[In the following essay, Bell argues that Shamela suggests themes and cultural critiques that are developed in a more serious and disciplined manner in his later works.]

An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, In which, the many notorious Falsehoods and Misrepresentations of a Book called Pamela, are exposed and refuted; and all the matchless Arts of that young Politician, set in a true and just Light. Together with a full Account of all that passed between her and Parson Arthur Williams; whose character is represented in a manner something different from what he bears in Pamela. The whole being exact Copies of authentick Papers delivered to the Editor. Necessary to be had in all Families. By Mr. Conny Keyber.

Original title page of Shamela (1741)

The anonymous publication of the novel entitled Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded in two volumes on 6 November 1740 was one of the great focal points of eighteenth-century British literary culture. For many reasons, after the appearance of Pamela, literature in English, especially prose fiction, was never to be quite the same again. This particular novel not only enjoyed enormous and controversial popular success at once, it also set the terms of reference and engagement for a great deal of subsequent English and European fiction, including Henry Fielding's first published venture into extended prose narrative. To make sense of Fielding's appropriation of the form of the novel, and to assess the reasons behind his attempt at cultural intervention, it is essential to see how his work interacts with and transforms the material at its disposal, especially with the complex and inconsistent material provided by Pamela.

The earlier novel offers an account, told through relatively unstylised and plainly told letters and journal entries, of how the eponymous heroine Pamela Andrews, a simple young serving girl in employment a long way from home, aged only fifteen at the beginning of her account, holds out against the improper and increasingly coercive sexual advances of her master, a prosperous country squire identified in the text only as Mr B—. Although he treats her very badly, and exerts great pressure upon her, Pamela's resistance is prolonged and articulate. Since Mr B— is both her employer and the local Justice of the Peace, the law incarnate, she has no obvious avenue to safety, and her letters become increasingly desperate. Eventually, the perceived threat to her chastity builds up to the extent that she tries to run away, only to be intercepted and restrained by her master and his wicked accomplices, Mrs Jewkes and Mr Colbrand.

However, as her anxiety increases, so too does her desire to reform the predatory squire, and, remarkably, she even begins to fall in love with him despite the circumstances. As this happens, her tormentor gets hold of her journal and some of her letters, and the spirit they display affects him so much that he begins to relent and starts to treat her with genuine courtesy and respect, seeing her for the first time as a fellow human being rather than as an object for his own desires. Towards the end of the tale, Mr B— reforms. Pamela then leaves behind her humble status and becomes the squire's wife, an elevated station in life to which she rapidly and unproblematically accustoms herself.

On each subsequent publication during its author's lifetime, the text of Pamela was revised and extended. However, the central fable of virtue rewarded remained constant, and the techniques of representation and narration did not fundamentally change. Alongside the detailed account of what happened on virtually a moment-by-moment basis, presented largely through the heroine's epistolary perspective, readers of all the editions were offered prolonged reflections on the morality of events, and advice about proper behaviour, voiced by the various participants. In its unadorned way, Pamela is a tale both frightening in its revelation of the power and depravity of Mr B—, and yet eventually reassuring in its representation of the remarkable triumph of the pure chaste Pamela. Its extraordinary appeal may be derived from this combination of apprehension and reassurance, by the way it both endangers and empowers its heroine, before finally relocating her and accommodating her within ‘exalted’ society. For all its apparent artlessness, Pamela now seems like an extraordinarily powerful attempt both to discover and to smooth over the contradictions in the dominant ideologies of the day, both social and sexual. For all its accessible simplicity, it looks like a book trying to negotiate between an attractive illusion of social mobility based on virtue or personal merit and a rigid framework of hierarchy, seeking to give a powerful voice to its lower-class heroine without radically undermining a fundamentally conservative vision of society.

The popular success of Pamela was immediate and unprecedented, with five subsequent editions appearing within twelve months, alongside numerous piracies, continuations, adaptations and sundry merchandising sidelines, from pictures on fans and teacups to displays of life-size waxworks of the main characters. As well as the various unauthorised continuations, a rather less successful authorised sequel, Pamela in her Exalted Condition, haphazardly recounting her adventures as a wife and her often self-congratulatory reflections on her new condition, appeared in December 1741.

The reasons for the sudden and extraordinary popularity of the novel, for the ‘frenzy’ it created, may now be hard to reconstruct, but there can be no doubting either its instant commercial success, or the intense public controversy it provoked at the time and which it even continues to provoke in eighteenth-century studies today. Perhaps the most salient and disorienting literary feature of the book is the way it combines immediacy and rumination, without relying on the directive extra-diegetic intrusion of a narrator, the whole tale offering a lengthy mixture of drama and sermonising which might be experienced with different priority by different readers. The very compendiousness of the book, its internal tensions, and its highly discursive narration, have led inevitably to the production of radically different and contending readings being offered within different interpretive communities. As we shall see, Henry Fielding's cynical ‘reading’ of Pamela was only one of many eighteenth-century readings, but it was one which sought to achieve hegemonic power by both redefining the original text and reappraising its meanings.

