SOURCE: Johnson, Maurice. “The Art of Parody: Shamela.” In Fielding's Art of Fiction: Eleven Essays on Shamela, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia, pp. 19-45. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961.

[In the following essay, Johnson considers Shamela, besides being pure, humorous fun, to be a prelude to Fielding's more serious, realistic works.]

The Pamela, which he abused in his Shamela, taught him how to write to please, tho' his manners are so different.

—Samuel Richardson.¹

Few parodies can withstand more than one rereading. But the energetic fun that went into the composition of An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741) keeps it fresh even after it has become familiar. Fun, though it may be abusive or finally at the expense of the reader himself, is the distinguishing characteristic of successful parody. Laughter, the reader's first reaction, issues from recognition and is succeeded by appreciation for the parodist's aptness, wit, and daring. In the few great parodies this entertainment is not diminished by a general criticism of literature and life—upon which the greatness, as distinguished from mere “hitting it off,” largely depends. One of the important parodies of prose fiction in English, Shamela amusingly and tellingly distorts its models in minute details; but the reader does not have to be aware of those details, or even to have read Richardson's Pamela, its foremost model, to share much of the sport and to recognize most of the oblique truths in Shamela.

Triumph of parody is never more laughingly evident, or more critically efficacious, than when it contrives on a single page not only to isolate and magnify the absurdities of a work at hand, and to demonstrate weakness of the literary kind represented by that work, but also contrives to show the incongruities between fictional characters as they are drawn by literary convention and as they would appear in terms of life, perhaps going further to hint at discrepancies between the codes and conventions by which we pretend to live and the antics we perform as human animals.

In The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1730, altered in 1731), Fielding had parodied the absurdities of heroic and quasi-heroic plays. It remains the best line-for-line take-off in English drama, “replete,” as Fielding's first biographer said of it, “with as fine parody as perhaps, has ever been written.”² But Tom Thumb, meticulously specific though it is in quarrying from more than forty tragedies identified by Fielding in burlesque footnotes, maintains its strength of fascination because it has a good deal to say about all pretentiousness and inanity, not necessarily dramatic. The parodied Preface and footnotes invite one to see how the pretentious and inane look under the heading of literary scholarship. They look, of course, familiar. If the “tragic” text of Tom Thumb seems familiar, with its theme of Love-and-Honour, its blazing hero, its inflammable heroine, its violence and bombast, these conventionally familiar elements are at once jerked into grotesque distortion; for the hero is a manikin, the heroine bears the preposterous name of Huncamunca, the hero is eaten (offstage) by a red cow, and at the end everyone kills everyone else, leaving the King to commit suicide: “Ha! murderess vile, take that. (Kills Mustacha.) And take thou this. (Kills himself and falls.)” Rhetoric murders rhetoric itself.

Part of the fun of reading Tom Thumb is in observing the act of parody in process: through quotations cited in his footnotes it is easy to trace Fielding's method. Sometimes phrases are drawn intact into the text; ambiguous phrasing is pushed in the direction of the absurd or indecent; proportions and emphases are wickedly altered, perhaps by addition of a single contaminating word; exalted flights of rhetoric are juxtaposed with “low” phrasing. Thus, Nathaniel Lee's pretentious conceit “Dost thou not view joy peeping from my eyes, / The casements open'd wide to gaze on thee?” is altered to “your eyes, / That like the open windows us'd to shew / The lovely beauty of the rooms within, / Have now two blinds before them.” Lee's casements are logically extended to provide a view, and then particularized by window-coverings, only surrealistically now retaining the aptness of the “eye” metaphor. The sound is almost authentic; the sense, with only the slightest tampering, has turned mad.

Similarly, parody-in-process is observable in some of Fielding's essays in the Champion which criticize infelicities in the Poet Laureate's autobiography, just published. In the Champion for Tuesday, 29 April 1740, Fielding ironically identifies the Laureate as “one of the Greatest Writers of our own Age: I mean Mr. Colley Cibber, who, in the Apology for his Life, tells us, that we have frequently Great Writers that cannot read.” Pretending to illustrate how Cibber himself can neither read nor write, Fielding quotes verbatim examples of awkward grammar and vocabulary, following these with some of Cibber's attempts at sublimity of style, displayed as though in a gallery of bad art. Three months later many of these objectionable quotations reappeared, this time in the book-length parody called An Apology for the Life of Mr. T[heophilus] C[ibber], in which Fielding's influence or hand shows up. The method of this leg-pull, purporting to be the work of the Laureate's son, is chiefly that of direct quotation, often unaltered, to suggest that Cibber had unwittingly devised his own parody. Cibber's language is adopted or mimicked until the parodist is ready, with some little alteration, to render it not only laughable but lunatic, appropriate to the man who was to become immortal in the role of the hero of The Dunciad. Cibber had written that “Beauty, like the Sun, must sometimes lose its Power to chuse, and shine into equal Warmth, the Peasant and the Courtier” (Apology, p. 42). Fielding, in the Champion, objects that “When in page 42. we read, Beauty SHINES INTO equal Warmth the Peasant and the Courtier, do we not know what he means though he hath made a Verb active of SHINE.” In the parody it becomes “Beauty, like the Sun, shines into equal Warmth, the Peasant and the Courtier” (p. 29). Through omission of the phrase between the words “Sun” and “shine” as Cibber had it, confusion is intentionally added to strain further the conceit and wayward grammar. Again, Cibber had written that “Mrs. Oldfield having thrown out such new Proffers of a Genius, I was no longer at a loss for Support” (p. 176). Objecting to “Proffers” as a noun, Fielding cites this in the Champion merely as “Mrs. Oldfield threw out such new Proffers of a Genius.” But the reference becomes arrogantly personal as well as ungrammatical in the parody: “nor did I fling out the Proffer of any great Genius” (p. 65).

