[In the following essay, Jeffrey compares Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker, and argues that by using letters, the heroines of the two novels are able to create their own portraits of themselves and construct stable, artistic versions of reality that are less painful than their real lives.]

Samuel Richardson would doubtless disapprove the mating of his first heroine with Smollett's last protagonist, but they are not, in some ways, such a strange pair. Pamela in 1740 is the heroine of the first great epistolary novel, while Humphry in 1771 is the titular hero of the last. Both begin as servants, both moralize throughout their novels, and both find themselves elevated socially at each novel's conclusion—Pamela by marriage to her former master and would-be seducer, Squire B.; Humphry by being legitimated. On the other hand, Pamela's initially violent reactions each time B. lays heavy, ineffectual hands upon her contrasts with Humphry's crude, initial (dare I say) appearance, his bare posterior inadvertently exposed. Literacy separates the two even further; Pamela writes two hefty volumes about her trials and triumphs, while Humphry pens not a word, leaving that three-volume task to members of the group he serves.

Although contemplation of this pairing amuses, the parallels are clearer between Pamela and Lydia Melford (a member of the group Humphry serves), especially in regard to their writing and the meaning of the epistolary format. Lydia is in fact one of Pamela's many daughters.¹ In character, both are young and fair, delicate and virginal creatures, much given to faints. Smollett does invert Richardson's plot, however, for the upper-class Lydia loves a man believed beneath her socially—an actor—although he too is legitimated at the novel's denouement. Lydia is not as prolific a writer as Pamela; few characters are. Lydia writes only eleven of the eighty-two letters in Humphry Clinker; her uncle, Matt Bramble, and her brother, Jery, write over two-thirds of the novel, while her aunt, Tabitha, writes six letters and Tabitha's maid-servant, Win Jenkins, “pursues her anal fixation”² through ten hilarious missives. Pamela writes all but four of the thirty-two letters and the entire one and one-half volume journal that constitute her novel.

Why anyone would want to fill two or three volumes with fictional letters puzzles the modern reader. Certainly, the other forms available to Richardson—the romance, the picaresque, the pseudomemoir—seem either far less technically crude or far faster paced. Why then settle on an epistolary format? The answer is not only that letter writing was the habit of Richardson's lifetime but that, as he explains in the Preface to Clarissa, the epistolary format has advantages the other forms lack: “Letters … written while the hearts of the writers must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects … abound not only with critical situations, but with what may be called instantaneous Descriptions and Reflections. …” “Much more lively and affecting,” he continues, quoting one of his characters, “must be the Style of those who write in the height of a present distress; the mind tortured by the pangs of uncertainty … than the dry, narrative, unanimated Style of a person relating difficulties and dangers surmounted, can be; the relater perfectly at ease; and if himself unmoved by his own Story, not likely greatly to affect the Reader.”³ In the Preface to Pamela Richardson hints at this same view, calling the format “probable,” “natural,” “lively,” and “mov[ing].”⁴ There is in Smollett no similar biographical predilection for the format, but, perhaps, he settles on it at last for the reasons Richardson states. Certainly, Smollett's four earlier novels are less successful than Humphry Clinker precisely because of the disparity between lively and affecting events and the dispassionate or ironic narrator who comments on them.⁵ But the epistolary format, as Richardson suggests in the prefaces, resolves such disparities by locating its writer somewhere between stream of consciousness and emotion recollected in tranquillity, thus providing at once a temporal closeness to the raw experience of reality and a consciousness which reacts to that reality.

As a consequence of this positioning, the writer of letters is both isolated and unreliable. In the act of writing, he separates himself from the present and cannot fully experience it; he can recreate only the past. Because the past he recounts precedes so immediately his recording of it and because that past so movingly affects him, his record of it cannot be wholly accurate.

