Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
Pamela, or Virtue Rewardeda novel by S. Richardson , published 1740 – 1 .
The first of Richardson's three novels, Pamela consists, like them, entirely of letters and journals, of which Richardson presents himself as the ‘editor’. He believed he had hit upon ‘a new species of writing’ but he was not the inventor of the epistolary novel, several of which already existed in English and French. He did however raise the form to a level hitherto unknown, and transformed it to display his own particular skills.
There are six correspondents in Pamela, most with their own particular style and point of view, but Pamela herself provides most of the letters and journals, with the ‘hero’, Mr B., having only two. Pamela Andrews is a handsome, intelligent girl of 15 when her kind employer Lady B. dies. Penniless and without protection, Pamela is pursued by Mr B., Lady B.'s son, but she repulses him and...
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