Like the heroic dramas burlesqued in Tom Thumb, Colley Cibber's Apology at its worst, in its most unleashed rhetoric, anticipates the parodist's art; and to some extent this is true of Samuel Richardson's epistolary Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (November, 1740). When the servant girl Pamela, by patiently twisting or fainting away from her employer's amorous advances, has been breath-takingly elevated to the state of marriage, she writes how, “the Ceremony of the Ring passing next, I receiv'd the dear Favour, at his worthy Hands, with a most grateful Heart; and he was pleased to say afterwards in the Chariot, That when he had done saying, With this Ring I thee wed, & c. I made a Court'sy, and said, Thank you, Sir. May-be I did; for I am sure it was a most grateful Part of the Service” (II, p. 144).³ Even the most entranced readers of Pamela's letters, even the clergymen who preached sermons on their moral charms, must have felt the burlesque of that passage, which would be hard to improve upon as an example of self-conscious, simpering humility at the moment of achieving a calculated social, monetary, and sexual triumph.

But surely much of the genuine astonishment that accompanies a sympathetic reading of Pamela today derives from Richardson's adroit anticipation of almost every objection that might be made, thematic, technical, or psychological. The practical impossibility of such voracious letter- and journal-writing, much of it “to the Moment,” is almost immediately remarked upon by Mr. B., the vexedly prurient employer, who is intrigued and a little alarmed at such indefatigable penmanship; and when Pamela herself writes that “it will be said, I blab every thing” (Letter xvi), she has exactly framed the opinion, not only of Mr. B., but of the reader and—to give him credit—Samuel Richardson. Because Pamela's idea of virtue seems limited, almost exclusively in important matters, to the immuring of chastity against violation before marriage, there is naturally much concern with sex in her letters. With Mr. B. on her mind, she dreams that she is pursued by a bull, and even the milk-cow seems a bull to her, exciting her to a state of terror. Her account of poor, frustrated Mr. B.'s attempt at rape is oddly ambiguous: “I found his Hand in my Bosom, and when my Fright let me know it, I was ready to die; and I sighed, and screamed, and fainted away. And still he had his Arms about my Neck” (Letter xxv). Though ostensibly intended for the edification of her old parents, her detailed description is a source of pleasure to herself, Richardson, and the reader; but how, one's curiosity is tickled to know, was she aware of Mr. B.'s arms when she had fainted? Such ambiguities lead Mr. B., after only a few pages, to announce that, while he finds her lovely, “I take her to be an artful young Baggage” (Letter xiv); and later, “See, said he, and took the Glass with one Hand, and turn'd me round with the other, What a Shape! what a Neck! what a Hand! and what a Bloom in that lovely Face!—But who can describe the Tricks and Artifices, that lie lurking in her little, plotting, guileful Heart! 'Tis no Wonder the poor Parson was infatuated with her!” (I, pp. 252-253). In the latter speech Richardson shrewdly anticipates, through Mr. B., any reader's suspicion that Pamela Andrews is too good to be true. In that speech, supposedly scribbled down in haste by Pamela herself, Richardson allows her to tot up her own physical attractions at the risk of sounding vain in excess; and he allows the reader to speculate, by means of the strong word “infatuated,” on the true nature of Parson Williams, who proposed marriage to Pamela and of whom Mr. B. is somewhat jealous. It is this little parson whom Fielding ruthlessly alters into Pamela's paramour, father of her child out of wedlock, and cuckolder of Mr. B[ooby].

For although Fielding's method of parody in the Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews is to make fun of Pamela by debasement, it generally operates by leaping upon incongruities of characterization and plot already pointed out, in one way or another throughout the letters, by Richardson himself. Because the main business of the two full volumes of Pamela is represented in fewer than fifty pages in Shamela, the shock to the reader is set off, not only by funny, distorted exaggeration, but by sheer concentration of Richardson's story. In Shamela's initial letter, for instance, Fielding hastens the action and pulls together material that extended as far as Letter xxxi in Pamela.

LETTER I

SHAMELA ANDREWS to Mrs. HENRIETTA MARIA HONORA ANDREWS at her Lodgings at the Fan and Pepper-Box in Drury-Lane.

Dear Mamma,

This comes to acquaint you, that I shall set out in the Waggon on Monday, desiring you to commodate me with a Ludgin, as near you as possible, in Coulstin's-Court, or Wild-Street, or somewhere thereabouts; pray let it be handsome, and not above two Stories high: For Parson Williams hath promised to visit me when he comes to Town, and I have got a good many fine Cloaths of the Old Put my Mistress's, who died a wil ago; and I beleve Mrs. Jervis will come along with me, for she says she would like to keep a House somewhere about Short's-Gardens, or towards Queen-Street; and if there was convenience for a Bannio, she should like it the better; but that she will settle herself when she comes to Town.—O! How I long to be in the Balconey at the Old House—so no more at present from

Your affectionate Daughter,

SHAMELA.

Unlike Richardson's heroine, who wrote accurately and sometimes with professional slickness, this girl misspells as any lady's maid in her nonage would be expected to; but otherwise her letters show her to be an unexpected, vulgar horror—though a most amusing horror. Richardson's model heroine began her initial letter in similar fashion (“I have great Trouble, and some Comfort, to acquaint you with”); but it was not until her thirty-first letter that she got around to the source for the rest of Shamela's first sentence (“I will set out To-morrow early; and the Honour you design'd me, as Mrs. Jervis tells me, of your Chariot, there will be no Occasion for; because I can hire, I believe, Farmer Brady's Chaise”). The same letter in Pamela mentioned the name of the parson (“if it were but to ask his Advice about Mr. Williams”). Then to find the source for Shamela's reference to her dead mistress' “fine Cloaths,” one must turn back to Letter vi in Pamela, where there is an account of “my late Lady's Cloaths,” of “fine Silk, and too rich and too good for me, to be sure.” Mrs. Jervis's hankering, in Fielding's parody, to “keep a House” or bagnio stems from the perfectly respectable wish of the original Mrs. Jervis, in Letter xii of Pamela, “to live independent; then she would take a little private House, and I should live with her like her Daughter.” And in Letter xii, too, when Pamela exclaimed, “O that I had never left my little Bed in the Loft … !” she set the pattern, though not the (im)moral tone for Shamela's “O! How I long to be in the Balconey at the Old House.”

