[In the following excerpt, Battestin examines the political, social, and cultural context for Fielding's composition and the public reception of Shamela.]

For many reasons, then—personal, financial, political—these months were a distressing time for Fielding. In this same year of 1741 we also first hear of the chronic ill health that plagued him for the rest of his life, undermining a robust constitution. That he managed to rise above this sea of troubles to produce Shamela attests not only to an irrepressible sense of humor, but also to that “philosophical” temper, as he called it, which would see him through deeper afflictions. From our vantage point two and a half centuries later, moreover, this little book marked a turning point in the development of the modern novel: for as Fielding's initial response to Richardson's Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, it prepared the way for Joseph Andrews and that rival tradition of comic fiction evolving through Smollett to Thackeray and Dickens.

The story of a vulnerable but wonderfully resolute young servant maid who withstands her master's numerous inept attempts on her chastity till she brings him at last to his knees at the altar, Pamela was a phenomenal success from the moment it appeared on 6 November 1740. There had never been a literary event to compare with the enthusiastic reception of this romance, told by the beleaguered heroine herself in letters and in vivid particularity. Five authoritative editions (as well as an Irish piracy) were called for in less than a year. What is more, provoked by spurious sequels, the anonymous “editor” of Pamela's letters—who finally revealed himself to the public as the printer Samuel Richardson—reluctantly published his own continuation in December 1741.

In town, according to a notice in the Gentleman's Magazine of January 1740/1, it was “judged … as great a Sign of Want of Curiosity not to have read Pamela, as not to have seen the French and Italian dancers,” while in the country (so the charming story goes) the illiterate villagers of Slough gathered at the smithy to hear it read aloud and celebrated Pamela's marriage by ringing the church bells. That same winter Horace Walpole observed that, like the snow, Pamela covered everything with her whiteness; and no less sophisticated a critic than Alexander Pope was reported to have said that the novel would do more good than many volumes of sermons. Indeed, despite its “inflammatory” scenes of attempted seduction and rape, Richardson's romance was lauded as a moral work and recommended by the clergy from their pulpits—most notably by the Reverend Benjamin Slocock of St. Saviour's, Southwark. Scenes and characters from the novel were represented on fans and in waxwork, and were depicted in a series of a dozen paintings by Joseph Highmore. The story inspired several comedies and an opera. Eulogies, imitations, spurious continuations, piracies, translations—Pamela was paid every kind of tribute.¹ Most remarkable of all is the fact that, more than two centuries later, women who have never read the novel or heard of its heroine continue to name their daughters after her; for, though Richardson found the name in Sidney's Arcadia, it was so thoroughly unfamiliar to his readers that no one knew how to speak it. It was, as the peddler observes in Joseph Andrews (IV.xii), “a very strange Name, Paměla or Pamēla; some pronounced it one way, and some the other.”

Pamela caught the public fancy as no mere romance had ever done. To some readers, however—Fielding in every respect first among them—the book was an egregious performance. The writing was inept, the morality crass and mercenary, the piety it recommended not only a mask for hypocrisy but pernicious in emphasizing the doctrine of grace. In receiving Pamela so cordially, the nation seemed besotted; some strong antidote was required for what Fielding saw as “an epidemical Phrenzy now raging in Town” over the book. That antidote he provided in Shamela, an uproarious parody of Richardson's novel and one of the best of its kind in the language.

But the frenzy over Pamela was only the most recent and salient symptom of what Fielding regarded as a general social disorder manifest in virtually every area of public life, whether in letters or in politics or in religion. Consider, for example, the popularity of Cibber's Apology for his life and of Conyers Middleton's Life of Cicero, the latter published in February 1740/1 and delivered to more than 1,800 subscribers; consider the apparently unshakable supremacy of the Prime Minister, Walpole the Corrupter; consider the disturbing spread of Methodism, the new sect, sparked by the stern Calvinist Whitefield, who in March returned from South Carolina to resume preaching and proselytizing in the fields near London; consider as well that smug defender of the established Church, Joseph Trapp, who in a series of sermons accused the upstart Whitefield of being “righteous over-much.”

All these targets are hit in the pamphlet published on 2 April 1741 at a shilling and sixpence by the bookseller Ann Dodd. The full title gave readers a foretaste of the rich variety of the tiny feast awaiting them within:

An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. In which, the many notorious Falshoods 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 that which 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.

The double joke of the “author's” name (for this early only Richardson's closest acquaintance knew he had written Pamela) would have been caught by any knowledgeable reader. On the one hand we are meant to think first of Colley Cibber, whose Apology for his life inspired Fielding's title and whose family name in Dutch was “Keiber,” as he himself acknowledged and as his adversaries, including Fielding in The Author's Farce (I.iv), often reminded him. But when we find the author dedicating the work “To Miss Fanny,” the name Pope had given the effeminate courtier John, Lord Hervy, a second prominent target comes into focus. For “Conny” points to the Cambridge divine, Conyers Middleton, who dedicated his Life of Cicero to Hervey in the most fulsome language—language Fielding here travestied to perfection.

