'Pamela' in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland
308
'Pamela' in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521110181 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2009 |
| Pages: | 308 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Peter Sabor is Director of the Burney Centre and Canada Research Chair in Eighteenth-Century Studies at McGill University, Montreal.
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Cambridge University Press
0521813379 - Pamela in the Marketplace - Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland - by Thomas Keymer, Peter Sabor
Excerpt
Introduction
This is not a book about Richardson, nor even a book about Fielding. There could be no Pamela controversy without Pamela itself, of course, and like any other groundbreaking work Richardson's novel is valuably illuminated by the appropriations and transformations, the resistant readings and creative misreadings, that followed its publication. Shamela was the most brilliant and influential of these re-readings, and its parodic disruption of the original text, later amplified in Joseph Andrews, gave early shape to a struggle of interpretation that has been remembered ever since as a duel between two canonical titans. To Pamela's first audience, however, this duel must have looked more like a battle royal: a clash of multiple, mutually competitive adversaries, in which no sympathetic allegiance or satirical antagonism was ever complete or stable, and the many contestants in play not only defended Richardson or followed Fielding but also responded to, argued with, and stole from one another in an overlapping series of side-engagements. Something of the complex dynamism involved is caught by Solomon Lowe's wry comment to Richardson, a year after publication, that Pamela had been ‘of so much Service to your very Brethren; witness the Labours of the press in Piracies, in Criticisms, inCavils, in Panegyrics, in Supplements, in Imitations, in Transformations, in Translations, &c, beyond anything I know of’.1 Pamela provoked and enabled a deluge of print, and in this context losses as well as gains have been entailed by a critical tradition in which ‘Richardson and Fielding seem destined for eternal contrast’ (as Allen Michie writes of this tradition)2 while other participants in the controversy languish in eternal eclipse. As a cultural phenomenon, here was something bigger than even its foremost players, and of significance in its own right.
Within the last few years, republication of a much broader sample of Pamela writing has focused new attention on the controversy as a whole, both as an exemplary case of the disputatious, dialogic framework in which so much eighteenth-century literature was produced, and as a necessary context for understanding and interpreting individual contributions.3 As the author of one such study concludes, ‘any discussion of the political implications of Pamela and its many sequels and counter-fictions . . . is caught up in the multiple refractions of alternative readings and characterisations, made by Richardson himself and by his readers and rewriters’.4 In light of these intricate entanglements, the purpose of the present study is to retrieve and analyse the output of Pamela's quarrelsome progeny in all its plenitude and range. Rather than swell the existing body of criticism on Pamela, Shamela and Joseph Andrews, we undertake a compensatory project in which the presence of Richardson and Fielding, though always felt, is secondary to the recovery of their neglected allies and rivals: dramatists and novelists, journalists and artists, professionals and patricians, pirates and hacks.
The scale of the Pamela controversy is if anything more remarkable than Lowe alleges. By the date of his letter, the novel had appeared in six authorized editions (one of them in French), and Richardson had recently published his sequel. Piracies had come out in London and Dublin, an unauthorized newspaper serialization was in progress, and Pamela was shortly to become the first novel printed in America. Even more striking than the number of reprints, as Lowe's improvised taxonomy of reception indicates, was the related output of others. It is now clear that Richardson was underestimating his novel's impact when noting on this letter, late in life, that ‘the History of Pamela gave Birth to no less than 16 Pieces under some of the above or the like Titles’; a similar late note, with the same conservative estimate, is scribbled elsewhere: ‘no less than 16 Pieces, as Remarks, Imitations, Retailings of the Story, Pyracies, &c.’5 Pamela inspired a swarm of uninvited appropriations, a Grubstreet grabfest in which a hungry succession of entrepreneurial opportunists and freeloading hacks – ‘these Poachers in Literature’, a book-trade colleague of Richardson called them6 – moved in for a slice of the action. Items already published in whole or part as Lowe wrote include Shamela, Anti-Pamela and The True Anti-Pamela; Pamela's Conduct in High Life, Pamela in High Life and The Life of Pamela; Pamela Censured and Pamela Versified; and, most recently, The Virgin in Eden (proving ‘Pamela's Letters . . . to be immodest Romances’) and Memoirs of the Life of Lady H------, The Celebrated Pamela. London and Dublin had seen stagings of Pamela. A Comedy, and the text of this play had been published in competition with a rival comedy, Pamela: or, Virtue Triumphant. Pamela poems had appeared in the newspapers and magazines of London and Edinburgh, and even on an illustrated fan. Other engravings based on the novel were already in circulation, as published in Pamela Versified, Pamela in High Life, The Life of Pamela, and a London piracy of Richardson's text; an official illustrated edition was in preparation. Joseph Andrews was shortly to appear, and would be followed by ‘Pamela the Second’ in the Universal Spectator; Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded. An Opera; Pamela: or, The Fair Impostor. A Poem, in Five Cantos; and a play recently discovered in a unique Dublin copy, A Dramatic Burlesque of Two Acts, Call'd Mock-Pamela. Another Irish play is recorded but lost.7
