Writing to the moment / moments of reading Pamela, the epistolary complex and eighteenth-century reading practices Stephan Karschay This article uses the debate raging around Samuel Richardson’s novel-inletters Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) as a case study in eighteenthcentury reading practices. At a time when reading took place both in shared public spaces and the privacy of the home and was performed aloud as well as in solitary silence, the form of the epistolary novel rendered Richardson’s Pamela suitable to a variety of reading practices - yet with widely differing assessments as to the rewards of ‘virtue’ promised in the novel’s subtitle. By focusing on what is introduced as the ‘epistolary complex’, the article aims to show how one and the same novel could encourage diametrically opposed protocols of reading. Viewed through the prism of the epistolary genre, one answer to Pamela’s success as a novel for public consumption (mirrored in the commodity culture surrounding the text) is its sententiousness and easy extricability. 1. Introduction: the Pamela craze Samuel Richardson’s novel-in-letters Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) marked a watershed moment in the development of the European novel as a serious literary form, and its protagonist’s private trials and tribulations were consumed in a conspicuously communal fashion. The novel’s success and impact can hardly be exaggerated, and designating it a mere ‘vogue’, as Richardson’s biographers have routinely done (Eaves & Kimpel 1971: 119), downplays the sheer scale of Pamela’s reception history as well as its extremely contentious nature (Keymer & Sabor 2005: 11-12). 1 A letter 1 The term seems to have been first used in Alan Dugald McKillop’s biography Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist (cf. 1960: 45; 92). AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0002 Stephan Karschay 20 from Richardson’s friend Solomon Lowe, dated 21 December 1741, suggests some of the diversity of the reactions that Pamela spawned within a year of publication from the pens of Richardson’s “very Brethren”: “witness the Labours of the press in Piracies, in Criticisms, in Cavils, in Panegyrics, in Supplements, in Imitations, in Transformations, in Translations, &c, beyond anything I know of” (cit. in Keymer & Sabor 2005: 1). One of the first-off-the-mark to respond to Richardson was, famously, Henry Fielding, whose humorous prose piece An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), published almost exactly five months after Richardson’s novel, took great fun in lampooning the “epidemical Phrenzy” (Fielding 1999: 312) Pamela had caused. The novel’s immediate success went far and beyond the field of print culture. Pamela’s energies were such that they occasioned a veritable consumer craze for ‘all things Pamela’, which both expanded and bound together a social community of readers: Families could drink from entire Pamela tea sets, while engaging in a round of quadrille with Pamela playing cards, the walls of their parlours adorned with Pamela prints by Joseph Highmore. Waxworks of the novel’s characters were displayed in London’s Shoe Lane, and whole pavilions were decorated with large-scale paintings from Pamela at Vauxhall pleasure gardens, where ladies could be seen walking with copies of the novel in one hand and a Pamela fan to cool themselves in warm weather in the other (Williams 2017: 225-226; Eaves & Kimpel 1971: 127). These material appropriations affected the novel’s public status in ambivalent ways. While bolstering Pamela’s status as a bestseller, they provoked rival booksellers and authors to add their own contributions to this ‘epidemic’ - out of jealousy or a desire to cash in on Richardson’s unprecedented success (Jung 2016: 514). Richardson’s novel did not only grip London’s fashionable metropolitan set. There is anecdotal evidence from Preston and Slough that church bells were rung in 1742, when readers in the provinces learned of Pamela’s wedding to her former employer Mr B. through a serialised newspaper reprint like the one that had been running over 18 months in Robinson Crusoe’s London Daily Evening Post. 2 There may well have been other such newspaper serials and summary digests no longer extant (Keymer & Sabor 2005: 39-40), and the marked pacing of the narrative in serialisation must have enhanced the experience of ‘receiving’ Pamela’s letters to her parents. Neither was the novel’s success restricted to the British market: The Pamela craze and the critical controversy around the novel gripped readers across Europe (Turner 1994: 71-72), and Richardson’s novel was adapted into a 2 Alan Dugald McKillop (1949) traced the origin of this anecdote to an address by Sir John Hershel to the subscribers of the Windsor and Eton Public Library and Reading Room, delivered on 29 June 1833. Hershel relayed the story apparently as told to him by a contemporary witness (McKillop 1949: 323). McKillop also described the permutations the anecdote took in subsequent renderings (1949: 324-325). Pamela, the epistolary complex and eighteenth-century reading practices 21 plethora of forms, not least because - at a price of six shillings - only the smallest part of the reading population could afford even the original, unillustrated 1740 edition in two volumes (Jung 2016: 516). 