The "Pamela" controversy of the early 1740s remains a landmark of literary history. So intense were the "Pamela" vogue and surrounding quarrels that one contemporary wrote of a world divided "into two different Parties, "Pamelists" and "Antipamelists"", as though even the sensational political developments of the day had somehow been eclipsed. Fuelling the partisanship was the swift entrepreneurial opportunism of the 18th-century marketplace. As Terry Eagleton has written, this was not so much a novel as "a whole cultural event ...the occasion of 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". Recommended from the pulpit of a Southwark church, illustrated in the pavilions of Vauxhall Gardens, exhibited in "a curious piece of waxwork" on a Fleet Street corner, "Pamela" was everywhere. Parodied and pirated, puffed and censured, versified and dramatized, and appropriated in several spurious continuations as well as Richardson's own authorized sequel, it now makes visible, like nothing else, the heterogeneity, vigour and turmoil of its cultural moment.
As has long been recognized, it also marks a defining moment in the history and formation of the novel as a literary genre. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) is not only among the most important and influential of English novelists. He also remains, as he was in his own day, one of the most controversial. Criticism of the last two decades has established his novels as key texts for academic debate under a whole range of rubrics, among them psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism and deconstruction. Nothing today, however, can match the fierce energy and ideological charge of the controversy that immediately followed the bestselling success of his first novel, "Pamela" (1740), which ran through six editions in 18 months and, as Richardson conservatively estimated, "gave birth to no less than 16 pieces, as remarks, imitations, retailings of the story, pyracies, etc".
The debate over "Pamela" and its continuation, in which Richardson himself played a prominent part, involved a fascinating variety of figures: rival novelists such as Henry Fielding and Eliza Haywood, playwrights such as Carlo Goldoni (whose dramatic response to "Pamela" was translated into English), artists such as Francis Haymand, Hubert Gravelot, Joseph Highmore and Philip Mercier, and a host of lesser critics, poets and dramatists. This edition brings together for the first time all the key sources for the contemporary debate, reprinting many of them for the first time in two and a half centuries. Although the significance of the "Pamela" controversy has long been recognized, many of the key sources exist in only a handful of scattered copies, and have not been widely available to scholars or students. Only Fielding's devastating contribution, in "Shamela" and "Joseph Andrews", is currently in print, and even Richardson's own defences of his work in such places as the preliminary matter to "Pamela" second and sixth editions are hard to locate.
This multi-volume collection brings together for the first time all the key sources for the contemporary debate, other than the easily available "Joseph Andrews". Among the longer works included are Eliza Haywood's brilliant appropriation of "Pamela" in her "Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected", and the spurious continuation by John Kelly, "Pamela's Conduct in High Life", which forced Richardson to write his defensive sequel of 1741. Four dramatic and operatic adaptations are also included, together with pamphlet commentaries and attacks, graphic representations including Joseph Highmore's sequences of 12 Hogarthian plates, and hostile and sympathetic verse responses including J--- W----'s mock heroic "Pamela; or, The Fair Impo