The Pamela Controversy:
Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, 1740–1750
Edited by Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor
Consulting Editor: John Mullan
978 1 85196 615 8: 234x156mm: £495.00/$875.00
The Pamela controversy of the early 1740s remains a landmark of literary history. So intense was the Pamela vogue and its surrounding quarrels that one contemporary wrote of a world divided ‘into two different Parties, Pamelists and Antipamelists’, as though the sensational political developments of the day themselves had somehow been eclipsed. Fuelling the partisanship was the swift entrepreneurial opportunism of the eighteenth-century marketplace. As Terry Eagleton has written, this was not so much a novel as ‘a whole cultural event ... the occasion or organizing principle of a multimedia affair, stretching all the way from domestic commodities to public spectacles, instantly recodable from one cultural mode to the next’.
Recommended from the pulpit of a Southwark church, illustrated in the pavilions of Vauxhall Gardens, exhibited in ‘a curious Piece of Waxwork’ on a Fleet Street corner, Pamela was everywhere. Parodied and pirated, puffed and censured, versified and dramatized, and appropriated in several spurious continuations as well as Richardson’s own authorized sequel, it now makes visible, like nothing else, the heterogeneity, vigour and turmoil of its cultural moment. As has long been recognised, it also marks a defining moment in the history and formation of the novel as a literary genre.
Although the significance of the Pamela controversy has long been recognised, many of the key sources exist in only a handful of scattered copies, and have not been widely available to scholars or students. Only Fielding’s devastating contribution, in Shamela and Joseph Andrews, is currently in print, and even Richardson’s own defences of his work in such places as the preliminary matter to Pamela’s second and sixth editions are hard to locate. This multi-volume collection brings together for the first time all the key sources for the contemporary debate, other than the easily available Joseph Andrews. Among the longer works included are Eliza Haywood’s brilliant appropriation of Pamela in her Anti-Pamela; or, Feign’d Innocence Detected, and the spurious continuation by John Kelly, Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, which forced Richardson to write his defensive sequel of 1741. Four dramatic and operatic adaptations are also included, together with pamphlet commentaries and attacks, graphic representations including Joseph Highmore’s sequence of twelve Hogarthian plates, and hostile and sympathetic verse responses including J---- W----’s mock-heroic Pamela; or, The Fair Impostor … In Five Cantos, which ingeniously conflates Richardson’s text with Pope’s mock-heroic Rape of the Lock. All texts are photographically reproduced from the original editions, and each volume is preceded by editorial introductions situating the contents in historical and critical context.
Contents
Volume 1
Richardson’s Preface, Introduction, and Conclusion to the second edition (1741); Henry Fielding, Shamela (1741); Richardson’s Preface and Conclusion to volumes III and IV (1741); Richardson’s Preliminary matter to the octavo edition (1742); Verse Responses: Anon, ‘Advice to Booksellers (after reading Pamela)’ (1741); Poems from the London Magazine; Josiah Relph, ‘Wrote after Reading Pamela’ (1747); Belinda, ‘To the Author of Pamela’ (1745); George Bennet, extract from Pamela Versified (1741); Anon, ‘Pamela the Second’(1742); J— W—, Pamela: or, The Fair Impostor (1743)
Volume 2: Prose Criticism
Review from History of the Works of the Learned (1740); Anon, Pamela Censured (1741); Charles Povey, The Virgin in Eden (1741); Abbé Marquet (?), Lettre sure Pamela (1742); Visual Representations: John Carwitham, Engravings from The Life of Pamela (1741); Hubert Gravelot and Frances Hayman, Engravings from the octavo edition (1742); Frances Hayman, ‘Pamela Fleeing from Lady Davers’ (c. 1741–2); Hubert Gravelot, ‘Pamela and the Fortune-Teller’ (1740s); Joseph Highmore, Engravings of scenes from Pamela (1745); Robert Feke, ‘Pamela Andrews’ (early 1740s); Philip Mercier, Three paintings of Pamela (c. 1745–50)
Volume 3: Two fictional responses
Eliza Haywood, Anti-Pamela (1741); Memoirs of the Life of Lady H— (1741)
Volumes 4 and 5
John Kelly, Pamela’s Conduct in High Life (1741)
Volume 6: Dramatic and operatic versions
Henry Giffard, Pamela. A Comedy (1741); James Dance (?), Pamela; or, Virtue Triumphant (1741); Joseph Dorman, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded. An Opera (1742); Anon, Mock-Pamela (1750); Carlo Goldoni, Pamela. A Comedy (1750, translated 1756)
Reviews
‘The introductions to each volume are exemplary. They are well written, and full of information. They set the context of each work very thoroughly and explain the relations of the various sequels not only to the original but to one another. There is also a masterly chronology … more scholarly care, and even original thought, have been devoted to these volumes than to many similar enterprises of collective reprinting.’
– Claude Rawson, The Times Literary Supplement
'These volumes...are a pleasure to read and ought to live up to the editors’ goal of encouraging more debate about the Pamela controversy.’
– Mark G Spencer, Eighteenth-Century Life