SOURCE: Baker, Sheridan. Introduction to An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, pp. xi-xxxvi. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953.

[In the following excerpt, Baker discusses Fielding's authorship of Shamela, the novel's thematic concerns, and its relationship to Pamela.]

Shamela is not only a little book of great historical interest; it is not only a work which turned Henry Fielding from a minor dramatist and journalist into a major novelist: it is itself a masterpiece. It may well be the best parody in English literature.

In the history of the novel, Shamela holds a highly distinguished place, standing as it does between the two books which are alternately taken to be the first modern English novel: between Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's Joseph Andrews. The history of the modern novel may conveniently be said to begin when Richardson anonymously published his Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded on November 6, 1740. By April 4, 1741, the tremendous popularity of these adventures of Pamela Andrews had drawn out Fielding's An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, ridiculing as sham the self-centered virtue of Richardson's heroine. A kind of collision between the masculine temperament of Fielding and the feminine temperament of Richardson produced this impudent child, in whom the features of both parents are simultaneously and comically visible, features which appear again transfigured in Fielding's Joseph Andrews of the following year. The parodist had become a novelist. Springing from the Richardsonian novel—the novel of emotional analysis, of tender hopes and fears, the novel which sees life as potentially tragic—Shamela brought forth the novel of manners, of panoramic social criticism, the novel which sees life as comic.

I

But Fielding never acknowledged Shamela as his. Moreover, Fielding's friend Arthur Murphy ignored Shamela when he made the first edition of Fielding's works and wrote the first Fielding biography in 1762. Shamela is recognized in no subsequent edition of Fielding's works, nor mentioned by a single one of Fielding's nineteenth-century admirers. Nevertheless, we can no longer doubt that Fielding wrote it.

Evidence for Fielding's authorship begins to appear in 1883 when Austin Dobson and Leslie Stephen, writing on Fielding and Richardson respectively, both quote from a letter in which Richardson refers to Shamela as Fielding's, and both omit any mention of Shamela whatsoever. In 1900 Clara L. Thomson quotes Richardson's statement (her attention perhaps called to it by Stephen's preface) and makes a brief for Fielding's authorship, noting that Richardson's Mr. B. is named Mr. Booby in Shamela and Joseph Andrews alike. In 1901 Ethel M. M. McKenna's reference to Shamela as Fielding's “famous parody” brings Austin Dobson grumbling from his study. “A discussion has lately arisen as to the authorship of this Apology, which has attracted to it more attention than it has hitherto received or deserves,” he tells us in his Samuel Richardson (1902). But on another of Richardson's letters Dobson has had the misfortune of finding a marginal note in Richardson's hand again assigning Shamela to Fielding. Moreover, Dobson admits, inside the book and out, other evidence points to Fielding. Mrs. Slipslop of Joseph Andrews uses the malapropisms of Shamela and Mrs. Jewkes. A Parson Oliver appears in Shamela; Fielding's boyhood tutor was a Parson Oliver (not to mention the play upon “Mister Oliver” which becomes “Trulliber” in Joseph Andrews). Dodd publishes Shamela; Dodd has published before and will publish again for Fielding. Finally, Shamela fits exactly into the pattern of Fielding's running feud with Colley Cibber, former manager of Drury Lane Theater and Poet Laureate of England. Anyway, says Dobson, no one has the right to call Shamela Fielding's “famous parody.”

But Dobson was to turn up still a third reference to Fielding as author of Shamela, a letter by one Thomas Dampier, and Dobson's successors have continued to find argument and stylistic evidence for Fielding's authorship. Professor Charles B. Woods offers, in a recent article, a bibliography and further persuasion.¹ The most recent concrete evidence was added in 1936 by Professor Alan D. McKillop:² a catalogue of a bankruptcy sale on July 10, 1746, in which the half interest of bookseller Francis Cogan in “Shamela, by Fielding” was sold to Andrew Millar, Fielding's friend, the publisher of his major novels.

