106. Pamela by Samuel Richardson

Pamela Anderson, Pamela Stephenson, Pam Shriver, Pam Ayres...none of them would have existed without Samuel Richardson. Why? Because with his epistolary novel Pamela (1740) he popularized the name, and started a Pamela craze that lasted well into our own century. Pamela was so successful that it became one of the world’s first total branding enterprises: there were Pamela prints and engravings, Pamela waxworks, Pamela fans (for cooling maiden cheeks), racehorses called Pamela, Pamela murals, Pamela sermons, Pamela stage-plays, Pamela playing-cards and Pamela operas.

But Richardson himself owed a debt to, of all people, Sir Philip Sidney (see this blog's post on Astrophil and Stella). Pamela was the heroine of Sidney’s Arcadia, a pastoral romance in prose dating to 1590. Sir Philip, it seems, invented the name, cobbling it together from the Greek pan and mela — ‘all honey’.

Richardson had more than a tangential connection to Sir Philip. His day-job – before Pamela and his smash-hit follow-up Clarissa really took off and made him rich - was as a printer, and in this capacity he produced an edition of the Arcadia in 1724-5. He drew from it not just the name of the heroine, but several plot devices: both Pamelas are imprisoned, both resist attempts on their virtue, and in the final crowd-pleaser both reap the eventual reward of their honey-like sweetness and virtue.

One anecdote about Samuel Richardson, from Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), is not related to the title but I find it irresistible. It is as follows:

One day at his country-house at Northend, where a large company was assembled at dinner, a gentleman who was just returned from Paris, willing to please Mr. Richardson, mentioned to him a very flattering circumstance — that he had seen his Clarissa lying on the King’s brother’s table. Richardson observing that part of the company were engaged in talking to each other, affected then not to attend to it. But by and by, when there was a general silence, and he thought that the flattery might be fully heard, he addressed himself to the gentleman, ‘I think, Sir, you were saying something about —’, pausing in a high flutter of expectation. The gentleman, provoked at his inordinate vanity, resolved not to indulge it, and with an exquisitely sly air of indifference answered, ‘A mere trifle, Sir, not worth repeating.’ The mortification of Richardson was visible, and he did not speak ten words more the whole day. Dr. Johnson was present, and appeared to enjoy it much.

Consulted:
Boswell, James, Life of Johnson (1791)
Sabor, Peter (ed., intro.), Richardson, Samuel: Pamela (1992)
Sabor, Peter; Keymer, Tom: 'Pamela' in The Marketplace (2005)
See also this blog's post on Shamela.