Further publications, without declaring the relationship in their titles, are little less closely connected with Richardson's novel, and less durable forms of cultural production and practice have assumed the dimensions of myth: the Pamela waxworks exhibited off Fleet Street for several months in 1745; the modish ephemera of London's pleasure gardens, one of which was decorated with Pamela canvases while at another ‘it was usual for ladies to hold up the volumes of Pamela to one another, to shew they had got the book that every one was talking of’.8 Other trends of this kind have been forgotten, including an equestrian Pamela vogue that is still faintly recoverable from records of the turf. The first racehorse to be named after Richardson's heroine ran at Reading in July 1741,9 and by 1742 several Pamelas are regularly found in starting line-ups, alongside the usual displays of political allegiance (‘Poor Robin’, ‘Bold Vernon’) and crude innuendo (‘Frisky Fanny’, ‘Bushy Molly’, ‘Stiff Dick’). Two Pamelas were entered for the same race at Epsom in May (both by baronets, one of them a Tory MP), but neither succeeded in beating ‘Merry Pintle’; a third ran disastrously at Earlshilton in June (‘Foxhunter run against a Post . . . upon which Stradler fell over or against him, and Pamela fell over Stradler’); a fourth was running in Ireland by July.10 These horses had begun to age by mid-decade, when ‘Mr. Musters's Ches[tnut] M[are] Pamela, six Years old’ was the strongest survivor, but Richardson's novel retained sufficient currency for a new generation to take their place. The equestrian vogue was alive and well in 1748, when ‘Capt. Shafto's Grey Filly, Pamela’ was among the successes of the Yorkshire season, her virtues rewarded by the Mayday hundred guineas at Blackhambleton and several other prizes.11
More conventional indicators mark the Pamela controversy as a milestone in literary history, including a statistical spike in the production of new fiction that was unprecedented at the time and not reached again until the circulating-library boom of the 1770s. A key moment in the emergence of the novel as a generically self-conscious and culturally central form, the publication of Pamela not only established a compelling prototype for the domestic, epistolary and psychological fiction of the decades to come. By triggering the rival formulations of Fielding, drawing Eliza Haywood back to a mode of writing from which she had drifted, and stimulating a variety of fictional responses from the many other novelists, identifiable or anonymous, discussed in the chapters below, Richardson's novel also provoked enduring debate about the techniques and purposes of the genre, and elicited the much wider repertoire of fictional types that was to dominate production into the nineteenth century. This picture of the controversy as a watershed in generic development, familiar in outline since Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (
A second strain of scholarship moves on from questions of strictly generic history to stress the importance of the Pamela controversy as both an indicator of, and an agent in, the emergence of a thriving, dynamic, and fully commercialized marketplace for print in the Dunciad era. Figures for Pamela's sale have not previously been known, but surviving evidence that a single edition (the third) sold 3,000 copies within two months lends statistical weight to the novel's reputation as, in Terry Eagleton's words, ‘one of the century's best sellers’.15 Even more arresting is the explosion of speculative print surrounding the work: bales of paper that seem to dramatize, or even decisively institute, the nightmare visions of A Tale of a Tub, in which books are like mackerel, fugitive commodities to be noisily hawked as their freshness ebbs. It is a nice paradox that Richardson courted the aging Scriblerians for endorsement of his novel, for in Pamela he unleashed the very phenomenon they most deplored, even as they drew on its energy: a market-led multiplication of lowbrow print, unregulated by traditional considerations of learning, decorum or taste. More recent perspectives emphasize this radical modernity. For Eagleton, Pamela is as brashly commercial as a Hollywood blockbuster, not so much a novel as ‘a whole cultural event . . . the occasion or organizing principle of a multimedia affair, stretching all the way from domestic commodities to public spectacles, instantly recodable from one cultural mode to the next’. William Beatty Warner writes that ‘the cultural location and meaning of novel reading took a decisive turn with the publication of Pamela’, generating an unprecedented ‘media event’ in which the novel became ‘an ambient, pervasive phenomenon’ in the press and public sphere.16 A defining moment in the history of print and consumer culture as well as that of a genre, the controversy gives special insight into the agility, responsiveness and entrepreneurial vigour of eighteenth-century Grubstreet, while also exhibiting the desperation that often drove its efforts. It is salutary to remember that the principal publisher of Pamela's Conduct, Richard Chandler, was shortly to kill himself under pressure of debt, and that Shamela was probably written in the bailiff's sponging-house where Fielding was confined in the month before publication:17 the acquisition of money, in both these works, was no mere abstract theme.
