SOURCE: Olivier, Theo. “‘Pamela’ and ‘Shamela’: A Reassessment.” English Studies in Africa: A Journal of the Humanities 17, no. 2 (September 1974): 59-70.

[In the following essay, Olivier maintains that Fielding's purpose in Shamela was not much different from that of Samuel Richardson in Pamela, in that both attempt to entertain, but do so by different means.]

All fools have still an itching to deride,
And fain would be upon the laughing side.

(Pope, Essay on Criticism)

To approach a comparison between Richardson and Fielding today poses some rather formidable problems, not the least that of saying anything original in the perspective of cumulative scholarly pronouncement. The topic is an old one which has had the benefit, as a motivating force, of a convenient divergence in personality between the two writers—so much so indeed that it seems strange that normally suspicious critics and scholars have not noticed the trap of an over-facile distinction between the “appropriately opposite types” who gave birth respectively to the “inward, analytic” style and the “outward, society-directed” approach.¹ However that may be, the fact is that a considerable body of learned opinion exists to intimidate any who might wish to read either of these authors with a different emphasis.

Almost everyone favours Coleridge's view of Fielding: “To take him up after Richardson is like emerging from a sick-room heated by stoves, into an open lawn on a breezy day in May.”² Yet this represents an apostatization;³ the valuation of Richardson's best-seller is too well documented to need recounting here, but even allowing for altered standards and taste we should surely pay some heed to the very large popular success it enjoyed. Is it reasonable that such opinion can have been totally misguided and unworthy of respect in our own day? Can we simply dismiss Dr Johnson's constant belief in the greater worth of Richardson; is Pope's good opinion to be taken simply as aberrant; were Blake's morals faulty that Richardson “won his heart”?⁴

Partly to anticipate affirmative answers to these questions, I should add that the approval of these men will not serve in quite the way that now seems necessary. Pope's view appears to be limited to the comment that Pamela would “do more good than many volumes of sermons”,⁵ which is capable of varied interpretation and might most meaningfully be read as a critical dig at contemporary sermon-writing, although a positive tribute to Richardson is clear in the version recorded in Dr Cheyne's letter of 12 February, 1741:

Mr Pope here charg'd me to make his warm Compliments to you as an honest good Man, and to tell you that he had read Pamela with great Approbation and Pleasure, and wanted a Night's Rest in finishing it, and says it will do more good than a great many of the now Sermons.⁶

Johnson's various comparisons between Richardson and Fielding tend to be too generalized to be of much pertinence except perhaps as an indication of his own limiting rigidity about Fielding: it is all very well to be told that there is “more knowledge of the human heart in a page of Richardson than in all Fielding”,⁷ but one's wish to concur is distressingly tempered by the further statement, “I, indeed, never read Joseph Andrews”, which Battestin uses as an ironic epigraph to his study of that novel.

What seems to be necessary now is a double reappraisal; on the one hand, of the weight of critical antipathy to Richardson and his novel, and on the other, of the validity of Fielding's seminal parody. What I shall try to do in the present essay is to suggest not merely that Richardson is easily undervalued but that the gap between him and Fielding is not so great as is sometimes held.

It might be argued that the choice of Pamela and Shamela as representative works of these authors is a perverse avoidance of the really significant. This is undeniable as far as Shamela is concerned since, notwithstanding the practically complete case for Fielding's authorship,⁸ he never acknowledged the work as his. I should not concede the point so readily in the case of Pamela however, if only because Richardson never abandoned the feeling he had for his heroine's integrity, even though he recognized the need for some reworking later on:

I intend to give to my good Pamela my last Hand. I find I shall correct it much; but shall have a particular Regard to preserve the Simplicity of the Character.⁹

But quite apart from these considerations there is something to be gained from the choice, since nowhere else are these authors so close together. And where this has normally offered such plentiful scope for the writer set on demonstrating the obvious contrasts to the advantage of Fielding, I hope that putting the qualities of the two works into adjacent focus might help a little towards achieving a balance.

