend the time reading this? At the end, I was delighted by the story and the portrayal of Pamela (despite her own misgivings, a most spiritual and graceful woman), perhaps the most elaborate—if redundant—single-character portrayal in all of fiction.
So why did I read this? For one thing, I’ve been on a “read the classics” jag for the last year or so, but this novel in particular, because I really wanted to read Henry Fielding’s Shamela, a parody of Richardson’s novel written only a year or so after Pamela’s publication. To best appreciate a spoof, one must know what is being spoofed. But Pamela is seven hundred pages long. Shamela is fifty pages! Oh well.
Shamela by Henry Fielding, 1741
So… Pamela is not the true story! It was commissioned by Mr. B___ (whose real name—revealed by Mr. Fielding—was Booby!) to produce a work complimenting him and his new bride. The real letters and journal were fewer and shorter (which makes more sense, see my comment above) and reveal a young girl, hardly a virgin, professing her innocence to her master for the sole purpose of seducing him into a disadvantageous (for him) marriage so that she might obtain legal access to his wealth! Meanwhile she (her real name being Shamela) has been sleeping with Parson Williams (an important—and. importantly, chaste—main character in Pamela) for some time already, a liaison that continues into her marriage to Booby!
Fielding’s satire continues the epistolary style even beginning with an exchange of letters between two ministers one of whom lauds the newly published “Pamela” as the epitome of Christian virtue and its just rewards, while his replier tells him that Pamela was ghost written by persons unknown (not wishing to insult Richardson by naming him) and that he, the replier, has the “real” letters and journal!
What I love about Fielding is his bawdy sense of humor, combined with a polished ability to talk about sex (there is a lot of it) through metaphor, innuendo, and double entendre. We learn, for example, that Parson Williams was well endowed, while Booby possessed only a “spindle,” and so on.
Shamela is but a novella, barely fifty pages long. It is funny, but not that funny, and feels rushed (Fielding’s first “novel,” and published barely a year after Pamela). Must one read a seven-hundred-page novel to appreciate the fifty-page farce? Technically, yes, though the two reading tasks are, to be sure, disproportionate. I’m glad, in the end, that I liked Pamela, crazy and perhaps unreal as it may be.
Ruminations 