I

Richardson pictures his heroine at odds with both familial and social units, and her isolation from such units the epistolary format effectively mirrors. Pamela's emotional isolation from her family is suggested by her parents' response to her first letter. Although Pamela's letter contains not the slightest indication that B. has other than an honorable interest in her or that Pamela feels anything other than gratitude to him for such interest, her parents respond to it by expressing fear that their fifteen-year-old daughter will act in a “dishonest or wicked” way; “we fear,” they write, “—you should be too grateful—and reward him with that Jewel, your Virtue, which no Riches, nor Favour, nor any thing in this Life, can make up to you” (p. 27). As a result of this extraordinary injunction, Pamela tries for most of the first volume to repress her attraction to B. Only after B.'s open admission of love for her does Pamela give way to the emotions of her own heart; only after her marriage and midway into the second volume can she write guiltlessly of her love, no longer fearful of her parents' reactions.⁶ Pamela's first letter also calls attention to her uneasy social position; through the good offices of Lady B., the squire's mother, Pamela has achieved “Qualifications above [her] Degree” (p.25), so that finding another suitable job would be difficult. But, if she is a little more than servant, she is less than B.'s kind, and she strives throughout most of the novel's first volume to escape both him and the concurrent moral and social dilemma his pursuit of her raises. Even after their marriage, she must attempt to make herself acceptable to those of B.'s class who either view her as a curiosity or openly scorn her. Not until she establishes a secure place in his social class does she lay down her pen.⁷ Pamela's isolation is also suggested geographically. In the first volume she is abducted from Bedfordshire (where friendly fellow servants aid and comfort her) to Lincolnshire (a wilderness in which, friendless, she endures temptations for some forty days and nights), and her switch from the letter format in Bedfordshire to the journal format in Lincolnshire mirrors her developing isolation, an isolation that works in Pamela's favor, for it forces her to make her own decisions rather than to act as her parents enjoin her. Near the end of the novel, she returns triumphantly to Bedfordshire and stops writing in order to “apply [her]self to the Duties of the Family” (p. 387). She has established her place, both as daughter and wife, within familial and social units.

Smollett's writers face similar difficulties—as they begin their journey from Wales through England and Scotland, they are isolated not only, as a group, from societies new to them but also, as individuals, from each other.⁸ Jery struggles to dominate his sister, Lydia, and views his uncle and aunt as “a family of originals” (p. 8). Matt's constipation comically reflects his emotional isolation; his bowels are as constricted as his heart. He even requests his correspondent to “lock up all my drawers, and keep the keys” (p. 6). Jery's isolation from Lydia is more literal. After some years of separation, he has “found her a fine, tall girl of seventeen … but remarkably simple, and quite ignorant of the world” (p. 8). In his first letter he parades his duty to the family and to her, such duty consisting, he believes, in stifl[ing her] correspondence” with the man she loves, Wilson the actor. Lydia delineates this injunction in two paired letters—the first to her school mistress, whom she thinks of as a surrogate mother (p. 9), the second to a schoolmate, Letty. As a result of that injunction, she has “promised to break off all correspondence” with Wilson “and, if possible,” she adds to Letty, “to forget him: but, alas! I begin to perceive that will not be in my power” (p. 10). This injunction figures importantly in the overall structure of the novel, for the novel will not end until all its letter writers achieve harmony within a familial unit. Matt tames Tabitha during a quarrel near the end of the first volume; Matt and Jery become friendly in the second, finding common ground in their sympathy for Martin, the rakish highwayman they encounter near the beginning of the volume,⁹ and in their mutual wonderment at Lismahago, the quixotic figure they encounter on the highway near that volume's end. They are not reconciled with Lydia until the last several pages of the volume, Matt when she calls him “father” in her hysterical relief that he has not drowned (p. 315), Jery soon after that, when, as Lydia phrases it, “the slighted Wilson is metamorphosed into George Dennison, only son and heir of a gentleman”—a gentleman who is also, too coincidentally, Matt's childhood friend (p. 336). The opening letters of the novel, then, introduce separate, because egocentric, consciousnesses, and the novel traces their developing union. As in Pamela, the geography of the novel suggests their progress. The characters journey through the urban centers of southern England (where their relationship is as constrained as Matt's bowels) to the north through Scotland (where Matt's pains ascend to his ear and where he and Jery both wax enthusiastic, but where Lydia sickens and writes nothing) to a midpoint between these geographical extremes, Dennison's rural estate, where Matt and Jery find new and even more compatible friends and where all three women—Lydia, Tabitha, and Win—fulfill themselves in marriage.

Thus to isolate a character calls attention to the existential dilemma in which he finds himself—or rather, in which she finds herself. For neither Richardson nor Smollett focuses much attention in these two novels on the existential choices of their heroes. Neither of Smollett's heroes are required to make such choices. Matt Bramble and his nephew, Jery Melford, record the mores of the places they visit but seldom mention their growing affection for each other. They do not, in any case, consciously choose to be affectionate. Squire B., on the other hand, is required to make some such choice, and critics have objected that Richardson has provided no other window into B.'s consciousness than Pamela's letters, which only record the reasons B. gives to her for his choice of her. Perhaps B.'s remarks about unequal marriages suggest reasons for the inequitable pressures only the heroines are forced to withstand. B. says, “A Man ennobles the Woman he takes, be she who she will; and adopts her into his own rank, be it what it will: But a Woman, tho' ever so noble born, debases herself by a mean Marriage, and descends from her own Rank, to his she stoops to” (p. 349). And he continues in this vein for six paragraphs. Here B. does not so much flaunt his own male chauvinism as he recognizes such chauvinism as the received social condition of his time. In such a society his roles are a given, defined by his birth into a particular class. Virtually nothing he could do would change this given, and thus his choices are essentially uninteresting and unimportant. A woman, however, is not socially defined. No matter her class, she can “debase herself” by “mean” behavior. Her place in society is thus more fluid and uneasy. Her choices are therefore vital, because she is self-defined.