A major aspect of the case against Richardson is implicit in the dual nature of the English novel—an aspect of the dichotomy in all art—its need to give both pleasure and profit. Rather, it rests on our expectations about this need, for the difficulty arises over the manner in which these elements are fused. Educated taste seems to require subtlety—we do not like our pleasure too overtly dosed with profit, the sugar covering the pill should not dissolve too abruptly. And should a writer tell, us bluntly that he intends to teach us, we seem to feel obliged to cry “wolf”. We feel by contrast an aura of great truth in the statement that,

The most moral writers … are those who do not pretend to inculcate any moral. The professed moralist almost unavoidably degenerates into the partisan of a system.¹⁰

But what is illustrated here is both the strength and weakness of generalization, which, as George Eliot pithily tells us, “gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals”.¹¹ Moreover recent studies tend to indicate—notably that of Battestin—no one was a greater “parisan of a system” than Fielding; and no writer contrives his situations or makes his comments more obviously to point a moral than Fielding. Nor is Fielding afraid to profess his moral, as his constant addresses to the reader surely witness.

Such professed moralizing is indisputably what was intended by Richardson, as the Familiar Letters (out of which Pamela grew) sufficiently indicate, claiming as they do to show those “unable to indite for themselves … how they should think and act in common cases”.¹² Richardson's physician, Dr George Cheyne, suggests clearly the temper of the time in this respect:

In fine, considering the present Degeneracy and lapse of Humane Nature, the present deep Corruption of the Age and this Nation, the present Condition and Laws of Mortality, and Mr Bailie's being obliged by his Station and Employment, to live always in the great World, where the Temptations are most and greatest: He was … the most perfect Instance of HUMANITY, BENEVOLENCE, Christian Fortitude, Perseverance, and Universal Charity, I ever knew … and I heartily wish his Example may influence and excite many of his Countrymen to follow it, and to imitate him.¹³

The emphasis here on moral example, Bailie's being an “Instance”, is representative. His (apparently unposted) reply to one of Cheyne's letters¹⁴ is challengingly blunt and to the point:

I am endeavouring to write a story, which shall catch young and airy Minds … And if I were to be too spiritual, I doubt I should catch none but Grandmothers … I have generally taken Human Nature as it is; for it is to no purpose to suppose it Angelic, or to endeavour to make it so. There is a time of Life in which the Passions will predominate; and Ladies, any more than Men, will not be kept in Ignorance; and if we can properly mingle Instruction with Entertainment, so as to make the latter seemingly the View, while the former is really the End, I imagine it will be doing a good deal … And can this be done, Sir, with young Minds, without blending and enlivening the Serious Part with some soft and tender Pencillings? … My Gentleman is a man of warm Passions, Youthful, unconverted—My Heroine is pious and Virtuous, but blooming in Youth and Beauty, which were the first Attractions to him.¹⁵

This letter gives Richardson's rationale for Pamela and I shall try below to indicate that he achieves its stated ends, that the mingling was indeed proper.

The preoccupation with Richardson's conscious moral purpose has given us another easy generalization: that he gave us the inward-looking novel of sentimental analysis, while Fielding directs us outwards towards the social perspective. This is often simply a way of saying that Richardson is ‘heavy’: the implication of inwardness is that he is one-sided, that for pleasure we had better read Fielding. The letter just quoted suggests that it is time to reassess this generalization. Dr Cheyne's evidence is again noteworthy; he assures us shortly after Pamela's appearance that the book “entertain'd me and all mine … extremely”, and goes on:

it will certainly sell vastly and I hope do a great deal of Good all my Acquaintances to whom I recommended it were much pleased and entertain'd with it, it is really finely wrought up, and delicately imagin'd in a great many Incidents and I never thought you Master of so much Wit and Gallantry as are couch'd in it, you need not be asham'd to own it, it will do no Dishonour either to your Heart or your Head.¹⁶

It is evident from his correspondence that Dr Cheyne's taste is representative of the time, both in the desire for moral example and in the qualities admired in phrases such as “interesting Incidents” and “unexpected Events”, and in the comment “Readers love Rapidity in Narrations and quick Returns keep them from doseing”. If these comments represent the typical audience response that Richardson might expect, then it is no wonder that the first part of Pamela succeeded so well, for few books can boast so close a resemblance to what was wanted, few writers in teaching have been so much students of their readers. Even sixty years after Pamela's appearance, in a period when, Downs tells us, the younger generation was hardening against Richardson, Francis Jeffrey could see the popular appeal of the Familiar Letters and recommend them albeit somewhat tartly as likely to be “of singular use to Mr Wordsworth and his friends in their great scheme of turning all our poetry into the language of the common people”.¹⁷ Also very interesting is the view in this article reviewing Mrs Barbauld's biographical edition of Richardson's letters, that “All Richardson's novels … are narrative” and that “the style … might be perfectly copied though the epistolary form were dropped”. This rightly suggests the importance of incident in his writing, of the story-telling element which is perhaps the basis of all literary entertainment.