While it may still appear to us, as to many contemporary readers, that Pamela was an entirely new kind of text—‘novel’ in all senses of that word—it can also be seen emerging from precedent literary and para-literary forms, engaging in dialogue with them, and creating a potent new mixture from diverse existent materials. Although obviously uninformed by the various classical and European models of prose fiction so prominent in Fielding's later work and in the developed novel of the mid-century as produced by Tobias Smollett and Charlotte Lennox, the seemingly artless narrative of the original Pamela nonetheless reappraises several native British traditions, drawing on the competing frameworks of the religious and practical guide on the one hand and the tempestuous female romance on the other. In many ways, the contradictory impulses brought in from the various precedent texts force Pamela to become a book caught up in conflict with itself. Not only does it starkly juxtapose its drama and its moralising, it is also a text in which contending egalitarian and hierarchical elements fight it out, in which passion and restraint are set at odds, and in which readers are interpellated or hailed as alternatively prurient and solemn as the pages turn.

Looking at Pamela from a traditional authorial perspective, we discover that its begetter (conventionally posing anonymously as only its editor in a preface) was one Samuel Richardson, a stout fifty-year-old tradesman, who was at this time successfully running a substantial printing and publishing business in London. Unschooled in the classics or in what was conventionally understood at the time to be ‘polite’ literature, and very comfortably accommodated within his mercantile community, Richardson seems an unlikely figure to provoke any kind of frenzy. Indeed, once his identity as an author was made known, many contemporary commentators took him to be a curious phenomenon of nature rather than the studied product of art. And such an assessment was by no means always positive in its emphasis. As Sir John Hawkins, the early biographer of Samuel Johnson, put it in 1787:

I might here speak of Richardson as a writer of fictitious history, but that he wrote for amusement, and that the profits of his writings, though very great, were accidental. He was a man of no learning nor reading, but had a vivid imagination, which he let loose in reflections on human life and manners, till it became so distended with sentiments, that for his own ease, he was necessitated to vent them on paper.¹

The image of the ‘distended’ Richardson evoked here is not meant to be an especially flattering or ennobling one—perhaps it is yet another sly reference to that figure's famed corpulence—and the representation of his writing as a kind of involuntary easing of internal blockages is, to say the least, disconcerting.

But it is the accidental and involuntary nature of the popular success of Pamela that arrests this unsympathetic critic's attention, just as it had earlier arrested Fielding's. Hawkins, by describing the book as an unpremeditated explosion of sentiments, allows for its power, and creates a frame of reference in which its inconsistencies might be explained away as artlessness. Given Richardson's lack of appropriate literary qualifications or expertise, Pamela becomes a book without a proper author, a book which is better read as a spontaneous or accidental outburst than as a carefully controlled production. By describing Richardson as he does, Hawkins makes the authorial presence in the book almost negligible, and the writer turns from being the organiser, director or proprietor of the text into a kind of impersonal conduit through which the eventual narrative emerges. Richardson, that is to say, may well have actually written or compiled the book, but he could not be held responsible for the finished product.

Ironically, the well-known history of the writing of Pamela seems to lend some authority to this curious version of it. There is an extensively documented account of how two prominent and commercially motivated London booksellers, John Osborn and Charles Rivington, invited Richardson in 1739 to compile a book of sample letters, to provide models of important correspondence which would be of use to the inexperienced or semi-literate in the daily conduct of their affairs. Richardson agreed, and his Familiar Letters on Important Occasions, although not eventually published until 1741, included specimens of correspondence between a serving girl and her distant family. Clearly, this preparatory work in 1739 offered a model for some of the basic drama as well as many of the formal devices for the more fully developed novel later to emerge as Pamela.² Whatever the mercenary motives of Osborn and Rivington, Richardson's project in compiling the letter-writer was not exclusively commercial; it was at the same time to be educative and didactic in a very broad sense. Not only was he offering accessible and imitable models for lower-class correspondence, he was also following in the tradition of his own earlier Apprentice's Vade Mecum (1733) and precedent texts such as Defoe's The Family Instructor (1715), providing a vernacular conduct-book, designed to offer guidance on appropriate behaviour and advice about how to negotiate problems of status in a rapidly changing world to uncertain and under-confident readers.

That a highly dramatic novel grew from this prosaic stimulus is surprising enough, but when combined with Richardson's subsequent remarks (made in a letter in 1753) about how the germ of the narrative was an anecdote dimly remembered from some twenty-five years earlier, the composition of Pamela seems less and less deliberate, and the text less controlled or programmatic, less ‘finished’. The book begins to take on significance and status far beyond that which its author could have understood or recognised. It is not just that Richardson was from the outset disqualified from ‘proper’ authorship by his lack of learning, as Hawkins clearly suggested, but that the text he somehow inadvertently produced took on significances and complexities of much greater resonance from the cultural fabric of his writing and from the moment of its intervention. And, of course, it remains highly probable that different readers may have found in the book much more (or even much less) than Richardson knew that he had put there.

