Servants of the Market: Pamela’s Literary Entourage

Probably every eighteenth-century scholar who has taught Richardson’s Pamela has sought to tantalize students with references to the novel’s reception history—the panegyrics, parodies, plays, and paintings spawned by the novel that combined to make it a kind of eighteenth-century Cats. Pamela’s blockbuster status has made the text a crucial test case in recent scholarship on the rise of the novel, the history of the book, reader reception, the eighteenth-century print market, and the growth of consumer culture. Given this exemplary status, the authoritative account of the Pamela vogue offered in Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor’s “Pamela” in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2005) constitutes an invaluable contribution to eighteenth-century scholarship not only in its meticulously researched history of the novel’s reception, but also in its portrait of the economic, social, and interpersonal dynamics shaping the contemporary literary marketplace. Bringing to vivid life the entrepreneurial energies that drove the vogue, Keymer and Sabor locate the novel’s stunning success in the strategic exploitation of the reading public’s appetites by the writers, printers, and artists who engineered and capitalized on Pamela’s popularity throughout the century.

It is telling that Keymer and Sabor’s study opens with a declaration of what it is not about: Richardson and Fielding. In the authors’ account, the Pamela controversy cannot be seen as a battle between two canonical titans—or even between two imperfectly demarcated teams of pro- and anti-Pamelists—but must be understood as “a clash of multiple, mutually competitive adversaries, in which no sympathetic allegiance or satirical antagonism was ever complete or stable” (1). Cracking open the binary opposition between Richardson and Fielding that has helped structure many dialectical accounts of the rise of the novel, Keymer and Sabor proffer a model of literary history grounded less in the genealogical continuities of declared literary filiation than in the rivalries and contestations that generate market demand, describing a kind of literary and cultural feedback loop in which texts, far from existing in discrete conversation with a handful of equally self-contained precursors, are generated out of their location within a broader literary, cultural, and economic milieu. Attributing less to the novel itself than to the machinery that arose around it, Keymer and Sabor convincingly demonstrate that it was as much the reaction to Pamela as the novel itself that generated the vogue: the life of the text was sparked in part by its afterlife.

“Pamela” in the Marketplace embraces not only the textual and visual artifacts used to reconstruct traditional reception histories, but also odd manifestations of the vogue ranging from ephemera like fans and the waxwork of “above a hundred Figures in miniature” to the querelle over the proper pronunciation of the vowels in the heroine’s name and the presence of an improbable number of equine Pamelas in starting line-ups at horse races. Chapter 1 examines Richardson’s marketing ploys: the strategic leaking of Pope’s celebrity endorsement, the careful selection of puffs gleaned from those indebted or otherwise obliged to Richardson, and the orchestration of a kind of whispering campaign. Authorial genius is supplanted by marketing ingenuity in this account, while the moral high ground that Richardson sought to arrogate is redefined as extremely valuable real estate. Chapter 2 turns to the abundance of literary hangers-on swept into the print marketplace on Richardsonian coattails—the sequels and prequels like the Life of Pamela, John Kelly’s Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, and Pamela in High Life that spurred Richardson to write his own continuation—while chapter 3 examines what Keymer and Sabor call “counter-fictions” by the likes of Eliza Haywood and James Parry: “works that borrow from, comment on and pay homage to, but also often parody and subvert, their fictional precursors” (83). Although the division of material in these two chapters at first glance seems to reassert the old Pamela / “Shamela” binary, Keymer and Sabor do not attribute writers’ dispositions in the controversy to ideological, moral, or literary positions. Instead, by locating...