[In the following essay, originally published in 1956, Watt discusses the major theme of faith versus good works and analyzes Fielding's brand of satire.]

Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded was published on November 6th, 1740. It immediately became the sensation of the literary season, and a swarm of attacks, parodies, and spurious continuations soon appeared to sour Richardson's remarkable and unexpected triumph; of these the first and easily the best was the eighteen-penny pamphlet An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, published on April 4th, 1741, under the name of Mr. Conny Keyber.

That Fielding was the author is indisputable. Horace Walpole and several other contemporaries privately recorded it as his in terms that do not suggest that there was any doubt about the matter; and in the last fifty years or so the labors of Austin Dobson, Wilbur Cross, Alan D. McKillop, Charles B. Woods,¹ and many others, have strengthened the attribution with a great deal of internal and external evidence. There is always an element of uncertainty about the authorship of any work that was published pseudonymously, remained unacknowledged by its author, and was not publicly attributed to him in his lifetime.² In the case of Shamela, however, these things are natural enough: Fielding was soon to become prominent as a novelist, journalist, and reforming magistrate, and was naturally unwilling to avow so indecent a work, especially once he knew, which he apparently did not when he wrote Shamela, that Pamela had actually been written by Richardson, whose Clarissa he was later to admire, and who was, moreover, a friend of his sister Sarah's; as for the public, it was not likely to be very interested in the authorship of a minor squib which, after the three editions of 1741, was not reprinted until 1926.

One might have expected that the question would have been settled in 1804, when Mrs. Barbauld published her edition of Richardson's correspondence; for it made public a letter to Lady Bradshaigh naming Fielding as the author.³ Nevertheless, the issue was avoided for nearly a century more, a fact which can perhaps best be explained as the result of the misplaced zeal of nineteenth century editors and scholars for Fielding's reputation or our morals, both matters, of course, which might more properly have been assumed to be no less invulnerable than Pamela's virtue.

I

Shamela, then, is Fielding's, and it is therefore his first prose fiction. The tale itself is accessible enough: the only facts it requires of its reader are those of life. Nor is the main range of satiric allusion much more recondite: it demands only a nodding acquaintance with Pamela, such as college easily supplies. The book opens and closes, however, with a series of secondary allusions which may call for some explanation. Any readers of the title page, for example, who do not have the works of Cibber and Middleton at their fingertips, may well wonder who is Mr. Conny Keyber?

Colley Cibber, actor, dramatist and Poet Laureate since 1730, was a very old enemy and butt of Fielding. His Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian, Written by Himself, had been one of the best sellers of 1740; the title of Shamela is closely modeled on it, and there is, further, some similarity between Cibber's air of ingenuous self-satisfaction and the innocent self-revelation of Fielding's heroine. Here, however, the connection stops; and it is probable that Fielding used Cibber's name for his parody mainly because it would add to its topicality, and to the further discredit of a celebrity whom everyone would recognize under the patent and already established sobriquet of “keyber.”

The “Conny” of “Conny Keyber” is a conflation of “Colley” and “Conyers,” with the added appropriate suggestions of “coney,” a dupe, and possibly of “cunny,” Latin “cunnus.” Conyers was the given name of Dr. Middleton, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, whom grateful colleagues had made “Principal Library-Keeper” of the University as some compensation for his vigorous, unsuccessful, and ruinously expensive attacks on the Master of his college, the redoubtable Dr. Bentley. Middleton had published a Life of Cicero early in 1741, and we know from Joseph Andrews⁴ that Fielding had little regard for the work itself; but what drew his fire in Shamela was the adulatory inanity of Middleton's “Epistle Dedicatory” to his patron, John, Lord Hervey. This courtier and poetaster, Pope's Sporus, was the Lord Privy Seal of Walpole's crumbling administration; and his effeminacy, which had already excited a good deal of satiric comment, explains the terms of Fielding's dedicatory letter “To Miss Fanny, & c.”—an appellation Pope had already established. The letter is actually a very close parody of Middleton's effusion; compare, for instance, its third, sixth, and final paragraphs with these passages from Middleton:

I cannot forbear boasting, that some Parts of my present Work have been brightened by the Strokes of your Lordship's Pencil.

