"Pamela" in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (review)

Most students of the early novel are aware that the publication of Pamela on 6 November 1740 was a multimedia event. It was not the first: the publication of Pope's Dunciad was more an event than an occasion; and Gay's Beggar's Opera had prompted some market-driven spinoffs similar to those that proliferated after Pamela . Pamela inaugurated an entirely new way of responding to fictional characters, however, very familiar to avid consumers of soap opera in our own time—responding to them, that is, as if they were really alive. Pamela offered unprecedented opportunities for what has been called "absorptive reading." That Pamela was the subject of a sermon preached from the pulpit, and that villagers rang out peals of bells on hearing of the heroine's marriage, are twice-told tales about the novel. (To find out what grains of truth exist in such stories, consult Keymer and Sabor, 23ff. and 39ff .) In 1994, James Grantham Turner laid out the parameters of Pamela as a media event in the following terms: "A keen Pamela hunter in the 1740s could buy the novel in large or small format, with or without Francis Hayman's engravings and Richardson's sequel, plus The Life of Pamela , The Celebrated Pamela , Pamela in High Life , Pamela , or Virtue Triumphant , Shamela Andrews, Pamela Censured , Joseph Andrews, Pamela; or the Fair Impostor, The True Anti-Pamela and Anti-Pamela , or Feign'd Innocence Detected ... She could visit two Pamela waxworks, drop in on Joseph Highmore's studio to see his twelve Pamela paintings and buy the set of his engravings, then see David Garrick in Pamela , a Comedy ... The day would end in Vauxhall Gardens, sitting in front of Hayman's Pamela murals, cooling herself with the Pamela fan, and opening a magazine to read 'Remarks on Pamela, by a Prude'" ("Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in Reception of Richardson's Pamela ," Representations 48 [Fall 1994]:70–96). What Keymer and Sabor have done in this book is to fill out that broad-brush sketch with exquisite detail and inclusiveness, so that there is very little more that any reader could know (or perhaps would want to know) about the impact made by Pamela in the decade after its publication and until the end of the century. The authors record, for example, the racehorses named after characters in the novel—the reader can even find out how the horses fared in their events! Devoting chapters to the initial "marketing" of the novel and its spinoffs, to prose serials and continuations, to responses to Pamela on stage and in visual art, and finally to the specifically Irish dimension of the phenomenon, the book is a satisfying delimitation and exploration of an engrossing field of inquiry.

Readers of Keymer and Sabor will be able to inform Turner, inter alia , that the finely illustrated octavo sixth edition of Pamela and its authorized continuation published in May 1742 had illustrations by Hubert Gravelot and Francis Hayman (not just Hayman), that his list of the various continuations, parodies, and subversions of Pamela is not in chronological order and is inaccurate as to titles, and that no one could have seen Garrick in Giffard's stage adaptation of Pamela (November 1741) at the same time as the waxworks at Shoe Lane, which were not mounted until April 1745. The standard of scholarship in Keymer and Sabor's work is superb, and virtually every page holds new or re-examined information to be processed about the Pamela phenomenon.

It would be possible to find that, despite the book's rich mine of information and the meticulous exhaustiveness with which it has been gathered and sifted, it does not decisively alter the picture presented in Turner's earlier article. The justification for reading some of the ephemeral and second-rate...