THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

through six London editions in its first year of publication and was celebrated by parodies, by an early French
translation and, in 1744, by a place on the Vatican’s Index of prohibited books (where it remained until 1900).
Clarissa (1747-9) also reached a large European audience in its edited French translation of 1751 (the work of the
Abbé Prévost) and through versions in the German and Dutch languages. It was honoured by a fulsome eulogy from
Diderot and by the unstinted praise of Rousseau. The ready availability of often expensive novels to the British
reading public had been promoted in 1726 by the establishment in Edinburgh of the first circulating library, a move
followed in London only in 1740. These circulating libraries, supported by subscribers, rapidly spread to most of the
major towns of Britain in response to the needs of those who did not necessarily want to own books and of those who
could not afford to do so. New literature in general, and novels in particular, circulated, for a moderate fee, amongst a
wide range of readers and the popularity of a book with the customers of a library became, for some two subsequent
centuries, a mark of true commercial success and a measure of its popular esteem. The libraries also helped to
consolidate national taste by dissolving certain provincial and class distinctions in literature. When that great letterwriter,
pioneer feminist, and intellectual snob, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), remarked of Pamela that it
had become ‘the joy of
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chambermaids of all nations’, she was not merely denigrating Richardson’s achievement; she was also paying an
indirect tribute to the classless appeal of a new art form.
Richardson came to fiction by an unpredictable route. He was a self-educated London tradesman with little
practical knowledge of what would have been called at the time ‘polite’ society or of ‘elegant’ literature. He had been
apprenticed at the age of 16 to a printer and had risen, by a steady application worthy of Hogarth’s industrious
apprentice, to two successive marriages to the daughters of former employers and, in 1753, to the Mastership of the
Stationers Company. He confessed in later life that as a boy he had stolen times for the improvement of his mind
‘from the hours of Rest and Recreation’ granted by a master who grudged them to him. He also took care to buy his
own candles ‘that I might not in the most trifling instance make my master a sufferer’. If his disclosure sounds more
than a little Heepish, his claim to have been in correspondence with a gentleman, greatly his superior in degree, ‘and
ample of Fortunes, who had he lived, intended high things for me’, offers clues as to the nature of Richardson’s later
fascination with class. In no sense, however, is he a social or moral iconoclast. As a printer and publisher in the 1730s
he had been instrumental in the reissue of several of Defoe’s works, but his own first publication The Apprentice’s
Vade Mecum or Young Man’s Pocket Companion of 1733 is little more than a handbook of ethics for the aspirant
lower middle class. The impetus to turn to fiction came, by his own admission, through a commission to write a
further manual, a series of ‘familiar letters’ concerning the problems and circumstances of everyday life which could
serve as models to prospective correspondents. Richardson provided ideal letters of consolation excuses for not
lending money, and formal recommendations for wet-nurses and chambermaids, but amongst them he included some
seven letters developing the story of a virtuous servant-girl, embarrassed by the sexual attentions of her master, who
finally succeeds in marrying her sometime persecutor. Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded sprang directly from this recall of
the kind of true story likely to appeal to a self made man with, what some might see as, a prurient concern with sexual
rectitude. Pamela was not the first epistolary novel (there seem to have been some hundred earlier novels and stories
told in the form of letters) but it proved the most influential. Pamela’s story is told partly through long missives to her
worthy parents and, when letters become difficult to send, partly through her recourse to her journal. Unlike Robinson
Crusoe’s, Colonel Jacque’s, or Moll Flanders’s ostensibly public and retrospectively instructive memoirs, Pamela’s
letters are private and immediate and a reader of them becomes something of an intruder into her confessions. The
reward for Pamela’s virtue is the respect, and ultimately the love, of her erstwhile employer, Mr B., but the slow
process of the winning of this reward has, from the beginning, persuaded certain of her readers to see her as a
calculating hypocrite and an upwardly mobile self seeker well aware of the marital price of her virtue. These problems
are only partly dispelled within a narrative charged
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with frustrated sexuality and with the mutual incomprehension of master and servant, man and woman. At a midpoint
Pamela can complain to her parents that ‘poor people are despised by the proud and rich’ and that ‘we were all
on a footing originally: and many of those gentry, who brag of their ancient blood, would be glad to have it as
wholesome and as really untainted as ours’. It is both a proclamation of democratic principle and an admission of
deference. A similar ambiguity lies at the heart of her proud declaration to Mr B. in Letter XXIV that she is ‘Pamela,
indeed I am: indeed I am Pamela, her own-self!’ Despite Richardson’s concern with the independence of the
individual throughout his work, and despite the moral ennoblement that Pamela finally receives, selfhood, in
Richardson’s first novel at least, is defined largely through what his heroine is not.