3 It is no exaggeration to say that in the years following its publication, almost everybody was reading Pamela in some form or other, “appropriate to his or her segment of the book market” (Michals 2014: 75). From inexpensive chapbook abridgements in duodecimo format and serialisations in farthing newspapers to lavishly engraved, expensively produced octavo editions, these incarnations of Richardson’s hierarchy-defying heroine cut across the social strata of the reading public as well. In the light of these manifold appropriations - trans-medial, trans-regional and trans-national - it is appropriate to think of Richardson’s first novel as “a multimedia affair” that proved “instantly recodable from one cultural mode to the next” in Terry Eagleton’s words (1982: 5). The publication of Pamela in November 1740 marked the beginning of nothing less than a self-sustaining “media event,” an “ambient, pervasive phenomenon” that produced a near-limitless series of repetitions and transmutations, as William B. Warner has demonstrated (1998: 178). In the light of this cultural maelstrom that Richardson’s novel opened and fuelled, Pamela ought to provide a prominent case study in eighteenth-century social reading practices. Yet such a project faces several challenges: The sheer raucousness of the ‘Pamela controversy’ throws into doubt how seriously we can take the highly ludic parodic responses the novel elicited. The debate raging around Richardson’s novel may have been unprecedented, but it was self-consciously so and thus can hardly provide the kind of empirical evidence that could ground a study in communal reading habits. This article wants to make a virtue of this fundamental problem by taking one famous anecdote of a shared reading of Pamela by Aaron Hill and examine it through the lens of its own and Richardson’s chosen genre: the letter. 4 3 This culture of adaptation persisted over the following decades. Sandro Jung (2016) has offered a nuanced reading of two illustrated chapbook abridgements of the novel aimed at the child reader: Francis Newbery’s The History of Pamela (1769) in his “New, Entertaining, and Instructive Little Books for Children” and Richard Snagg’s The Pleasing History of Pamela (1774) in his “New Chap Books, or Little Books of Entertainment” series (Jung 2016: 517-523). 4 The scholarly literature on the letter, epistolary writing and, especially, the novelin-letters is vast, beginning with Janet Gurkin Altman’s study of the form in 1982. See also Redford (1986), MacArthur (1990), Heckendorn Cook (1996) and Zaczek (1997) for theoretically informed studies of the epistolary form. My notion of an epistolary complex engages most directly with Keymer’s unsurpassed examination of Richardson’s epistolary style (1992). Building on Keymer’s work, Joe Bray (2003) develops his thesis that it is the letter form’s shaping of subjectivity that made the eighteenth-century novels of Richardson such important precursors for the modern novel’s representation of consciousness. Clare Brant (2006) has offered a groundbreaking study exclusively devoted to the genre of the printed letter and its stylistic techniques (as opposed to epistolary verse or fiction). Stephan Karschay 22 What is so unique about the Pamela controversy is that one and the same novel could be read with such widely differing effects. In Ian Watt’s provocation, Pamela is “a work that gratified the reading public with the combined attractions of a sermon and a striptease” (1957: 173), and this distinction also maps onto the ‘solitary/ communal’ binary that structures eighteenth-century reading habits. By focusing on what I suggest labelling the ‘epistolary complex’, I aim to show how one and the same novel could encourage such divergent protocols of reading by appealing to - in Thomas Keymer’s felicitous phrasing - the letter’s “[c]onfessional and rhetorical impulses” (1992: 15). As a novel-in-letters, Pamela simulates a temporal immediacy that makes its contents appear as the unmediated expressions of a fluctuating consciousness, while also giving voice to the spontaneous effusions of a heart dangerously quickened by passion; yet this rousing directness is undercut by the well-pondered strategies of rhetorical design that establish didactic distance rather than emotional proximity. Viewed through the prism of the epistolary genre, one answer to Pamela’s success as a novel for public consumption (mirrored in the commodity culture surrounding the text) is its sententiousness and easy extricability to the relative neglect of plot. Since the novel’s title prominently announces what the upshot of Pamela’s adventures will be - the heroine’s virtue shall be rewarded -, individual episodes can be extracted ad libitum to suit the congregated audience without any loss of narrative coherence. 2. The Pamela controversy When PAMELA: OR , V IRTUE Rewarded. In a S ERIES of F AMILIAR L ETTERS FROM A Beautiful Young D AMSEL , TO her P ARENTS (Richardson 2011: 2) was first published in two volumes on 6 November 1740, the literary field almost instantly split into two broad factions that one European commentator labelled the ‘Pamelists’ and the ‘Antipamelists’. 5 The latter group, comprising such prominent voices as those of Fielding and the immensely popular author of amatory novels of scandal and intrigue Eliza Haywood satirised Richardson’s novel as the sensation-seeking brainchild of a mere tradesman 5 All references to Richardson’s novel are to the following edition: Richardson, Samuel ([1740] 2011). Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded. In The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson, Vol. 2. Ed. Albert J. Rivero. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Subsequent references appear in the text and follow the pattern (Pamela p.n.). The two factions first appear in the Dano-Norwegian poet and playwright Ludvig Holberg’s introduction to his collection of 63 essays on moral philosophy Moralske Tanker (1744). Holberg here makes out “tvende Factioner af Pamelister og Antipamelister” (cit. in Keymer & Sabor 2005: 9). A physician, Peter Shaw, plagiarised Holberg’s account and published it in English in 1750 (ibid.: 8-9). Pamela, the epistolary complex and eighteenth-century reading practices 23 - a disreputable text that should harm an artist’s standing rather than bolster it. 6 The moral flawlessness of the heroine that would metaphorically be stamped on the Pamela merchandise as a badge of honour for polite society to emulate was here interpreted as virtue-signalling pure and simple, an insincere gesture designed to disavow the novel’s near-pornographic appeal. The main accusations against Richardson’s text are neatly encapsulated in the eponymous name Fielding chose for his antiheroine. The Shamela of his parody is both a ‘sham’ (a fraudster whose declarations of virtuous piety are fake) and one who - free from all shame - can compare her secret lover’s sexual prowess to her limp husband’s poor performance of his marital duties: Well, at last I went to Bed, and my Husband soon leap’d 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. And to confess the Truth, I might have been well enough satisfied too, if I had never been acquainted with Parson Williams. (Fielding 1999: 335) Such parodic counter-fictions and continuations of the story were plenty, as Lowe’s letter to Richardson indicates. Within only one year, the anonymous Pamela Censured appeared and so did the sequels Pamela’s Conduct in High Life by John Kelly, Pamela in Her Exalted Position by Richardson himself, Haywood’s Anti-Pamela, or, Feign’d Innocence Detected, James Parry’s The True Anti-Pamela, Charles Povey’s The Virgin in Eden and the anonymous Memoirs of the Life of Lady H------. The responses to Pamela even included early forms of fan fiction in the shape of creative sequels penned by amateur writers (Keymer & Sabor 2005: 40-41) and a plethora of versifications, in what Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor have neatly labelled “a Grubstreet grabfest” (2005: 3). What is particularly striking about Pamela’s reception is how narrowly evaluations of the novel are connected to its aesthetic form as a collection of ‘familiar letters’. The accusations levied against the novel - that it was hiding its prurient intentions behind a façade of virtuous respectability - echoed the very motivations ascribed in the novel to Pamela by Mr B. to justify his own transgressions and the heroine’s imprisonment. When Mr B. sends a letter to Pamela’s father to disguise his nefarious plans, he feigns to credit Pamela’s truthfulness while also accusing the Andrews’ daughter of the very duplicity Fielding would find in her: “Something, possibly, there might be in what she has wrote from time to time; but, believe me, with 6 This is not to say that the lines dividing these two audiences were impermeable or that the eighteenth-century public was divided in equal measure. ‘Antipamelist’ responses differed from each other as much as they did from ‘Pamelist’ ones, as Thomas Lockwood (2017: 555) remarks with a view to Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (1741). Stephan Karschay 24 all her pretended Simplicity and Innocence, I never knew so much romantick Invention as she is Mistress of” (Pamela 86). In Mr B.’s characterisation, Pamela is a “little Hypocrite”, skilled in “all the Arts of her Sex”: “she is a mighty Letter-writer”, who fashions herself as “an Angel of Light” against Mr B.’s “Devil incarnate” (Pamela 33). In Thomas Keymer’s words, “Pamela […] anticipates its own parody at every point” (1992: 31). The novel is very clear, then, that what readers assume to be happening in its pages depends in every respect on a serious consideration of Pamela’s status as a novel-in-letters, with the epistolary form affording divergent reading protocols that - as we shall see - recommend the novel for private consumption, while rendering it equally suitable for shared social readings. 3. Richardson and the solitary reading of letters Even though we can trace a general trajectory in reading practices from the mediaeval period to the eighteenth century, away from oral and communal forms of ‘reading’ to ever more solitary reading habits, the former were never fully supplanted by the latter (Owens 2020: 299), and forms of communal reading persist throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries well into the twenty-first. The rise of the first generation of large circulating libraries-cum-publishers in the 1740s (Jacobs 2003: 3) certainly suggests that the decade of the Pamela controversy also witnessed a relative increase in the silent reading of novels. Yet as Corinna Schlicht has indicated, a ‘re-oralisation’ of literature occurred in the course of the eighteenth century as part and parcel of the culture of sensibility (2018: 276), which Richardson had pioneered through his use of the letter in fiction. The epistolary novel - and Richardson’s oeuvre especially - holds a correspondingly vacillating position in this literary history. Ever since Ian Watt’s groundbreaking study The Rise of the Novel (1957), the development of the form has been inextricably linked with Daniel Defoe, Fielding and Richardson as the towering figures of the eighteenth-century English novel. Even though subsequent generations of scholars have critiqued Watt on a number of grounds, his general estimation of Richardson’s epistolary fiction is still pertinent: these novels are exceptional in allowing the bourgeois subject to constitute itself as a private individual with a complex psychological interiority (Watt 1957: 174-207). 