To write about Pamela was not only to engage in commercial opportunism or a dispute about literary technique, however; it was also to take a position, whether consciously or not, on social and sexual politics. A third strain of criticism has stressed the ideological undercurrents of the controversy, finding in Richardson's euphoric tale of social mobility and transgressive marriage a set of provocative messages about gender and class, and interpreting the hostile interrogations of Pamela's character that proliferated after Shamela as evidence of a conservative backlash. By locating virtue in a voice from below, asserting the spiritual equality of servant and princess, and inserting this servant into the social elite as an agent of reformation, Richardson's novel disrupted many of the assumptions on which traditional hierarchy rested, and cried out for refutation. The text is laden ‘with revolutionary moral and social implications . . . its impulses are insistently, even convulsively, antihierarchical’, as Terry Castle writes, and in this context Fielding's parody is often read, for all its levity and exuberance, as a rearguard reassertion of patrician values.18 At the most obvious level, debate turned on local ambiguities in Pamela's representation: the veracity of her narration, the sincerity of her motivation. Increasingly in play beneath the surface, however, were the larger uncertainties of an age in which social distinctions were coming to seem perilously fluid and their ideological foundations unstable – a trend crystallized for contemporaries by several high-profile breaches of endogamy in society to which the novel was publicly compared.
Critics have sometimes overstated Pamela's credentials as a working-class heroine, not only because of the anachronistic connotations of ‘class’ in a society still organized by traditional stratifications of rank, but also because Richardson was careful to modify her lowness with traces of ancestral respectability: as George Cheyne wrote, with only slight exaggeration, ‘Your Heroine you have made a Gentlewoman originally and distinguished only [on her marriage] by some Ounces of shining Metal’.19 Readings of Shamela as a reactionary critique of social levelling tend to rest, moreover, on a basic confusion between Fielding and the character of Parson Oliver (whose paranoid commentary, in neo-Scriblerian style, is part of the satire), while also neglecting the celebratory relish of Shamela's representation and the awkward fact that Fielding himself was later to marry a servant. Nonetheless, there can be no question that for other writers of the controversy Pamela did indeed present an affront (albeit sometimes a welcome affront) to hierarchical assumptions, and the novel remained an instinctive touchstone for decades when any question of marital misalliance came up. In Francis Coventry's Pompey the Little (
Other issues at stake in the Pamela controversy, though more peripheral to modern critical preoccupations with gender and class, sparked no less fire among readers at the time. If Fielding's satire carried serious ideological freight, indeed, it lay more in religion and ethics than in questions of rank. By alleging the poverty of a notion of virtue that fails to go beyond chastity and justification by faith, Shamela implicates Richardson's narrative of virtue rewarded in larger theological controversies concerning the rival claims on the Christian soul of inward piety and outward action, and links the novel in particular with the self-regarding providentialism of George Whitefield. These objections were real and durable enough to resonate in Fielding's later works. In Tom Jones, the proposition ‘that Virtue is the certain Road to Happiness’ holds good for an inward-looking, stay-at-home prudence that unmistakably recalls his earliest responses to Pamela, but not for that more commendable benevolence ‘which is always busying itself without Doors, and seems as much interested in pursuing the Good of others as its own’; a conspicuous instance of the former quality is the pious widow of a Turkey merchant, ‘whose Virtue was rewarded by his dying, and leaving her very rich’.22 Nor was Fielding the only writer to detect in Pamela a whiff of enthusiasm that alarmingly suggested – for all the confessional orthodoxy of its author – the dissenting radicalism of Defoe or the upswell of popular Methodism. Fifteen years later, when a survivor of the Lisbon earthquake described his deliverance with a mixture of providential rhetoric and circumstantial bathos that was now familiar (‘I have been miraculously preserved . . . but I have no shoes to put on my feet’), there remained no more obvious or economical rebuke than to mock him as ‘Master Pamela’.23
