Summary
Dedication
Conny Keyber writes a dedication to Fanny, saying it is appropriate to dedicate his work of the life of Shamela to a young lady of wit and beauty. He admits it is impossible to do so without flattery, so he praises her pen, her conversation, her good use of her time, her early wake up time, and her ability to stop herself from overeating. He also praises her sonnets, but concludes the dedication by saying it is Euclid’s Elements that influenced his own writing. Fanny, by contrast, pays him for writing.
Letters to the Editor
Two letters—one from anonymous, one from John Puff—praise the book and suggest the author take on the life of “his Honour” next.
An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews
Parson Tickletext to Parson Oliver
Tickletext writes to Oliver, providing a copy of Pamela and deeming it the “SOUL of Religion, Good-Breeding, Discretion, Goo-dNature, Wit, Fancy, Fine Thought, and Morality” (9). He admires its ease, propriety, and its ability to evoke emotion in the reader. He has read it to others and heard others read it to him, and can barely get away from it. It has bewitched him and remains before him. He ventures to say it would be best if all other books were burnt as this one is perfect, and it will endure forever.
He asks that after Oliver has read it five or six times, which he will no doubt do in a week, to pass it along to his God-Daughter—this will in fact be “the only Education we intend henceforth to give our Daughters” (10). He also wants the Servant-Maids to read it.
Parson Oliver to Parson Tickletext
Oliver writes back, saying he received the book but was acquainted with the history of Pamela before Tickletext wrote and now wishes to make a few remarks on it and its tendency to improve morality. Firstly, he will not deliver it to his daughter or servant-maids.
It is concerning, in his opinion, that the text seems to suggest servant-maids look sharp for their masters, and that they neglect their work and be debauched by the masters. This is not what they should want for their sons.
He also does not want his daughter to read some of the scenes in the text, as they are obscene. The narrative is overall a “Misrepresentation of Facts” and a “Perversion of Truth” (12), so he has enclosed other papers to help clarify the matter: the woman’s name was Shamela, not Pamela; her father served as a drummer in one of the Scotch Regiments in the Dutch service; her mother sold oranges in the playhouse and it was not known if she was married to Shamela’s father.
He includes the rest of Shamela’s history and assures Tickletext the documents are authentic.
Analysis
Shamela begins as Pamela did, with an introduction and florid letters of recommendation and praise. It then, however, contains a parson’s response to one of those letters, with damning statements that Pamela is actually “Shamela,” that her birth and upbringing are suspect, and that there are other numerous and more concerning elements of untruth and perversion of facts in her story. Hugh Amory writes that “Fielding thrusts aside all the qualifications that Richardson posed so delicately about the social tendency of his novel. Pamela is ‘really’ the illegitimate daughter of a Drury Lane orange-woman, not the true scion of a gentle family fallen on evil times.”
Fielding is clearly having fun right away, and even a reader who does not know the contemporary allusions and the coded commentary can recognize what he is doing. However, knowledge of those allusions is important and can illuminate the text even further. To begin, “Conny Keyber” is a reference to two men, Colley Cibber and Dr. Conyers Middleton. Both had recently published biographies of notable contemporaries. In her notes to the Penguin Classics edition of the text, Judith Hawley explains that “Conny puns on Conyers, ‘cony’ (a simpleton or dupe) and ‘cunny’ (the female pudenda).” Second, there is “Miss Fanny, &c.” Lord Fanny was a derogatory nickname for John, Lord Hervey, Baron Ickworth, a known bisexual royal. He was Middleton’s dedicatee in the biographer’s History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (1741). Fanny was also a slang term for the female pudenda, though Hawley wonders if that association was not dated until at least 1749.
The two prefatory letters of puffery in Shamela mock those included in Pamela. Fielding also mocks them in Parson Tickletext’s first letter, “reorganizing paragraphs, exploiting innuendos, taking sentiments out of context and exposing the blatant absurdity of the correspondence’ praise by quoting verbatim.” As for Parson “Tickletext,” this is, as Hawley notes, “a colloquial name for a parson, possibly with bawdy implications, or suggesting that he misreads the Scriptures” and that Fielding had a character named Tickletext in a prior work.
Scholars have much praise for Fielding’s wit, especially in these early parts of the text. W.R. Irwin writes admiringly that Shamela is “almost pure parody” and “displays Fielding’s method in fairly simple form. Part of the joke lies in his using the same whip on such different persons as Colley Cibber and Richardson; the first stroke is in the full title: An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. In the Dedication either Cibber or Richardson might be meant by Conny Keyber's acknowledgment of his debt ‘to an Author, whose Stile I have exactly followed in this Life, it being the properest for Biography.’ Again the amusing association is emphasized in Shamela's report that her Booby wishes to have their romance put into a book, the intended author of which can make Shamela—whose name will be changed to Pamela—her husband, and Parson Williams all seem great people, so practiced is this author in showing black as white. Beyond a good joke, Fielding's point in all this undoubtedly was that Cibber's Apology and Pamela share fundamental falseness. Shamela parodies both the spirit and the method of Pamela.”
Bernard Kreissman also lauds the satiric structure, saying in his work on Pamela and its parodies, “Fielding's bawdy dedication to Miss Fanny contains a foretaste of what is to come; and his burlesque of the dedicatory letters attacks not only Cibber and two other minor writers of the day, but also the Reverend Slocock for his pulpit commendation, and Pope's remark that Pamela ‘will do more good than many volumes of sermons.’”