In fact, as Margaret Anne Doody has convincingly shown, Pamela can be seen as a complex synthesis of a whole range of existent popular writings, as an adroit, if wholly unconscious exercise in intertextuality.³ The novel draws not only on the recent conduct book, but also on the native traditions of fable and romance, especially the often despised and ‘low’ forms of women's writing. Learning from the established popular works of Penelope Aubin, Jane Barker, Elizabeth Rowe, Mary Davys and Eliza Haywood, among others, familiar to him through his activities as a printer, Richardson the novelist brought together the existing impassioned seduction narrative and the more formal tale of elaborate courtship. From Aubin's popular novels of the 1720s in particular, Richardson had at his disposal the ideas of female virtue in distress and the struggle for the survival of chastity (or at least virginity), which he could rewrite through his own mercantile perspective. And from other female writers, Richardson and his readers were given templates of narrative in which women were put under pressure, in which virtue and integrity eventually secured remarkable triumphs over passion and jeopardy.⁴

So although, for the present purposes, it is attractive to see Pamela as opening a dialogue with Shamela and Joseph Andrews in turn, it would really be fairer to see it as also continuing one with these earlier texts. This novel is not an autonomous object, nor is it an unambiguous or deliberate statement of its author's ideological position. Rather, it is best seen as a complex and polyphonic text in which radically different and at times incompatible ideological positions are voiced—and perhaps voiced differently in the various revisions and adaptations. The simple hierarchical model of the conduct book becomes inappropriate and abrasive in the presence of the more volatile sexual ideology at work elsewhere. Richardson's control over the processional narrative, the actual blow-by-blow sequence of events, may be tight, but his control over its resonant meanings is relatively slack. As a result, his novel is full of ideological interference, with pious moralising and almost revolutionary outbursts sitting uncomfortably side by side, at once restraining and empowering readers. Residual traces of the impassioned female romance are juxtaposed with emergent filaments of social mobility, and the text eventually becomes a compendium of diverse ideological possibilities rather than a carefully orchestrated or directed whole. The ‘author’ fails to intervene decisively in this cacophony, or to arbitrate between the contending positions, and readers are left to impose coherence on the text by selecting from it the particular emphasis that suits their reading appetite best. The text on the page thus remains incomplete, awaiting the interpretive guidance of particular readers in specific reading contexts.

With the benefits of distance and hindsight, the confusions of meaning and purpose in Pamela, which may have partly provoked Fielding's hostile response, are now relatively easy to identify, often being located in the question of the heroine's status and the significance of her chastity/virginity. Clearly, the orthodox reading of the book, as preached from many eighteenth-century pulpits, was that temptation was to be resisted, no matter how strong it might be, and that virtue might be its own reward. Thus, some of Pamela's more outspoken remarks can be naturalised within an overall moral or religious ideology. At one point, she makes what look like uncompromisingly egalitarian statements:

Were my life in question, instead of my virtue, I would not wish to involve any body in the least difficulty for so worthless a poor creature. But, O sir! my soul is of equal importance with the soul of a princess, though in quality I am but upon a foot with the meanest slave.⁵

Pamela's sense of personal integrity here—her belief that her soul is absolutely valuable—jostles against her acknowledgement that her rank, or, as she puts it, her ‘quality’, is humble and relatively worthless. Even in this brief passage, the text seems to introduce contending meanings and to slip out of firm authorial control. Is Pamela's statement to be read as an endorsement of the prevailing social hierarchy, recognising its paradoxes, or as an enlightened refusal to submit to its demands? Or is it simply an unexamined contradiction, clumsily interrupting the narrative and needlessly deflecting attention from the sequence of events?

There are many such moments of ideological stress uncomfortably contained within the narrative structure of the novel. At one point, Pamela insists on her personal integrity in terms which are very dismissive of the vanity of the rich:

One may see by it how poor people are despised by the rich and the great! And yet we were all on a foot originally. Surely these proud people never think what a short stage life is; and that, with all their vanity, a time is coming, when they shall be on a level with us … O keep me, Heaven! from their high condition, if my mind shall ever be tainted with their vice!

(Pamela, p. 294)

Pamela cries out for understanding, and offers a class-based (or ‘quality’-based) hostility to the vices of the wealthy, modulated through a more egalitarian religious ideology. But of course she herself has been transformed into one of these wealthy people by the end of the novel, achieving the ‘high position’ about which she here expresses uncertainties, and the reward she receives for retaining her ‘virtue’ is significantly more material than it is spiritual.

Such confusion over the value of hierarchy is discoverable throughout the book, and the issue of Pamela's true status never seems to be fully under authorial control. Similarly, it is perplexing that after her spirited and intense resistance to her master's encroachments, and her insistence on her equal spiritual worth, when she comes to be socially relocated towards the end she promises the most abject obedience in her wedding vows:

‘Know you any impediment?’ I blushed, and said softly, ‘None, sir, but my great unworthiness.’ Then followed the sweet words, ‘Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife’, & c. and I began to take courage a little, when my dearest master answered audibly to this question, ‘I will’. But I could only make a curt'sy, when they asked me; though, I am sure, my heart was readier than my speech, and answered to every article of obey, serve, love, honour.