7 By granting his readers unprecedented insights into the anguished thoughts of Pamela Andrews, Clarissa Harlowe 7 The revision of Watt’s ‘Rise of the Novel’ paradigm reached a height with influential studies in the 1980s, notably that of McKeon (1987), who extended the history of the novel backwards into the seventeenth century, and several important feminist histories of the novel such as Spencer (1986), Armstrong (1987) and Todd (1989). Especially the wide-ranging contributions of female novelists to the development of the genre has been recognised at least since the second wave of the feminist movement in the 1960s and early 1970s (Nussbaum 2005: 745). Pamela, the epistolary complex and eighteenth-century reading practices 25 and (somewhat less anguished) those of Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson changed the literary landscape irrevocably. This inward pull in the development of eighteenth-century fiction is intimately linked to Richardson’s prominent use of the epistolary form and sets his work apart from the amatory tales of intrigue and exotic romances of adventure that preceded Pamela in the prehistory of the modern novel (Lockwood 2017: 551). In his Preface to Clarissa, William Warburton expressly commended Richardson’s decision to present his novels as the compilations of letters, “supposed to be written by the Parties concerned”, since this technique allowed the writer to register “those lively and delicate impressions” made on the minds of his characters (Richardson 1970: 124). This aesthetic ploy afforded him the necessary means to enter “farther into the recesses of the Human Mind, than the colder and more general reflections” (ibid.) of a more conventional third-person narrative in the vein of Haywood, Tobias Smollett or Fielding (who was, indeed, the main target of this poetological justification). Contained in this narrative set-up is the conception of an implied reader who would appreciate ‘warmer’ and ‘more personal reflections’ as if they were addressed in ‘familiar’ letters to them individually, thus suggesting an intimate reading experience akin to that of a private correspondent exchanging epistles with another writer. Yet despite this sense of authentic interiority privately expressed - which novels like Pamela and Clarissa so powerfully evoke for emulation by the solitary, silent reader - Richardson’s appeal to sentiment and feeling at the same time fed into a growing culture of communal and empathetic reading. In such a community, reading Pamela became a fashionable and even “a polite activity”, as Paul Goring (2005: 168) has noted, and reading with feeling - tearfully, blushingly, joyfully - was tantamount to reading well and should therefore be displayed in one’s social circles. This “public respectability of its consumption” (ibid.) may have puzzled an early editor of the novel like Anna Laetitia Barbauld (Michals 2014: 95) yet signalling that one was of the Pamela-tribe by carrying the novel in public was perfectly in harmony with the wider culture of Pamela-themed merchandise (Williams 2017: 225-226). 4. The shared reading of letters In the eighteenth century, communal forms of reading occurred both privately and in public. In the family, spouses would read to each other, as would the young to the elderly or bed-ridden (Bannet 2017: 142). Reading would, of course, occur silently and in solitude as well, but the timetables of households with their rosters of work, prayer and leisure, made communal reading a practicable and even necessary ritual that allowed audiences to perform other tasks while listening to a text being read out loud (Tadmor Stephan Karschay 26 1996: 166). 8 The purposes of communal reading were as manifold as its manifestations: they could be sociable (to while away the time in the evening), devotional (to offer religious instruction), instructive (to provide guidance in the performance of manual tasks) or didactic (as part of a homeschooled education). Whatever its goal, reading aloud always had the beneficial effect of countering idleness by means of “an improving and entertaining soundtrack to other domestic activities” (Williams 2017: 43). Depending on the economic status of the family, domestic servants were often included - coincidentally or by intention - in these reading arrangements, even though for those in livery the stakes of multitasking were significantly higher than for their social betters. What might ward off boredom in their employers could prove an unwelcome distraction from the satisfactory performance of a domestic task in the case of household staff. The Lady Bradshaigh regaled Richardson with an account of a maid, who had to interrupt the coiffure of her employer during a shared reading of Clarissa, as the girl would otherwise have ruined her lady’s hair with her profuse weeping (Williams 