ABOUT PAMELA
The impetus to turn to fiction came, by Richardson's admission, throuhg a commision to write a further manual, a series of 'familiar letters' concerning the problems and circunstances 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 vituous servant-girl, embarrassed by the sexual attentions of her master, who finally succeds in marruing 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 massives to her worthy parents and, when letters become difficult to send, partly through her recourse to her journal. Unlike Robinson Crusoe's, Colonal 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 in 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 up wardly mobile self-seeker well aware of the marital pride of her virtue. These problems are only partly dispelled within a narrative charged with frustrated sexuality and with the mutual incomprehension of master and servant, man and woman. At a mid-point 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 untained 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 throught 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.