Even Fielding's silence as to Shamela finds plausible explanation. Indeed, he would perhaps have disowned it if he could. The Richardson who was nameless to him when he burlesqued Pamela was already the neighbor and friend of Fielding's four sisters, and that friendship grew. By 1748 Fielding himself praises Richardson's new Clarissa. As R. Brimley Johnson has observed, Fielding quite probably would not care further to disturb his great rival with a public confession of what was already known: that he had written Shamela.

Since Dobson, no one who has considered the problem has doubted for more than a scholarly minute that the book is Fielding's. No one has ever so much as suggested another author for it. And even if some back cupboard eventually produces another claimant, the possibility of explaining away all the evidence that points to Fielding seems indeed remote. Perhaps the only rebuttal possible is to challenge as over-facile some of the parallels between Shamela and acknowledged works of Fielding. Wilbur L. Cross,³ for example, makes the point that Shamela “has Parson Adams's habit of snapping her fingers.” But Shamela snaps her fingers in deliberate contempt; Adams unconsciously, when excited. Certain similarities in phrasing also lose strength when we look outside Fielding's works. Perhaps making Shamela the “lady” instead of the “wife” of the hero, just as in Joseph Andrews, is characteristic of Fielding.⁴ But any writer of Shamela would perhaps have used the same term, if not from his own word stock, then from the Pamela he is mimicking: “… if you make Mrs. Andrews your Lady, she will do Credit to your Choice.” Similarly, although Fielding liked to ridicule the publisher's phrase “Necessary to be had in all Families,” its appearance on the title page of Shamela may go no further than direct burlesque of the prediction made in the first letter introductory to Pamela: “… it will be found worthy a Place, … in all Families.” The same may be said for Paul de Castro's discovery that Fielding uses the phrase “be not righteous over much” in The Champion and that Shamela hears Parson Williams preach a sermon on the text Be not Righteous over-much. The advice to “Be not righteous over much” is found also in the fifth of the letters prefixed to Pamela. But this leads us to Fielding's characteristic absorption of current phrases and attitudes, and to the timeliness upon which burlesque feeds. All in all, the conclusion that Fielding wrote Shamela is inescapable.

II

The timeliness of Shamela is inseparable from several of Fielding's basic concerns. In addition to Pamela, three current books give point to Shamela: A Short Account of God's Dealings with the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield (1740), An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian (1740), and Conyers Middleton's Life of Cicero (1741—two months before Shamela).⁵ As live game for burlesque each stirred Fielding in its own way.

At a glance, the several references in Shamela to Whitefield's Short Account of God's Dealings would seem merely to satirize Pamela's piety and book learning. The prominence of Parson Williams also doubtless owes much to the simple exaggeration of Pamela's acquaintance with that young man. But when Fielding gives Williams a sermon on the text “be not righteous overmuch,” we realize that Williams is drawn together from the dust of a popular turmoil, and shaped by ideas that had been turning in Fielding's head as well. Williams's sermon takes its title from a series of four preached in April and May, 1739, by Dr. Joseph Trapp against the Methodist George Whitefield, himself present in the congregation during the first sermon. The Nature, Folly, Sin, and Danger of being Righteous over-much, a text from Ecclesiastes, went through several editions before the end of the year. The Gentleman's Magazine for June printed a long extract, slightly edited so as to begin with the words “To be righteous over-much.” The phrase obviously was in the air, as was the controversy, kept aloft by Whitefield's Dealings in 1740, and by replies to Trapp from Whitefield, Seagrave, Law, and others. The same page of The Gentleman's Magazine⁶ which announces the arrival of Shamela lists “Dr. Trapp's reply to Mr. Law.”

But in Williams Fielding comprehends both sides of the controversy. He is by nature disposed toward the popular side—its popularity by no means a deterrent—the side of temperance against enthusiasm, of reason against inspiration, of Established Church against Methodist innovation. Consequently into Williams go all the popular accusations against Whitefield and the Methodists: that the Methodists claimed a special Grace which exempted them from good works, made them arrogant and hypocritical, freed them to sin with their bodies since salvation of their souls had been guaranteed. Hence the casuistry and licentiousness of Williams and the enthusiasm for grace and pleasant emotions of Tickletext.

