Pamela, Shamela, and the Politics of the Pamela Vogue

Pamela, Sitamela, and the Politics of the Pamela Vogue Richard Gooding There are Swarms of Moral Romances. One, of late Date, divided the World into such opposite Judgments, that some extolled it to the Stars, whilst others treated it with Contempt. Whence arose, particularly among the Ladies, two different Parties, Pamelists and Antipamelists. ... Some look upon this young Virgin as an Example for Ladies to follow ; nay, there have been those, who did not scruple to recommend this Romance from the Pulpit. Others, on the contrary, discover in it, the Behaviour of an hypocritical, crafty Girl, in her Courtship; who understands the Art of bringing a Man to her Lure.1 Ever since Dr Peter Shaw's assertion in The Reflector that Pamela had created two factions called Pamelists and anti-Pamelists, the critical orthodoxy about the Pamela vogue has been that it centred on Pamela's chastity and entailed a strict division between admirers and critics of Richardson's heroine. At first, Shaw's remarks certainly look like a fair account of contemporary responses to Pamela. Almost every book, pamphlet, and poem of the Pamela vogue discusses sexual morality and presents itself as an attack on Pamela or as a more authentic account of her life than Richardson's. Even the titles of these works support 1 Dr Peter Shaw, The Reflector (1750), quoted in A.D. McKillop, Samuel Richardson: Printerand Novelist (1936; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), pp. 101-2. McKillop, in fact, identifies Shaw's remarks as plagiarism of a passage from the Danish dramatist Ludvig Holberg's Moral Thoughts (1744). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 2, January 1995 110 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Shaw's claim of a straightforward division between opposing camps: Fielding's Shamela, Haywood's Anti-Pamela, Parry's True Anti-Pamela, and the anonymous Pamela Censured constituting one side, and Kelly's Pamela's Conduct in High Life, Giffard's Pamela. A Comedy, and three anonymous works—The Life ofPamela, Pamela in High Life: Or, Virtue Rewarded, and Memoirs of the Life ofLady H[esilrige], the Celebrated Pamela—constituting the other.2 But if the commonplace is true that Pamela represents a defining moment in the history of the English novel, then these works should delimit what might be called the "horizon of expectations"3 in 1741—that is, the set of conventional moral and aesthetic standards that resisted the moral insights and technical innovations distinguishing Pamela from earlier fiction . It is surprising, then, that even the best accounts of the Pamela vogue ignore the possibility that Richardson's novel, by virtue of its audacious attempt at recording the minutiae of moral experience, met with resistance and incomprehension that cannot be explained away by reference to obvious ambiguities in Pamela's conduct. A.D. McKillop and, more recently, T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel tend to support both Shaw's claim that the Pamela vogue is about moral authenticity and the corollary that the Pamelists understood and agreed with Richardson's portrayal of Pamela.4 But by emphasizing the debate over Pamela's sincerity , Richardson's biographers disregard what contemporary readers perceived as the political implications of Pamela and what their understanding of these implications did to their opinion of Richardson's heroine. 2 These, along with Charles Povey's Bunyanesque The Virgin in Eden and an anonymous play consisting largely of dialogue lifted from Pamela, are the main productions of the Pamela vogue; all were published between April and December 1741, the height of the vogue in England. But despite their titles,.some are not responses to Richardson's novel. Parry's memoirs have a blatantly adventitious title (internal evidence suggests that The True Anti-Pamela was written before the publication of Pamela). The biography of Lady Hesilrige presents a story roughly analogous to Richardson's, but its title too seems superadded. Even Haywood's Anti-Pamela bears only a tenuous connection to Pamela, since it presents a character unlike Richardson's. Haywood 's book does, however, treat questions of sexual hypocrisy and the problem of being educated above one's degree. The best available reconstruction of the precise publication sequence of the major works of...