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.

36. Shamela by Henry Fielding

The title page of Shamela reads:

AN
APOLOGY
FOR THE
LIFE
OF
Mrs. SHAMELA ANDREWS.
In which, the many notorious FALSHOODS and MISREPRSENTATIONS of a Book called
PAMELA,
Are exposed and refuted; and all the matchless ARTS of that young Politician, set in a true and just Light.
Together with
A full Account of all that passed between her and Parson Arthur Williams; whose Character is represented in a manner something different from what he bears in PAMELA. The whole being exact Copies of authentick Papers delivered to the Editor.
Necessary to be had in all FAMILIES.
By Mr. CONNY KEYBER.

From this rococo beginning it can be seen that Fielding’s main target was Pamela, Samuel Richardson’s smash-hit novel of 1740. The plot of Pamela is fairly simple: the heroine is a maid in the service of Mr B., who tries repeatedly to seduce her. Pamela foils all attempts on her virtue until Mr B., frustrated beyond endurance, makes a marriage proposal, which she accepts. The End. The subtitle of Pamela — Virtue Rewarded — leaves no doubt about the high moral tone of the book. Some, however, detected a whiff of hypocrisy. Richardson claimed that he had excluded anything ‘inflammatory’ in the book — that it was intended merely as a conduct manual for young ladies — but Pamela, which is basically a tease spread over 800 pages, has a force-nine erotic charge. Almost as soon as it had left the presses Pamela had drawn mockery and parody in a genre of books now known as ‘anti-Pamelas’, and Fielding was first off the blocks with Shamela, published only five months after the book that had inspired it.

Shamela is a splendidly immoral little squib, the story of a faux-naif strumpet on the make, out to ensnare Squire Booby (the counterpart of Mr B.), all the while carrying on an affair with Parson Williams. But Pamela was not the only target of Shamela. The full title, An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews, and its pseudonymous authorship by one ‘Conny Keyber’, reveals a second mark. Colley Cibber was the poet laureate, an appointee of the Whig ministry of Robert Peel, and much scorned as an establishment propagandist by his rivals, notably Alexander Pope, who made him the hero of the Dunciad. Cibber’s vainglorious memoirs of 1740 were entitled An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber. The transformation from ‘Colley Cibber’ to ‘Conny Keyber’ was in reference to Cibber’s Danish ancestry: he was regularly ridiculed in the press as ‘Minheer Keiber’. (‘Conny’, originally meaning a rabbit, was slang for the dupe of a thief or trickster.) The title-page of Shamela was an attempt to mock the Apology, and in the long introduction to Shamela, written in the form of various dedicatory and commendatory letters, there were many little anti-Cibber and anti-Walpole touches.

Shamela was an overnight success and marked an important career-change for Fielding. He had spent his youth writing plays: Shamela was his first novel. It was quickly followed, in 1742, by Joseph Andrews, the story of the brother of Shamela, and then in 1743 Jonathan Wild (another anti-Walpole production). In 1749 he produced his greatest novel, Tom Jones.

One postscript is of some interest. Three years after the death of his wife Charlotte in 1744, Fielding married, not without scandal, his wife’s maid Mary Daniel, who was six months’ pregnant at the time. One wonders if he had Shamela — or alternatively Pamela — in mind.

Consulted:
Fielding, Henry: An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (introduction by Sheridan W Baker, University of California Press, 1953)
Fielding, Henry: Shamela (introduction by Thomas Keymer, Oxford World’s Classics, 1999)
Turner, James Grantham: ‘Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson's Pamela’, Representations, No. 48 (1994)

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