(Pamela, p. 374)

After the abduction and the privations Pamela has suffered, not to mention Mr B—'s acknowledged treatment of a previous mistress, Sally Godfrey, whom he has virtually exiled in Jamaica, the heroine's willingness to accept her new husband and master without reservation or hesitation seems quite remarkable. Is this voluntary self-abasement a contradiction of her earlier independence, or can it be read as a continuation of her selfhood by different means? As she herself says immediately afterwards, describing her own career in the third-person to her parents, the transformation in Mr B— has been spectacularly sudden—‘… thus the dear, once naughty assailer of her innocence, by a blessed turn of Providence, is become the kind, the generous protector and rewarder of it!’ (p. 375). To describe the predatory seducer (and kidnapper) Mr B— as ‘once naughty’ seems remarkably restrained, trivialising and tolerating his behaviour, and it does a radical disservice to the heightened drama and intensity of the earlier narrative.

The point of contact between proper self-assertion and ‘knowing your place’ is a major point of friction in this text, and the book's subtitle, Virtue Rewarded, could be inflected in different ways. In the most conventional reading, these points of stress are invisible, and the text naturalises an ideology which may have been internally fraught but which held important meanings for its lower-class subjects. By acting upon principle, upon an intuitively understood code of conduct, the humble could yet instruct (and reform) the proud. Just as the humble heroine becomes exalted, lower-class readers could feel themselves aggrandised by the experience of the text, rewarded for their integrity and their fidelity.

That might account for the popularity of Richardson's work with one audience, but for readers as unsympathetic as the more patrician and literate Fielding, the book was a ridiculous farrago. Under the disguise of piety, it did not seek to consolidate the value of Pamela's chastity so much as raise the price of her virginity. Fielding took the success of Pamela, a text he clearly saw as incoherent, unintelligent, ungrammatical and morally fraudulent, to be an index of the woeful credulity of the times. More than just a facile piece of writing, it reflected the effects of the failure of those in positions of prominence to behave with due dignity or proper authority. In an age in which Colley Cibber could be made poet laureate, and Sir Robert Walpole could be the First Minister of State, the success of the low-brow novel epitomised by Pamela simply reinforced the sense of imminent cultural collapse and declining standards in contemporary life which Fielding's fiction returns to again and again.

Fielding's Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews, then, published as a pamphlet on 4 April 1741, after three editions of Pamela had appeared, is not just a topical parodic rewriting of Richardson's novel designed to make fun of its specific literary shortcomings. It is also a much wider assault on the inadequacy of the moral and intellectual life of the times conducted through the perspective of the precedent novel, engaging in dialogue with its declared ideology and its more covert assumptions, and thereby with the much wider issue of identifying who may and who may not legitimately lay claim to cultural authority.

Returning to the terms of reference laid out in the previous chapter, it is clear that the kind of parody found in Shamela is always a dialogic exercise. As Mikhail Bakhtin puts it, the parodic text speaks with two tongues:

… an author can also make use of another person's word for his own purposes by inserting a new semantic orientation into a word which already has—and retains—its own orientation. In that case, such a word, by virtue of its task, must be perceived as belonging to another person. Then two semantic orientations, two voices are present in a single word. The parodistic word is of this type …⁶

In Shamela, Fielding pursues his own aims by imposing just this kind of new intention on his predecessor. The authorial strategy in his book is to commandeer the ambiguities and uncertainties of the original narrative, and to make them cohere around a single, ridiculously travestied reading of that text by an act of jeering mimicry. The technique of caricaturing existing texts to make them seem ridiculous was already thoroughly familiar in the adversarial literary world of eighteenth-century England. In Fielding's earlier theatrical career, he had produced various plays which relied on the bathetic effect of just this kind of travesty, notably The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) and The Covent-Garden Tragedy (1732), and throughout the pages of his periodical The Champion (1739-41) he had exploited the ‘double-voicing’ devices of selective exaggeration and parody to denounce what he saw as the imbecility and pomposity of his literary (and commercial) rivals.

That Fielding's appropriation of the original text was persuasive to many cannot be doubted. He may have disfigured Richardson's work irretrievably, but he did so in a way that affirmed his own cultural authority over the low-brow interloper and rival, which seems to have persuaded at least some others to revise their opinions likewise. As an anonymous poem in the London Magazine in June 1741 put it:

Admired Pamela, till Shamela shown,
Appear'd in every colour—but her own:
Uncensur'd she remained in borrow'd light,
No nun more chaste, few angels shone so bright.
But now the idol we no more adore,
Jervis a bawd, and our chaste nymph a w———.(7)

It may be that this revision appealed more to the sophisticated coffee-house literati than to the common reader, newly enfranchised into literature, but nonetheless Shamela seems to have made a great impact of its own. So how did Fielding manage this extraordinary redirection of emphasis? How did he frame the original text in such a way as to make it seem so ridiculous and inept to certain kinds of reader? And what were the prime targets of his satiric attack?

The attempt to rewrite Richardson's text as a catch-penny burlesque begins on the title page, where this new slim volume is described as being ‘Necessary to be had in all FAMILIES’. The hit at the commercial success of Pamela is only the first part of Fielding's basic reorientation of the book, moving it entirely away from questions of morality and insistently towards questions of money. Put very simply, Fielding turns the central figure of the narrative from being a frightened and naive female victim clinging on to her integrity in the face of Mr B—'s attacks into an accomplished mercenary prostitute who deftly cons the gullible ‘Mr Booby’ into marriage with the assistance of her worldly accomplices Mrs Jervis and Parson Williams—the isolated, vulnerable figure on whom others gang up is thus not the helpless lower-class female, but the witless upper-class male.

