routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

The novel
175
That kingdom he hath left his debtor;
I wish it soon may have a better.
(Verses on the Death of Dr Swift)
. . . written, though perhaps not intended, with such
explicitness (don’t be alarmed, my dear!)
(Samuel Richardson, Clarissa)
It is with the next generation of novelists that love stories come into their
own. Samuel Richardson had worked his way up from poverty to become
a prosperous printer. Among the works he published in the late 1730s
were books of moral advice and a version for the times of Aesop’s Fables.
The success of these led him to develop a series of ‘familiar letters’ with
their original aim being a manual of letter-writing. But they turned into a
major epistolary novel, Pamela, published in 1740.
Novels in the form of letters had been popular for several decades,
Aphra Behn having published Love Letters between a Nobleman and
his Sister as early as 1683. Richardson wanted to raise the tone of the
novel from the level of this kind of subject matter, and in doing so
created a heroine for the times. Poor but virtuous, Pamela suffers a
series of trials at the hands of Mr B, culminating in attempted rape.
She refuses to become his mistress or his wife until she converts Mr B.
Then she agrees to marry him and becomes a paragon of virtue admired
by all. The contrast between male domination, with its implied
sensuality, and female restraint and submission, with its emphasis on
virtue symbolised in chastity, was immediately criticised as hypocritical,
and parodied by Henry Fielding in Shamela.
Pamela was a huge success. It not only created a fashion for the
epistolary novel, but underscored role distinctions which were to
become predominant in society for some two centuries: the dominant
male as provider and master; the female as victim, preserving her
virtue until submitting to ‘affection’ and the inevitability of the man’s
dominance. An impression of female independence is given by the
creation of a woman’s role in society as mistress of a social circle. Thus
the female role is established in relation to male roles, and any deviation