[In the following excerpt, Uglow offers a general reading of Shamela and notes the reader's collusion with the author in the novel's pretense.]

Shamela was prompted by three books that had made Fielding's blood boil in 1740. The most important was Samuel Richardson's Pamela, in which, through her plangent, urgent letters home, we follow the young servant's brave attempts to foil the assaults on her virtue by her master, Mr B—, (including kidnapping, near-rape, and virtual imprisonment), until the final resolution in a happy marriage and handsome settlement. Fielding thought the novel an example of bad morality and (almost a worse sin) bad writing, and was outraged by its rapturous reception, especially by the clergy.

A second source of irritation was An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian, Written by Himself, published in March 1740. The book's flatulent self-esteem, grammatical scrambling, and misused words (surely a source for Mrs Slipslop's errors in Joseph Andrews), had provoked some of the funniest Champion articles, culminating in Cibber's inglorious trial for ‘Assault on the English Language’. The self-congratulatory tone and bubbling, inconsequential style seep brilliantly into the text of Shamela, which nods openly to Cibber through its coy title and phoney author (Keyber being the original Dutch form of Cibber).

The ‘Conny’ of ‘Conny Keyber’ immediately suggests a hoax (through ‘coney’, a gull or dupe) and a bawdy read (through ‘cunny’). But it also points to a third target, Conyers Middleton, Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge and author of a new life of Cicero. Fielding thought Middleton's book terrible, but what really made him laugh was its obsequious dedication to Lord Hervey, Walpole's Privy Seal. The ‘Dedication’ in Shamela is an open parody, adopting Pope's name for the effeminate Hervey ‘Miss Fanny’, and making each of Middleton's grovelling phrases ridiculous (and usually sexual): Middleton's boast that ‘some Parts of my present Work have been brightened by the Strokes of your Lordship's Pencil’ becomes ‘Madam, I must tell the World that you have tickled up and brightened many Strokes in this Work by your Pencil’, while his admiration at finding Hervey ‘engaged with the Classical writers’ on early morning visits becomes a dawn assignation, ‘when I have constantly found you reading in good Books; and if ever I have drawn you upon me, I have always felt you very heavy’ ([Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Oxford: Oxford University Press (World's Classics), 1980) hereafter cited as [JA/S 317).

Much of this, like Shamela itself, is pure foolery, but the political sting is noticeable. It is amplified in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ (imitating the rapturous letters Richardson inserted in the second edition of Pamela and quoting many of the more ludicrous phrases), when Fielding's ‘John Puff’ suggests that the creator of Parson Williams might move on to a life of ‘his honour’ (Walpole) since there is ‘little more to do than pull off the Parson's Gown … and the Cap will Fit’ (JA/S 319). In the framing of Shamela, politics and letters are thus undermined as purveyors of false standards, while a similar moral blindness within the church is suggested by Parson Tickletext, who hotly recommends Pamela (but cannot help reverting always to the ‘emotion’ he feels, and even dreams of, on thinking of her sexual trials). In reaction, Parson Oliver (named after Fielding's boyhood tutor) is appalled that families can recommend such scenes to their daughters and horrified that the public should be hoodwinked by self-interest masked as virtue. His anger, and Fielding's, prompts these ‘authentic’ letters, exposing Pamela's sham.

The religious, literary, and political allusions made Fielding's burlesque topical and deepened its resonance. Like his plays-within-a-play, Shamela is a book within a book: an exposure of the overall culture of ‘acting’, as well as a wicked parody of writing. The way books are puffed mirrors the way actions and fundamental attitudes are misread. Fielding's strategy in the main text is simple and clever. First, (as in The Covent-Garden Tragedy) he transposes the early action from the country to Drury Lane and turns Richardson's good characters into guilty ones: Shamela from reluctant prey to eager predator, her mother from naïve peasant to knowing bawd, Mrs Jervis from kindly housekeeper to professional procuress. The effect is to introduce us to a world where bodies are openly, rather than covertly, for sale. The use of other correspondents (Shamela's mother, Mrs Jervis, Parson Williams) places Shamela's action in perspective, and also allows Fielding to summarize (and ridicule) the plot. Shamela's own letters can thus concentrate on crises, their style mocking all Richardson's mannerisms. One such mannerism is the apparently naïve spontaneity—and therefore authenticity—of recording events as they occur, the trick of the ‘writing for the moment’:

THURSDAY NIGHT, TWELVE O'CLOCK

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 …

(JA/S 330)

Through such mimicry and compression Fielding catches the underlying tone of Richardson's prose, whether it be the heated immediacy, the prurience of his semi-sadistic seduction scenes, or the bourgeois stress on money, property, and manners.

Mrs. Jewkes went in with me, and helped me to pack up my little All, which was soon done; being no more than two Day-Caps, two Night-Caps, five Shifts, one Sham, a Hoop, a Quilted-Petticoat, two Flannel-Petticoats, two pair of Stockings, one odd one, a pair of lac'd Shoes, a short flowered Apron, a lac'd Neck-Handkerchief, one Clog, and almost another, and some few books: as A full Answer to a plain and true Account & c., The Whole Duty of Man, with only the Duty to one's Neighbour, torn out. The Third Volume of the Atlantis. Venus in the Cloyster: Or, the Nun in her Smock. God's Dealings with Mr. Whitefield. Orfus and Eurydice. Some Sermon-Books; and two or three Plays, with their titles and Part of the first Act torn off.

(JA/S 344).

