SOURCE: Varey, Simon. “Shamela and Joseph Andrews.” In Henry Fielding, pp. 46-52. London: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

[In the following excerpt, Varey examines the parody of Pamela which Fielding uses in Shamela as a forerunner of the parodical elements in Joseph Andrews.]

Samuel Richardson's first novel, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded was published in November 1740. It was a triumph, a sensation. Perpetually tinkering with his text, Richardson brought out four revised editions in less than a year. He soon added a sequel (Pamela in her Exalted Condition) and later virtually rewrote the whole novel twice more. Pamela had also provoked other writers to take up their pens. Like most literary triumphs, this novel was subjected to spurious sequels, adaptations, imitations, and parodies. One of the parodists was Fielding, who hated Pamela with a passion. Five months after the first appearance of Richardson's long novel, Fielding reacted with a short pamphlet, An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews, better known as Shamela. For a short time this too was popular, but it seems to have chagrined Richardson and his circle of friends, which later included Fielding's sister Sarah. Like its ostensible model, Shamela was published anonymously. The story goes that when Fielding discovered the authorship of Pamela, he regretted the offence his parody had caused; whether or not this was the reason, Fielding never publicly admitted that he had written Shamela.

Among the earliest novels seriously to develop the form of letters written by the characters, Pamela had appeared at a time when the novel—in any form—was still not secure in the literary market place. Richardson found an audience among the growing middle classes, who valued his narrative, for Pamela embodies an essentially middle-class morality. Pamela Andrews, a servant-girl, resists the advances of her seducer, the wealthy squire Mr B., until he does the right thing by her; that is, until he marries her. While the seduction takes place, Pamela finds she loves him in spite of herself, and Mr B. eventually values her resistance so highly that he falls in love with her. Pamela's ‘virtue’ is equivalent to her virginity, her urgent desire to preserve it no more than prudent self-interest. If the novel turns on a matter of principle, it is that virginity pays. It is this central element of Pamela that Fielding exposes in Shamela.

Although not great literature, Shamela is interesting, especially as a forerunner of Joseph Andrews. Fielding's method is burlesque: his narrative imitates Richardson's epistolary style—even down to the letters between the supposed discoverer of the original manuscripts and the clergyman to whom he sends them. In Fielding's treatment, Richardson's almost saintly servant becomes a cunning, shameless minx; her virtue is corrupted into ‘vartue’; with a delicious irony, Mr B.'s full name is discovered to be Booby; Pamela's prudent self-interest is also Shamela's, but where Pamela's reward is her exalted condition, Shamela is satisfied with money. Shamela, the sham, is the epitome of pretence, hypocrisy, and greed, always with an eye to the main chance. The wealthy squire is on the way to impoverishment by his bride once she recognises the power of her upgraded status: having asked him for a hundred guineas two days running, Shamela declares: ‘I believe I shall buy every Thing I see. What signifies having Money if one doth not spend it[?].’ She demands another hundred the next day, at which Booby asks how she could have spent so much so fast; her reply: ‘Truly, says I, Sir, I shall live like other Ladies of my Fashion; and if you think, because I was a Servant, that I shall be contented to be governed as you please, I will shew you, you are mistaken.’ She then fakes a fainting fit, deflects his questions, and receives the money: ‘I fancy I have effectually prevented any farther Refusals or Inquiry into my Expences. It would be hard indeed that a Woman who marries a Man only for his Money should be debarred from spending it’ (348-9).

As that episode reveals, Shamela is callous and cynical, so much so that she is content to disown her mother on the grounds that her own new social status is now too high to allow her to be seen with one of so low a rank. Yet Shamela is not carping and bitter: although it is a serious attack on the morality of Pamela, it is also a very funny parody. A little nasty perhaps, Shamela's cynicism itself can be an object of fun:

The most difficult Task for me was to blush; however, by holding my Breath, and squeezing my Cheeks with my Handkerchief, I did pretty well … Well, at last I went to Bed, and my Husband soon leapt in after me; where I shall only assure you, I acted my Part in such a manner, that no Bridegroom was ever better satisfied with his Bride's Virginity.

