It is impossible (and unwise) to discuss Shamela without an understanding of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Interestingly, Fielding did not actually know Samuel Richardson was the author. Pamela, which was published on November 6, 1740, was issued anonymously and purported to be the genuine letters of Pamela Andrews. It was not until 1772 that Richardson’s name was affixed to the now-posthumous sixth edition.
Richardson was a printer and not a novelist, but was tasked by booksellers to put together a work of model epistles. He agreed to do so if he could add a moral component to them, and first produced one by a young servant-maid beset by her master’s attentions. The second was a response from the young woman’s father. Intrigued by this story he was starting to tell, Richardson began writing a novel in the epistolary form.
One of the things that Fielding delightfully mocked in Shamela was Richardson’s prefacing his work with letters of praise. Indeed, Richardson had 38 of these encomiums in the second edition, many of them written by his friend Aaron Hill.
The synopsis of Pamela is as follows, courtesy of the British Library: “After the death of her employer, the young maidservant Pamela finds herself having to rely on her wits and moral virtue to fend off the attentions of Lady B.’s son. Young Mr B gives Pamela his mother’s clothing and then offers to pay her to acquiesce to his seduction. When she refuses, he intercepts her letters to her parents and moves her to a distant country estate, away from the protection of the friendly housekeeper Mrs Jervis, and puts her under the care of the immoral Mrs Jewkes. He offers to pay her parents if she will comply with his demands. However, despite Mr B’s threats and promises, his physical intimidation and his efforts to isolate her from familial support, Pamela remains firm. After discovering Mr B’s plot for a sham marriage and injuring herself in an attempted escape from her seducer, Pamela prevails upon Mr B to let her return to her parents. The climactic turn in their relationship comes when Mr B writes her two letters: bidding her farewell and wishing her happiness in the first, and asking her to return to him in the second when he falls suddenly ill. The two reunite and marry. Pamela has some final trials, including accepting an illegitimate daughter of Mr B’s and overcoming the prejudice of the neighbourhood gentry and Mr B’s sister, but is eventually accepted by all.”
Scholar Judith Hawley notes that it is “difficult to get an undistorted image of Pamela, not least because the book provided so many spin-offs, continuations, and merchandise, including waxwork models of Pamela in high life. Something of a cult of a cult has grown up around it,” and that “The extraordinary hold Pamela has over its readers is derived not just from its potentially (but perhaps only potential) radical criticism of sex and class relations, but also from the obsessively detailed and subjective way in which it is narrated in Pamela’s own interrupted and self-absorbed correspondence.”
The novel is perhaps the first bestseller, a tremendously popular, lauded, and mocked work that has remained a central pillar of the study of the development of the modern novel.