That singular Temperance in Diet, in which your Lordship perseveres …

It was Cicero who instructed me to write; your Lordship who rewards me for writing.

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

[Fourthly, You have a Virtue which enables you to rise early and study hard, and that is, forbearing to over-eat yourself, and this in spite of all the luscious Temptations of Puddings and Custards, exciting the Brute (as Dr. Woodward calls it) to rebel. This is a Virtue which I can greatly admire, though I much question whether I could imitate it.

[… it was Euclid who taught me to write. It is you, Madam, who pay me for Writing.]

Middleton had also commended Hervey's habit of early rising, of “spending a useful day, before others begin to enjoy it,” and had recorded his own matutinal visits “when I have found you commonly engaged with the classical writers of Greece and Rome.” The vignette was irresistible, and in the fifth paragraph of his dedicatory letter Fielding delightedly developed the opening afforded by the ambiguity of “engaged” into the kind of sexual innuendo appropriate to Hervey's reputation. We must agree with the verdict of Thomas Dampier, later Dean of Durham, who writes in a private letter of 1741 that “the Dedication to Lord Hervey has been very justly and prettily ridiculed by Fielding in a Dedication to a Pamphlet called ‘Shamela’ which he wrote to burlesque … ‘Pamela,’ a Romance in low Life.”⁵

So much for the title page and dedicatory letter: the second of the “Letters to the Editor” introduces yet another polemic note. Unlike Fielding, Cibber and Middleton were both Administration supporters, and this was no doubt an added reason for Fielding's mockery: but the political issue is not specifically raised until John Puff's letter. There Fielding ironically suggests that the talents of the creator of Shamela might even be equal to no less a task than writing a biography of “his Honour”—Walpole, and follows this insult with an injurious explanation of that politician's notorious complaisance about his wife's infidelities. The political aspect of Shamela, however, is very minor, and we must pass on to the letters of the two parsons which serve as introduction and conclusion to the narrative itself if we are to get to grips with Fielding's main intentions and appreciate Shamela as—among other things—a topical literary, religious, and moral satire.

When Parson Oliver, who bears the name of Fielding's early tutor, speaks of “an epidemical Phrenzy now raging in Town” over Pamela, we are confronted with yet another example of the Augustan rearguard action against the swelling ranks of the Grub-Street Dunces. It was bad enough that Cibber should make 1500 pounds from his Apology and Middleton much more from his Cicero,⁶ especially when Fielding himself was in the literary and economic doldrums, the dramatic career ended, that of the novelist and magistrate not yet begun; but the simultaneous furor over Pamela must have looked like the most dangerous conspiracy of all against the Republic of Letters, since the clergy seemed to be the ringleaders.

Fielding probably had two things mainly in mind when he made Parson Oliver attack “the confederating to cry up a nonsensical ridiculous Book, (I believe the most extensively so of any ever yet published).” There was, first, Richardson's insertion of some thirty pages of laudatory letters in the second and subsequent editions of Pamela: puffing was ancient enough, but never had it been so copious and shameless, and Fielding could make his satirical point merely by culling the riper fatuities from the original—the passages in quotation marks in Tickletext's first letter are all, with one brief exception,⁷ cited verbatim from the prefatory matter to Pamela.⁸

The second, and much more important thing that Fielding had in mind in attacking “the confederating to cry up” Pamela was the unprecedented and enthusiastic collaboration of the clergy. Dr. Benjamin Slocock had even recommended it from the pulpit of St. Saviour's Church, Southwark, and, it was rumored, had received ten guineas for the favor. When Fielding, therefore, put the rubric “Necessary to be had in all Families” on the title page of Shamela, and made Tickletext compare the Whole Duty of Man unfavorably with Pamela, he was only going a little further than Richardson's clerical claque. Pope himself, incidentally, had been numbered in the chorus, and in the charming eulogy “The Editor to Himself” Fielding seems to be embroidering his no doubt intentionally ambiguous encomium that Pamela “would do more good than many volumes of sermons.”