That is the first of Shamela's epistolary exclamations, most of them coarse, bored, and impatient, such as “O! What precious Fools Men are!” and “O what a silly Fellow is a bashful young Lover!” Similarly exclamatory were Pamela's outcries in her letters, characterized however by self-pitying but patient piety, like “O why are poor foolish Maidens try'd with such Dangers, when they have such weak Minds to grapple with them!” and (rather wordily censorious) “O the unparallel'd Wickedness, Stratagems, and Devices of those who call themselves Gentlemen, yet pervent the Design of Providence, in giving them ample Means to do Good, to their everlasting Perdition, and the Ruin of poor oppressed Innocence!” By inversion of these sentiments, Fielding provokes in the reader an amused impatience with Pamela's “O the unparallel'd Wickedness,” which seems to contribute as little to an intelligent conduct of life as do the brash opinions of Shamela.

LETTERS II-V

Letter ii in Shamela returns to Richardson's first letter for its account of how the young employer “took me by the Hand, and I pretended to be shy” (in Pamela he “took my by the Hand; yes, he took my Hand before them all”); but for the kisses that immediately follow, Fielding has drawn on a later episode. Shamela's vexation at interruption of the love-play is, of course, Fielding's own contribution. And the brief Letters iii and v, from Shamela's mother, as well as Shamela's equally brief Letter iv, are mostly Fielding's invention to move his story along, though there are possibly some unimportant echoed phrases, such as “I read in good Books” (Letter iv), reminiscent of “all she loves to hear read is good Books” in Letter v of Pamela.

LETTER VI

Letter vi, set down in three installments in Shamela, clearly shows Fielding's critical method of selection and alteration. One source of psychological convincingness in Pamela was Richardson's occasional curdling of poor Mr. B.'s ill-received amatory overtures into tantrums of name-calling directed at the object of his love. Here Shamela reports to her mother how Mr. Booby

caught me in his Arms, and kissed me till he made my Face all over Fire. Now this served purely you know, to put upon the Fool for Anger. O! What precious Fools Men are! And so I flung from him in a mighty Rage, and pretended as how I would go out at the Door; but when I came to the End of the Room, I stood still, and my Master cryed out, Hussy, Slut, Saucebox, Boldface, come hither. …

In her Letter xi Richardson's Pamela had told how Mr. B. kissed her “two or three times, with frightful Eagerness” and exasperatedly called her a “foolish Hussy” and a “foolish Slut.” Later, in Letter xv, Pamela was called “Saucebox” and “Boldface”; and Mr. B. “offer'd to take me on his Knee, with some Force,” “by Force kissed my Neck and Lips,” and “then put his Hand into my Bosom,” after which, according to Pamela, her indignation gave her strength to wrench “free from him by a sudden Spring” and she ran from the room. The key to the parody here resides in Fielding's words “pretended as how”; for although Shamela makes a calculated show of indignation and does not want to leave the room, Pamela did run from it in spite of her desire for Mr. B.—in marriage. This passage in Shamela continues with the girl's impertinent reply to Mr. Booby:

Yes to be sure, says I; why don't you come, says he; what should I come for says I; if you don't come to me, I'll come to you, says he; I shan't come to you I assure you, says I. Upon which he run up, caught me in his Arms, and flung me upon a Chair, and began to offer to touch my Under-Petticoat. Sir, says I, you had better not offer to be rude; well, says he, no more I won't then; and away he went out of the Room. I was so mad to be sure I could have cry'd. … Mrs. Jervis who had been without, harkening, now came to me. She burst into a violent Laugh the Moment she came in.

“Began to offer to touch my Under-Petticoat,” altered from “offer'd to take me on his Knee,” represents in detail Shamela's satisfaction, up to that point, with Mr. Booby's progress in wooing. But her pretense of outraged innocence, taken seriously by Mr. Booby, results in disappointment for her. The original Mrs. Jervis, far from being moved to laughter by this episode, “could not speak for crying” (Letter xv).

Shamela's second installment of Letter vi, in imitation of some of Pamela's journal-letters, is headed “Thursday Night, Twelve o'Clock” and opens with a deserved burlesque of the epistolary style which fuses action with the written report of that action. In this matter, too, Richardson anticipated parody, for it would be hard to write any more directly “to the Moment” than in Pamela's accounts of hearing footsteps behind her as she moves her pen across the paper to describe them. Shamela, somehow managing pen and paper, rapidly writes:

Mrs. Jervis and I are just in Bed, and the Door unlocked; if my Master should come—Odsbobs! I hear him just coming 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.

