Summary
Letter 10: Shamela to Henrietta
Shamela tells her mother she received a letter from the Squire, which said he hoped she was not mad he sent her to Lincolnshire, not London, and that he wanted to be with her and was on his way. She thinks he plans to marry her, and she will be Mrs. Booby and the mistress of a great estate. This is exciting for all the wondrous things she will buy and do, but she is regretful about Parson Williams.
Mrs. Jewkes then came in and told Shamela that the Squire wanted her to be nice to Shamela so she would, as she greatly respected him. Shamela insisted upon her own virtue; Mrs. Jewkes did not know the truth but was still suspicious.
She dallied with Parson Williams that afternoon until he had to leave, and became worried about what Mrs. Jewkes might do. She decided to pretend that she intended to drown herself, and stripped her petticoat off into the canal and then hid in the coal-hole. The servants were terrified and looked everywhere for her. Finally they “found” her and she said the Devil put it in her head to end her life (but this was a lie).
She went inside and prettied herself and soon her Master arrived. She went downstairs and he told her he would give her anything she wanted, but then called her a hypocrite and a hussy, but then as she turned away, pulled her back and kissed her.
After he left Mrs. Jewkes came to her and told her she had left the Master in a tizzy and he was bothering other servants. Huffily she told Mrs. Jewkes not to affront her. Mrs. Jewkes quieted herself and the two of them talked about her virtue until dinner time. At the table her Master gave her champagne and pulled her onto his lap. She feigned being irritated by him. Mrs. Jewkes told her privately that she believed Shamela would soon be her mistress.
They went to bed, but the Master stole into the room and came into her bed and started touching her. Mrs. Jewkes held down one of her arms and told her Master to do it, but Shamela remembered her mother’s instructions on not being ravished so she fought back and ended it. He apologized and proclaimed he would never take her by force.
The next morning he presented her with a list of things he was willing to provide for her as his mistress, but she heatedly refused. He bemoaned his state of affairs and proclaimed himself bewitched.
Letter 11: Henrietta to Shamela
Henrietta congratulates her daughter but says she is worried about Parson Williams and wishes he was out of the way. She suggests Shamela wait until after the wedding to see him again, admonishing her that “a married Woman injures only her Husband, but a single Woman herself” (29). She is hoping to see her daughter as a great lady.
Letter 12: Shamela to Henrietta (written before receiving the prior letter)
Shamela tells her mother how the Squire came to her and asked her to walk in the garden. He inquired if she had any other suitors and she said no, making sure to calm his suspicions of Parson Williams. Relieved, he said he wanted to marry her, but she said he could not go below his station. In a fury, he cast her away.
Mrs. Jewkes told her the chariot was coming to take her home. A little startled, she knew she could not go back on her behavior towards him. She lied and told Mrs. Jewkes she was happy to leave, and would never think of her Master again.
She packed up her things and bid goodbye to the servants and went on her way. As the chariot rolled away, a man on horseback came and thrust a letter into the chariot. She recognized the Parson’s hand.
In his letter, the Parson excoriated the Squire for calling in a debt of his, and told Shamela that unless he could get the money soon he would be thrown into jail. He begged her to prevail upon the Squire to release him, but cautioned her not to do anything improper.
Shamela includes a letter from Williams to Squire Booby in which the Parson wonders why he is the object of the Squire’s displeasure and if perhaps false statements were circulating about him. Shamela tells her mother that this treatment of the Parson shocked her.
She includes one final postscript that says she received another letter from her Master telling her to return and providing her with a number of promises. She is sure she has him in her grasp now.
Parson Oliver says here that the aforementioned letter and Shamela’s response are lost, but he will include one from about a week after the wedding was performed.
Analysis
Fielding does not let a single one of his characters escape from being loathsome. Mrs. Jewkes is sniping and opportunistic, the Squire is lascivious and querulous, and Shamela is, of course, Shamela. But it is Parson Williams who is the worst of them all, for as a religious man he is certainly supposed to live his life according to a higher standard. Through this character, Fielding satirizes and critiques not just Samuel Richardson and Pamela but religious hypocrites and Methodists in particular.