II

A closer examination of the two heroines reveals important differences as well as similarities in the choices that affect their self-definition. Parental figures enjoin both girls at the very outset of the novels, and these injunctions force the heroines to affect roles, roles that are negative and potentially destructive; until they are free from these injunctions, the girls cannot act positively, as autonomous selves, for the injunctions involve them in what transactional analysts call “losing scripts.”¹⁰ Pamela's parents conclude the injunction of their first letter thus: “… we had rather see you all cover'd with Rags, and even follow you to the Church-yard, than have it said, a Child of Ours preferr'd worldly Conveniences to her Virtue” (p. 28). Here, as elsewhere, Pamela's parents equate dishonor and death; thus, when B. later tells her father that Pamela “is in a way to be happy,” her father replies, believing her defiled, “What! then is she dying?” (p. 248). Pamela accepts this equation for the first half of the novel, first threatening suicide (p. 126) and then nearly committing it (pp. 151-54) when she believes she cannot avoid dishonor. Her parents' script provides Pamela with only two roles, “Poor But Honest” and “The Ruined Maid.” The former she must embrace, the latter avoid at any cost, even death. Throughout most of the first volume, Pamela's behavior alternates between these two roles: she describes at length either her longing to escape from B. and her preparations for servitude at home (pp. 52, 60) or alternately, and rather warmly, her resistance to B.'s advances (pp. 64-68) and her near suicide. But the trials she undergoes while alone at Lincolnshire free her from her parents' script, and when B. releases her, admitting his love, she acts contrary to her parents' injunction. Her return to B. is an assertion of her own selfhood; she has realized her desires in a winner's role, that of Cinderella.

The consequences of Lydia's choices are less fully explored, although they are similar to Pamela's. Like Pamela, Lydia begins the novel with a loser's role, one assigned her by Jery, Matt, and Tabitha. Her correspondence with Wilson precipitates her brother's attempts to duel with him, and after the lovers are separated, as Matt writes, “the poor creature was so frightened and fluttered, by our threats and expostulations, that she fell sick the fourth day after our arrival at Clifton, and continued so ill for a whole week, that her life wa despaired of” (p. 14). Enjoining her against the role of “Ruined Maid,” they have instead scripted her as “Sleeping Beauty.” They believe time will erase Wilson from her memory and provide her with a mate of more suitable class. Lydia accepts this role, but she hopes that “time and the chapter of accidents, or rather … that Providence … will not fail, sooner or later, to reward those that walk in the paths of honour and virtue” (p. 11). Lydia has less appeal as a character than Pamela does because Lydia never rebels against her passive role. Instead, she accepts the pain that role causes her and faints and falls ill repeatedly. Happily for her, but unhappily for the novel, “accident” does convert her loser's role into a winner's. Her lover stumbles through the Brambles that surround her and is “metamorphosed”—from Wilson the Frog into The Prince of Dennison.

So, acceptance of their losing roles leads both girls to sickness and nearly to death. Thus Lydia languishes. And thus Pamela pitifully: “And now my dearest Father and Mother, expect to see soon your poor Daughter, with a humble and dutiful Mind, return'd to you: And don't fear but I know how to be happy with you as ever: For I will lie in the Loft, as I used to do; and pray let the little Bed be got ready … and fear not that I shall be a Burden to you, if My Health continues …” (p. 45). Still, one of the roles presented to the heroines has less appeal, because less potential, than the other, as Richardson has Pamela intuit. Pamela, of course, never does return to her parents. Life in a hovel is no life for her; “if my Health continues,” indeed. And Lydia's contrasting acceptance of the role chosen for her causes her many illnesses and also, intriguingly, the three-month cessation of correspondence with Letty, while Lydia journeys to and travels in Scotland, her farthest remove from Wilson. In short, acceptance of the role parental figures assign them can lead only to the stultification and stagnation of their personalities. On the other hand, flirtation with ruin—that is, with the role against which the parental figures enjoin them—provides both excitement and the greater potentiality. Pamela's flirtation with this latter role enables her to mature and, in fact, to define her own life, while Lydia's choice of the former role thwarts her maturation and, in some measure, her self-definition.

