PAMELA; OR  VIRTUE  REWARDED

            Samuel Richardson had been interested in a young lady's story, so he thought of making of it the matter of one or two letters; but when he began to reflect about this theme, his talent was developed by itself. Then he composed the first part of Pamela, which formed two volumes that were written between 1739 and 1740. This novel got a very big success, so it was published five times in a year. The four volumes appeared between 1740 (two) and 1741 (two), usual division at this time because the publication expenses were cheaper.
           Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded tells, in the form of letters, the story of a young maid-servant's defense of her honor. Pamela's real significance lies in its dramatic and exploratory use of the letter form. The heroine is created from inside; the reader is not told about her by an all-knowing narrator, but experiences her story through her own mind as the events occur. Writing a novel in letters has its difficulties, but also great advantages. Pamela is startlingly alive her homespun language gives immediate and complex insights in her mind, and the reader's understanding of her experience develops with hers.
            The form is dramatic because the author banishes himself and creates only through his characters and imagining himself into their minds. It is explotatory because the more vividly he imagines this consciousness other than his own, the more he is led to discover in it unrealized depths. The explotation is increased when one character is set in conflict with others. Even in Pamela, in which the letters come almost entire from the heroine, the conflict of values between the puritan and her rakish master, Mr. B., allows the reader to see Pamela clearly through his eyes as to see him through hers, and to realize that both views are inadequate.
            The reader must never make the mistake of confusing Richardson with his characters. Through the dramatic exploration of his heroine's character in the careful constructed early scenes, he came to realize weaknesses in his values, which may have been his own when he began to write. They led him to isolated her to explore the implications of his discoverings. He finds a kind of blindness in her purity, a pride behind her guarded reliance. Only after 40 days and nights of imprisonment and temptation, during which she nearly succumbs to the ultimate of suicide, does she find that double faith; only when she knows she can find happiness, or create the possibility of a human relationship with her tormented tormentor, struggling with his banal pride.
            The novel has faults. It is often crude, sometimes comics so. Many of its attitudes, to class, to sex, to the "rewards virtue", are limited. Richardson fails to examine his hero, or to create his development from plotting seducer his oughly enough to make his final offer of marriage convincing that the novel's significance lies in the way that its insights growing depth, humanity, and understanding. It is not a great novel, is the preparation for Clarissa.
            It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Pamela. Mr. B.'s wrestle with his shadow-tendencies and his compulsion to possess a girl from lower social class anticipate the two great themes of Goethe's Faust (1808). Pamela also served as a model for innumerable later images of women whose strength of character can be boiled down to their ability to bear with an intolerable husband and make themselves useful by their good deeds. Pamela's characteristics thus provided a pattern of behaviour that was to be enormously detrimental to the personal fulfilment of several generations of women and it has a continuing significance for the reader today.