The "Pamela" controversy of the early 1740s remains a landmark of literary history. So intense were the "Pamela" vogue and surrounding quarrels that one contemporary wrote of a world divided "into two different Parties, "Pamelists" and "Antipamelists"", as though even the sensational political developments of the day had somehow been eclipsed. Fuelling the partisanship was the swift entrepreneurial opportunism of the 18th-century marketplace. As Terry Eagleton has written, this was not so much a novel as "a whole cultural event ...the occasion of organizing principle of a multimedia affair, stretching all the way from domestic commodities to public spectacles, instantly recodable from one cultural mode to the next". Recommended from the pulpit of a Southwark church, illustrated in the pavilions of Vauxhall Gardens, exhibited in "a curious piece of waxwork" on a Fleet Street corner, "Pamela" was everywhere. Parodied and pirated, puffed and censured, versified and dramatized, and appropriated in several spurious continuations as well as Richardson's own authorized sequel, it now makes visible, like nothing else, the heterogeneity, vigour and turmoil of its cultural moment.
As has long been recognized, it also marks a defining moment in the history and formation of the novel as a literary genre. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) is not only among the most important and influential of English novelists. He also remains, as he was in his own day, one of the most controversial. Criticism of the last two decades has established his novels as key texts for academic debate under a whole range of rubrics, among them psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism and deconstruction. Nothing today, however, can match the fierce energy and ideological charge of the controversy that immediately followed the bestselling success of his first novel, "Pamela" (1740), which ran through six editions in 18 months and, as Richardson conservatively estimated, "gave birth to no less than 16 pieces, as remarks, imitations, retailings of the story, pyracies, etc".
The debate over "Pamela" and its continuation, in which Richardson himself played a prominent part, involved a fascinating variety of figures: rival novelists such as Henry Fielding and Eliza Haywood, playwrights such as Carlo Goldoni (whose dramatic response to "Pamela" was translated into English), artists such as Francis Haymand, Hubert Gravelot, Joseph Highmore and Philip Mercier, and a host of lesser critics, poets and dramatists. This edition brings together for the first time all the key sources for the contemporary debate, reprinting many of them for the first time in two and a half centuries. Although the significance of the "Pamela" controversy has long been recognized, many of the key sources exist in only a handful of scattered copies, and have not been widely available to scholars or students. Only Fielding's devastating contribution, in "Shamela" and "Joseph Andrews", is currently in print, and even Richardson's own defences of his work in such places as the preliminary matter to "Pamela" second and sixth editions are hard to locate.
This multi-volume collection brings together for the first time all the key sources for the contemporary debate, other than the easily available "Joseph Andrews". Among the longer works included are Eliza Haywood's brilliant appropriation of "Pamela" in her "Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected", and the spurious continuation by John Kelly, "Pamela's Conduct in High Life", which forced Richardson to write his defensive sequel of 1741. Four dramatic and operatic adaptations are also included, together with pamphlet commentaries and attacks, graphic representations including Joseph Highmore's sequences of 12 Hogarthian plates, and hostile and sympathetic verse responses including J--- W----'s mock heroic "Pamela; or, The Fair Impo
Industry Reviews
'The combat of the Pamelists and the Antipamelists questions literary technique - how could a truly innocent servant act and write so self-servingly? - in verses, illustrations, and documents. Volume one includes Richardson's own prefaces and promotions, as well as Henry Fielding's parody of them in Shamela, but the rest include paratextual material that shows how central Pamela was to the narrative imagination of midcentury England... the edition also includes texts never before, or rarely, reprinted, including two Irish comments: Pamela; or, The Fair Imposter (1743) and Mock-Pamela (1750), previously extant in only one copy, and a French text, Lettre sur Pamela (1742)... This edition shows how popular publishing can change literary ideologies.' - Barbara M Benedict, Studies in English Literature 'The introductions to each volume are exemplary. They are well written, and full of information. They set the context of each work very thoroughly and explain the relations of the various sequels not only to the original but to one another. There is also a masterly chronology ... more scholarly care, and even original thought, have been devoted to these volumes than to many similar enterprises of collective reprinting.' - Claude Rawson, The Times Literary Supplement 'Tom Keymer and Peter Sabor have assembled a rich collection of facsimile texts, presented without annotation, but prefaced by substantial, scholarly, and often lively introductions... The value of an edition such as this makes itself evident in a number of ways. Firstly, there is of course the service performed by reprinting scarce material (in this case, represented most graphically by the anonymous dramatic burlesque of 1750, Mock-Pamela, which otherwise survives in a single recorded copy at Trinity College, Dublin). In the second place, the introductions to the separate volumes of this edition are well written, unfailingly interesting, and occasionally rise to the level of serious and ground-breaking scholarship as well as being serviceable for the student who wants to orientate themselves in this rich but confusing literary terrain. Finally, the juxtapositions which naturally arise when a collection such as this is put together can have a transforming effect on our understanding of a particular work.' - David Womersley, The Review of English Studies 'The marvelous volumes under review, edited by Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, will surely spur modern interest and, even more importantly, may direct scholars towards new areas of illuminating inquiry... Most useful of all, however, are the ably-written essays that introduce each volume. Together these 170 pages offer richly-documented interpretations of the works being reproduced by situating them in their historical contexts. Tracing intricate borrowings, allusions, and reprintings in a masterful way, they reveal too many fascinating points to be covered here. The commentary on Pamela Censured is particularly astute (2: x-xvi) and will surely lead to further debate, as will the interpretation of Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela (4:vii-xxv). The footnotes to the introductions are similarly invaluable and direct readers to most of the important historiography... these volumes are well conceived, expertly executed, and contain remarkably few errors caused by the copy editing or printing - and are even handsomely bound. They are a pleasure to read and ought to live up to the editors' goal of encouraging more debate about the Pamela controversy.' - Mark G Spencer, Eighteenth-Century Life 'On November 6, 1740, Samuel Richardson published his Pamela. Though he certainly realized that his text was in many ways different from any previous prose writing, Richardson probably had no idea of the cultural earthquake Pamela was going to cause. In the following ten years, the book inspired a number of spurious continuations, reams of critical commentary, a handful of dramas, operas, illustrations and paintings, waxworks, fans, and even large billboards at Vauxhall Gardens. With the exception of the last three items, which unfortunately are lost to posterity, all of this material is collected for the first time in the excellent The Pamela Controversy, edited and knowledgeably introduced volume by volume by Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor... Now, instead of looking at the literary "quality" of writing, critics assess what Keymer and Sabor call the "serious ideological stakes" (I xvii) it raises. Since much of this discussion has been happening without the primary material being in the landscape, The Pamela Controversy is a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century scholarship.' - Norbert Schurer, Eighteenth-Century Studies