‘Shamela’ is a prostitute's daughter, and her correspondence with her mother steadily and brazenly reveals the plot to soak Mr Booby of his money by arousing (but, of course, not satisfying) his sexual interest in attractive young serving girls. So Fielding's version of the story immediately reverses the terms of reference of the original: where Pamela is victim, Shamela is predator; where Mr B— is rakish, Booby is oafish; where Pamela acts from integrity, Shamela feigns and pretends; and where Pamela strives alone for honesty, Shamela contrives trickery with her accomplices. The whole coinage of Richardson's text is devalued by Fielding's transformation of the heroine's secret aims, as she famously puts it:

I thought once of making a little Fortune by my Person. I now intend to make a great one by my Vartue.⁸

So it seems that Shamela (and, of course, by implication Pamela as well) is more artful than a mere prostitute, having hit upon an altogether more remunerative and painless way of making a living—‘Vartue’. For these characters, as Fielding (mis)represents them, it is even easier to fake integrity than to fake orgasm, and the rewards to be gained from such skilled deception are concomitantly greater.

This is clearly an unfair and partial misreading of Pamela, deliberately blind to its more liberating or egalitarian possibilities, and to its pathos. But the point of Fielding's exercise is that it is not to be seen as constructing a new meaning which might gratuitously be imposed on the original, but rather that it claims to offer a revelation of the real meaning hidden away and obscured within the original, the real voice hidden under the cultivated accent of protestation. According to Fielding, Pamela's ‘virtue’, about which she makes so much fuss, is after all really only ‘vartue’, a secret desire for social climbing and a talent for cunning personal advancement, and it is thus clearly not worth all the protestation she makes. Fielding's book swiftly and flagrantly rewrites the sexual politics of the basic plot, removing the notion that men are predators and women victims, and replacing it with the contending notion that the crafty are predatory and the gullible are their prey, irrespective of gender.

In this way, Shamela avoids a sexual politics which is gendered, and gives us instead one which is ‘intelligenced’, if I may put it that way. We return here to the traditional Jonsonian or Restoration comic world of fools and knaves, where women hold secret power, a move which provides a way of defusing the topical energies of Richardson's text, which are taken out of the immediate social context, and relocated in this familiar literary world of farce and duplicity. By offering such a familiar and exclusively literary set of references, Shamela covertly decontextualises and redirects the sexual ideology of its source. From Fielding's perspective, the ‘newness’ of Pamela is seen only to be a hypocritical veneer, and to be a rather unconvincing one at that.

There is little to be gained by citing extensive parallel passages from the two books, since Fielding's point is made much more rapidly than Richardson's, and since he is trying to draw a single consistent meaning from (and into) an ambiguous and compendious text. Yet it is worth looking at Shamela's preparations for her wedding night in comparison with Pamela's. Whereas the social concerns of Richardson's novel meant that Pamela had to persuade Mr B—'s family of her worthiness, while striving to convince her own family that she had not lost her right to their respect, Fielding's Shamela has an altogether simpler task to perform before the great event:

In my last I left off at our sitting down to Supper on our Wedding Night, where I behaved with as much Bashfulness as the purest Virgin in the World could have done. The most difficult Task was for me to blush; however, by holding my Breath, and squeezing my Cheeks with my Handkerchief, I did pretty well … at last I went to Bed, and my Husband soon leapt in after me; where I shall only assure you, I acted my Part in such a manner, that no Bridegroom was ever better satisfied with his Bride's Virginity. And to confess the Truth, I might have been well satisfied too, if I had never been acquainted with Parson Williams.

(Shamela, p. 347)

The creation of ‘Vartue’ here is certainly comic, and the farce is deftly handled. But as a reading of the precedent text it is clearly reductive in the extreme, as well as profoundly coercive, failing to engage with the complexities of rank or ‘quality’ which are so prominent in the original.

And it is not only the meanings of the original book that are ridiculed in the parody. Elsewhere, Fielding makes clear his view of the manifest absurdity of Richardson's blow-by-blow narrative technique. In a very funny, but uneasily tempered passage, he offers a ridiculous travesty of the breathless epistolary style:

THURSDAY NIGHT, TWELVE O'CLOCK

Mrs. Jervis and I are just in Bed, and the Door unlocked; if my Master should come—Odsbods! I hear him just coming in at the Door. You see I write in the present Tense, as Parson Williams says. Well, he is in Bed between us, we both shamming a Sleep, he steals his Hand into my Bosom, which I, as if in my Sleep, press close to me with mine, and then pretend to awake.—I no sooner see him, but I scream out to Mrs. Jervis, she feigns likewise but just to come to herself; we both begin, she to becall, and I to bescratch very liberally. After having made a pretty free Use of my Fingers, without any great Regard to the Parts I attack‘d, I counterfeit a swoon. Mrs. Jervis then cries out, O, Sir, what have you done, you have murthered poor Pamela: she is gone, she is gone. -

O what a Difficulty it is to keep one's Countenance, when a violent Laugh desires to burst forth.