Actually both Tickletext and Fielding's anti-Methodism had already begun to form in The Author's Farce (1730), Fielding's first broad satire. Of course, the several young men talking together in their rooms at Oxford had yet attracted neither wide attention nor the name of Methodists, and Fielding must look toward Scotland for his dissident and comic clergyman. But Mr. Murder-text, the Presbyterian Parson, speaks—though briefly—the language of Tickletext and Williams. A pretty girl asks that the company may dance. Says Murder-text:

Verily, I am conquer'd—Pity prevaileth over Severity, and the Flesh hath subdued the Spirit—I feel a motion in me, and whether it be of Grace or no I am not certain—Pretty Maid, I cannot be deaf any longer to your Prayers, I will abide the performing of a Dance, … being thereto mov'd by an inward working. …

And in The Grub-Street Opera (1731) Parson Puzzletext⁷ exploits this same rhetorical cassock. Shamela simply formulates as anti-Methodism Fielding's previous criticisms of pious hypocrisy, and Fielding continues to repeat the formula throughout his subsequent works. All will recall Thwackum of Tom Jones, who propounds the doctrine of grace and accuses Allworthy of “being righteous overmuch.”

In The Champion Fielding had twice cautioned himself against “being righteous over-much” and had once reprimanded Whitefield for being so (April 5 and May 24, 1740), using the phrase as Trapp does to uphold moderate, established religion. But in the mouths of Established Churchmen Williams and Thwackum the phrase shows up those pastors who would put a comfortable limit on their own righteousness. The sword cuts both ways. Although Fielding deplored Whitefield's irregular zeal, he also deplored the laxity and fatness of the clergy against which Whitefield's zeal was directed. In Puzzletext Fielding had pictured a great deal more than sanctimoniousness; he had pictured the pipe-smoking, ale-drinking, hare-hunting, time-serving country parson, the Latin scholar and politician, who was to reappear first as Williams, then variously as Trulliber, Supple, Thwackum, and indeed—transformed—as Adams himself. If the evils in both sides give us Williams, the virtues in both sides give us Adams. With John Wesley, Adams prefers a virtuous Turk to a tepid Christian;⁸ he is a lovingly comic portrait of a Whitefieldian enthusiast, who nevertheless condemns Whitefield's enthusiasm:

“Sir,” answered Adams, “if Mr. Whitefield had carried his doctrine no farther … I should have remained, as I once was, his well-wisher. I am, myself, as great an enemy to the luxury and splendor of the clergy as he can be.”

Against these specific abuses of the clergy Fielding had written four essays in The Champion in the spring of 1740, describing the pride and complacence and Burgundy which were eventually to go into Williams and Supple, as well as the humility and dedication which were to inspirit Adams. Professor Woods has demonstrated the agreement of Parson Oliver's closing remarks in Shamela with passages of religious criticism in The Champion and Joseph Andrews. Fielding's lasting concern in religious matters, together with the tempest around Whitefield, largely account for the prominence of the clergy in Shamela.

But a specific incident seems to have roused Fielding against both Pamela and the abuses of the clergy. Parson Tickletext's mention of the preaching of Pamela from the pulpit alludes to the actual commendation of Pamela from the pulpit of St. Saviour's in Southwark by Richardson's friend Dr. Benjamin Slocock. Other clergymen were not silent: Tickletext's enthusiastic letter to his friend in the country is a satirical rendering of fact. When Fielding has Tickletext write that “It is expected shortly, that his L[ordshi]p will recommend it in a [Pastoral] Letter to our whole Body,” Fielding may be simply exaggerating this clerical clamor. But he may be gathering in Whitefield as well. “His Lordship” is Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, assiduous writer of pastoral letters,⁹ who himself took arms against young Whitefield on August 1, 1739, in “The Bishop of London's Pastoral Letter to the People of his Diocese; … by way of Caution, against Lukewarmness on one hand, and Enthusiasm on the other.” Two thirds of this well-circulated letter attacked religious enthusiasm, with ninety quotations from Whitefield for grist. When the Editor writes of Shamela that “it will do more good than the C[lerg]y have done harm in the World,” he seems to be ridiculing a remark of Pope's concerning Pamela: “It will do more good than many volumes of sermons.”¹⁰ Barnabas perhaps re-echoes this statement as he denounces Whitefield in Joseph Andrews: “Sir, the principles of … all the free thinkers, are not calculated to do half the mischief as those professed by this fellow and his followers.”

