Introduction
This site is dedicated to examining the initial influence of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded on the literary market. The main focus is to present an overview of the major works produced as part of the reaction following its initial publication. During this time, Pamela wavered between cultural inspiration and obsession, while permeating the literary market- appropriately termed the "Pamela Media Event” by William B. Warner. Leading up to and during the 1740’s, the British cultural stance on novels was pervaded with a general moral dilemma about reading for pleasure.
The previous decades had linked the novel with successful amatory fictions of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood. Samuel Richardson saw these works as simple, licentious entertainment surely dangerous for the impressionable minds of youth. Putting aside Familiar Letters, a letter-writing manual he started in 1739, he began to draft the epistolary novel that would become Pamela.
As successful printer, Richardson understood that whatever morals Pamela intends to teach readers must not damage the book’s potential entertainment value. It is, according to him, a “new species of writing”; perhaps a crossbreed of a conduct book and amatory fiction, novel or not, it became the epicenter for a web of critique, satires and imitations.
"An acquaintance with the muses, in the education of youth, contributes not a little to soften the manners. It gives a delicate turn to the imagination, and a kind of polish to the mind in severer studies." -Samuel Richardson. Pamela vol. 4 |