(347)

Both the theatricality of Shamela's manufactured blush and her success in taking in the gullible Squire Booby, provoke laughter, even if it is tinged with scorn. Possibly the most quoted paragraph of the whole piece is one of Shamela's ludicrous descriptions of a nocturnal visit from Booby (before their marriage):

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 awake.—I no sooner see him, but I scream out …

(330)

By so absurdly emphasising the present tense for a spurious immediacy, this passage sends up Richardson's narrative technique of having Pamela write ‘to the moment’; but the passage can also stand on its own as sardonic wit. Some isolated passages in Shamela are not at all dependent on Pamela for their effect. When Shamela sits in her husband's carriage listening to her lover, Parson Williams, she responds in a way that provokes our laughter and draws attention not to Pamela explicitly so much as the morality which Shamela has come to represent:

Therefore, says he, my Dear, you have two Husbands, one the Object of your Love, and to satisfy your Desire; the other the Object of your Necessity, and to furnish you with those other Conveniences. (I am sure I remember every Word, for he repeated it three Times; O he is very good whenever I desire him to repeat a thing to me three Times he always doth it!) as then the Spirit is preferable to the Flesh, so am I preferable to your other Husband, to whom I am antecedent in Time likewise. I say these things, my Dear, (said he) to satisfie your Conscience. A Fig for my Conscience, said I, when shall I meet you again in the Garden?

(351)

The bawdiness of Shamela's interpolation anticipates her easy dismissal of matters spiritual. It is clear, then, that she cares not a fig for Pamela's type of virtue.

There is more satire at Richardson's expense. The slightly obsessive accumulation of apparently trivial detail creates a minutely portrayed world in Pamela. Fielding's parody shows how easily such detail can become an end in itself, and so be arbitrary, inconsequential, and superfluous:

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.

(344)

Not only is this list absurdly haphazard, it also indicates something of Fielding's broader aims: the books include mild pornography, a volume on Methodist doctrine, and a much read devotional book, The Whole Duty of Man. But it is noticeable that Shamela's copy of this last does not include the part about duty to one's neighbour, so that her self-interest is represented even by a book in her motley library. Venus in the Cloyster is one of many pointers to a feature of Fielding's whole parody that must have offended Richardson and can sometimes offend modern readers: the bawdy. The language of Shamela is peppered (as Fielding would say) with slang, much of it now obsolete and obscure, double entendre, and plain obscenity. Fielding's prurient innuendo coarsens Richardson's ‘moral’ tale by turning it into a thinly disguised lascivious adventure. Richardson's reader is thus endowed—in Fielding's treatment—with the mentality of a voyeur.

My emphasis lies on Shamela's nature as a destructive satiric weapon. Fielding lets it go at that, in the sense that he does not construct any serious alternative to the hypocrisy he evidently loathed. But Shamela is not aimed at Pamela alone. Fielding also attacks the Methodism of George Whitefield, the moral corruption of the clergy, Lord Hervey (one of the most prominent courtiers of the day), the author Conyers Middleton, and the actor and playwright, Colley Cibber.

Whitefield is singled out for propagating a doctrine that offers a specious, conscience-salving form of words that covers as it encourages immorality. Parson Williams' sermon

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 …

(336)

The moral corruption of the clergy is obvious enough not only in this pernicious doctrine attributed to the Methodists and in the dubious character and conduct of Parson Williams, but also in Parson Tickletext. Tickletext fulsomely recommends Shamela to his fellow clergyman, Parson Oliver, in the first letter. Tickletext has ‘done nothing but read it to others, and hear others again read it to me’, and his neighbouring clergymen have ‘made it our common Business here, not only to cry it up, but to preach it up likewise’. As his admiration increases, the satire begins to take shape: Tickletext exclaims, ‘Happy would it be for Mankind, if all other Books were burnt, that we might do nothing but read thee all Day, and dream of thee all Night’ (322). Once we have recognised the bawdy hints that follow, we know what kind of dreams those will be. He continues: ‘Thou alone art sufficient to teach us as much Morality as we want’ but not, one supposes, as much as the clergy should have. Then turning his attention to the author, Tickletext adds: ‘The Comprehensiveness of his Imagination must be truly prodigious! It has stretched out this diminutive mere Grain of Mustard-Seed (a poor Girl's little, & c.) into a Resemblance of that Heaven, which the best of good Books has compared it to’ (322). Distorting Richardson's original phrase, ‘a poor Girl's little, innocent Story’, the bawdy ambiguity strikes simultaneously at both the lecherous clergy and the vulgar author, for these two sentences are direct quotations from Richardson.