Sandwiched between Fielding's clerical essays in The Champion we find his early criticisms of An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber. On Saturday, March 29, 1740, Fielding prints an essay (untitled) on the clergy. The following Tuesday brings his first jab at Cibber's Apology (in which Cibber had characterized Fielding as a literary failure and a mudslinger). And on Saturday we find the following title before the leading essay: “The Apology for the Clergy,—continued.” Though Fielding is here far from burlesque, Cibber's title seems to be running in his head. Perhaps Fielding in July, 1740, had something to do with:

An Apology for the Life of Mr. T[heophilus] C[ibber], Comedian. Being a Proper Sequel to the Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian … Supposed to be written by Himself.

Just as John Puff in Shamela recommends that the author undertake the writing of “the Life of his Honour,” so the mock Theophilus Cibber (the actual name of Colley Cibber's son) in his dedication suggests his willingness to write an apology for the life of Prime Minister Robert Walpole. But there is no doubt that Fielding's political battle in The Champion against Walpole's government, represented by the pseudonymous Ralph Freeman in The Daily Gazetteer, took similar advantage of Cibber's book. On October 16, 1740, Fielding advertises:

… an Apology for the Life, Actions, and Writings of Ralph Freeman, alias, Court Evil, Esq; containing an authentic History … during his Time. Written by Himself.

The book is to be published by “T[heophilus] C[ibber], Publisher-General of the Ministerial Society.”

Fielding's combination of Cibber and Walpole in satire again is evident in An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews by Conny Keyber.¹¹ Even the format of the title page mocks Cibber's book; and the dedication to “Miss Fanny” brings the Walpole cause under fire. “Miss Fanny” is Pope's name for John, Lord Hervey, Walpole's friend and propagandist, already satirized by Fielding as Miss Stitch in Pasquin (1736) and as John in The Grub-Street Opera (1731). In this latter play, an extended satire on Walpole and the royal family, we find the Parson Puzzletext whom we meet again in Shamela, superficially in the name of Tickletext, and in the very flesh as Williams.

Fielding's combined satirization of Cibber and Walpole—as with his rendering of the clergy—begins as early as The Author's Farce (1730). Cibber was the manager of Drury Lane Theater who would turn down young playwrights like Fielding. Cibber was called a plagiarist. Cibber was a standing joke about town as a Poet Laureate who could not write an ode. Cibber also stood for the Whig ministry of Sir Robert Walpole because his anti-Catholic and anti-Stuart play, The Non-juror (1717), had surely won him his laureateship. Young Fielding drew on this general fund—no doubt to settle a private account—when he comically set forth the playwright's troubles in The Author's Farce, but he (perhaps prudently) left politics alone except in once referring to Cibber as “Mr. Keyber.” Fielding's audience in 1730 would not miss the point. Of the political reaction to The Non-juror Cibber himself writes in his Apology:

… to none was I more beholden than to that celebrated author, Mr. Nathaniel Mist, whose Weekly Journal, for about fifteen years following, scarce ever fail'd of passing some of his party compliments upon me. The state and stage were his frequent parallels, and the ministers, and Minheer Keiber, the manager [Cibber was of Danish descent], were as constantly droll'd upon.

If by 1740 Mist's standing joke had begun to fade, Cibber's own book refreshed the memory. No one could miss the combined political and personal references when Fielding made Conny Keyber the author of An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews—to expose the guile of Pamela, “that young Politician.” And “Conny,” of course, looks like “Colley” and means rabbit or dupe. It has the further advantage of patting the head of Mr. Conyers Middleton.