Recognizing her cue, after having planned the entire scene with Mrs. Jervis, Shamela screams, scratches, and counterfeits a swoon. Mrs. Jervis cries out that the girl has been murdered. Frightened, Mr. Booby abandons his attack and, when Shamela finally pretends to recover her senses, begs her forgiveness, saying that “by Heaven, I know not whether you are a Man or a Woman, unless by your swelling Breasts.” But before he leaves, he has again been reduced to name-calling. Most of this, except the open pretense—Shamela's shamming—derives from Letter xxv in Pamela, where Mr. B., driven desperate, made an attack on the girl in the bed she shared with Mrs. Jervis. But it was in this scene that Pamela, who supposedly scorned pretense, after telling how she “found his Hand in my Bosom” and then “screamed, and fainted away,” went on to say that “still he had his Arms about my Neck.” Fielding has had only to confirm the pretense, and depict sham as a policy and way of life, to reduce Richardson's episode from virtuousness to vulgarity. In the original, when Mrs. Jervis shrieked that “my poor Pamela is dead for certain!” her utterance came from anxiety, not from rehearsals. For Mr. Booby's vow that he had not ventured beyond Shamela's “swelling Breasts,” Fielding reaches ahead in Pamela to another episode where Mr. B. vowed that “I know not, I declare (beyond this lovely Bosom), your Sex” (I, p. 282).

Headed “Friday Morning,” the third section of Letter vi tells how Mrs. Jervis and Shamela are instructed to quit Mr. Booby's employ: the “morning after” has brought him to a state of impatience with both female servants. But Shamela, her head full of plans, insists to Mrs. Jervis that “I'll warrant we are not so near being turned away, as you imagine.” In Richardson's Pamela, on the night of the attack, Mr. B. had threatened Mrs. Jervis with violence and wanted “to turn her out of the House the next Morning” (Letter xxv); the next day, when Mrs. Jervis begged to take Pamela with her, Mr. B. told her “the sooner the better.” Referring to Mrs. Jervis's plight, Pamela simply expressed a “hope it may still be made up” (Letter xxvi).

Thus, action in Letter vi of Fielding's semi-obscene parody faithfully, and in detail, parallels an episode in Richardson's novel (which announced on its title page a lofty intention “to cultivate the Principles of VIRTUE and RELIGION in the Minds of the YOUTH of BOTH SEXES”). The vital difference between the novel and the parody here is that Fielding has caused his heroine to state her conniving intentions openly and proudly, letting her crudely announce that she “pretended as how,” is “shamming,” and plans “a Fetch” for Mr. Booby, with no idea of leaving his house without wifely access to his moneybags.

Although Richardson daringly allowed Mr. B. to accuse his heroine of all the shamming that Fielding's heroine embodies and admits to, he preserved to the end Pamela's reputation for undeviating Christian goodness, which she herself more than once remarked upon. The possibility that Pamela was vain, affected, hypocritical, and calculating—truly the “subtle, artful Gipsey” that Mr. B. once called her—hovers persistently but elusively over the pages, suspended there almost invisibly by means of Richardson's considerable art. Pamela seemed to remain decently passive in her “hope” that Mr. B. would not evict Mrs. Jervis; Shamela, indecently active, by plotting with Mrs. Jervis against Mr. Booby, makes their eviction unlikely. And the episode concludes, in both novel and parody, with the heroine signing her epistle as a “Dutiful Daughter.” Duty, in the novel, is to please impoverished old parents by maintaining Virtue until it can be Rewarded; in the parody, Duty is to please a mother, who formerly “sold Oranges in the Play-House,” by securing the Reward by whatever means, even by shamming Virtue.

LETTERS VII-XI

Two episodes from Pamela are altered and joined in Fielding's Letter vii, “Mrs. LUCRETIA JERVIS to HENRIETTA MARIA HONORA ANDREWS.” The account of how Shamela, in neat rural dress, bamboozles Mr. Booby closely imitates Richardson's Letter xxiv. And the account of Mr. Booby's plan to abduct Shamela to his Lincolnshire estate is drawn from interpolated remarks by Richardson in his role as “Editor,” following Letter xxxi in Pamela. In Shamela, the disguise as a farmer's daughter is represented as the conniving “Fetch” (now called her “Stratagem”) alluded to in Letter vi; and the abduction to Lincolnshire is no surprise to her, for Shamela has been informed, and is delighted to return to the scene where she had her child by Parson Williams and where she will renew acquaintance with “our old Friend Nanny Jewkes,” a benign version of the grotesque Mrs. Jewkes who kept Pamela a prisoner.

Just as Pamela industriously copied out letters and documents to swell the bulk of her history, intended for her parents to read, Shamela encloses a letter from Parson Williams in her Letter ix and a transcript of a letter from him, itself transcribing his letter to Mr. Booby, in her Number xii. In her Number x she transcribes a letter from Mr. Booby, who announces that “I cannot live without you,” an echo of Mr. B.'s plea when he represented himself as “one that cannot live without you, and on whose Honour to you, you may absolutely depend” (I, p. 178).

Shamela's reaction to this avowal is to enumerate the advantages of being Mrs. Booby—the estate, coaches, house in London, servants, the jewels that are almost within her grasp. She jeopardizes her future, however, by a rendezvous in the garden with Parson Williams, and to provide an excuse for her absence from the house,

it came into my Head to pretend as how I intended to drown myself; so I stript off one of my Petticoats, and threw it into the Canal; and then I went and hid myself in the Coal-hole, where I lay all Night; and comforted myself with repeating over some Psalms, and other good things, which I had got by heart.

(Letter x)

When Shamela's petticoat is found in the water, the servants bring out a drag-net; but she is discovered amongst the coal and is led into the house for breakfast. This is a variation on a scene in which Richardson's Pamela, stripping off her upper petticoat, neck handkerchief, and cap, flung them into the pond in order to be thought drowned and to divert her pursuers when, with the key in her possession, she planned to unlock the wall door and escape; but discovering that the lock had been changed, Pamela hid, “low and dejected,” in the woodhouse. Before she was discovered there, where the frantic thought of suicide occurred to her, a drag-net was ordered for her search (I, pp. 227-240).