Even the proper pronunciation of Pamela's name became a matter of controversy, albeit one that was still inflected by the persistent issue of social hierarchy. ‘Pamela’ was originally the name of a romance princess (in Sidney's Arcadia), not an upstart servant, and had also featured in poems by Waller, Pope and others. For readers determined to prove the ignorance and vulgarity of the novel, Richardson's accenting, evident from the scansion of Pamela's verses on herself, was a solecism at odds with the etymologically correct accenting of the poets, and made offensively audible his perversion of established convention. Aaron Hill came ingeniously to Richardson's defence by concocting a new etymology for the name, involving a short Greek epsilon as opposed to a long eta, but a sense persisted that here was a symbolically important breach of propriety and tradition.24 The dispute was heated enough to be recalled and satirized years later: ‘all the pretty Gentlemen in the Kingdom were deciding the proper Pronunciation of the Name Pamela’, remembers a character in Sarah Scott, and Sarah Fielding creates a pedant who, ‘if the Question arose, whether the e, in Pamela, should be pronounced long or short . . . had immediate Recourse to the Greek Prosodia for a Determination’.25 Mere vowels were now weapons of debate, and nowhere more so than in the devastating shift in orthography that became shorthand, in the work of Fielding's many imitators, for the subversive reinterpretation of Pamela's virtue. Fielding did not coin the term ‘vartue’ in response to Richardson, as is usually assumed (he uses it a decade earlier in his play Rape upon Rape, and may have borrowed it from a Vanbrugh comedy about moral and social affectation),26 but the word sums up the fundamental question of identity on which everything in the controversy hinged.
This view of the radical divisiveness of Richardson's novel finds its classic statement in the unlikely shape of a plagiarized report, first published in English in 1750, but traceable to a Danish work of 1744:
There are Swarms of Moral Romances. One, of late Date, divided the World into such opposite Judgments, that some extolled it to the Stars, whilst others treated it with Contempt. Whence arose, particularly among the Ladies, two different Parties, Pamelists and Antipamelists. This Book describes a poor young Chambermaid, with whom a Gentleman of Fortune falls in Love, and endeavours, by Power and Subtilty, to corrupt; but her Virtue and Chastity prove so great, that she could not be prevailed upon to grant unwarrantable Favours. Hence, after some time, his impure Love turns to Esteem; insomuch, that, without regarding the Inequality of their Conditions, he marries her. Some look upon this young Virgin as an Example for Ladies to follow; nay, there have been those, who did not scruple to recommend this Romance from the Pulpit. Others, on the contrary, discover in it, the Behaviour of an hypocritical, crafty Girl, in her Courtship; who understands the Art of bringing a Man to her Lure. Both these Judgments, I think, are in the Extreme. For we cannot entirely rely upon the Conduct of such a Girl; because we frequently find, that Men are imposed upon by pretended Virtue: and yet every Instance of Virtue must not be deemed Hypocrisy. Women of real Religion may be found, who have no such sinister Views. I comply so far with the Ladies, whose Friendship I always cultivate, as to reckon Pamela of this last good Sort; especially as, in her Prosperity, her Conduct is similar to what it was before; so that she pleases every body by her Civility, Modesty, and obliging Behaviour. Her History, indeed, would have been more exemplary, and her Conduct less exceptionable, if this Heroine, after suffering so many Persecutions, had continued in her low Condition; for, thus she would have avoided the Censure now pass'd upon her. At least, she might have made her Admirer wait a few Years, before she concluded the Match. Nevertheless, I approve of this Romance, so far as it contains just Sentiments, and holds out an Example of Virtue and Honour. At the same time, I cannot allow it to be a Master-piece; and by no Means think it deserves to be recommended from the Pulpit. For tho' there are some instructive Parts in this Work; yet there are others too licentious. And certainly the Images it draws of a beautiful Woman, her Shape, Air, Neck, Breasts, &c. which are all fully display'd, cannot furnish a proper Text for a Sermon.27