The dedicatory epistle ‘To Miss Fanny, & c’ establishes Fielding's satirical thrusts at Cibber, Middleton, and Hervey. Few readers now will recognise the allusions, for few now know that ‘Lord Fanny’ was a common pejorative nickname for the effeminate and allegedly hermaphrodite (a contemporary term for homosexual) Lord Hervey. Few now will realise that Fielding's epistle is verbally very close to Middleton's dedication—to Hervey—of his History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero, actually quite a respectable biography. Cibber will be a familiar name to readers of Fielding's drama or of Pope's Dunciad of 1743. However, ‘Conny Keyber’ (that is, ‘Conyers’ plus ‘Cibber’), the ‘author’ of the epistle dedicatory—in fact, according to the title page the alleged author of Shamela—may be puzzling. The full title of Shamela actually recalls Cibber's recently published, controversial Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber, an autobiography whose appalling English and incredible vanity Fielding had already attacked in the Champion and would attack again, with more telling effect, in Joseph Andrews. To anyone with no knowledge of Cibber (impossible ignorance amongst the literati of London in 1741), the alignment of Cibber with Richardson will pass unnoticed. Similarly, the inclusion of Hervey as one of the satiric victims introduces a political dimension which is now generally accessible only to the specialist. Fielding's protests against these people are all aimed, one way or another, against corruption—moral, political, and linguistic—but all the protests rely on knowledge that Shamela itself does not generally provide. Shamela, then, may offer serious criticism and a good deal of fun, but it is too topical to take a place alongside the lasting satires of the age: Shamela is dated, as spoofs usually are.

On 22 February 1742, less than a year after the first appearance of Shamela, two small volumes were published under the title The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. Written in Imitation of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote. This much loved novel is a far wider and more deeply developed response to Pamela, but this time Fielding did offer a serious alternative to the corruption, hypocrisy, greed, and self-interest he had hit so hard in Shamela. Joseph Andrews is also based on a number of models with which (regrettably) comparatively few modern readers are familiar: the Bible (for the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife), Don Quixote, and the Odyssey. But although these models account for the structure of the narrative and suggest the underlying virtue of the two principal characters, they are transcended in Fielding's rich mixture of satire and comedy.

Joseph Andrews himself, ‘brother to the illustrious Pamela’, is a footman in the service of Sir Thomas Booby, uncle of Pamela's Mr B. Sir Thomas is quickly and casually dispatched, dying off early in the novel: ‘his disconsolate lady’ recovers so quickly from the shock that within seven days she is trying to seduce the incredibly virtuous Joseph, whom she angrily discharges for resisting her amorous attempts. She invents a different charge against him, accusing him, with grotesque injustice, of sexual licentiousness. In this Lady Booby is abetted by her equally voracious but astonishingly ugly waiting-gentlewoman, Mrs Slipslop. Since they recall Pamela so explicitly, the early chapters, describing the seduction and Joseph's relationship with Pamela, suggest that Joseph Andrews will continue Fielding's war on Pamela.

The brief first chapter of Book I seems to promise something built on a response to Cibber's Apology and Pamela. Fielding distinguishes himself from these authors in two ways. Firstly, where Cibber brazenly portrayed himself, and Richardson posed only as the editor of others' correspondence, Fielding adopts the role of the historian or biographer who records what the participants have told him afterwards about their adventures. He therefore professes neither total detachment nor total involvement. Cibber's book, he says,

was written by the great Person himself, who lived the Life he hath recorded, and is by many thought to have lived such a Life only in order to write it. The other is communicated to us by an Historian who borrows his Lights, as the common Method is, from authentic Papers and Records.