This pretended drowning of the heroine, with motives quite opposed in the novel and in the parody, is followed by still another effort to rape her. In both versions, with Mrs. Jewkes holding one of the heroine's arms, and Mr. B[ooby] “as rude as possible,” there is a struggle on the bed. “What you do, Sir, do; don't stand dilly-dallying,” cried Richardson's Mrs. Jewkes. “Why don't you do it? I have one Arm secure, if you can't deal with the rest I am sorry for you,” cries Fielding's Mrs. Jewkes. (In this instance it seems to me that the model is funnier than the parody.) But whereas Pamela conveniently fainted away, Shamela discourages poor Mr. Booby by following her mother's instructions, forcefully grasping his privates with her free hand: “O Parson Williams, how little are all the Men in the World compared to thee.” In both versions, too, there is a proposal from Mr. B[ooby] to settle money and other advantages on the heroine if she becomes his mistress; for both the heroines, Shamela replies a little vulgarly by saying that “I value my Vartue more than all the World, and I had rather be the poorest Man's Wife than the richest Man's Whore.” She pushes further, however, to state explicitly what a Pamela could never trust to paper: “I thought once of making a little Fortune by my Person. I now intend to make a great one by my Vartue.”

LETTER XII

The remaining eighteen pages of Shamela's correspondence, though written at different times, are under the heading of “Letter xii,” just as the last four-fifths of Pamela, after Letter xxxi, assumed the form of a journal. During a walk in the garden Mr. Booby takes Shamela's hand, remarks on his jealousy of Parson Williams, and asks her to “suppose I should lay aside all Considerations of Fortune, and disregard the Censure of the World, and marry you.” Surprisingly, Shamela demurs. In the original of this scene, Mr. B. took Pamela's hand in the garden, expressed a jealousy which made him “hate the Name of Williams,” and achieved anti-climax by protesting, still unwilling to bestow the Reward upon lowly Virtue, “But my dear Girl, what must we do about the World, and the World's Censure?—Indeed, I cannot marry!” (I, p. 300).

One more scene precedes Shamela's marriage. Preparing to return to her mother, though suspecting that Mr. Booby will send after her (as he finally does), and prepared to “brazen it out,” as she says, Shamela flings herself into the chariot, and is driven off. Pamela had also ridden away from Mr. B. in a chariot. Before either girl travels very far, a man on horseback comes at “full Speed” with a letter, Shamela's being from Parson Williams, who has been arrested (like the original Williams), and Pamela's being a conciliatory plea from Mr. B.

On the wedding night, Shamela simulates bashful virginity, even shamming a blush “by holding my Breath, and squeezing my Cheeks,” to achieve something like Pamela's description of how she trembled and her “Colour went and came.” Both husbands, though eager, allot their brides time alone in their closets before going to bed, Shamela utilizing her quarter of an hour to write to Parson Williams, and Pamela writing out her more generous half hour in a letter to her parents. Their marriages now consummated, both brides are rewarded by the pay-off. On the next day Pamela received fifty guineas for her parents' debts and a hundred more for the servants; when she begged to give a guinea to “a poor Body in the Town,” Mr. B. magnanimously replied, “Send Two, my Dear, if you please” (II, p. 172). Shamela immediately distributes her hundred guineas among the servants and asks for another hundred, fifty of which she sends to Parson Williams; on the next day she wants a third hundred guineas but, to get it, has to throw a fit.

“I forgot to mention, that Mr. Williams was here Yesterday,” Pamela remarked, perhaps too casually, in the midst of her epistolary report on her first bridal days. After the wedding Parson Williams, who had served as a kind of half-hearted foil for Mr. B., withdrew almost entirely from the story. In Shamela's story, however, Parson Williams now dominates over Mr. Booby, sharing the adulterous spoils with his loved one. To dramatize Williams's unpriestly proclivities, Fielding takes hints from an episode that occurred in Pamela before the marriage, when Pamela and Mr. B., out for a drive, encountered Parson Williams walking in the meadow and invited him into the coach with them. At the request of Mr. B., who was evidently trying to prove that he had conquered jealousy, Parson Williams kissed Pamela's hand, sat next to her (“all that ever he could do,” Richardson has her say!), and rode with them to dine “in a most pleasant, and easy, and frank manner” (II, pp. 87-94). Quite differently, the parson when encountered in Shamela is not walking in the meadow but is poaching Mr. Booby's hares; the two men exchange places, actually and symbolically, Booby following on horseback while the parson rides in the coach, kisses the bride, inquires about the wedding night, and discourses on the difference between Flesh and Spirit; at dinner he accepts Mr. Booby's note for fifty pounds and promises to pray for him. This is something like the business of Restoration comedy. And indeed Fielding's Grub-Street Opera (1731), in the Restoration mode, had featured both a Parson Puzzletext, “in love with women, tobacco, drink, and backgammon,” and a young gentleman in pursuit of a serving maid, with a good deal of talk, ironically intended, about the “value of virtue”: the butler in the play entreated Sweetissa, “if you love virtue—if you love honour—if you have humanity, answer me one question. Did the parson ever make love to you?” (III, vii).

In the opinion of Charles B. Woods, the reprimanding of the clergy is one of the major themes in Shamela. The moral duty of the clergy, Fielding's topic for several essays in the Champion in the year preceding Shamela, now appears as a subject to be remarked upon satirically and incorporated with the burlesque of Richardson's “moral” novel. Williams's danger to the church and to society is represented not only by his lechery but by his doctrinal division of Flesh and Spirit, exaggerated here to justify Shamela's retaining a paramour to satisfy her desire while her husband provides “those other Conveniences.” Mr. Woods shows that Parson Williams is intended to portray “the kind of clergyman who agreed with Whitefield and Wesley on the question of Faith vs. Good Works.”⁴ This comment has been glossed by Ian Watt, who says that “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.’”⁵ Both Mr. Woods and Mr. Watt dwell at length on the significance and sources for Williams's sermon text “Be not Righteous overmuch.” But like almost everything else in the body of Shamela, that text comes directly from Pamela, 2nd ed. (the fifth prefatory letter).⁶

Concurring with Poetic Justice, the authority of Ecclesiastical Law has the last word in Shamela; for Fielding arrives at a Finis more sternly moral than Richardson's, not by rewarding Virtue, but by punishing Hypocrisy:

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.