As Shamela literally crams everything in, Fielding caricatures the way Pamela's piety and fainting timidity never quite overwhelm her avid interest in dress, or her stylistic passion for detail. Fielding descends to joyful spoof (‘one Clog, and almost another’) but he also makes a serious point about the ‘authorities’ which ballast her physical and moral luggage. She mingles her mangled plays and pornography, with popular religious tracts ‘with the Duty to one's Neighbour torn out’, and the works of the Methodist George Whitefield, whose ‘Dealings’ appeared in 1740. Fielding detested Methodist enthusiasm, which set the self-dramatizing individual spirit above the needs of the community (men wept and rolled on the ground in misery at their sins, at Whitefield's huge outdoor meetings). But in his eyes both Whitefield and his complacent Anglican opponent Joseph Trapp were equally guilty, since both emphasized grace over acts, encouraging the cant which Parson Williams preaches, ‘'tis not what we do, but what we believe, that must save us’ (JA/S 336).

By condensing Pamela's leisurely chapters into a few hectic lines, Fielding homes in on the moral ambiguities, which are linked, in his view, to the unconvincing characterization. The compression and accelerated pace show Richardson's vaunted psychological realism to be patently unreal, such as Mr B—'s shifts between abject love and frustrated anger.

How can you say I would ruin you, answered the Squire, when you shall not ask anything which I will not grant you. If that be true, says I, good your Honour let me go Home to my poor but honest Parents; that is all I have to ask, and do not ruin a poor Maiden, who is resolved to carry her Vartue to the Grave with her.

Hussy, says he, don't provoke me, don't provoke me, I say. You are absolutely in my power and if you won't let me lie with you by fair Means, I will by Force. O la, Sir, says I, I don't understand your paw Words.—Very pretty Treatment indeed, says he, to say I use paw Words; Hussy, Gipsie, Hypocrite, Saucebox, Boldface, 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.

(JA/S 339)

As Fielding sweeps together the scattered, angry epithets of Mr B— into ludicrous lists, the welter of reported action and speech does not exactly resemble farce, but something even more absurd, someone describing a play at high speed—rendering Pamela itself as ‘a farce’. But in a scene like this, something else is happening that takes Fielding's short work out of the realm of burlesque. His own blatant enjoyment of his performance is transferred to his central character and she acquires her own fictional authenticity. Her gutsy, breathless energy is endearing, and her delight in machinations is infectious:

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.

(JA/S 330)

As one peels off the onion layers that surround her story, the parodic Shamela ironically comes to seem the most honest character of all, since at least she acknowledges what she is doing. A further joke is the unstated fact that by the actual self-interested, mercantile standards of her day, Shamela is acting in the ‘right’ way and so deserves the marriage she finally wins. She is a good little capitalist, preferring contracts to promises, determined to protect her assets: ‘nothing under a regular taking into Keeping, a settled Settlement, for me, and all my Heirs, all my whole Life-time, shall do the Business—or else cross-legged is the Word, faith, with Sham; and then I snapt my Fingers’ (JA/S 330). But, like Defoe's Moll Flanders, another thoroughgoing, amoral, materialist ‘innocent’, Shamela has a fatal flaw, her weakness for a particular man. In a final postscript, Tickletext, cured of his Pamela fever, tells us tersely that Mr Booby ‘hath caught his Wife in bed with Williams; hath turned her off, and is prosecuting him in the spiritual Court’ (JA/S 357). This, too, is part of her appeal: having gained the heights, she loses all for love. Shamela, of course, has fallen for the biggest hypocrite of all, Parson Williams, the man who seduces through sermons. Her own technique is turned against herself.

Fielding is fond of Shamela: in some respects she is the innocent, the gull. The blame, he implies, lies less with her than with those who claim to ‘guide’ her, her mother and men like Williams. It is they (and writers like Richardson) who teach her the values she holds and the language which disguises them. Her blunt assertion, ‘I once thought of making a little Fortune by my Person. I now intend to make a great one by my Vartue’ (JA/S 342), looks like the core of the piece, but a harsher model is suggested by the constant repetition and play with the word ‘Vartue’ and by Shamela's silent thought, ‘O what a charming word that is, rest his Soul who first invented it’ (JA/S 339).

Richardson's Pamela is a dangerous model, in Fielding's view, not because she is a maid skilfully angling for her master, but because she and the reader do not see that that is what she is, since the narrow physical meaning put on ‘virtue’ has been so thoroughly internalized. Pamela's very ‘innocence’ is her most pernicious attribute, and the danger is increased because the way the book is written—the letters, the immediacy, the detail, the seething urgency of tone—sucks the reader into the heroine's mentality.

Fielding thus suggests that the simulated morality is matched by a simulated realism. The whole edifice depends on the reader's collusion: the authenticity of the novel is essentially phoney since the familiar conventions of romance ensure the tale will end in marriage. We can indulge in Pamela's trials without real alarm—as voyeurs rather than sympathizers. Those who praise the book's morality are hypocritical as readers, wilfully blind to literary context, surrendering to the artifice of surface. By mimicking Richardson's technique, Fielding strikes at the ‘truthfulness’ of his method of representation. Parson Oliver does not only unmask the ‘true name of this Wench’, but unmasks the fraud of the epistolary form itself, offering his creator's wonderfully wild parodic version, ‘in the following Letters, which I assure you are authentick’ (JA/S 325). This insight into the moral coercion of form underlies Fielding's next move—the creation of a new moral genre of his own to tackle the problem of ‘false-seeming’.