2017: 214-215). Communal reading in the eighteenth-century home can also be understood as having a regulatory double function. It allowed the pater familias (like Samuel Richardson or Aaron Hill) to control what was being read within the domestic circle (with a view to the women and children of the family as well as the servants working in the household), while also offering him the possibility of editing the recited content spontaneously and, conceivably, putting his own spin on the performed material. Instances of sociable reading thus governed both what was being read and how it was read. Nowhere was such an invasive form of reading more necessary than in the case of sentimental fiction, a vogue of writing uniquely geared towards an affective engagement of the reader and thus potentially dangerous for children and women, who were traditionally thought of as more prone to undistanced emotional identification than adult men. Such solipsism in the consumption of fiction was to be avoided vigilantly (Williams 2017: 206) so that “shared domestic reading was presented as a kind of cultural prevention” (ibid.: 210) against the loosening of moral standards. Despite the accusations of thinly veiled prurience levied against Richardson by his detractors, Pamela proved a prized example recommended for such supervised reading in the home. As Abigail Williams has noted, reading as a shared activity becomes traceable in the reception history of books as well as in their material form, including their specific genre. The formal make-up of books was certainly moulded by “their suitability for performance” (Williams 2017: 3), yet the reverse was also true: certain genres lent themselves more readily than others to communal reading in the family or wider social circles - arguably 8 Naomi Tadmor (1996) reveals the reading habits of two very different households - Samuel Richardson’s and that of the shopkeeper and diarist Thomas Turner. Pamela, the epistolary complex and eighteenth-century reading practices 27 none more so than novels comprised entirely of letters. The performative features of the letter as a literary form are often ignored or downplayed in accounts of the novel and its rise in the eighteenth century (following Watt’s classic study), since performativity - with its associations of theatricality, disingenuity, even mendacity - runs counter to an understanding of the novel as the apex of authentic individual experience recorded in fictional form for which Richardson’s novels were so praised by the Pamelist faction. 9 Yet the performative quality of letter reading is highly relevant in the case of one of the most frequently recounted episodes in Pamela’s reception history - that of the seven-year-old Harry Campbell. 5. Harry Campbell: “the youngest of Pamela’s converts” This intimate instance of a communal reading of Pamela occurred in the parlour of Aaron Hill, feted literary lion and Richardson’s critical amplifier. In a letter to Richardson, dated 29 December 1740, Hill recounted the effect an episode from Pamela had on the seven-year-old Harry Campbell. Harry was Hill’s adopted son “ever since he could totter, and waddle” (Hill 2013a: 67), orphaned the year before and at his tender age so easily impressed that he was literally reduced to tears by Pamela’s fate. This anecdote, wordily relayed by Hill, corroborated Richardson’s conviction that his novel was unfairly lampooned by the likes of Fielding, Haywood and the anonymous writer of Pamela Censured that he included the letter, together with others, in the preface to the second edition of Pamela in 1741. Richardson’s repurposing of this piece of private correspondence as part of the novel’s puffing apparatus is one trivial reason why Richardson’s biographers have so frequently included the episode in their own work (e.g., Flynn 1982: 79-80). What is more is that a scene like this one offers a rare glimpse into communal reading practices of the period - as much as these need to be treated with cautious scepticism. In his letter to Richardson, Hill recalled reading from Pamela’s “Reflections at the Pond to some Company” that - unbeknownst to Hill - included the little Harry: The little rampant Intruder, being kept out by the Extent of the Circle, had crept under my Chair, and was sitting before me, on the Carpet, with his Head almost touching the Book, and his Face bowing down towards the Fire.—He had sat for some time in this Posture, with a Stillness, that made us conclude him asleep: 9 The psychological realism of Richardson’s narrative style led twentieth-century critics such as Percy Lubbock (1921), E. M. Forster (1927) and Ford Maddox Ford (1930) to view Richardson as an early exponent of stream-of-consciousness techniques in fiction (Keymer 1992: 5). See Bray (2003) for a study that questions the assumption that epistolary fiction offers a transparent and unmediated representation of consciousness. Stephan Karschay 28 when, on a sudden, we heard a Succession of heart-heaving Sobs; which while he strove to conceal from our Notice, his little Sides swell’d, as if they wou’d burst, with the throbbing Restraint of his Sorrow. I turn’d his innocent Face, to look toward me; but his Eyes were quite lost, in his Tears; which running down from his Cheeks in free Currents, had form’d two sincere little Fountains, on that Part of the Carpet he hung over. All the Ladies in Company were ready to devour him with Kisses, and he has, since, become