For the sake of convenience, and after experimenting with other, clumsier approaches, I have handled the stories of Pamela and Shamela here as though their relationship is that of an original work and its imitation in the form of parody. But one of Fielding's funniest devices is his assurance to the reader that Shamela is the truth and that Pamela was concocted for money by a professional writer of Histories, who invented flattering lives “out of his own Head” and “can make black white, it seems.” To insist upon the variegated coloring of human nature, the parodist opposes one kind of extreme with another. The “true” Pamela is Shamela, we are entertainingly told in Shamela's final postscript and in the introduction and conclusion to her narrative, in the form of letters between two parsons.

LETTERS OF TICKLETEXT AND OLIVER

These three letters, of Parson Tickletext and Parson Oliver, together with a letter of “The EDITOR to Himself” and a letter from “JOHN PUFF, Esq; to the EDITOR,” mimic the thirty-six pages of matter introductory to the second edition of Pamela: Richardson's Preface, followed by adulatory or critical readers' letters, some of them represented by abstracts or excerpts.

The first letter of Parson Tickletext to Parson Oliver recommends Pamela as an immortal work, a model for daughters and servant-maids, and a text for the pulpit. Into this letter Fielding has woven numerous lines of direct quotation from Richardson's introductory matter: this was the technique in An Apology for the Life of Mr. T[heophilus] C[ibber]; and it is of course like Richardson's own printing of excerpts from letters prefatory to Pamela. But some of these quotations, though they begin verbatim like Richardson's, amusingly go wrong in the direction of vulgarity. Whereas one of Richardson's admirers had exclaimed, “Little Book, charming PAMELA! face the World, and never doubt of finding Friends and Admirers, not only in thine own Country, but far from Home,” Fielding rudely alters it to “Little Book, charming Pamela, get thee gone; face the World, in which thou wilt find nothing like thyself.” Or, by the device of omission, “this Father, of Millions of MINDS” preposterously reads “this Father of Millions.” Or whereas Richardson's imagination was described as having prodigiously “stretched out this diminutive mere Grain of Mustard-seed, (a poor Girl's little, innocent, Story) into a Resemblance of That Heaven, which the Best of Good Books has compar'd it to,” in Shamela there is the wicked, catastrophic substitution of “a poor Girl's little, & c.”

Parson Oliver's reply to Parson Tickletext expresses his disappointment that such extravagant, unthinking praise should be laid before so patent a hoax as Pamela. Heaven help the clergy, he says, if “the Cause of Religion, or Morality, can want such slender Support.” Anyway, he adds, the heroine's real name is not Pamela but Shamela, and he is forwarding to Parson Tickletext the papers which compose the authentic narrative. Phrases from various portions of Richardson's introductory matter turn up in Parson Oliver's delusion-shattering paragraphs, and he proves that Pamela does not represent its author's starry-eyed innocence:

I cannot agree that my Daughter should entertain herself with some of his Pictures; which I do not expect to be contemplated without Emotion, unless by one of my Age and Temper, who can see the Girl lie on her Back, with one Arm round Mrs. Jewkes and the other round the Squire, naked in Bed, with his Hand on her Breasts, & c. with as much Indifference as I read any other Page in the whole Novel.

This faithful summary of one scene from Pamela serves a purpose, through contrast, of drawing attention to the strongest objection that Richardson allowed to appear in his introductory matter, the insipid complaint that “the Passage where the Gentleman is said to span the Waist of Pamela with his Hand” may encourage tight-lacing among females!

When he has transcribed all the letters comprising the story, Parson Oliver says, “So much for Mrs. Shamela, or Pamela,” but goes on to argue for the letters' publication as a useful warning to young gentlemen and to the clergy, who should consider Williams the worst of examples. Finally, Parson Oliver lists the ways in which Pamela, “a nonsensical ridiculous Book,” will do harm: through its lascivious images, its instruction that young gentlemen show virtue by marrying chambermaids and that chambermaids should seek to marry their employers, its rewarding of the vile Mrs. Jewkes, and its depiction of Williams as a “good” clergyman.

With those arguments and the transcription of Shamela's papers before him, Parson Tickletext can only write back to his friend that, ashamed of the praise he had heaped on Pamela and angered at the presumptuous author of such an imposture, he will see to it that the “true” letters are published. And it is he who appends the information that Shamela has been thrown out of the house and that Parson Williams is being prosecuted for adultery.

THE DEDICATION

By joining Pamela with other works in his parody, Fielding implies that it is hardly worth burlesquing by itself—or that it is merely illustrative of what is wrong with the widespread attitudes it embodies. The prefatory letter from “JOHN PUFF, Esq.,” for instance, though only a few sentences in length, alludes to the author of Pamela, clergymen like Parson Williams, and Robert Walpole (the Prime Minister, here called “his Honour”), all of whom are accused of mistaking fashion for virtue. In Parson Oliver's letter, criticism of Pamela's author includes derogatory references to Colley Cibber and to Conyers Middleton, the latter by means of the phrase “Ciceronian Eloquence.”