The complaint that Richardson moralizes too directly is, however, of a general nature and could be held equally against many other writers. More specifically damaging is the accusation that his morals—at least in Pamela—are merely specious, that he is utterly shallow and that Pamela herself deserves caricaturization as Shamela. This is by no means an easy charge to contradict, but I shall try to indicate that it has not been demonstrated, and that Fielding's derisive parody is simply a counter-assertion of infinitely less worth morally and as entertainment.

A fundamental aspect of anti-Richardson criticism is a sense of antipathy to his effeminate tendencies. By the time that the hardening attitude of the early nineteenth century had matured, Richardson was thoroughly the object of Victorian scorn; for Thackeray in 1853, Pamela was a work “for which … one can understand the hearty contempt and antipathy which such an athletic and boisterous genius as Fielding's must have entertained”.¹⁸ Nor was this merely a Victorian enthusiasm; as recently as 1947, Willcock's study of Fielding as A True-Born Englishman decided that he was “one of the most typical Englishmen who ever lived”, echoing Thackeray's conclusion that Fielding was “the manly, the English, Harry Fielding”. The associated attack on Richardson seems to be to some extent based on his personal shortcomings rather than on his literary failings, though doubtless the two would be seen as indivisible. Even in the technical matter of versification, weak endings are dubbed “feminine”, and it would seem that effeminacy, to the English critical mind, is something negative, a lack of character rather than a particular one.

Nor is this legacy quite spent. With the New Criticism came a less personal approach to literary comment, and disapprobation of Richardson's oddities shifted to the more pertinent charge of moral contradiction in his writing; yet scorn was still a part of even ‘objective’ criticism—consider Battestin's scathing contempt for his “triumphant virgin”, his “silly and immoral book”.¹⁹ Where Richardson was previously criticized for being an old maid, he came to be damned for having an old (and hypocritical) maid's values. This does of course represent a better state of critical affairs, but it is as well to remember the possible presence of such a bias in our reading even of modern criticism and to temper its weightiness accordingly.

Nonetheless, Richardson stands accused of shallow and false morals. Leaving aside for the moment Shamela,²⁰ let us look at some specific arguments and see whether we may accept them entirely, or whether it might not be better to have some reservations. Almost as quick off the mark as Fielding was the still anonymous author of Pamela Censured, who makes his point quite fully in his complete title:

Shewing that under the Specious Pretence of Cultivating the Principle of Virtue in the Minds of the Youth of both Sexes, the most Artful and Alluring Amorous Ideas are convey'd.²¹

As Kreissman rightly sees, this is essentially an attack on Richardson's sincerity of purpose. The scenes of attempted rape in Pamela, it is suggested, are the end for which he wrote. This, on the plainest a priori grounds, is absurd, and suggests rather the critic's own prurience in his merely listing the “choice” passages. But it is a complaint that was and is common. (Dobson characterizes the “embarrassment” felt by contemporary readers, and evidently something needed to be chastened—censored—in the French translation by M. Prévost.) It is a charge that requires not so much an answer as a retort: the onus of prurience is on the reader, not on the author. It is part of Richardson's technique to give fullness of detail, and if this includes embarrassing references, then it is better to remember who is embarrassed and to ask why than to protest.

A more serious level of criticism—still apart from Fielding, though it is he who first pointed to it—can be seen in Mrs Barbauld:

The moral of this piece is more dubious than … the author's friends were willing to allow. So long as Pamela is solely occupied in schemes to escape from her persecutor, her virtuous resistance obtains our unqualified approbation; but from the moment she begins to entertain hopes of marrying him we admire her guarded prudence, rather than her purity of mind. She has an end in view, an interested end, and we can only consider her as the conscious possessor of a treasure, which she is wisely resolved not to part with but for its just price.²²

Dobson suggests that this is the ‘last word’ in the criticism of Pamela, and indeed it is practically the form which all modern writers tend to adopt in judging the work. What this attack ultimately comes down to is a charge of incompetence: thus Downs makes the point that there is a gap (even in Clarissa) between Richardson's intention and his practice, that he makes his characters preach Christian values while they indulge in most un-Christian practices, and that therefore we must distrust his “speculative and reasoning faculties”. The position is summed up by Battestin in his statement that in Fielding's eyes London had gone wild over “an egregiously bad and pretentious book—a book morally contemptible and technically incompetent.”²³

