This Way of Scribbling

‘Sawce box’, ‘Boldface’, ‘Lambkin’, ‘Babyface’, ‘Chastity’, and ‘Beggarly Brat’ are just some of the names bestowed on Samuel Richardson’s eponymous heroine in his first novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. Even before Miss Andrews became known to some of her readers as the trickiest (or simply the most annoyingly self-satisfied) character in literary history, the novel had itself suggested the myriad ways in which its main protagonist might be interpreted. For its author, the story of a 15-year-old servant girl who resists her rakish master’s advances and eventually becomes his wife was always his ‘little Work’. Richardson’s novel burst on to the literary scene in 1740, dividing the world between Pamelists and Anti-Pamelists, and hurled its author, already a successful publisher then in his early fifties, into the arms of ‘that coy mistress Fame’ (as Richardson’s arch-rival Henry Fielding put it). New-found celebrity was not altogether felicitous for the author. Although Richardson was often capable of egregious self-promotion, in 1741 he lamented his public exposure: ‘I have suffer’d by it, as well in my own Mind, as in the Malice and Envy of others.’ His lament, in the midst of the furore, had a note of something more confessional than a mere self-pitying gesture.

This latest version of Pamela, soundly edited by Albert J. Rivero, is the second volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (the first being Richardson’s Early Works). The entire publication is something of a momentous occasion for readers interested in eighteenth-century literature and the history of the novel. Publication of all the securely attributable works and letters will finally allow us to assess Richardson’s achievement with the aid of a fully annotated scholarly edition with explanatory and textual apparatus. As well as the three novels, Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1747–8), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4), many other more obscure works will receive editorial attention for the first time, such as his earliest known work, The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1733), his edition of Aesop’s Fables (1739) – an important source for Pamela – and ‘The History of Mrs. Beaumont’, a late, incomplete, and unpublished work that deserves further attention as part of the writer’s oeuvre.

Richardson has long been compared unfavourably with Fielding in terms of self-conscious literary prowess. Alongside Fielding’s wittily urbane, densely allusive, classically informed prose, Richardson’s writing has sometimes seemed parochial, tediously minute, trying in its prolixity. He was himself keenly aware of the criticisms, and endlessly debated, analysed, and answered them in the prefaces, footnotes, revisions, postscripts, and other paratextual material that he added to the various editions of the novels that his printing press produced in his lifetime. One need only flick through the expanded third edition of Clarissa (1751) to get a sense of the extent of Richardson’s tinkering obsession – the pages are cluttered with footnotes; they guide the reader to toe the authorial line of interpretation and at the same time offer many ways to read the relationship between what goes on in the story and the editorial commentary upon it. Rivero, following the sensible textual policy of the series, has opted for the first edition of Pamela as his copy-text, before Richardson turned critic and editor of his own prose and to a certain extent diluted its original spontaneity (excising some of the sexual innuendos, and substituting rustic words with more decorous ones, such as ‘Court’sey’ for ‘Curchee’). We appear to receive, as Jean Baptiste de Freval puts it in a letter used as prefatory material to the first edition, ‘Pamela as Pamela wrote it; in her own Words, without Amputation, or Addition’.

A debate can certainly be had about the merits of choosing first texts over final ones, but in this case readers interested in comparison can easily access Peter Sabor’s Penguin edition (reprinted 2003), which is...