When Conyers Middleton dedicated his Life of Cicero to Hervey, he unwittingly dedicated himself to Fielding's purpose. Middleton not only exalted one of Fielding's natural political enemies; he also in passing slighted the Observations on the Life of Cicero by Fielding's friend George Lyttelton. The Life of Cicero appeared in February, 1741, along with the second edition of Pamela, the edition—with new laudatory letters to the editor—which Parson Tickletext sends to Parson Oliver, the edition which seems to have set Fielding to work. Fielding neatly cut Middleton's dedication to fit “Miss Fanny.” Turn to Fielding's opening sentence, for example, with Middleton's in mind:

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, and bearing a principal share in the great affairs of the Nation; who, according to the usual stile of Dedications, might be the proper subject of a comparison with the Hero of my piece.

Nothing in the dedication to Miss Fanny fails to use Middleton with utmost economy. Hervey is commended for following “the example of Your Noble Father” by making his own way into the House of Commons, and for “maintaining the rights of the people, yet asserting the prerogative of the Crown; measuring them both by the equal balance of the laws.” Miss Fanny is commended for winning entrance to the ballroom by her charm and for balancing herself on the dance floor, though she perhaps leans too much to one (political) side. And Middleton's stylistic absurdities joined Cibber's under Fielding's attack. Where Conyers Middleton attributes his fine style to the periods of Cicero, Conny Keyber credits the rules of Euclid. We can appreciate the almost geometric nicety with which Middleton fitted Fielding's plan when we learn, as Brian Downs tells us, that Cibber himself was then considering his own subsequent study of Cicero.

In making Conny Keyber the author of Shamela Fielding implies (quite unjustly) that Cibber's Apology is scandalous. Of the author of Shamela John Puff writes—in parody of one of the letters introducing Pamela:

Who is he, what is he that could write so excellent a Book? … he is able to draw every thing to Perfection but Virtue.

In Joseph Andrews Fielding, continuing to question Pamela's virtue, writes of Cibber's Apology:

… this character of male-chastity … is almost the only virtue which the great Apologist hath not given himself for the sake of giving the example to his readers.

Cibber's “authorship” of Shamela simply serves Fielding's multidirectional satire. To suggest that Fielding actually thought Cibber wrote Pamela—a view stated by Dobson and repeated widely—seems to miss Fielding's complexity and perhaps to misread the text. Answering Tickletext's letter, Oliver intimates that the style which at first suggested Colley Cibber was soon conceded to be that of another.¹²“Ciceronian Eloquence” seems to refer rather to Middleton than to Cibber, as does:

I have seen a Piece of his Performance, where the Person, whose Life was written, could he have risen from the Dead again, would not have even suspected he had been aimed at, unless by the Title of the Book, which was superscribed with his Name.

Cicero might rise from the dead to confront the Life that had been aimed at him; Cibber outlived Fielding. When Fielding refers to “a Parson … who writes Lives” he surely means the Reverend Mr. Conyers Middleton, D.D.

But we must not be too literal. Fielding is satirizing bad writing in Cibber, Middleton, and the unknown author of Pamela. A man with Fielding's ear for language would not mistake one for either of the others. He had poked fun at Cibber's idiom in The Champion. He knew Middleton well enough to quote a long paragraph from the Life of Cicero in his Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751). The attention he gave Richardson's style may be easily ascertained by placing Shamela beside Pamela. He is merely enriching his burlesque of Pamela with references to two other books currently popular and currently damned. In Joseph Andrews (III, vi) he again pairs Middleton and Cibber as bad writers.

III

Fielding's criticism of Richardson is more basic, being close, indeed, to Fielding's criticism of life. To be sure, he ridicules the extravagant style of the letters prefatory to Pamela, and he mocks Richardson for telling his story in letters, particularly where Shamela records the action from her bed. But Fielding aims more especially at the vanity which led Richardson to prefix flattering letters, and at the hypocrisy in Richardson's pretending to be editor in order—it would seem—to praise his own book. In his first edition Richardson printed two letters flattering enough—Tickletext's “Little Book, charming Pamela” comes from the first of these—but to the second edition Richardson added twenty-four pages of letters, including a poem. In Joseph Andrews (I, i) Fielding continues to ridicule “the excellent essays or letters prefixed to the second and subsequent editions” of Pamela.¹³ And in the preface to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, his last work, Fielding still seems to remember these letters, commenting on “the conduct of authors, who often fill a whole sheet with their own praises, to which they sometimes set their own real names, and sometimes a fictitious one.” Within two more sentences he refers to Richardson himself. Fielding's satire, combined with friendly advice, perhaps caused Richardson to withdraw the introductory letters from the sixth edition (May 10, 1742), but they reappear in the seventh edition and (slightly abridged) in the eighth, Richardson's last.