Clearly, there can be no simply theoretical answer to such a blunt charge; the challenge of incompetence is a generalization and as such can only be repudiated—or made good—by detailed analysis, but as a thorough-going approach is manifestly impossible here, I shall confine my comments to what I take to be the salient points up to Pamela's marriage. Obviously, it is practically impossible now to approach a reading of Pamela without bias. The reader will usually come to the work via a tradition of moral clarity and earnestness—the tradition of Jane Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad and Lawrence. Ours is a morally aware age, constantly concerned to unmask pretence and pretentiousness, angry at hypocrisy, undeceived by affectation; we are, that is, firmly in the tradition of Fielding and on the side of generous-spirited honesty, as in the “good heart” of Tom Jones, of Joseph Andrews and his Quixotic friend Parson Adams. When we confront Richardson we expect a similar correspondence between our response and the writer's intention. But if our literary training has been at all orthodox, we will have been well primed with the failure of Richardson's intention, and we will be alert for a false note in Pamela's character: we wait constantly for her to trip herself and confirm what we expect. A maiming consequence is that an unbiased reading is now made more difficult, for if we simply believe what critics tell us, we find the faults to be very clear, whereas if we do not, we tend to apply opposite bias and can barely avoid reading with a sense of wanting to justify apparent faults.

Richardson begins his story with the fact of Pamela's already achieved elevation in fortune; her parents' concern for her is lest she should be “brought to anything dishonest or wicked, by being set so above yourself” (p. 5).²⁴ They clearly approve of her “improvement”, averring that “Everybody talks how you have come on …” But they are afraid, for “what avails all this, if you are to be ruin'd and undone!” This suggests indeed an entirely conventional awareness that fortune is fickle, which is the main burden of the letter. They fear a design because they doubt the squire's intent. The likelihood of a second altruistic sponsor for Pamela simply seems remote to them, and their doubt is soon apparently justified in their own eyes by Mr B. He is all concern and approval at first; the new master of the house being patronizing to his servants. He is agreeably impressed by Pamela's “tolerable” spelling and her “pretty” handwriting, and suggests that she may go on in this improvement and use his mother's books. But if there is any design in this, it is not evident; moreover, the passage suggests that his intentions at this stage are not necessarily reprehensible—a man wishing no more than a sexual conquest over the servant would surely not be concerned for her improvement. Should he, however, have something more in mind, her refinement would be of interest. Even the Andrews recognize that his attentions “truly, are very great favours, if he means well” (p. 6). Richardson presents us at the outset with a deliberately ambiguous situation in which are juxtaposed an apparently generous master whose motives are trusted by Pamela, and the suspicious mistrust of the parents who do not expect fortune to go on smiling. This is characteristic of the novel's structure.

As the tale unfolds, the reader is given more and more corroboration of the rightness of the Andrews's mistrust. Yet, at the same time, there is a contradictory movement in Pamela's hope; her parents' letter has filled her with trouble, for as she says, “it has made my heart, which was overflowing with gratitude for my master's goodness, suspicious and fearful” (p. 8). She is upset that they mistrust her “honesty”, and points out that she has the love of everybody: “Sure they can't all have designs against me because they are civil!” (p. 8). A further suggestion that there is more to Mr B's attentions than mere lust, comes in letter 4 where Pamela is pleased with the idea that she is regarded as a “very pretty wench”, and with Lady Davers' having “taken great notice” of her. This concerted interest by brother and sister seems to imply rather more than an evil design; at least the ambiguity is there to facilitate the later turn from evil to good. Pamela suggests too, quite sensibly, that “I am sure my master would not demean himself so, as to think upon such a poor girl as I, for my harm. For such a thing would ruin his credit as well as mine … who, to be sure, may expect one of the best ladies in the land” (p. 12).

It is worth noticing how much this notion of something positively generous and good is emphasized in these opening pages of the book. In Pamela's eyes, Mr B has the character of her angelic late mistress, which is a significant point to remember for her later inability to hate him. However, his fall from grace is dramatic, and with letter 10 the long struggle begins abruptly: “yes, I must call him a gentleman, tho' he has fallen from the merit of that title” (p. 19). In his “true colours”, “nothing appears so black and so frightful”. Yet she is not merely the outraged girl—there is a degree of pique in her sense of duty slighted:

And yet I work all hours with my needle, upon his linen, and the fine linen of the family; and am, besides, about flowering him a waistcoat.—But, oh! my heart's broken almost; for what am I likely to have for my reward, but shame and disgrace, or else ill words, and hard treatment!