Though he never acknowledged Shamela as his own, Fielding was certainly the author of this impudent little masterpiece.² It seems just as certain that when he wrote it, he had no notion at all who the author was who had perpetrated Pamela. The book itself and what it represented of the spirit of the times were his game. He dashed off his burlesque in a matter of days, sometime after Pamela appeared in a third edition of 12 March.³ He had all the motive and leisure he needed to complete the work with dispatch, this being the period when he was confined in a sponging house trying to raise bail to satisfy his creditor—a situation lamented by Parson Williams in the narrative, who finds himself in the same predicament (pp. 37-8).

For the most part Shamela is a faithful burlesque of the epistolary form and ardent didacticism of Richardson's romance. In half a hundred pages Fielding distills the essence of Pamela, a tale at once so pious and so prurient—so seeming real. Even Richardson's trick of “writing to the moment” is scrupulously rendered:

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. 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 wake.

(p. 15)

Here too is that hallmark of formal realism, of which Richardson and Defoe were the earliest masters, the circumstantial enumeration of trivial particulars:

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 Atalantis. 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.

(pp. 36-7)

As for Richardson's moral—namely, that his heroine's virginity is a commodity readily convertible into hard cash and social rank—how succinctly Shamela sums it up: “I thought once of making a little Fortune by my Person. I now intend to make a great one by my Vartue” (p. 33).

Fielding considered Pamela bad as art and pernicious in its affected religiosity and leveling social doctrine. His point was taken by the author of a poem addressed to him in the London Magazine for June 1741:

Admir'd Pamela, till Shamela shown,
Appear'd in every colour—but her own:
Uncensur'd she remain'd in borrow'd light,
No nun more chaste, few angels shone so bright.
But now, the idol we no more adore,
Jervice a bawd, and our chaste nymph a w———
Each buxom lass may read poor Booby's case,
And charm a Williams to supply his place;
Our thoughtless sons for round-ear'd caps may burn,
And curse Pamela, when they've serv'd a turn.(4)

Though Fielding for the most part thus contented himself with impishly showing Pamela in her own colors, revealed in the funhouse mirror of parody, he departed radically from his original in one respect important to an understanding of his motives as a comic author: he used the occasion of this bawdy burlesque to continue the theme of his series “An Apology for the Clergy,” published in The Champion a year earlier. Most notable of his improvisations in this vein is the framing of Shamela's story by an exchange of letters between the fatuous Parson Tickletext and his wiser friend the Reverend “J. Oliver,” Fielding's spokesman. (It was the Reverend John Oliver, we recall, who taught Fielding Latin when he was a boy at East Stour and who continued to serve as curate of the neighboring parish of St. Mary's, Motcombe.) Shamela and her mother, moreover, are represented as avid readers of Whitefield's sermons and his confessional autobiography, “that charming Book about the Dealings” (p. 13). At best a contradiction still, Shamela is also charmed by the doctrines of Whitefield's adversary, Joseph Trapp, as they are conveyed to her by her lover Parson Williams—though, as she assures her Mamma, Williams's theology is “not the most charming thing belonging to him”:

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.

(p. 24)

Enemies though they were, the Methodist Whitefield and the High Churchman Trapp (or rather Fielding's caricature of him in the figure of Williams) thus concur in what Tickletext calls “the useful and truly religious Doctrine of Grace” which he rejoices to find “every where inculcated” in the pages of Richardson's romance (p. 2). As their willing scholar, therefore, Shamela naturally scorns the very different theology of Fielding's distinguished friend, Bishop Hoadly: heading the list of cherished inanities in the catalogue of her little library is one of the many virulent tracts written by High Churchmen against Hoadly's Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper (1735). Even in the mood in which he wrote Shamela—a work as rude and bawdy as any to come from his pen—Fielding's comedy is thus colored by a serious moral intent.

