Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (Oxford World's Classics) | Samuel Richardson

Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (Oxford World's Classics) | Samuel Richardson | Pamela - Dumb like a Fox

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Pamela: Or Virtue ...

	Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (Oxford World's Classics) Samuel Richardson Oxford University Press, USA, 2001 - 592 pages average customer review:based on 31 reviews view larger image
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One of the most spectacular successes of the flourishing literary marketplace of eighteenth-century London, Pamela also marked a defining moment in the emergence of the modern novel. In the words of one contemporary, it divided the world "into two different Parties, Pamelists and Anti-pamelists," even eclipsing the sensational factional politics of the day. Preached for its morality, and denounced as pornography in disguise, it vividly describes a young servant's long resistance to the attempts of her predatory master to seduce her. Written in the voice of its low-born heroine, Pamela is not only a work of pioneering psychological complexity, but also a compelling and provocative study of power and its abuse.
Based on the original text of 1740, from which Richardson later retreated in a series of defensive revisions, this edition makes available the version of Pamela that aroused such widespread controversy on its first appearance.

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Samuel Richardson's "Pamela" was the first English Bestseller!

Pamela was published in 1740 quickly becoming a popular work of fiction. Britain was becoming a literate nation and novel reading was becoming a popular pastime in English homes. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) was a printer whose novels were epistolatory (all of them are written in the forms of letters-in Pamela her letters are to her parents who have become very poor.)
Pamela is a maid in the home of the wealthy Mrs. B. The good lady dies and we see Master B the scion of the family seeking to seduce the virtuous 16 year old girl. Pamela is abducted and taken to an isolated estate being held in genteel captivity by servants in the employ of Master B.
Pamela seeks to escape but her plans are foiled. She falls in love with Mr B. In part two we see Pamela being introduced into polite society by her wealthy husband. We even learn that he has fathered a child by a woman now living in Jamaica who was once his mistress. The novel ends with virtue triumphant as the good Christian Pamela becomes a trophy wife of Mr. B.
The plot, therefore, is a simple one in which a Cinderella/Jane Eyre heroine spotless for her virginal purity wins the heart of a rake. What makes Richardson worth reading is his psychological depth in analyzing why characters acts as they do in the objective world.
Pamela is much shorter in pagination that the massive Clarissa novel of 1747 (over 1500 pages long!) and is lighter in tone. There are comic characters presaging the work of Dickens in the Victorian age. Clarissa Harlowe is a rich young lass while Pamela comes from the ranks of the lowborn seeking to exist in a very class bound conservative social milieu.
The characters speak in high-flown language which makes the 21st century reader skeptical that anyone (much less a teenaged Pamela could speak or write in such words!) The second half of the novel is slow and
somewhat tedious as we see the happily married Pamela tell us how great Mr. B is and how grateful she is to him to have been elevated to a higher social class than the one in which she was born. This old novel would not win applause by modern day feminists!
The novel does have more movement than the very static "action" in "Clarissa." We travel to eighteenth century manor homes; inns on the roadside and see the slow pace in which life was lived in the
English countryside.
This novel would be parodied by the witty Henry Fielding who wrote "Shamela" in imitatiion of the pieties uttered in prose by Richardson.
Anyone who is interested in the birth of the English novel needs to read
"Pamela." It has its moments and its dull stretches but it is worthy of attention for its historical and literary importance.

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Pamela - Dumb like a Fox

If you enjoy epistolary books this is quite enjoyable with less maddening characters than in Clarissa. I would suggest reading this prior to Clarissa.

As always, Richardson brings out the worst in people and makes each fault larger than life. Do not use this as a what I want to be when I grow up primer.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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