Les mémoires de Pamela, écrits par elle-même, and: Paméla, ou La Vertu récompensée, SVEC 2007:04 (review)

The controversy over Samuel Richardson’s astonishingly popular novel Pamela, first published anonymously in two volumes in November 1740, with two further volumes added a year later, spread rapidly across the Channel. By March 1741, Richardson was already advertising an authorized French translation, which duly appeared in October, less than a year after the first English edition. The year 1742 saw the publication of a waspish pamphlet, Lettre sur Pamela, probably by the Abbé Marquet, as well as a staunchly pro-Pamela critique by Pierre Desfontaines, Observations sur les écrits modernes, and a hostile pamphlet response, Lettre à Monsieur l’Abbé Des Fontaines sur Pamela. Then in 1743, three comic adaptations were produced in Paris, with mixed success: Louis de Boissy’s Paméla en France, Nivelle de La Chaussée’s Pamela, and Claude Godard d’Acour’s La Déroute des Paméla.

A hitherto unknown work, Les mémoires de Pamela, écrits par elle-même, was also published in 1743, ostensibly in London. Desfontaines mentions this third-person abridgment of Pamela, but it is absent from William Sale’s still standard bibliography of Richardson, and recent critics of the Pamela controversy ignore it as well. Franco Piva does a great service in making this work available to modern readers, basing his text on a copy at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, the only one known to be extant. His footnotes point to passages in which the Mémoires diverges from the novel, consider particularities of diction and style, elucidate obscurities, and explain eighteenth-century English customs. Supplementing the notes is a glossary of terms that have changed their signification since the mid-1740s, such as “aimable,” “cabinet,” and “générosité.”

The 110-page introduction to Piva’s edition, almost a monograph in length itself, is replete with information on the early stages of the querelle de Pamela in France and the place of the Mémoires in the controversy. Piva also undertakes a detailed analysis of the text, which reduces Richardson’s four volumes to just over a quarter of their length. He notes that Richardson’s original novel occupies 254 pages of the Mémoires, while the continuation takes up only 147 pages: a sensible redistribution of the material, since the continuation is much less lively than the first two volumes. The abridging and reworking of Richardson’s material are carried out, as Piva demonstrates, with considerable skill. Piva is unable to put a name to the anonymously published work, but he does suggest, convincingly, that at least two different hands were responsible for the two parts, noting substantial differences between the ways in which they alter Richardson’s text. In this respect, the Mémoires resembles the authorized French translation of Pamela, for which two or more writers were responsible. For all its amplitude, Piva’s introduction overlooks one important question: where was the Mémoires published, and by whom? The title page, for which a facsimile is helpfully provided, states only that the work was published “à Londres,” probably falsely; it would be useful to know if there are any other clues to the work’s origin, either in the sole surviving copy or elsewhere.

Unlike the long-neglected Mémoires, much recent critical discussion focuses on Nicolas François de Neufchâteau’s comedy Paméla, ou La Vertu récompensée, written in 1788 and first performed at the Comédie-Française in August 1793. Martial Poirson’s excellent critical edition, the first modern edition of the play, is based on the prompter’s manuscript, with variants from the 1793 and 1795 published texts at the foot of...