First of the many attacks on Pamela, Shamela seems also to have had some effect on Richardson's continuation of Pamela (December, 1741). Delighted at catching the grave moralist at the keyhole, Fielding concentrates his forces against Richardson's two bedroom scenes. On his title page Richardson, somewhat defensively, had written that although his book “agreeably entertains” it is “intirely divested of all those Images, which, in too many Pieces calculated for Amusement only, tend to inflame the Minds they should instruct.” In Oliver's direct comment, in Tickletext's emotional responses, and in detailed travesty, Fielding answers Richardson's claim. And Richardson soon declares that in his sequel he intends “to avoid inflaming Descriptions”; and again, “that in the Two new Volumes, I shall have no Occasion for such of the deep Scenes, as I believ'd necessary to the Story in two Places in the former.”¹⁴ Moreover, Richardson has Lady Davers defend at length Pamela's description of her “two grand Trials” as being indispensable to the story, adding “… it must be a very unvirtuous Mind, that can form any other Ideas from what you relate, than those of Terror and Pity for you.”

But Fielding had formed ideas which bring Pamela's virtue seriously into question. He believed that Richardson pictured serving girls a good deal better than they should be: shortly before Pamela he commends Sir John Barnard's Present for an Apprentice for warning young men against female servants.¹⁵ Moreover, behind Pamela's virtue Fielding seems again to have found the vanity and hypocrisy which for him were the essence of comedy. Pamela is unconsciously—sometimes coyly—vain in writing about the praises she receives, her humility, her Godliness, her clothes, and the overwhelming attentions of her young master. She is unconsciously a hypocrite as she strives to leave but wants to stay. Richardson wrote into his story the powerful attraction of the opulent Beast for his captive Beauty, who endures magic trials to be rewarded in the end—as Mr. B. turns into Prince Charming.¹⁶ But Richardson, too intent with the object, could not see how it—or he—looked from a distance. Fielding simply turned into spirited calculation all of Pamela's unconscious bargaining. As he had done in The Covent-Garden Tragedy, Fielding had turned lofty seriousness concerning the passions of men and women into something like the business of the bawdy house.

That is the key to the satire in Shamela, but it does not open the way to all its brilliance. Once Pamela's virtue is turned upside down, the inversion of every other character and the manipulation of speech and action in rough mimicry of Richardson follow naturally enough. Indeed, we might expect Fielding, the experienced playwright, to take somewhat his own course. And actually we find Mrs. Jewkes more wholesome and the heroine more honest. But the real brilliance of Shamela comes from the precision of its parody, cut into a hundred facets. Phrase by phrase, taking advantage of every turn, Fielding harries Richardson to a finish. He had acquired the art in Tom Thumb, The Covent-Garden Tragedy, and Tumble-Down Dick; he had written brief parody in The Champion; he shared with his age the love of burlesque and satire. But nowhere before Shamela is his parody so sustained, so impertinent, and so close. Where Pamela sighs “O that I had never left my Rags and Poverty,” Shamela remarks “O! How I long to be in the Balconey at the Old House.”¹⁷ Aaron Hill in his letter to the editor writes that the author of Pamela “has stretch'd out this diminutive mere Grain of Mustard-seed (a poor Girl's little, innocent, Story) into a resemblance of … Heaven.” Fielding with the slightest of touches inserts his satirical thesis—Pamela is a harlot—and upsets into obscenity Hill's extravagance. He simply writes: “a poor Girl's little, &c.”