doubly a Favourite—and is perhaps, the youngest of Pamela’s Converts. (Hill 2013a: 68) It would be facetious to try to argue for or against this scene’s historical veracity. It is certainly well documented that Richardson and Hill were key figures in Harry Campbell’s biography: after Hill’s death in 1750, Harry became apprenticed to Richardson, who waived the fee common for such an arrangement (Eaves & Kimpel 1971: 120). Yet it is productive to entertain some speculations about this letter’s intentions and draw out some of its poetological implications. In any case, the scene described by Hill illustrates the powerful somatic effects a skilful public reading of sentimental fiction was supposed to have on the bodies of an assembled audience. Underlying the description of Harry’s emotional response is an understanding of childhood in line with a Lockean conception of malleable innocence that needed to be shaped into maturity by reasonable parental guidance and education. 10 Pamela’s ordeal in the gardens of Mr B.’s Lincolnshire estate, where she ponders suicide by drowning as the only means of escape from her tormentors, prompts an effusion of supposedly authentic feeling from “the little rampant Intruder”. Harry sits like an Aeolian harp made flesh with the breath of the recital running through the utter “Stillness” of his body to finally produce ‘heart-heaving’ and ‘side-swelling’ sobs, culminating in the ‘free-running’ tears as indices of the genuineness of the boy’s affective response (those “sincere little Fountains”). This conspicuous display of feeling may well raise suspicions about the authenticity of little Harry’s affective response - not least because of the foregoing remainder of Hill’s letter, which suggests a distinct theatricality to little Harry’s persona. The boy apparently likes to regale the household with his babblings (“this Tom-tit of a Prater” [Hill 2013a: 68]), and he treats the Hills’ domestic world as his stage: “He is an hourly Foundation for Laughter, from the Top of the House to the Parlours; and, to borrow an attribute from the Reverend Mr. Peters, (tho’ without any Note of his Musick) plays a very good FIDDLE in the Family” (ibid.: 67). None of this should strike us as unusual in a seven-year-old boy, although later references to Harry Campbell in the Hill-Richardson correspondence suggest 10 On Locke’s significance for Pamela, see, for instance, Ezell (1983) and Aikins (1996). See Michals (2014) for a wideranging reading that builds on an understanding of Pamela as “a thoroughly Lockean production” (89) and situates Richardson’s novel in the burgeoning eighteenth-century book market for children. Pamela, the epistolary complex and eighteenth-century reading practices 29 that he did not quite live up to the sprightly promise of his younger self. 11 Yet Hill’s reference to the Reverend Peters, who fails to help Pamela escape from Mr B.’s Lincolnshire estate but marries the couple at the end of the novel, is only one of two comparisons with the characters from Richardson’s fictional universe. Tellingly, the other is to Richardson’s protagonist herself. Like those of Pamela, Harry’s somatic responses are here cast by Hill as utterly truthful. Hill treats Harry like one of Richardson’s creations and enlists the little boy as an example of the salutary effects that virtuous sentimental reading can exert. That Harry Campbell thus has a quasi-poetological function in the letter, which Richardson promptly exploited by incorporating this piece of correspondence into the preface of the second edition, is made clear by Hill’s opening remarks that he must “tell the Author [i.e., Richardson] a Story, which a Judge not so skilful in Nature as he is, might be in Danger perhaps of mistaking, for a trifling and silly one” (Hill 2013a: 67, emphasis in original). It appears, the reported gambols of Harry are anything but “trifling” and “silly”. On the contrary, Hill so meticulously details these affective responses because they exonerate Richardson from the charges laid at his door by the Antipamelists. They give weight to Richardson’s intention (inscribed on the novel’s title page) of cultivating “the Principles of V IRTUE and R ELIGION in the Minds of the YOUTH of BOTH SEXES” (Pamela 2). Harry’s actions are here likened to those of Pamela (whose “every Motion […] has a Spring”), and the more of her fate little Harry has read to him, the more he becomes “the youngest of Pamela’s Converts,” until he has “half her Sayings by heart [and] talks in no other Language but hers” (Hill 2013a: 68). Hill uses this scene of communal reading to allegorise the effects of virtuous reading promoted by Richardson through the epistolary voice of his heroine. 