Thinking Activity The Pamela

Thinking Activity The Pamela or Virtue Rewarded

Samuel Richardson

Born  :19 August 1689

Died   :4 July 1761 (aged 71)

Samuel Richardson  was an English writer and printer best known for three epistolary novels: Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). He printed almost 500 works in his life, including journals and magazines, working periodically with the London bookseller Andrew Millar.Richardson had been apprenticed to a printer, whose daughter he eventually married. He lost her along with five sons, but remarried and had four daughters who reached adulthood, but no male heirs to continue the print shop. As it ran down, he wrote his first novel at the age of 51 and immediately joined the admired writers of his day. Leading figures he knew included Samuel Johnson and Sarah Fielding, the physicians Behmenist and George Cheyne, and the theologian and writer William Law, whose books he printed. At Law's request, Richardson printed some poems by John Byrom. In literature he rivalled Henry Fielding; the two responded to each other's literary styles.

Pamela herself acknowledges

this when she admits her subjective perception of harmless cows as dangerous

bulls that prevents her from carrying out her escape from B.’s estate. Since

Pamela is able to identify the influence of her subjectivity it is unlikely that her

report of events is highly distorted by it. I would further argue that the problem

of subjectivity is not the aspect of the novel which initially causes the reader

to doubt Pamela’s reliability. Pierce points out that in the context of Pamela

the “sincere heart” is seen as a “measure of truth”22 and not as an organ that

distorts reality. It is, therefore, Pamela’s sincerity which has to be established

or undermined by the narration in order to allow as a judgement about her

reliability. I have tried to show that this sincerity is supported on several levels

of the novel. Obviously, Pamela is intended to be reliable but, ironically, her

credibility is endangered by precisely the same means that are used to support it.

Conflicting author intentions are the reason for this, that is conflicts between the

demands of an epistolary novel that wants to entertain and engage the reader’s

passions and the demands of a didactic story that wants to teach a specific lesson.

Especially Richardson’s use of a female narrator in order to attach the reader to

this story causes problems with historical concepts of female modesty. This is not

to say that the character of Pamela is free of inconsistencies and that she does not

share most of her author’s intentions for recording and telling her story. However,

since Richardson clearly does not intend to expose an inconsistent character –

remember the subtitle – a critical reading that concentrates on Pamela alone

has difficulties to explain why her reliability is supported by the editor and is yet

always in danger of being doubted by the reader. I have argued that her difficulty

seems to be founded in the fact that she is created in order to serve conflicting

author intentions. She has the fate of being the narrator and the heroine of a story which is not entirely herself 

Narrator Point of View

Third Person Objective (Editor) and First Person (Pamela)

The fictional editor who presents Pamela's letters to us comments on Pamela's life and fate from a position outside the situations he describes, so he's definitely a third person (objective) narrator. He is careful to emphasize his own objectivity in the preface, when he says, "an Editor may reasonably be supposed to judge with an Impartiality which is rarely to be met with in an Author towards his own Works" (1.11).

In short, Pamela is a didactic representation of virtue. This virtue is presented to us in the story of Pamela's resistance against the sexual advances Mr B. ... And indeed, on the level of the narration itself Pamela is treated and presented as both an extremely virtuous girl and a reliable narrator.