The ostensible author of this discussion was Peter Shaw, a fashionable physician with prior business connections to the publishers of Pamela's Conduct, but Shaw's undeclared source was the introduction to Ludvig Holberg's Moralske Tanker. The key terms are Holberg's own (‘tvende Factioner af Pamelister og Antipamelister’), and, having first gained currency as the eighteenth century progressed, they are frequently encountered as categories in modern criticism.28 Like any other pair of binaries, they risk polarizing a body of writing that was rather more polymorphous and fluid than such language suggests, and Holberg's own evident ambivalence is a good reminder that Pamelist and Antipamelist currents could coexist and compete within a single writer or text.29 With his talk of different factions or parties, however, Holberg nicely conveys the capacity of the Pamela controversy to outgrow its immediate source – as though resembling, or even eclipsing, the sensational politics of the day, when the long campaign against the great Whig kleptocracy of Sir Robert Walpole was in its climactic stages. There is a sense, indeed, in which the controversy provided an alternative channel or proxy arena in which these politics might be pursued, as happens not only in Shamela, which compares the heroine's dexterity in the art of thriving with that of ‘his Honour himself’,30 but also in the spurious continuation by John Kelly, whose zeal as an anti-ministerial satirist had previously landed him in prison, and whose political farce The Levee was banned in 1741.
Pamela became a site of contestation, in short, in which some of the most pressing anxieties, conflicts and stress-points of its culture can now be observed with unusual clarity. For all the capacity of reception studies to make visible the structures and fissures of mid eighteenth-century ideology, however, it may be that criticism has sometimes lost its sense of proportion on this issue, and that the larger dimensions of the controversy have been overplayed. Comparison with other print controversies is instructive here. At one level, a remarkable true-life analogue arises in the cause célèbre of Elizabeth Canning, a teenage scullery maid whose alleged abduction and imprisonment in 1753 by Mary Squires, a Jewkes-like gypsy, led to scandalous trials of both women and a pamphlet war in which Canning was accused, like her fictional precursor, of cynical falsification and hysterical religious enthusiasm. Writing of the furore, one author called Canning ‘a realized Pamela’, while another seemed to echo Shaw's version of Holberg: ‘this intricate Affair had long engaged the Attention both of Town and Country, and divided all Ranks and Degrees of People into two Factions or Parties, the one distinguished by the Name of Canningites, and the other called Egyptians, each violently heated against the other's Favourite’.31 There were also many differences, however, not least the fact that on this occasion Fielding was among the foremost champions of the calumnied victim as an exemplar, as he put it in his pamphlet on the occasion, of ‘injured Innocence’.32 The most significant difference lies in the sheer severity of the partisanship involved, which reached a pitch of violence when one leading anti-Canningite, the Lord Mayor Sir Crisp Gascoyne, was attacked by a mob in April 1754, the same month in which his attempt to enter Parliament as member for Southwark foundered disastrously on the issue.
Pamela broke no windows and threatened no lives, by contrast, and in this context a better analogy may lie in the much later dispute surrounding Henry James's Daisy Miller (1878). As with Pamela, James's exploration of changing gender roles and transgressive courtship in Daisy Miller became a kind of lightning conductor for debates about female identity and conduct. But this debate, though noisy and ubiquitous, was also shallow. ‘The thing went so far that society almost divided itself in Daisy Millerites and anti‐Daisy Millerites’, as W. D. Howells writes in the aftermath of the affair, echoing Holberg's formulation about Pamela in a way that by now was doubtless coincidental. In this case the division was a matter of fashionable posture, however, and never more than superficial, as Howells adds: ‘there has been a vast discussion of which nobody felt very deeply, and everybody talked very loudly’.33
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