(p. 20)

Pamela faces a dilemma made particularly prickly by the difference in station between herself and the man she obviously finds attractive, whom she would not dare to think of, yet with whom she already begins to equate herself; what is this but a petulant girl complaining of her lover's slight—without any serious suggestion of giving him up:

May be I he and him him too much: But it is his own fault, if I do. For why did he lose all his dignity with me?

(p. 21)

It seems significant that this passage—giving her subsequent state of mind—should precede the actual description of the first “attack” on her. Had Richardson wished to show the relationship as a merely lustful escapade with no possible development, he would surely have given his reader the shock of an unprepared and blunt attack. What he does give us is the first of many increasingly complex descriptions which seem to point obviously in one direction—the straightforward depiction of a rapacious opportunist and his effect of fear, anger and scorn on Pamela—yet which contain cumulative hints of something else, a wish to think better, which eventually grows into a distinctly perceived desire. Mr B acts like an opportunist, but we must recall Richardson's unposted letter to Cheyne; he is a young man of “warm passions, unconverted”, wanting to make his feelings known, but blundering and clumsy in his approach. A very large part of our objection to Mr B is to his abusive language to Pamela, his assumption that she should bow to his rank. Tom Jones is the essence of generosity and consideration and therefore we like him, yet he is scarcely less of an opportunist with a willing wench. Further, Mr B is an altogether tenuous position: as the master he must keep his distance just as much as the servant must keep hers.

The question of why Pamela does not do something to avoid the attentions of Mr B arises directly after the first attack. She should run away, but that is more easily demanded of her than done; her fears about the loss of her good name and the likelihood of accusations of theft are quite adequate to forestall any such impulsive move. Then again there is the possibility that she is fascinated by Mr B. At 15 she can scarcely be thought to have a clear knowledge of her own desires, or expected to see the rational path through the problems that now confront her. Little wonder that she should long for the simplicity of her “grey russet again”. Her confusion is reiterated at the end of this letter:

O that I had never left my little bed in the loft, to be thus exposed to temptations on one hand, or disgusts on the other!

(p. 28)

—which makes the mixture of responses explicit, while Richardson implies a deepening of his intentions in the next letter from her parents:

Temptations are sore things; but yet, without them, we know not ourselves, nor what we are able to do.

(p. 29)

Thus he ravels his tale, alternately confirming our (and Pamela's) anger and contempt for Mr B, and sowing seeds of hope that his intent may lead to something more.

Mr B's letter, handed to her at the farmhouse, speaks in a tone of some openness of using her honourably. Even though Pamela does not trust this letter, she is aware of the peculiar complexity of the affair, for surely no simple lust would take so much trouble? As she says,

here are strange pains taken to ruin a poor innocent, helpless, and even worthless young body. This plot is laid too deep, and has been too long hatching, to be baffled, I fear.

(p. 172)

She might have concluded, “to be believed”, for it is incredibly elaborate for a single-minded game of cat and mouse.

In spite of Mrs Jewkes's delineation as a “procuress”, she admits to understand something of the matter, hinting that Pamela “will soon be mistress of us all”. Moreover in spite of the barbarities of her usage by Mrs Jewkes and Mr B, Pamela is concerned when he comes to grief in crossing a stream. She asks “what is the matter, that, with all his ill usage of me, I cannot hate him?” (p. 297), and this confession is a vital element in the continuity of Richardson's suggestion that Pamela is attracted to Mr B. Thus his “seven articles” by way of proposition to keep her as his mistress seem to have little real effect on her when, having survived another attempt, she watches him from her window: “he was charmingly dress'd: to be sure, he is a handsome fine gentleman; … what pity his heart is not as good as his appearance! Why can't I hate him?” (p. 329).

Not even the deceit and trickery of the final attempt can turn her absolutely against this apparently insufferable man. She is very willing to clutch at the straw of his kindness to her the next day, and is now aware of her desire for him. She begins “to be afraid, I know too well the reason why all his hard trials of me, and my black apprehensions, would not let me hate him” (p. 359). But even this good turn is controverted by the fortune-teller's note, so that she is anguished by the fact that she has “as good as confess'd I love him” and must therefore “break this wicked, forward heart” of hers that won't be “taught to hate him” (p. 376).