The first readers hear of Williams is through Shamela. We learn the two are lovers, that she had a child by him, and that he told her if she prayed and improved herself through reading good books she would be cleansed of her sin. He tells her in a letter that he considers her like a wife, and that he has repented of the “venial” sin the two committed, but then immediately says he is planning on spending the evening with her “in Pleasures, which tho’ not strictly innocent, are however to be purged away by frequent and sincere Repentance” (23). Clearly his religiosity is malleable, and all sinful behavior able to easily wiped away by pretending to be repentant.
In the same letter we also learn that Williams’ family has been the incumbent clergy on the Squire’s land for a few generations. Williams hates the Squire, whom he calls a “perfect Reprobate” (22) and says that even though “a Contempt of the Clergy is the fashionable Vice of the Times…let such Wretches know, they cannot hate, detest, and despise us, half so much as we do them” (22). Yet this does not deter Williams from confiding that he has “prevailed on myself to write a civil Letter to your Master, as there is a Probability of his being shortly in a Capacity of rendering me a Piece of Service” (22).
Williams’ self-serving approach to religion manifests itself in the sermon he delivers. He preaches that, conveniently, “the Bible doth not require too much Goodness of us,” and that “to go to Church, and to pray, and sing Psalms, and honour the Clergy, and to repent, is true Religion” (23). He adds that “‘tis not what we do, but what we believe, that must save us” (23), which also seems like a convenient way to behave sinfully and excuse it away by “believing” that it is okay, or that one has repented enough. The Squire dislikes Williams as much as the parson dislikes him, and in the next section has him arrested for the money he lent him. Williams feigns ignorance, crying in a letter to the Squire that “I cannot avoid thinking some malicious Persons have insinuated false Suggestions against me; intending thereby, to eradicate those Seeds of Affection which I have hardly travailed to sowe in your Heart, and which promised to produce such excellent Fruit” (32-33). The men eventually come to a truce and end up drinking and smoking and talking politics late into the evening. The last we hear of him, though, is in Tickletext’s letter: “Since I writ, I have a certain Account, that Mr. Booby hath caught his Wife in bed with Williams; hath turned her off, and is prosecuting him in the spiritual Court” (43).
As clergymen themselves, Tickletext and Oliver have reason to object to Williams’ behavior. Oliver says in Williams, who is presented in Pamela as a “faultless Character,” we see someone who is actually “a busy Fellow, intermeddling with the private Affairs of his Patron, whom he is very ungratefully forward to expose and condemn on every occasion” (42). Even more damning, he says “In Him you see a Picture of almost every Vice exposed in nauseous and odious Colours; and if a Clergyman would ask my by what Pattern he should form himself, I would say, be the reverse of Williams” (41).
Critics offer illumination on what Fielding is doing with this character. Hugh Amory writes, “Parson Williams' interest in Pamela and his interference in his patron's affairs—for which, we should note, he duly apologized in the original—is the ‘real’ method of a Methodist in the parody, plotting to eliminate the gentry's control of the clergy while availing himself of their patronage.” He sees Shamela’s behavior as far less problematic than Williams’: “Shamela is naively delighted to learn that one may fornicate with-out sin if one ‘repents’; but what she understands as a facile formality, Williams places at the core of his creed, the acknowledgement of the Church's authority to prescribe penance.” Eric Rothstein has similar insights, noting “The most obvious religious satire in Shamela centers in the Methodistical Parson Williams, who preaches the convenient doctrine of the sufficiency of faith.” Fielding, Rothstein claims, “makes us perceive, through Parson Oliver's censure of Pamela, the social chaos inherent in disrupting the established places of gentlemen, maids, and curates. He reminds us, through the Dedication, of government by sycophancy rather than by law and merit. And he shows the result, in Parson Williams, of an unrestrained personal interpretation of domestic, social, and religious modes of order.” And Morris Golden connects the character to Fielding himself: “In the simmering insolence of Shamela and Williams, both resentful of their subordination, scornful of Squire Booby and yet aware that he had conventional power over them, Fielding embodies both his conception of politicians and his sense of being identified with them.”