6. Confessional or rhetorical? The epistolary complex Hill was an instrumental figure in the Pamela controversy, and his flattery of Richardson can be understood as, to a certain degree, self-serving - an act of expected reciprocity. Moreover, Hill’s epistle replicates and encapsulates the ambivalent function of the letter in Richardson’s novels - what we might call ‘the epistolary complex’: the tensions resulting from the letter’s simulation of temporal proximity to recorded experience with the letter-writer’s concurrent confessional and rhetorical impulses. Richardson’s 11 In 1745, Hill was to write to Richardson concerning Harry Campbell: “He is still in our Family, and one of your humble, and grateful, Admirers. If he did not love Play, a little more than he needed, He wou’d be a pretty Good Boy, as Boys go, at present. He has some wit, and much Honesty: and is so full of the Fables you sent him, that he seems to have borrow’d the Best of what he is, from YOUR System.” (Hill 2013b: 171) Stephan Karschay 30 novel technique, his “New Manner of Writing - to the Moment” (cit. in Eaves & Kimpel 1971: 598), is built around a “gap between lived and recorded experience”, as April London has put it (2017: 149). If the letter’s aim of being persuasive as an authentic representation of interiority is to be met, the writer must bridge that gap and claim to minimise the temporal distance of experience and its recording necessitated by any act of writing, lest the faulty memory of the letter-writer produce distortions. It is precisely this ideal of synchronising the moments of experience and transcription that provides much of the humour in Fielding’s Shamela, which lampoons one of Pamela’s most critical events thus: “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” (Fielding 1999: 318). The hyperbole of Fielding’s burlesque makes us see what any letter’s claim to temporal proximity tries to hide: its status as a thoroughly fabricated artifice. Neither are a letter’s suasive elements - its rhetorical flourishes, unctuous flatterings, aestheticised moral pronouncements etc. - evidence of the spontaneous effusions ‘of the moment’, but carefully constructed and welltimed speech acts. Thomas Keymer has crystallised the problem: “For all their professions of spontaneous veracity, […] Pamela’s letters also betray at least the symptoms of rhetorical design: as well as simply reporting events, they also interpret and persuade” (1992: 22). As Keymer has amply shown, this is the case for Richardson’s novels (most characteristically in Clarissa), but it is also true - maybe even more so - for the non-fictional Hill-Richardson correspondence. 12 Thus, differences of age and gender notwithstanding, the story of Harry Campbell’s behaviour in the Hill household can be thought of as reproducing the very tensions that characterise the letters of Pamela Andrews and Clarissa Harlowe. That Hill describes a 12 Just like Pamela, Richardson himself was “a mighty Letter-writer” (Pamela 33), whose network of correspondence was vast, even by the standards of a popular eighteenth-century novelist. In an astute study of the connection between Richardson’s works and his voluminous correspondence, Louise Curran (2016) has examined Richardson’s use of his personal letters to construct an authorial persona and project a certain ideal of authorship while engaging in critical literary debate with his correspondents. By contrast with a writer like Fielding who hated the writing of letters (Curran 2016: 10), Richardson maintained epistolary connections with his colleagues and readers, notably a set of young female correspondents he liked to think of as his adopted daughters (ibid.: 15). Curran shows how - despite his willingness to engage in such voluminous epistolary exchanges - Richardson remained anxious about the burdens of literary publicity and was consequently keen to present himself as - in Richardson’s own phrase - “an undesigning scribbler,” (ibid.: 9) in both the sense of one who does not work with a strict writing plan and the sense of not being calculating or duplicitous. See Schellenberg (2016) for an innovative study interested in a particular type of correspondence network: the literary coterie. Schellenberg looks in great detail at four such coteries, including the Highmore ‒ Edwards ‒ Mulso group that established itself around Richardson in the early 1750s, and for which the author of Pamela acted as influential enabler (Schellenberg 2016: 44-53). Pamela, the epistolary complex and eighteenth-century reading practices 31 communal scene of reading, rather than a solitary one, serves additional functions here as well: Hill’s audience is constructed as bearing witness to the described events (something Pamela only rarely can) if called upon to testify; and the ladies’ sympathetic responses to little Harry are treated as evidence for the success of Richardson’s fictional project. The popularity of Pamela among its early readers has often been ascribed to the novel’s successful evocation of ‘sentiment’. Samuel Johnson famously saw this as Richardson’s greatest achievement. In 1772, during a dinner conversation with Boswell and the lawyer Henry Erskine (who thought Richardson’s fiction “very tedious”), Johnson recommended a specific reading agenda: “Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment” (Boswell 1998: 480). Harry Campbell’s emotional reaction and Aaron Hill’s delighted account of the episode to the author of Pamela also underwrites Richardson’s status as a ‘writer of feeling’, which has proved so influential in accounts of the history of the novel (Benedict 1994; Mullan 1988; Todd 1986). Though Richardson’s sentimentalism can provide one answer to the question why his novels proved so popular with their original audience, it does not directly address the curious fact that Pamela also proved so eminently suited to social - rather than purely solitary - reading situations. Yet a case can be made that the term ‘sentimentalism’ does not only pertain to certain affective responses. Bonnie Latimer has pointed to the word’s etymology by linking it to ‘sentiment’ in the sense of ‘thought, opinion, notion’ and ‘striking sentence in