Shamela also throws light on Fielding's political attitude during this period. Though Middleton's Dedication of the Life of Cicero was awful enough in its own right to have prompted Fielding's ridicule, the mockery of Middleton and his book was probably owing in part to his having alluded condescendingly to a work on the same subject by Fielding's patron: Lyttelton's Observations on the Life of Cicero would be issued in a second edition in this same month of April 1741. Politics is not Fielding's principal game in Shamela, but his loyalties remain with Lyttelton and his party. Following hard on the satire of Lord Hervey in the Dedication is this encomium addressed to the “Editor” of Shamela by “John Puff, Esq;” who is certain that the biographer who can do justice to the morals of Richardson's characters is qualified to write the life of Hervey's master, Walpole:

SIR,

I have read your Shamela through and through, and a most inimitable Performance it is. Who is he, what is he that could write so excellent a Book? he must be doubtless most agreeable to the Age, and to his Honour [Walpole] himself; for he is able to draw every thing to Perfection but Virtue. Whoever the Author be, he hath one of the worst and most fashionable Hearts in the World, and I would recommend to him, in his next Performance, to undertake the Life of his Honour. For he who drew the Character of Parson Williams, is equal to the Task; nay he seems to have little more to do than to pull off the Parson's Gown, and that which makes him so agreeable to Shamela, and the Cap will fit.

As the burlesque thus opens by deriding the morals and virility of the Prime Minister and his lieutenant Hervey, so Shamela in her last letter describes the scene on the eve of the election that will determine control of Booby's borough, the corporation having gathered at his home to drink heartily and sell their votes. It comes as no surprise that Parson Williams is very much Walpole's man in the game of “Pollitricks.”

Most readers agreed that Shamela hit all targets with devastating effect. Particularly interesting is the testimony of the son of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, Charles Yorke. Writing on 12 April to his brother Philip in London, he reported the reception the book was enjoying in Cambridge, Middleton's own town:

Shammela & the Dedications to it, the former as a ridicule on Pamela, & the latter on the Dedication to the Life of Cicero, meet with general Applause.—Your Embassador has not as yet seen the Book, and is credibly informed that it is in such universal Request at the Theatre coffee-house, that unless he were to purchase it for himself (which he has by no means any Intention of doing) it will be impossible for him to gain a sight of it these two months.

Just how thoroughly Fielding's travesty had done its work with Yorke and his fellow Cantabrigians of the Water-gruel Club, who met regularly to pronounce on the merits of current best-sellers, is clear as he reports that Pamela was “condemned without mercy”: “No Advocate appeared on it's behalf—The whole Assembly concurred in Determination.”⁵

A huge success among the sophisticates of Cambridge, not to mention such literate judges as Thomas Dampier and Horace Walpole, Shamela obviously enjoyed a favorable reception from readers other than “the Weak and Vicious” sort to whom the hack John Kelly consigned it.⁶ Later in the year (on 3 November) it was issued in a second edition. The work did have the regrettable consequence, however, of earning Fielding the enduring enmity of Richardson, and also, we may suppose, of costing him his friendship with Aaron Hill. For, though Fielding could not have known, it was Hill whose fawning letters of praise, prefixed to the second edition of Pamela, he mischievously burlesqued in Tickletext's opening remarks to Oliver. …

Notes

1. See B. Kreissman, Pamela-Shamela: A Study of the criticisms, burlesques, parodies, and adaptations of Richardson's “Pamela” (n.p., Neb: 1960); T. C. Duncan Eaves and B. D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: 1971), esp. Ch. VII.

2. See C. B. Woods, “Fielding and the Authorship of Shamela,” Philological Quarterly, 25 (1946), 248-72.

3. Parson Tickeltext advises Parson Oliver that copies of Pamela will be available in the country “as soon as the fourth Edition is published” (p. 4). For the date of the third edition, see the Daily Post (12 Mar. 1740/1).

4. “To the Author of Shamela,” London Magazine, 10 (1741), 304.

5. BL: Add. Mss. 35633, ff. 31-2.

6. Introduction to Pamela's Conduct in High Life (1741), pp. xii-xiii, by “B.W.”—attributed to Kelly.

Bibliography

Works by Fielding

1734

The Author's Farce. In which will be introduc'd an Operatical Puppet Show, call'd The Pleasures of the Town. With great Additions, and a new Prologue and Epilogue. First perf. Drury Lane, 15 Jan. 1734 (DJ[Daily Journal]). Publ. by J Watts as “Third Edition” 1750.

1741

An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. In which, the many notorious Falshoods 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 that which 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. Publ. by A. Dodd, 2 Apr. 1741 (DP [Daily Post]). 2nd edn. publ. 3 Nov. 1741 (Ch [The Champion]).

1742

The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his friend Mr. Abraham Adams. Written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote. 2 vols. Publ. by A. Millar, 22 Feb. 1742. 2nd edn., Revised and Corrected with Alterations and Additions by the Author, publ. 10 Jun. 1742. 3rd edn., illustrated with Cuts [by J. Hulett], publ. 21–8 Mar. 1743, the first edition to carry Fielding's name on the title-page. 4th edn., revised and corrected (misdated 1749), publ. 29 Oct. 1748. 5th edn., publ. 19 Dec. 1751.