Even where Fielding seems to be extemporizing most freely in his own vein he is following Richardson. His mayor and aldermen might have walked in directly from his Don Quixote in England or Pasquin to engage Williams in wine and politics after dinner, robbing Shamela of his company. But the scene also imitates the arrival in Pamela of Mr. B.'s drinking companions on the eve of his wedding. And again, nothing is more germane to the Fielding countryside than Williams poaching Booby's hares with horse and hound. Yet as Williams rides off in the coach beside Booby's bride we realize that this is all a mime of the episode in Pamela where we find Williams walking, book in hand, at the meadowside, met, reconciled and finally taken into the coach by Pamela and Mr. B.:

Pray, Mr. Williams, oblige Pamela with your Hand; and step in yourself. He bow'd, and took my Hand, and my Master made him step in, and sit next me, all that ever he could do. …

Fielding reduces Richardson's two volumes to half a hundred pages, pinning scenes together with details from here and there (examine Shamela's relationship with Mrs. Jewkes), and yet following Richardson's contours exactly. Few parodies—in verse or prose—can come near Shamela in its sustained and persistent mimicry.

The close parody of Richardson's bedroom scenes taught Fielding the high comedy of sex. To be sure, Fielding had for some time been writing comedies around the intrigues of the sexes. More than any of his contemporaries he emulates the Restoration playwrights. But his amorous scenes are heavy. The ladies of his plays know what they want, and they know themselves. We feel that young Fielding is so interested in sexual experience that he forgets its subtle connections with the rest of human nature. But Shamela is lit by an awareness of the comic incongruity of sex in civilized life. Pamela wants—not simply for prestige—to submit to her master, but everything she believes in prevents the desire from even breaking surface. In burlesquing this unconscious hypocrisy Fielding learned what it was. Fielding's stage ladies wish to appear proper only in the eyes of others; Lady Booby and Mrs. Slipslop wish to appear proper in their own eyes as well. A great deal of the comedy in Fielding's novels comes from the universal struggle of hidden passion against propriety, or, on the masculine side, of passion against the best of intentions. Shamela, more than anything before, brought this to the center of Fielding's comic vision.

Shamela draws together another significant element for Fielding the novelist. Fielding's habit of commenting upon his story can be seen already sketched into his plays: he repeatedly uses the convention of putting a supposed rehearsal on the stage, with author at one side commenting to the critics. In Shamela we find Parson Oliver commenting directly upon the immorality of Pamela. Oliver shows little of Fielding's later wit as intrusive narrator, but Oliver is similarly the wise head, assuring by plain statement that the satire does not backfire. Paralleling Richardson's own summary, Oliver enumerates the wayward lessons Pamela will be apt to teach. He upholds Fielding's aristocratic view that place should be kept. But more important, he declares one of Fielding's basic beliefs, the lesson he hoped to teach in Tom Jones: that prudence must not be overturned by passion. Oliver says that Pamela encourages young gentlemen to impetuous matches which will “sacrifice all the solid Comforts of their Lives, to a very transcient Satisfaction of a Passion. …” In Tom Jones Fielding seeks “to make good men wise” by instilling in them “that solid inward comfort of mind, which is the sure companion of innocence and virtue.” Oliver writes of “the secure Satisfaction of a good Conscience, the Approbation of the Wise and Good, … and the extatick Pleasure of contemplating, that their Ways are acceptable to the Great Creator of the Universe.” “But for Worldly Honours,” Oliver continues, “they are often the Purchase of Force and Fraud. …” And Tom Jones cries out concerning Blifil who has defrauded him:

What is the poor pride arising from a magnificent house, a numerous equipage, a splendid table, and from all the other advantages or appearances of fortune compared to the warm, solid content, the swelling satisfaction, the thrilling transports, and the excellent triumphs which a good mind enjoys in the contemplation of a generous, virtuous, noble, benevolent action?