Richardson is playing a conscious game of suspense with his audience. He is by nature a story-teller, and he has consistently complicated what is basically a very simple tale, presenting the same fact repeatedly, each time with a new overlay of reasons both for and against the central issue of the motives relative to Pamela's virtue and its reward. This concern is kept firmly before our eyes by the repetition of situation and even by the simple printing device of the running title, which emphasizes this issue across every opening of the book. As Mr B's ingenuity increases, Pamela's resistance is more sorely tried and her resourcefulness grows with his cunning—hence, perhaps, Mrs Barbauld's and others' interpretation of her as having “guarded prudence” and a “just price”. Richardson sets up each situation to show how Pamela gets out of it—as in the continuing popular tradition of the thriller—even down to the detail of the final attempt where Mr B exclaims “You see, now you are in my power!—You cannot get from me, nor help yourself” (p. 341). It is the classic situation and the classic wording is used except that here, though the reader's antipathy is aroused against the villain while his sympathy grows for the heroine, his response is complicated by the constant hints that the opposition between heroine and villain is not simple.

In insisting on her own view of Pamela's motives, Mrs Barbauld missed Richardson's insistent method suggested in outline above; she also missed what Pamela actually achieves by holding out for her “just price”; the transformation of a libertine opportunist into a generous husband—a not unworthy end nor an entirely unexpected one. It is developed from a passion never quite so crass as to enforce its satisfaction, in a character whose villainy never really outweighs an amusing propensity to blunder.

No one will now attempt to dispute Fielding's qualities: he both delights and instructs us. Yet Fielding grew up in literature as a reactionary writer, one who depended on the folly of others to supply the matter for his work. Both as a dramatist and as a journalist he kept his sights on the statements and actions of others, and shot them down when they committed breaches of sense or taste. Thus Humphreys gives us a picture of his “corrective and orthodox” irony which “prunes society of perversions”,²⁵ while Irwin sees him as taking over Pope's crusade against dullness, using a constant empirical method, the “simple exposure of words and actions”.²⁶ From the mere fact that almost no one now reads his plays and pamphlets it was as well that he abandoned this dependent approach and found his own positive hobby-horse in Joseph Andrews. That he did so by standing on Richardson's shoulders is a point that bears reiteration in the present context.

While the critical consensus seems to be that it need not be set up in opposition to Pamela or demand our attention in place of Richardson's book, there is nevertheless a distinct sense that Shamela is a necessary antidote to the “poison” of Pamela—which is indeed the term Fielding uses in parson Oliver's closing remarks to parson Tickletext. The danger of this view is that this essentially parasitic work is invested with power to dictate our response to Pamela: “we can never again read Richardson's novel as once we did, never again take it quite so seriously”.²⁷ There are, doubtless, many moments in Pamela when one does feel irritated—by a situation that seems improbable, by characters who seem insufferable, by actions that seem falsely motivated, by moral responses that are different from our own. Richardson, in trying to maintain an air of tension, has created a world in which his characters seem to think and act in a mutually contradictory way. In a word, he laid himself open to a charge of affectation which, to Fielding, was as a red rag to a bull. Fielding's nature, as Battestin suggests, fitted him for the satire of Pamela—as did his dramatic and other writing experience. His nature comes out in the shape of a snort, partly of anger, partly of satisfaction at a prime object for his skill.

Critical comment on Shamela has been predictably slight, and although it ranges from Dobson's remark that “if Fielding wrote it, he must have been glad to forget it”,²⁸ to Baker's “a masterpiece … the best parody in English literature”,²⁹ there seems to be a general agreement that the work will not bear scrutiny. The inherent difficulty of putting much weight on it lies, ironically parallel with the complaint against its original, in the very great difference in tone and worthiness between its motivation and its expression. On the one hand Fielding's sense of the need to ‘expose’ both what he felt to be the moral falsity of Pamela and the folly of its great esteem is pertinently stated in the title, in the brief letter of “the editor to himself”, and in Oliver's response to Tickletext's enthusiasm. On the other hand, we hear little but the bull snorting rather gleefully at each thrust.