One other religious aspect of Shamela perhaps calls for brief explanation. Shamela, we notice, is like her avatar in owning a little library of devotional as well as other reading; and she twice mentions A Short Account of God's Dealings with the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield. Whitefield had published this work in 1740 as a reply to an attack on Methodism and on him personally by Dr. Joseph Trapp in the previous year; and when Parson Williams takes as his text “Be Not Righteous Overmuch” he is following Trapp in his first sermon, which had provided the keynote for the subsequent polemics.⁹ Public interest in the rise of Methodism, then, supplied Fielding with yet another set of topical allusions: and it is also, no doubt, partly responsible for the expansion of the role of Parson Williams, who is a very minor figure in Richardson, but who in Shamela becomes a caricature of a canting and hypocritical enthusiast.

Fielding's religious target in Shamela, however, is certainly not the Methodists as such, but rather those of any persuasion who are governed by what in Joseph Andrews he called “the detestable doctrine of faith against good works.”¹⁰ This emphasis on the social and moral virtues is typical of Fielding; and it is the central idea in Shamela, since it brings together Fielding's two main polemic purposes—the attack on those who had puffed Pamela as a book likely to promote the cause of virtue and religion, and the attack on Richardson's interpretation of his heroine's character. The domain of faith is inward and subjective: those who profess it may be deceiving themselves, or they may intentionally be deceiving others; we cannot test their professions any more than we can test the oft-protested purity of Pamela's motives; but we have a right to be suspicious, and a duty both to warn those who are duped and to expose those who sham.

II

These dual intentions give Shamela its basic narrative strategy. Fielding very ingeniously outdid Richardson in his pretense that he was only the editor of authentic letters: for he provided two independent sets of correspondence. We begin with a discussion between two clergymen about Pamela; then, once the framework of moral and literary criticism has been built up, Oliver discovers the real letters which prove his view of the case; and when these have been given, the two parallel actions—the disabusing of Tickletext and the unmasking of Shamela—are brought together in the final letter where Tickletext acknowledges that he had grievously misunderstood the whole matter, before telling us in his last postscript that justice has at last overtaken Shamela and her paramour.

Fielding's retelling of the Pamela story for his own purposes keeps very close to the original incidents; but gives them a contrary psychological explanation. Shamela feigns virtue only because Booby's inexperience makes her see that instead of “making a little Fortune by my Person” she can easily make “a great one by my Vartue.” What changes Fielding makes are not without warrant in the original: Mr. B., for example, had noted Pamela's “lucky Knack of falling into Fits when she pleases”—it was easy enough to show that it was not luck but cunning; and even Shamela's intrigue with Parson Williams is licensed by Mr. B.'s suggestion that his interest had been amorous rather than pastoral.

This aspect of Shamela is obvious enough to any reader of Pamela, and has often been analyzed. But some other elements of the satire have perhaps met with less notice. Fielding parodies Richardson's manner as cruelly as his moral. He is particularly successful in hitting off the incongruity between Pamela's pretensions to literate gentility and the rusticity, not to say boorishness, of much of the dialogue: some of the badinage between Pamela and her “Angel” is not far removed from such a report on her master's courtship as the following from Shamela: “Says he … Hussy, Gipsie, Hypocrite, Saucebox, Boldface, get out of my Sight, get out of my Sight, or I will lend you such a Kick in the—I don't care to repeat the Word, but he meant my hinder part.” The juxtaposition of exalted sentiments and inconsequential domestic details, which was a characteristic Richardsonian innovation in making the narrative seem real, is also very nicely taken off by Fielding: “And so we talked of honourable Designs till Supper-time. And Mrs. Jewkes and I supped upon a hot buttered Apple-pie.” Excellent, too, is the hit at Richardson's use of present-tense narration in highly improbable circumstances: “Mrs. Jervis and I are just in Bed, and the Door unlocked; if my Master should come—Odsbobs! I hear him just coming in at the Door. You see I write in the present Tense, as Parson Williams says.”