What does this mean? How do the heroines define themselves? They do so not by projecting their personalities onto an existential reality, but by projecting themselves onto paper.¹¹ They are, after all, doubly isolated from reality. As they write, they isolate themselves temporally, and the two authors also isolate their heroines spatially. Only Lydia of Smollett's five writers seems to correspond covertly (pp. 27, 58, 134), and Pamela, of course, retires to her writing closet at every opportunity; she even busies herself with scribbling fifteen minutes before the hymeneal night's consummation devoutly to be wished (p. 295). Peculiarly separated from the realities of time and space, the heroines' letters contrast with reality and with the scripted roles, both of which threaten the heroines' destructions.

Just as the roles her parents script would destroy Pamela, so too, of course, would B. He does not at first think of Pamela as fully human; she exists for him simply as an object for his sexual pleasure. Nor does he respond to Pamela's threats, expostulations, faints, or prayers; nothing the girl does moves him. It is her journal, her “ready … Talent at [her] Pen” (p. 231), that destroys his “Resolution” (p. 213) to forget her and so “mov[es]” him (p. 208) that he proposes marriage. In her journal he discovers that what he had earlier thought “artful Wiles” (p. 160) and “little villainous Plots” (p. 161) either to escape or to ensnare him were in fact “pretty Tricks and Artifices, to escape the Snares [he] had laid for her, yet all … innocent, lovely, and uniformly beautiful” (p. 255). Similarly, B.'s sister, Lady Davers, is somewhat reconciled to Pamela by B., but the “Sight of your Papers,” she tells Pamela, “I dare say, will crown the Work, will disarm my Pride, banish my Resentment …, and justify my Brother's Conduct” (p. 375), will in fact “make me love you” (p. 374). Lydia's epistles do not serve quite so dramatic a purpose, but they do render her happier than either the role she accepts or her travels with her family. For in her letters she can openly admit the real “condition of [her] poor heart” (p. 93); indeed, only in her letters does she dare to mention Wilson, who figures prominently in them all. Thus, Lydia does not write only of the reality she has experienced during her travels or the torment and sickness caused by her role; she projects in her letters the reality for which she hopes. When these hopes seem to her most unlikely to be realized, the three-month hiatus in her correspondence occurs. Seemingly deprived of the reality she desires, she ceases to exist as a personality. Her epistolary death is the inverse of Pamela's proliferative epistolary life. Richardson has a good deal of fun with this idea of Pamela's papers having life. After catching a carp, for example, Pamela retires to her garden, there to “plant Life,” as she says (p. 120). What she plants, of course, is a letter to Parson Williams. Just prior to this episode, she conceals her entire packet of papers “in [her] Under-coat, next [her] Linen” “for they grow large!” (p. 120). Using the same phrase, Pamela calls attention to her epistolary pregnancy once more (p. 198.), just before B. jocularly threatens to strip her of the clothes that conceal her papers; she retires to her bedroom and complains that she “must all undress” before she can deliver the bundle (p. 204). This delivery, by the way, she “stomach[es] … very heavily” (p. 206).

In their letters, then, the heroines conceive of a life reality would abort, and each conceives of that life as an artist of his material. Each heroine distances herself from her own raw experience by writing letters, and each projects a more orderly version of that experience in her letters. For each girl, reality is painfully chaotic, and each can give it shape only in her letters. Each girl is rootless, tossed from Bedfordshire to Lincolnshire, around and back, carried throughout England and Scotland. Pamela's loss of and Lydia's need for a mother figure, which each mentions at the beginning of her first letter, stresses this rootlessness. Each heroine, therefore, projects a structure onto her disjointed experiences, and each is aware of doing so.