What Fielding essentially does in Shamela is to give a cynical reading of Pamela; he chooses to put a malicious interpretation on the heroine's actions—one that simply refuses to believe in the human variability and mixed, changing feelings of that very young girl. But to hold that Shamela ‘exposes’ Pamela is to have altogether too much faith in the authority of one set of values over another.

Fielding justifies his view by reducing the tale to what he takes to be its essence, a series of bedroom scenes in which the wily Shamela lures the fumbling Mr Booby to his fate. But after the first few pages it bears virtually no relation to Pamela whatever. No fair appraisal of Pamela can see the ‘real’ Pamela in Fielding's bawd who complains, “by Ill-luck Mrs. Jervis came in, and had like to have spoiled sport” (p. 19).³⁰ What Fielding weaves is a patchwork of bawdy witticism—

After what hath happened, I should know thee out of any Dress from all thy sex … (p. 32) I remembered, Mamma, the Instructions you gave me to avoid being ravished, and followed them, which soon brought him to Terms, and he promised me on quitting my hold, that he would leave the Bed. O Parson Williams, how little are all the Men in the World compared to thee …

(p. 50)

—which is indeed funny, but not because it makes us see the real Pamela underlying Richardson's character. We laugh partly at the mere bawdy, partly at the inherent comedy of the situation; thinking, in effect, wouldn't the tale be funny if it were inverted. This is fine as long as we remember that it is simply an inverted situation, but if we insist on making the inversion the reality, then our laughter must be seen as hollow, a mere “itching to deride”.³¹

However, Fielding's genius is by no means absent from Shamela. It does not lie so much in opening our eyes to Pamela's true nature as in detecting the framework for satire of a more positive kind. Almost by accident, the make-believe inversion of Richardson's world gives him the figure of Parson Williams. Here, more clearly, is justifiable invention, for his parson has some bearing on Richardson's Williams. The latter author's dubious portrait of the willing, serviceable Williams does not quite deserve Fielding's vicious depiction, yet this treatment recognizes the basic self-seeking that even Richardson partly implied in the parson's eagerness to offer himself to Pamela. Woods has rightly pointed out the heavy emphasis in Shamela on the clergy and that a main function of the work is to reprimand the clergy for accepting Pamela so approvingly, hence Williams, “a minor figure in Richardson, was elevated to equal rank with Shamela”. In Williams, Fielding saw by exaggeration rather than by inversion, the type of hypocritical minister he could not stomach, one who could manipulate Whitefieldean doctrine to suit his own comfort; thus he is more than a satire of Richardson's Williams, more even than a “rascally disciple” of Whitefield, “his character is a synthesis that is set up as warning to the clergy of 1741”.³²

Once Shamela has been created, Williams is a natural adjunct, and once he has his teeth into the character, Fielding finds his metier. It has been customary to read Joseph Andrews as a book that suddenly found its feet in the creation of Parson Adams, a view that has been modified recently, but I would suggest that this can be better claimed for Shamela in the creation of Parson Williams. What has been rather flimsy fabrication, witticism in the mode of his early farces, suddenly becomes pithy Fielding:

I hope you have remembered your Promise, to bring me a leaden Canister of Tobacco (the Saffron Cut) for in Troth, this Country at present affords nothing worthy the replenishing a Tube with. Some I tasted the other Day at an Alehouse, gave me the Heart-Burn, tho' I filled no oftner than five Times.

(p. 37)

We are at once in the world of Barnabas and Trulliber where the arrogant, worldly parson asserts himself under cover of religion, relishing his ale, tobacco, and (venial) sins secure in the comfort of assured grace that can accommodate any amount of uncharitableness so it be truly repented. His viciousness is barely covered by the humour with which he is treated:

a Contempt of the Clergy is the fashionable Vice of the Times; but let such wretches know, they cannot hate, detest, and despise us, half so much as we do them.

(p. 38)

Indeed, it would not be far wrong to suggest that his is the spirit that dominates Shamela, and that she is virtually his disciple, even echoing his words, “I shall never care a Farthing for my Husband. No, I hate and despise him of all Things” (p. 43).