(I, i)

When Coleridge likened Richardson to a stuffy, hot sick-room, and Fielding to an open lawn on a breezy day, he identified a distinction that Fielding made himself, in a way. Fielding's objections to Pamela include his distaste for epistolary fiction and in particular the claustrophobic, introverted nature of a story told in this way: hence Shamela's parody of the obsessive heaping up of detail, even the parody of letters per se, hints at the author's desire to break out from the suffocation of Richardson's enclosed world. In a corresponding way, Cibber's self-indulgent autobiography is the epitome of vanity, or unhealthy enclosure of another kind, in which Cibber occupies the centre of a stage from which all others are excluded. In Joseph Andrews Fielding carefully dissociates himself from both these modes of telling a story. Fielding's own chosen narrative mode is to install an amiable, talkative narrator who engages his reader in what amounts to a social act, something akin to conversation. It is as if the author throws open the doors of his home to let in both the air and us, his visitors.

A second way in which Fielding dissociates himself from Cibber and Richardson is by stressing virtue as his subject, contrasting with Richardson's ‘Virtue Rewarded’—and we have seen what Shamela does with that—and Cibber's ‘Male-Virtue’, which is not virtue at all:

The authentic History with which I now present the public, is an Instance of the great good that Book [Pamela] is likely to do, and of the Prevalence of Example … since it will appear that it was by keeping the excellent Pattern of his Sister's Virtues before his Eyes, that Mr. Joseph Andrews was chiefly enabled to preserve his Purity in the midst of such great Temptations; I shall only add, that this Character of Male-Chastity, tho' doubtless as desirable and becoming in one Part of the human Species, as in the other, is almost the only Virtue which the great Apologist [that is, Cibber] hath not given himself for the sake of giving the Example to his Readers.

(I, i)

The concepts of history, examples, and virtue will be important later, but here, at the end of the first chapter, they are subordinate to Fielding's joke, which reminds us that he imitates neither of his ‘models’. Pamela and her husband themselves appear in Book IV of Joseph Andrews: although Pamela has little to say there, she still manages to condemn herself. But by introducing Pamela and Mr B., Fielding brings his characters together in a comic dénouement (which develops into a travesty of Oedipus), simultaneously offering a satirical commentary on the bourgeois values embraced by Richardson. Pamela and Mr B. try to persuade Joseph that he must forsake his beloved Fanny, a milkmaid, because such a match would damage the Booby family's social status, Pamela herself notwithstanding. The concealed reason for this sudden snobbery is that Lady Booby still wants Joseph to herself to satisfy her carnal desires. The novel is brought to an end with another gibe at Richardson, but by then most readers are unlikely to be concerned with specific allusions to either Pamela or Cibber's Apology. Although jokes and satirical thrusts directed at Richardson and Cibber are scattered through the narrative, they neither dominate nor give shape to Joseph Andrews in the sense that they do Shamela. For although the writings of these two men are symptomatic of evils which Fielding saw as menacing social and individual virtue, Joseph Andrews has more substantial matter to offer than a riposte to two books. It is most rewarding to approach Joseph Andrews through its dramatised conflicts between virtue and vice; its exposure of affectation and vanity in the light of Fielding's expressed aims; its narrative technique; Fielding's satiric conception of character and of the famous ‘comic Epic-Poem in Prose’. Together with these elements, Fielding's characterisation reveals the two dominant themes of the novel: chastity and charity, the one an expression of individual, the other of social, virtue. In Joseph Andrews Fielding creates an ironic, and finally more realistic, alternative to the Richardsonian novel. …

Select bibliography

I. Fielding's works

Joseph Andrews. Ed. Martin C. Battestin. Wesleyan edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Standard. The same text, with even more extensive notes and a lucid, concise introduction, is accompanied by Shamela in Battestin's Riverside edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961). There is also a good Penguin edition, ed. R. T. Brissenden (1977). Maynard Mack's Rinehart edition has a valuable introduction, reprinted in Paulson, Fielding (see below). Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Douglas Brooks (London; Oxford University Press, 1970), has reliable texts and concise notes.

An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews. Introduction by Ian Watt. Augustan Reprint Society, no. 57. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1956. Facsimilie reprint of the first edition. For other editions, see under Joseph Andrews, above.

III. Major Criticism

Paulson, Ronald. Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1962. Useful Collection.