In the same month that the second edition of Pamela appeared with its adulatory testimonials, Middleton's Life of Cicero was published in two sumptuous volumes, shamelessly dedicated to Lord Hervey. This Dedication is parodied, from salutation to signature, in the Dedication for Shamela. Fielding's intention is similar to that of Alexander Pope in his “Epilogue to the Satires” (1738), which dwells on affronts to Truth and Virtue and on the corrupting force of Flattery. Like Fielding later, Pope drew together Theophilus Cibber, Robert Walpole, Jonathan Wild, Fielding's friend Lyttleton, the clergy, Hervey under the name of “Lord Fanny,” and Conyers Middleton by name and through allusion to “that easy Ciceronian stile.” Pope and Fielding describe flattery and false virtue as corrupting influences in every realm of human activity. In the language of Ezra Pound, used in connection with Ernest Hemingway's parody, The Torrents of Spring, Shamela “kicks the bunk out of a number of national imbecilities.”⁷

When Middleton's Life of Cicero and Fielding's Shamela were published, Lord Hervey had recently been elevated by Walpole to a seat in the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal: Vice-Chamberlain, fop, confidant to Queen Caroline, Walpole's agent, poetaster, and the eighteenth-century Fannius, he was an important public figure and a familiar target for personal satire, though it never again hit with as much genius as in Pope's “Sporus” passage in “The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1735). Middleton's dedication “TO the RIGHT HONORABLE JOHN Lord HERVEY, Lord Keeper of His Majesty's Privy Seal” is in twelve fawning paragraphs; Fielding's dedication, “To Miss Fanny, & c.,” is in nine. The closest of all his extended verbal parodies, and among the funniest, the nine paragraphs of “The Dedication” are instructive in the study of Fielding's prejudices and art. Below, the paragraphs have been set down at length alongside their source. Middleton's “Dedication” follows [preceding] Fielding's … :

[MIDDLETON]

MY LORD,

The public will naturally expect, that in chusing a Patron for the Life of CICERO, I should address myself to some person of illustrious rank, distinguished by his parts and eloquence. …

[FIELDING]

MADAM,

It will be naturally expected, that when I write the Life of Shamela, I should dedicate it to some young Lady, whose Wit and Beauty might be the proper Subject of a Comparison with the Heroine of my Piece. …

The absurd exchange of Cicero for Shamela is followed by logically associated exchanges of “person of illustrious rank” for “young Lady,” and “parts and eloquence” for “Wit and Beauty,” all lowered in the direction of the trivial and frivolous.

[MIDDLETON]

You see, my Lord, how much I trust to your good nature, as well as good sense, when in an Epistle dedicatory, the proper place of Panegyrick, I am depreciating your abilities, instead of extolling them: but … it would ill become me, in the front of such a work, to expose my veracity to any hazard … I could wish to see the dedicatory reduced to that classical simplicity, with which the ancient writers used to present their books to their friends or Patrons. …

[FIELDING]

You see, Madam, I have some Value for your Goodnature, when in a Dedication, which is properly a Panegyrick, I speak against, not for you; but … why should I expose my Veracity to any Hazard in the Front of the Work, considering what I have done in the Body. Indeed, I wish it was possible to write a Dedication, and get any thing by it, without one word of Flattery; but since it is not, come on. …

Now by omission of the phrase “good sense” Fielding implies that Hervy lacks it; by reduction of Middleton's rhetoric into “I speak against … you,” he writes an insulting Basic English; by addition of “considering what I have done in the Body,” he alludes both to Middleton's text and to his own parody of Pamela; and by coarse alteration of Middleton's words on dedicatory writing, he casts doubts on the “classical” high-mindedness of the flattery addressed to Hervey.

[MIDDLETON]

I cannot forbear boasting, that some parts of my present work have been brithened by the strokes of Your Lordship's pencil.

[FIELDING]

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

Addition of the sensual word “tickled” to “strokes” suggests that Fielding is degrading “pencil” into an anatomical pun. One now looks back at the seemingly innocent word “Body,” added to “Front,” in the preceding paragraph.

[MIDDLETON]

It was the custom of those Roman Nobles, … in conversing with the celebrated wits and Scholars of the age. …

I am saying no more, my Lord, than what I know, from my constant admission to Your Lordship in my morning visits, before good manners would permit me to attempt a visit any where else; where I have found You commonly engaged with the Classical writers of Greece or Rome … for I have seen the solid effects of Your reading, in Your judicious reflections on the policy of those ancient Governments, and have felt Your weight even in controversy, on some of the most delicate parts of their History.

[FIELDING]

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 I will take my Oath on; for I am admitted to your Presence in a Morning before other People's Servants are up; 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.

The self-designated great scholar is now made to admit that he is merely one of Hervey's servants; and the sexual punning reaches its climax of vulgarity—punning that Middleton, by his choice of phrases, seems almost to have asked for.

[MIDDLETON]

I mean that singular temperance in diet, in which Your Lordship perseveres with a constancy, superior to every temptation, that can excite an appetite to rebel. …

[FIELDING]

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. …

An absurd subject to receive space in a book on Cicero, Hervey's control of his appetite becomes more absurd by the Dickensian naming of dishes; the bodily rebellion connected with the name of Woodward was that of vomiting, which he thought could cure most human ills (“As one of Woodward's Patients, sick and sore, / I puke, I nauseate,—yet he thrusts in more.”—Alexander Pope, “The Fourth Satire of Dr. John Donne,” ll. 152-3).

[MIDDLETON]

… personal merit: … after the example of your Noble Father, to open Your own way into the supreme council of the Kingdom. In this august Assembly, Your Lordship displays shining talents, … in the defence of our excellent Establishment; in maintaining the rights of the people, yet affecting the prerogative of the Crown; measuring them both by the equal balance of the laws. …

[FIELDING]

Fifthly, A Circumstance greatly to your Honour, that by means of your extraordinary Merit and Beauty; you was carried into the Ball-Room at the Bath, by the discerning Mr. Nash. … Here you was observed in Dancing to balance your Body exactly, and to weigh every Motion with the exact and equal Measure of Time and Tune; and though you sometimes made a false Step, by leaning too much to one Side; yet every body said you would one time or other, dance perfectly well, and uprightly.