(Shamela, p. 330)

The full vocabulary of fraudulence is encapsulated here—‘shamming’, ‘pretend’, ‘feigns’, ‘counterfeit’—and our privileged access to the event allows us to recognise its truly farcical nature. Yet Fielding's point in parodying the immediacy of the present tense epistolary style is to show us how Richardson himself is complicit in the act of counterfeiting. By giving up control of the narrative to the characters, he is merely pretending not to be an author, failing to acknowledge publicly his directive responsibilities in shaping his narrative. And if we follow Fielding's argument, we are forced to see that by pretending not to be an author, by failing to live up to his organisational responsibilities, Richardson is disqualified from the genuine writer's position of real cultural authority.

Fielding's intervention is thus a comic travesty of both the sexual drama of the original and its manner of literary representation. However, it moves beyond any single point of reference, and goes well beyond the confines of the spoof, taking the occasion to develop greater dialogue with the manifold weaknesses of contemporary culture. The meaning and success of Pamela becomes a focal point for the analysis of cultural decline. It is significant that the title-page describes the heroine as a ‘young Politician’, for Fielding here begins his fictional reinterpretation of contemporary political life, an authorial concern which is continuously prominent throughout Joseph Andrews, Jonathan Wild, Tom Jones and Amelia.

Around this apparently casual exercise in parody, Fielding assembles a group of representative figures who stand for the contemporary abuses of taste and failures of cultural responsibility which he is eager to castigate. On the title-page, the author is represented as a ‘Mr. Conny Keyber’, a clear caricature of the egregious Colley Cibber, man of the theatre, poet laureate, and recent author of the similarly titled. An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian, (1740).

As mentioned already, Fielding and Cibber were bitter and persistent antagonists—Cibber had passed disparaging remarks about Fielding in his Apology, and Fielding had immediately retaliated through the pages of The Champion in April and May 1740. But the feud between the two figures, only one of many feuds in Fielding's combative career, went back to the earlier period when Cibber had been largely in control of the Drury Lane theatre. In Fielding's play The Author's Farce, published and performed in 1730, the year Cibber received the accolade of the laureateship, the actor-manager had been caricatured as the theatrical tyrant ‘Marplay’, as the ridiculous thespian ‘Sir Farcical Comic’, and had even slightingly been referred to in person as the suspiciously German-sounding ‘Keyber’. The renewed assault on Cibber in Shamela not only shows Fielding's remarkable ability to harbour grudges and sustain resentment over a long period, it offers up ‘Keyber’ as a representative of the wider cultural failings of Hanoverian England. The first name ‘Conny’ is not only a dismissive slang term evocative of fools, rabbits and the female pudenda, it also aligns Cibber with another prominent literary figure, Conyers Middleton, the apparently pompous and self-important author of The History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (1741), a respectable enough scholarly work which seems to have irritated Fielding intensely, largely on account of its obsequious and fulsome dedication to the appalling Lord Hervey.⁹

For Fielding, the success of these works, as of the anonymous Pamela itself, was indicative of serious and disquieting errors of discernment in contemporary culture, which his parody is more than willing to address. As well as transforming the internal drama of the narrative into an all-too-familiar Restoration romp, Fielding contextualises its popular success by slyly setting it alongside other examples of the contemporary failure of taste, compiling corroborative illustrations of equally incompetent texts and fraudulent characters from the surrounding world. The point is made clearer in the dedicatory epistle to Shamela, which not only parodies Richardson's shameless incorporation of ‘puffs’ for his book, which had started modestly enough and then expanded greatly with the second edition of February 1741, but makes the link between literary production and political corruption much clearer. The letter from Keyber ‘To Miss Fanny’ brings into the text the notorious figure of Lord Hervey, already travestied by Pope as ‘Lord Fanny’ in his First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated (1733) and as ‘Sporus’, the butterfly broken upon the wheel in his Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735). Hervey's close association with the court and with Walpole's regime surreptitiously implicates major political figures in this satiric attack, and at the same time it begins Fielding's fictional examination of the ideology of masculinity.

The letter to Miss Fanny pretends to follow the fulsome style of Conyers Middleton's own dedication to Hervey, excessively panegyrical and unstinting in its encomium, but it simultaneously makes oblique references to Hervey's reputation for ‘hermaphroditic’ sexual practices, eventually producing a ridiculous mixture of vanity and inept self-revelation:

First, then, Madam, I must tell the World, that you have tickled up and brightned many Strokes in this Work by your Pencil.

Secondly, you have intimately conversed with me, one of the greatest Wits and scholars of my Age.

Thirdly, You keep very good Hours, and frequently spend an useful Day before others begin to enjoy it. This will I take my Oath on; for I am admitted to your Presence in a Morning before other People's Servants are up; when I constantly found you reading in good Books; and if ever I have drawn you upon me, I have always felt you very heavy.