The use which she and Williams make of Booby is all invention on a plane beyond what Fielding could have derived from Pamela. Once begun, the book is self-propelling and Pamela is virtually forgotten as the greater possibilities suggested in Williams become obvious to Fielding. He seems to be thinking ahead to a framework in which such a figure could be seen in greater development, become the type of a whole set of values which could be shown up for what they are in positive contrast with those of a really Christian parson such as Oliver is, but who is too much in the background in Shamela to stand adequately against the virulence of Williams. That framework obviously hinges about the dominating spirit of Parson Adams, and while McKillop called Joseph Andrews “the greatest of anti-Pamelas”,³³ I should like to think of it as at least equally anti-Shamela. In creating the Shamela world Fielding realized that such an inversion of values could not be the centre of true interest, that a book with such central figures could only be a negative, ephemeral thing that would not endure. Fielding is after all not a cynic; his is a positive view, and in Joseph Andrews it is the positive acts and spirit of charity that hold together in a constant contrast with the goodness of Adams and several minor characters the otherwise loosely-connected series of incidents that tend to show repeatedly how ill most men treat one another.

I hope I have suggested that, ultimately, Richardson and Fielding were after the same ends. Writers such as McKillop, Kermode, and Humphreys,³⁴ have given us insight into the seriousness of Richardson's mode, into the tragic emphases and complications of motive in his work. I hope to have suggested rather his qualities as an entertainer, albeit in a different mood from that of Fielding, yet still valid and as legitimate as the witty. My aim has been to show that some of the weight of the case against him is simply ballast, and by probing some of it, I hope that a degree of redistribution has been achieved. What should be evident is that Richardson has borne a good deal of unjust criticism on grounds that are too easily accepted as valid. He deserves a reading that is as far as possible unprejudiced by this superabundance of adverse opinion. Conversely, Fielding is not overpraised so much as he is embarrassed by misdirected valuation of Shamela.

Richardson, in Pamela, entertains by means of suspense and tends to demonstrate that virtue eventually triumphs over vice. Fielding, in Shamela, denies that Richardson does this and entertains by bawdy wit; yet in Joseph Andrews he entertains mainly by ironic contrast, and tends to show good acts outweighing ill nature. This is not very far from Richardson's position, and as he moved closer to Richardson, so he sought to heal the breach that had arisen between them, becoming one of Clarissa's followers and among the correspondents who tried to persuade the author to end that work happily—by marrying the embattled heroine to the rake. Perhaps Fielding really did wish to forget Shamela.

Notes

1. M. C. Battestin, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (London, 1961).

2. T. M. Raysor, Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism (London, 1936).

3. F. Kermode, ‘Richardson and Fielding’, Cambridge Journal 4, 1950.

4. B. W. Downs, Richardson (London, 1928).

5. Variously cited, this taken from B. Kreissman, Pamela-Shamela (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1960).

6. Letters of Dr George Cheyne to Samuel Richardson, Edinburgh University Library, MS Laing III, 356.

7. W. Hazlitt, On the English Novelists (London, 1819).

8. In this essay I have simply accepted the piece as Fielding's.

9. Letter to Rev. Stinstra, cited by I. A. Williams, ‘Two kinds of Richardson’, London Mercury 7, 1923.

10. Hazlitt, On the English Novelists.

11. Middlemarch (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 638.

12. A. Dobson, Samuel Richardson (London, 1902).

13. Cheyne, letter XI, 23 August 1738.

14. Cheyne, letter XLIII.

15. Cited by A. D. McKillop, Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (London, 1936).

16. Cheyne, letter XL, 13 December 1740.

17. Edinburgh Review 9, October 1804.

18. W. M. Thackeray, The English Humorists (London, 1853).

19. Battestin, Joseph Andrews and Shamela.

20. Shamela is the basis of all subsequent criticism and contains within it the essence of both main attacks on Pamela.

21. Cited by Kreissman, Pamela-Shamela.

22. Cited by Dobson, Samuel Richardson.

23. Battestin, Joseph Andrews and Shamela.

24. All page references to the text of Pamela are from the sixth edition, 1742.

25. A. R. Humphreys, ‘Fielding's irony: its methods and effects’, R. E. S. 18, 1942.

26. W. R. Irwin, ‘Satire and comedy in Henry Fielding’, E. L. H. 13, 1946.

27. Battestin, Joseph Andrews and Shamela.

28. Dobson, Samuel Richardson.

29. S. W. Baker, Shamela (London, 1930).

30. Page references to the text of Shamela are from S. W. Baker's edition, 1953.

31. Cf. Epigraph.

32. C. B. Woods, op. cit.

33. McKillop, Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist.

34. A. R. Humphreys, “Richardson's Novels: Words and the ‘Movements within’.” Essays and Studies, NS XXIII, 1970.