To draw a parallel, not unlike that in Gulliver, between dancing and maintaining political equilibrium, Fielding sets up interrelated and interacting puns. Middleton had provided “Assembly” (“Ball-Room”), “rights,” “measuring,” “equal,” and “balance,” all applicable to dancing as well as to government. Fielding's “balance,” “Body,” “Motion,” “false Step,” “leaning … to one Side,” and “uprightly” apply even more graphically to Hervey's Cabinet than to Fanny's ball-room. After such a tissue of puns has been established, “dance perfectly well” automatically equates with “maneuver with political adroitness”; but the final phrase, “dance … uprightly,” which can refer to a dancer's carriage or to a politician's virtuousness, reintroduces the sexual innuendo that mercilessly trails Hervey.

[MIDDLETON]

… the sprightly compositions of various kinds, with which Your Lordship has often entertained us.

… it was CICERO, who instructed me to write; Your Lordship, who rewards me for writing: the same motive therefore, which induced me to attempt the history of the one, engages me to dedicate it to the other. …

[FIELDING]

Sixthly, I cannot forbear mentioning those pretty little Sonnets, and sprightly Compositions. …

And now, Madam, I have done with you; it only remains to pay my Acknowledgments to an Author, whose Stile I have exactly followed in this Life, it being the properest for Biography. The Reader, I believe, easily guesses, I mean Euclid's Elements; it was Euclid who taught me to write. It is you, Madam, who pay me for Writing.

Fielding's “Sixthly” paragraph, by adding a reference to “pretty little” verses, returns to the frivolousness of the first paragraph. But the effectiveness of Euclid as a substitute for Cicero is harder to explain, although the reader is immediately surprised and amused by the exchange, sensing that no literary style could have been learned from Euclid's propositions and demonstrations (“Full in the midst of Euclid dip at once, / And petrify a Genius to a Dunce.”—Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, II. 263-4). Finally the replacement of the euphemistic, ambiguous word “rewards” by the crass word “pays,” which can mean nothing but “gives money,” hits off in a monosyllable the relationship between patron and servant.

The name “Conny Keyber” affixed to Shamela's Dedication fuses Conyers Middleton and Colley Cibber, with the additional suggestion of “cony” in the sense of “dupe,” and perhaps, as Professor Watt thinks, of “cunny,” Latin cunnus.⁸ The name “Keyber” was of long standing in allusions to Cibber, as he remarks in his Apology: it began as a reflection on his Danish lineage.

Just as the Dedication to Miss Fanny is signed with the name of “Conny Keyber,” so the title page announces: “By Mr. CONNY KEYBER.” The funny device by which Fielding's title, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, scores simultaneously against two best-sellers of 1740, Pamela and Cibber's Apology, may have been suggested by Richardson's own Preface, in which he said of himself as “Editor,” that “as he is therefore confident of the favourable Reception which he boldly bespeaks for this little Work; he thinks any further Preface or Apology for it, unnecessary.” Fielding's mock-apology grossly magnifies Richardson's “confident” editorial boldness, which was an apology for nothing, by having the more-than-confident “Editor” of Shamela write “to Himself,” that “believe me, it will go through many Editions, be translated into all Languages, read in all Nations and Ages, and to say a bold Word, it will do more good than the C[lerg]y have done harm in the World.” From Richardson's first testimonial letter, too, may come another item on Shamela's title page; for Richardson's admirer had said that Pamela “will be found worthy a Place, not only in all Families … but in the Collections of the most curious and polite Readers.” On Fielding's title page it flatly becomes “Necessary to be had in all FAMILIES.”

Fielding's frisky gambados, kicking at false presentations of life and literature, are sobering as well as funny. Somewhere, between the extremes of the models and the parody, stand the accepted, unvarying terms of real life, to which the reader's thoughtful attention is directed. By means of the marvelous, negative gift of parody, showing up inconsistencies and hypocrisies, Fielding discriminates between convention and truth, pretense and action, the pretentious and the actual, the unrealities of art and artless reality. And his parody foreshadows his positive achievement of “reality” in Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia.

Notes

1. Samuel Richardson to “Mrs. Belfour,” Lady Bradshaigh, 1749, Correspondence, ed. Anna Barbauld (London, 1804), IV, 286.

2. Arthur Murphy, “Essay on the Life and Genius of Henry Fielding, Esq.,” Works of Fielding, 2nd ed. (London, 1762), I, 26.

3. Identifications of passages from Pamela are made by reference to the numbered letters (Letter xii, etc.) through Letter xxxi; after that point, because Richardson alters the strictly epistolary form to that of a running journal, references must be made to volume and page. Fielding parodies the 2nd ed., which differs widely from the 1st. All quotations from Pamela here are from the Shakespeare Head Ed. (Oxford, 1929), based on the 6th ed., but not significantly different—in the quoted passages—from the 2nd ed. used by Fielding. For the novel's prefatory matter in the 2nd ed., however, I have used the facsimile reproduction in Samuel Richardson's Introduction to “Pamela,” ed. Sheridan W. Baker, Jr., Augustan Reprint Soc. Publ. No. 48 (Los Angeles, 1954).

4. Charles B. Woods, “Fielding and the Authorship of Shamela,” Philological Quarterly, XXV (July, 1946), 264.

5. Ian Watt, Introduction, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, Augustan Reprint Soc. Publ. No. 57 (Los Angeles, 1956), p. 7.

6. This is noted by Sheridan W. Baker, Jr., Introduction, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953), p. xv.

7. Ezra Pound, “Correspondence,” The New Republic, LII (5 October, 1927), 177a.

8. Ian Watt, op. cit., p. 3.