a composition’ (Latimer 2019: 52), as Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) has it. In other words, Pamela can be looked at as both a fiction of sentimentalism as well as a novel of sententiousness. Understanding it in this way can help us account for the wildly divergent readings of the novel offered by the Pamelist and the Antipamelist camps without trying to give precedence to either one of these interpretive paradigms. If we were to focus on the novel’s salient plot features - the incessant danger posed to Pamela’s virtue by the still unrepentant Mr B., the quasi-Gothic narrative arch of persecuted femininity, even the fairy tale resolution of the marriage plot - then Pamela appears as a much more sensational and thus less decorous novel than it actually is. The pond scene over which Harry Campbell spilled so many tears is a case in point. In Albert J. Rivero’s volume for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson, this episode stretches over five pages - with little more than a single page (Pamela 157) devoted to the novel’s plot proper, in which Pamela details in quick succession how she escapes her room through the window, hides her papers in the rosebush, stages a decoy by flinging some of her clothes into the water, and unsuccessfully attempts to make her escape by scaling the garden wall. However, the far and away greatest part of this scene is dedicated to Pamela’s “Apprehensions”, her Stephan Karschay 32 “Conflicts on this dreadful Occasion”, in which the narrative time of Pamela’s letter to her parents effectively pauses the duration of the narrated events (“Pause here a little, Pamela, on what thou art about […]” [Pamela 158]). Having sprained her ankle in her attempted escape, Pamela is “so maim’d” to give her time for “some Reflection,” rather than “throw [her]self in without Consideration”: “and so, when I came to the Pond-side, I sat myself down on the sloping Bank, and began to ponder my wretched Condition: And thus I reason’d with myself” (Pamela 158). These reasonings then take over the better part of three pages before Pamela continues with her “sad Relation” (Pamela 161). In the course of her internal argument, Richardson’s heroine manages to convince herself and her reader of the religious duty a good Christian subject bears towards her creator in a series of rhetorical questions (“wilt thou fly in the face of the Almighty? ”, “wilt though suffer […] all the good Lessons of thy poor honest Parents […] to be thrown away upon thee […]? ” [Pamela 160]) and sententious pronouncements (“[t]his Act of Despondency […] is a Sin”, “while thou hast Power left thee, avoid the tempting Evil” [Pamela 160]). It is expository passages like these that make Pamela so eminently suitable for polite communal reading against and despite the Antipamelist accusations of the novel’s prurient duplicity. Reframed in this way, the novel’s plot appears entirely in service to the philosophical musings of the heroine. These, in turn, lend themselves to selective quotation in a way that the cause-and-effect relationships of key plot events do not. This is not to say that ‘plot’ is an irrelevant or even subsidiary category in a novel like Pamela (see Hühn 2010); yet the overall trajectory of the plot which underpins Pamela’s reflections - namely that the protagonist’s virtue shall be rewarded in the end - is the necessary precondition for social readings suited for the entertainment of polite society and the instruction of children. A career as a printer-publisher who turned his hand to writing relatively late in life (he was 51 years old when Pamela appeared) certainly allowed Richardson to gauge the literary appetite of the time: that Richardson was closely familiar with Haywood’s amatory novels of intrigue is well known, and he printed the first and fourth volumes of the third edition of her Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems in 1732 (Ballaster 2019: 38). At the same time, he sincerely felt what Thomas Lockwood has called “a didactic imperative in literary writing for publication” (2017: 553) that all writers of fiction had to accommodate in some way. 13 That Richardson consciously attempted to facilitate didactic readings of Pamela is evident from his later decision to collate excerpts from all of his novels in a volume like the 1755 13 Lockwood points to the Preface to Moll Flanders (1722), in which Defoe (by comparison with Richardson, half-heartedly) charges his audience to read responsibly by favouring the penitent part of Moll’s history to the wicked one. Haywood also exhorted the readers of her Love in Excess (1719-20) that her chosen title was a salutary warning rather than an encouraging enticement (Lockwood 2017: 553). Pamela, the epistolary complex and eighteenth-century reading practices 33 A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. Read in this light, it is the very extractability of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments (as the collection’s title is usually rendered) of Richardson’s fiction in contradistinction with the relative insignificance of the plot’s details that can help to account for the wildly divergent readings that Pamela received. It is this unrivalled mix of the sententious and the scandalous, the didactic and the entertaining, the expository and the eventful that offered such distinct avenues in the novel’s reception history. 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