(Shamela, p. 317)

It is clear that there is no direct satire on Samuel Richardson here. Indeed it has now been established by scholars that Fielding was actually unaware of Richardson's identity as the author of Pamela at this point, and that he bore him no personal animus. Richardson was acquainted with Fielding's sister, Sarah, with whose own novels he was involved, and the actual author is never directly or personally targeted in Shamela. Instead, the satire is directed at the ridiculous and blinkered vanity of over- ambitious contemporary authors in general—seen also in the commendatory letter from ‘the Editor to Himself’—and at a number of other more familiar targets. However the Cibber/Middleton figure, unwittingly revealing himself to be Hervey's catamite, also stands for the widespread corruption of taste and morality which Fielding saw as a particularly disturbing feature of upper-class life at the time, a motif which appears constantly throughout his fiction. By relocating the book in this way, Fielding is not disparaging Richardson's personal qualifications, but taking an opportunity to attack other pretenders to the dignity and gravity of authorship.

The Cibber/Middleton figure, and Lord Hervey, represent Fielding's contemptuous view of many of his fellow-authors, and other features of the text are introduced in order to ridicule the equally bogus qualifications of the contemporary reading public. In the preliminary exchange between two members of the clergy, the views put forward by ‘Parson Oliver’ seem to be close to Fielding's own understanding of Pamela:

The instruction which it conveys to Servant-Maids, is, I think, very plainly this, To look out for their Masters as sharp as they can. The Consequences of which will be, besides Neglect of their Business, and the using all Manner of Means to come at Ornaments of their Persons, that if the Master is not a Fool, they will be debauched by him; and if he is a Fool, they will marry him.

(Shamela, p. 324)

Oliver represents the worldly, sensible reader of Pamela, as constructed and recommended by Fielding, explicitly contrasted by the credulous, unwitting ‘Parson Tickletext’, who expresses his steamy infatuation with the book. Tickletext has been so taken up with the book, that he has joined his fellow clergymen in extolling its merits from the pulpit—‘for we have made it our common Business here, not only to cry it up, but to preach it up likewise’ (Shamela, p. 321). Tickletext is here reiterating the praise heaped on the book by the wonderfully named Reverend Benjamin Slocock of St Saviour's Southwark earlier in the year. He may be voicing a common view, but it is soon apparent that, underneath the piety, the real pleasure to be had from the text is more ticklish than he seems to realise:

This Book is the ‘Soul of Religion, Good-Breeding, Discretion, Good-Nature, Wit, Fancy, Fine Thought, and Morality. There is an Ease, a natural Air, a dignified Simplicity, and Measured Fulness in it, that Resembling Life, Out-Glows it. The Author hath reconciled the pleasing to the proper; the Thought is every where exactly cloathed by the Expression; and becomes its Dress as roundly and as close as Pamela her Country Habit; or as she doth her no Habit, when modest Beauty seeks to hide itself, by casting off the Pride of Ornament, and displays itself without any Covering;’ which it frequently doth in this admirable Work, and presents Images to the Reader, which the coldest Zealot cannot read without Emotion.

(Shamela, p. 321)

Parson Tickletext here unwittingly gives an exhilarating anticipation of Roland Barthes in combining intertextuality—the quoted passage comes from the prefatory material to the second edition of Pamela—and perhaps the earliest recorded account of reading as an exercise in jouissance. The pleasure of this text for this reader is clearly sexual, seen in the way Tickletext mentally undresses the heroine—‘Oh! I feel an Emotion even while I am relating this: Methinks I see Pamela at this Instant, with all the Pride of Ornament cast off’ (Shamela, p. 322)—and his ridiculously lurid fantasies alert the reader to the prurient and semi-pornographic nature of the tale of female suffering.

The incorporation of Tickletext has slightly more to do with the satire on Richardson's novel than the introduction of Conny Keyber and Miss Fanny, since there are scenes in the original text which do seem to be ‘warm’ in a way Tickletext would recognise and enjoy. However, its real role is to begin the discussion of issues which become increasingly prominent in Joseph Andrews: the role of the clergy in contemporary culture and the dubious nature of religious ‘enthusiasm’. Just as Shamela's virtue is inauthentic, so too is the piety of Tickletext and, even more obviously, that of Williams. The clergy play only a small role in Pamela and Fielding introduces this idea into his spoof to attack a related issue of the day more than to parody the precedent novel. He adumbrates this idea much more elaborately later on, but in Shamela itself, Methodism and the doctrine associated with the controversial figures of George Whitefield and John Wesley enter as new topics in the continuing dialogue, consequences of his engagement with the public ‘frenzy’ surrounding the earlier book rather than precise renderings of its internal workings.

The main idea running through Fielding's parody is that his heroine protests virtue without possessing it, and a number of devices are introduced to show that this was not an isolated phenomenon peculiar to the participants in Richardson's novel. In the world of contemporary religion, the Methodist movement seemed to Fielding to be giving scandalous legitimacy to such forms of outward show by concentrating on ‘faith’ rather than ‘works’ as the criteria for true piety. Parson Tickletext himself seems to be an example of the unconscious hypocrite the book is designed to expose, and within the narrative there are other indications of a growing concern with the proper and improper forms of religious observation.

