Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, by Samuel Richardson

I bought my own copy of Pamela.

In a sentence: this is an 18th-century epistolary novel about a 15-16 year old lady’s maid pursued by her young master. There’s not a great deal of plot, so stand by for spoilers after the jump. As a result, anyone wondering whether to read this book is best advised not to read on, but I do have a suggestion: most of the book consists of Pamela’s internal monologue, of which the following is a typical example. If you don’t like her style, this one probably isn’t for you:

After I had dried my eyes, I went in, and began to ruminate with myself what I had best to do. Sometimes I thought I would leave the house, and go to the next town, and wait an opportunity to get to you; but then I was at a loss to resolve whether to take away the things he had given me or no, and how to take them away: Sometimes I thought to leave them behind me, and only go with the clothes I had on: But then I had two miles and a half, and a bye-way to the town; and being pretty well-dressed, I might come to some harm, almost as bad as what I would run away from; and then, maybe, thought I, it will be reported, I have stolen something, and so was forced to run away: And to carry a bad name back with me to my dear parents, would be a sad thing indeed!

I found this novel, and my reactions to it, to be full of contradictions. The story is circular, beginning with Pamela reporting the death of her mistress to her parents and ending with her stepping into her mistress’s place, over the course of two volumes which are strikingly different in content and tone. In volume one, Pamela is sexually harassed by her dead mistress’s rakish son (Mr. B., in his mid-twenties). He abducts her, imprisons her at his Lincolnshire estate and, with the assistance of the housekeeper, Mrs Jewkes, attempts to rape her. Richardson makes it clear that Pamela is trapped even before her physical imprisonment: her parents are too poor to support her, she risks her physical safety in the attempt to get back to them, and attempts to interest the local gentry in her cause fail because they don’t want to antagonise the powerful Mr. B. B is basically an eighteenth century Mr. Big: he is wealthy, owns several estates, is a member of Parliament and a Justice of the Peace – a position he abuses more than once in the novel. Pamela’s letters to her parents soon take the form of a journal where she argues her own cause passionately:

My soul is of equal importance with the soul of a princess, though in quality I am but upon a foot with the meanest slave.

This was an idea to which religion paid lip-service but which in reality was ignored: the sexual double standard meant that young gentlemen were expected to sow their wild oats, but not with the girls of their own rank, whose virginity had to be preserved until marriage: working-class girls like Pamela were expected to make themselves sexually available to their masters, who might reward them with a dowry so that they could marry a man of their own sort. Pamela’s refusal to play this game, her insistence that she is not her master’s property, her sense of self-esteem, were provocative, and the way her virtue was rewarded was revolutionary.

In the second volume, the nightmare becomes a fairytale. B. has a change of heart, and allows Pamela to return unsullied to her parents. But by this time she has fallen in love with him, leaves him only reluctantly, and when he writes to her promising marriage, she returns. He does marry her, and insists that the local gentry and his overbearing sister Lady Davers accept her as his wife. The book ends with the newly-wedded pair looking forward to a life of wedded bliss and to starting a family.

As ludicrous as this sounds, Richardson is a good enough writer to make me believe in the love between B. and Pamela. It may be Stockholm Syndrome on her part, but it is real. Her description of her wedding day was genuinely moving: she is so nervous she spills her hot chocolate at breakfast, and, during the ceremony, curtsies when it is time for her to say, ‘I will.’

What I couldn’t believe was that their happiness would have outlasted the honeymoon period. Once married, Pamela becomes a Stepford wife: it’s as if she checked her ability to think for herself at the chapel door. It should be clear to her that the gushing compliments she receives from the neighbours, and the subservience B.’s servants, her former jailors, now show her, is down to their desire to please Mr. B., not any real respect for her as a person. But she seems incapable of realising this, taking their insincerities at face value. Mr. B. fell in love with her for her rebelliousness, but expects the utmost submission after marriage, to the point that he is furious just because Pamela fails to meet him at a neighbour’s house at the time he told her to be there. During her imprisonment Pamela vows that ‘no husband in the world…shall make me do an unjust or base thing’, but once engaged, she assures B. that ‘all you do must be right.’ B.is clearly shown to be proud, selfish, changeable as a weathercock and subject to ungovernable rages after his marriage as much as before: he might genuinely wish to reform his way of life, but although he promises Pamela the utmost fidelity, it’s impossible to imagine him remaining chaste throughout the long series of pregnancies she will no doubt undergo. She expects a future of unalloyed bliss, but it seems far more likely that she will spend her married life either turning a blind eye to her husband’s affairs or angering him by her attempts to protect the young women in her service. The paradox of the book is that Richardson makes brilliantly-drawn characters live in a world where virtue has a transformative power that changes everything and everyone it touches: a world that does not exist.

The book is written almost entirely from Pamela’s point of view, which gives it power and coherence but involves a lot of suspension of disbelief: that Pamela would want her parents, her intended readers, to know all the details of her attempted seduction, that she would faithfully copy out every letter she receives, that she would even have the time to write all this. Her letter-diary itself is a pivot for the plot: B. changes his attitude toward her after reading the section where she describes her thoughts of suicide. Despite the longueurs and repetitions, Pamela’s writing has a breathless quality: she is always in the middle of her own story, and at one point, when the formidable Lady Davers arrives to confront her, the style morphs into first person, present tense:

I have ordered the chariot to be got ready. I will go and dine with Lady Darnford. I am already dressed.

Mrs. Jewkes is sent for down. The trampling of horses in the court-yard. Visitors are come. A chariot and six. Coronets on the chariot. Who can they be? They have alighted, and come into the house.

Dreadful! Dreadful! What shall I do? Lady Davers! Lady Davers, her own self! And my kind protector a great, great many miles off!

Mrs Jewkes, out of breath, tells me this, and says, she is enquiring for my master and me. How I tremble! I can hardly hold my pen. She asked her, it seems, if I was whored yet? There’s a word for a lady’s mouth!

The vulgarity and aggressiveness of the high-born Lady Davers, contrasted with the spirit and decorum of the low-born Pamela, make for some highly entertaining scenes, with better-known descendants in the passages between Elizabeth Bennet, Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Bingley’s sisters in Pride and Prejudice. Pamela is full of period detail – the hot chocolate and toast Pamela has for breakfast, the white and silver bridal clothes Pamela and Mr B. wear on their first visit to church after their marriage – and some of the action is hard to understand without a knowledge of eighteenth-century etiquette. One iron-clad rule was that only people of similar social rank ate at the same table: Lady Davers has to be dragged kicking and screaming to eat dinner with Pamela.

Pamela was one of the first and greatest bestsellers, spawning commentary, fan fiction, parodies, and merchandising. As far as I can tell, it is little read today outside academia. But its influence survives to this day.  Jane Eyre, which references it, reworks its master/servant plot, and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, influenced by Jane Eyre, describes a marriage which bridges social classes (interestingly, in each book, while the master is always a member of the upper classes, the servant heroine goes up a rung each time, from lady’s maid to governess to paid companion, narrowing the distance between her and her mate). And as long as readers of romance continue to demand virginal heroines desired by the boss, Pamela will live on:

Tags: charlotte bronte, daphne du maurier, jane eyre, pamela, rebecca, samuel richardson