We may wish to concede that Shamela is coarse. We must certainly concede that it is hasty: when Shamela comes to Lincolnshire Fielding forgets that Mrs. Jewkes must have known all about her—the grapevine, we are told, is excellent—and Shamela had borne her child by Williams at the Lincolnshire estate. Mrs. Jervis and Mrs. Jewkes are confused in Fielding's mind: in the second edition he corrects an erroneous reference to Mrs. Jervis. Fielding seems to have read, digested and sharply parodied Richardson in a month's time, a month engaged also with political pamphleteering¹⁸ and to some extent with a law practice and The Champion. But we cannot dismiss Shamela as trivial or ephemeral. Its place in the history of the novel is secure. Much of Fielding's mature comic genius is here. And it would be hard to find a better parody anywhere.

Notes

1. “Fielding and the Authorship of Shamela,” The Philological Quarterly, XXV (1948).

2. Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1936), p. 74.

3. The History of Henry Fielding, 3 vols. (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1918), I, 307.

4. Ibid.

5. Fielding alludes to other current books. Professor Charles B. Woods identifies: (1) A full Answer is a plain and true Account, an answer to Bishop Benjamin Hoadly's A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament, admired by Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews; (2) Orpheus and Eurydice, a pantomime by Lewis Theobald ridiculed by Fielding in The Champion; (3) Venus in the Cloyster; or, the Nun in her Smock, a pornographic booklet which brought publisher Edmund Curll to trial. Better known are the Earl of Rochester's notoriously bawdy Poems; Mrs. Mary Manley's New Atlantis, a collection of current scandals disguised as incidents in a romantic tale; and The Whole Duty of Man, a favorite household book of devotion.

6. Op. cit. (April, 1741), p. 224.

7. Parsons Oliver and Tickletext both may ultimately derive their names from Shakespeare's Parson Oliver Martext, with perhaps another textual parson assisting. In Christopher Bullock's Woman's Revenge: or, a Match in Newgate (revived in 1728 in the wake of The Beggar's Opera and acted twenty times during Fielding's theater years) a Parson Tickletext is mentioned by a malapropist not unlike Mrs. Jewkes or Mrs. Slipslop. But whatever Fielding's immediate source, we can see more than accident in the progression: Martext—Murdertext (together with a Marplay in The Author's Farce)—Puzzletext—Tickletext. And “Tickletext” might have suggested “Oliver,” a choice endorsed by Fielding's memory of Parson Oliver, his boyhood tutor.

8. Woods, op. cit., p. 264.

9. Cross, op. cit., I, 311.

10. McKillop, op. cit., p. 74.

11. Fielding may have been helped to the full title of his satire by Richardson's preface to Pamela: “further Preface or Apology … [is] unnecessary.”

12. Oliver's remark—“our Author's Professions of Modesty, which in my Youth I have heard at the Beginning of an Epilogue”—may indeed refer to the epilogue which Cibber wrote for Fielding's Miser, as Aurelien Digeon suggests (The Novels of Fielding [London, George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1925], p. 47, n. 1). But Oliver's remark hardly establishes that Fielding thought Cibber wrote Pamela, and it may refer only to the practice of covering up a bawdy play with a moral epilogue—spoken by an actress in tights.

13. Fielding apparently did not see the first edition, taking all the introductory letters to be new with the second (February 14, 1741). He therefore must have started Shamela sometime after the middle of February, and he must have finished it sometime before the middle of March to afford publication on April 4. Meanwhile the third edition of Pamela sailed past. Although Oliver thanks Tickletext for sending the second edition, Tickletext has suggested that Oliver and his neighboring clergymen must wait for the fourth edition to supply their pulpits. The composition of Tickletext's opening letter may thus postdate that of Oliver's reply.

14. McKillop, op. cit., pp. 62-63.

15. Ibid., p. 35.

16. Cf. Simon O. Lesser, “A Note on ‘Pamela’,” College English, XIV (1952), pp. 13-17.

17. The Drury Lane Playhouse, where Shamela's mother sold oranges. Others will perhaps take it to be a house of poorer repute. But the balcony at Drury Lane was sufficiently low for Fielding's purpose; and this theater, antedating Covent Garden by a century, was referred to as “the old house.”

18. The Crisis: a Sermon appeared in the same month with Shamela; both use the clergy for political satire.