At the beginning, Shamela receives from her mother a copy of ‘one of Mr. Whitefield's Sermons, and also the Dealings with him’ (Shamela, p. 328), from which she is encouraged to learn how best to ensnare her ‘rich Fool’, Mr Booby. Later, when she hears Parson Williams preach, the Methodist message is even more flagrantly caricatured:

Well, on Sunday Parson Williams came, according to his Promise, and an excellent Sermon he preached; his Text was, Be not Righteous over-much; and indeed he handled it in a very fine way; he shewed us that the Bible doth not require too much Goodness of us, and that People very often call things Goodness that are not so. That to go to Church, and to pray, and to sing Psalms, and to honour the Clergy, and to repent, is true Religion; and 'tis not doing good to one another, for that is one of the greatest Sins we can commit, when we don't do it for the sake of Religion. That those People who talk of Vartue and Morality, are the wickedest of all Persons. That 'tis not what we do, but what we believe, that must save us, and a great many other good Things; I wish I could remember them all.

(Shamela, p. 336)

The ideas outlined here are, of course, a grotesque travesty of Whitefield's actual views, but within the text they smear the enthusiasts by a process of guilt through association. Yet although it provides greater resonance for the events portrayed, the subject of devotional enthusiasm is not central to the enquiry in this particular narrative. Rather, it is a recurrent concern of Fielding the auteur, visible in earlier periodical writing and elsewhere, which gets written on top of the farcical adventures, adding to them without really developing them along any consistent thematic line. As far as Fielding is concerned, his new text is capacious enough to incorporate a whole range of slanders and caricatures, and he is not to be exclusively restricted to a simple reworking of Pamela if other opportunities present themselves.

Parson Williams, as we know, is the father of Shamela's illegitimate child (who is referred to, but does not appear in the narrative), and in the text Fielding is having fun with the character for the sake of it, as well as using him to blacken Methodist ideas. Williams is knowing and mercenary, whereas the hapless Tickletext is simply naive. Yet by the end of the book, a traditional comic reversal has taken place: Tickletext is sadder but wiser, and Williams is publicly exposed as a fraud:

P. S. Since I writ, I have a certain Account, that Mr. Booby hath caught his Wife in bed with Williams; hath turned her off, and is prosecuting him in the spiritual Court.

(Shamela, p. 357)

The traditional literary taxonomy of knaves and fools is reinstated, and the pamphlet concludes. By now it is clear that as well as rewriting the original Pamela, to expose its technical crudities and its mercenary attitudes, Fielding is seizing on the whole Pamela phenomenon as an opportunity to castigate the contemporary state of his culture. Under the government of Walpole, referred to as ‘his Honour’ by ‘John Puff’ in the prefatory letters, Fielding sees a society driven by money and outward show, hopelessly gullible and lacking in substance. By engaging in dialogue with that culture's most celebrated literary document, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Fielding is able to begin to build a platform from which he may announce his own oppositional concerns and attitudes.

However, the attempt to rewrite Pamela through his own perspective is not wholly consistent. In this text, as in earlier eighteenth-century exercises in such dialogue as The Beggar's Opera or Gulliver's Travels or The Rape of the Lock and so many others, there are elements of struggle between the material on hand and the emergent ideas. The simple parody of Richardson becomes a pretext for a wider cultural analysis, but the basic caricature leaves Fielding insufficient room to develop the further themes he introduces. Seeing him as auteur, we might suggest that in this particular work his later themes are nascent, but not fully formed or contained within the text, which has its own momentum. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. Shamela is a volatile text, struggling to contain a broad agenda of cultural criticism within the framework of the anti-Pamela. It shows Fielding's desire to sit in place as arbiter of the good taste of his age, but it could not really be called an example of that cherished ‘good taste’. The exercise in arbitration or cultural brokerage it conducts is undisciplined, splenetic and at times unfocused, repeating in a slightly different and more self-aware form the lack of cohesion which Fielding identified in the original novel. In order to put to rights both the literary ineptitude of Pamela and the weaknesses endemic in the culture which produced and celebrated it, Fielding had to appropriate the popular form of the novel and much more systematically redefine its function. In Joseph Andrews, … he sought to carry on the cultural and commercial combat by other means.

Notes

1. Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson Ll.D. (1787), ed. Bertram H. Davis (London, 1962), p. 96.

2. See T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford, 1971), pp. 86-99.

3. Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford, 1974), pp. 14-35.

4. See Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford, 1986), pp. 75-90.

5. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1970), ed. Peter Sabor, with an introduction by Margaret Doody (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 197. Further references will be to this edition, and will be incorporated in the text.

6. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoyevsky's Poetics (2nd edn, 1963), trans. R.W. Rotsel (no place of publication indicated, 1973), pp. 156-7.

7. Quoted in Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage, ed. Ronald Paulson and Thomas Lockwood (London and New York, 1969), p. 116.

8. Henry Fielding, An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741), ed. Douglas Brooks-Davies (Oxford, 1970), p. 342. Further references will be incorporated in the text.

9. See Glenn W. Hatfield, Henry Fielding and the Language of Irony (Chicago and London, 1968), p. 149.