Pamela's inclusion in her letters of her poems and of her alteration of the 137th Psalm to fit her own circumstances calls attention to her conscious artistry, as does her constant worry about her little store of pen, paper, and ink—the utensils of her art. But she also calls attention to the artistry of her letters, which she writes as a “Diversion” from her troubles (p. 106). From the outset she compares herself and B. to various characters in books she has read—romances (p. 49), the Bible (p. 180), and Aesop's Fables (pp. 77, 162). Pamela writes also of the “Inditing” of letters (p. 37), of the “Scene[s]” in them (p. 155), of the “Part[s]” (p. 173) played by the other “Character[s]” (p. 181), of her own “Part” (p. 225), and of her style or “Language” (p. 257). She even suggests that her “Story surely would furnish out a surprizing kind of Novel, if it was to be well told” (pp. 212-13). B., at least, believes it; after reading part of her journal, he pleads with her thus to be shown the rest: “I long to see the Particulars of your Plot, and your Disappointment, where your Papers leave off. For you have so beautiful a manner, that it is partly that, and partly my Love for you, that has made me desirous of reading all you write. … And as I have furnished you with the Subject, I have a Title to see the fruits of your Pen.—Besides, … there is such a pretty Air of Romance, as you relate them, in your Plots, and my Plots, that I shall be better directed in what manner to wind up the Catastrophe of the pretty Novel” (p. 201). For Lydia, too, the artistry of her own letters provides the primary solace and order of her life. Thus she entrusts the “chapter of accidents”—in the Book of Life?—to reunite her with Wilson, and thus her “method of writing” to Letty affords her “some ease and satisfaction in the midst of [her] disquiet” (p. 307). But when Matt nearly drowns and Humphry is legitimated and Wilson stands revealed as Dennison, poor Lydia's “ideas are thrown into confusion and perplexity” so that she fears she will not be able to impart “either method or coherence” to her letter. She soon does so by settling into “a regular detail” of those events, that is, into a minute narrative of them (p. 334). Like Pamela, she creates order where she does not find it.

The epistolary format, then, enables Pamela and Lydia to structure an artistic version of reality that is less painful to them because given order by them, and both heroines are aware they are using their letters for that purpose. In the face of chaotic realities, they trust their art to provide permanence and stability in their lives. Richardson's remarks about the epistolary format suggest the validity of this interpretation: “Much more lively and affecting … must be the Style of those who write in the height of a present distress; the mind tortured by the pangs of uncertainty … than the dry, narrative, unanimated Style of a person relating difficulties and dangers surmounted, can be; the relater perfectly at ease; and if himself unmoved by his own Story, not likely greatly to affect the Reader” (my italics). Richardson's remarks do not stress only the psychic torment of his creations; his remarks also indicate his use of those creations as creators, artists aware of their own “Story,” aware of their own “Style.”

In sum, the epistolary format of Pamela and Humphry Clinker isolates the heroines from reality and thus enables them to construct their own portraits of themselves. The heroines are aware of the artistry such portraiture involves, and they use their art to structure not only their characters but also the plots of their lives. Essentially, Pamela and Lydia use the format as another of the century's great writers used his journal, and one of James Boswell's plaintive entries may serve as an appropriate epigraph for both Richardson's and Smollett's novels. Boswell wrote: “I am fallen sadly behind in my journal. I should live no more than I can record, as one should not have more corn growing than one can get in. There is a waste of good if it be not preserved. And yet perhaps if it serve the purpose of immediate felicity, that is enough.”¹²

Notes

1. Robert F. Utter and Gwendolyn B. Needham, Pamela's Daughters (New York: Macmillan Co., 1936), esp. p. 13.

2. Sheridan Baker, “Humphry Clinker as Comic Romance,” in Essays on the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. Robert Donald Spector (Bloomington: Indian Univ. Press, 1965), p. 163.

3. Samuel Richardson, “Author's Preface (1759),” Clarissa, ed. George Sherburn (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1962), p. xx.

4. Samuel Richardson, “Preface by the Editor,” Pamela, ed. T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1971), p. 3. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text.

5. See Tuvia Bloch, “Smollett's Quest for Form,” MP, 65 (1967), 103-13.

6. Cf. Robert Alan Donovan, “The Problem of Pamela,” in The Shaping Vision (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 47-67.

7. Cf. John A. Dussinger, “What Pamela Knew: An Interpretation,” JEGP, 69 (1970), 377-93; Stuart Wilson, “Pamela: An Interpretation,” PMLA, 88 (1973), 79-91.

8. Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker, ed. Lewis M. Knapp (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), p. 5. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text.

9. Interestingly, a rake named Martin also appears in the latter half of Richardson's novel.

10. See, for example, Eric Berne, Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy (New York: Grove Press, 1961) and What Do You Say After You Say Hello? (New York: Grove Press, 1972). The latter work Berne devotes to extensive analysis of various life plans, or scripts, finding in such classic fairy tales as Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty patterns of human behavior.

11. David Goldknopf, “The Epistolary Format in Clarissa,” in The Life of the Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 59-78.

12. James Boswell, The Ominous Years, 1774-1776, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1963), p. 265.