In general, then, Fielding unerringly selects the most dubious aspects of Pamela, and drives home its crucial moral and psychological ambiguities. The eighteenth century was a great age of burlesque; there is much to be said for the view that the best of Fielding's previous works had been burlesques such as The Tragedy of Tragedies and The GrubStreet Opera; and Shamela may be seen as the happy fruit of Fielding's own long experience in the genre.

But of course Shamela also looks forward. Like Hemingway's Torrents of Spring, it goes far beyond its original intention as parody, and takes on a life of its own. Not only so: Fielding, again like Hemingway, is ridiculing someone from whom he has learned much, more, perhaps, than he knows: for there is substantial truth in Richardson's assertion that “Pamela, which [Fielding] abused in his Shamela, taught him how to write to please. … Before his Joseph Andrews (hints and names taken from that story, with a lewd and ungenerous engraftment) the poor man wrote without being read. …”¹¹

Shamela, of course, is not a faultless performance. Some of the details show signs of its hasty composition—there is some confusion, for example, about the extent of Mrs. Jewkes's complicity in Shamela's designs. It may also be questioned whether Shamela's very conscious hypocrisy about sexual matters is in harmony with the apparently unconscious nature of her religious hypocrisy; and there is perhaps an analogous contradiction between Tickletext's main role as a foolish dupe, and his conscious and unashamed revelation to Oliver of the aphrodisiacal effects of reading Pamela. At other times Fielding's love of the facetious tends to interfere with his main intention; and it is difficult to reconcile his many scabrous innuendoes with the serious didactic purpose he puts into the mouth of Parson Oliver.

Shamela, then, has many diverse elements: in matter, both coffee-house polemic and timeless satire on human folly; in manner, both precise stylistic parody and uproarious burlesque. This diversity naturally puzzles the literary historian, who is called on to place a work that is both a footnote to the Dunciad and a prologue to Tom Jones; while the critic, recognizing much of the brilliant invention, the lively narrative pace, the human insight, and the fortifying gusto found in Fielding's novels, may well have difficulty in determining how successfully the varied aims and methods of Shamela have been combined. There is a further difficulty: the ultimate criteria by which so bawdy a work can properly be judged have not, to my knowledge, been satisfactorily established. Grave moral reservations are doubtless mandatory. But perhaps I should leave them to my betters, and end instead by revealing that, if perfect honesty in these matters were to be made possible by some guarantee of academic immunity, I could find one reader of Shamela at least willing to testify that—to use a metaphor dear to Fielding—this salty hors d'oeuvre is more to his taste than some of the more imposing dishes on the Pierian buffet.

Notes

1. Whose excellent article, “The Authorship of Shamela,” PQ, XXV (1946), 248-272, gives full references to previous work on the subject.

2. With one exception: the catalogue of books and copyrights offered at the bankruptcy sale of the bookseller Francis Cogan, July 10th, 1746, shows that his half interest in “Shamela, by Fielding” was sold to Andrew Millar (Alan D. McKillop, Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1936], p. 74).

3. Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, IV, 286; probably written late in 1749.

4. Bk. III, chap. vi.

5. McKillop, op. cit., p. 73.

6. Richard H. Barker, Mr. Cibber of Drury Lane (“Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature,” No. 143 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1939]), p. 194; Conyers Middleton, Miscellaneous Works, 1755, I, 397.

7. On p. 3, l. 21, “innocent story” is changed into “& c”; cf. Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene I, line 38. The “dear Monysyllable” toasted on p. 30, l. 29, is glossed in Eric Partridge, Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. [References are to the text of Mr. Watt's edition, which is a facsimile of the second edition of November 3, 1741. Ed.]

8. The passages, which were actually written by Aaron Hill, can conveniently be compared in the Augustan Society's valuable reprint of the Introduction to Pamela (ed. Sheridan W. Baker, Jr., No. 48, 1954).

9. See Sheridan W. Baker, Jr.'s Introduction to his edition of Shamela (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953), pp. xv-xx.

10. Joseph Andrews, Bk. I, chap. xvii.

11. See note 3.

“Shamela.” Introduction to Ian Watt's edition of An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, “Augustan Reprint Society,” No. 57 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1956), pp. 1-11. Reprinted by permission of the author and publisher; and slightly revised by the author.