Pamela in the Marketplace: or, The Multimedia Adventures of a Sawcy Wench (book report)

[note: Yes, I do intend to go back and add italics... soon as time allows.]

Keymer, Thomas and Peter Sabor. Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

In Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor explore the burgeoning 18th-century media culture, a whirl of print, pictures, and theatre in which developing medium and genres offered sweeping possibilities for the production and adaptation of any story. To investigate this complex culture, Keymer and Sabor utilize a dizzying wealth of resources in exploring the craze and controversy that developed around Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. They face the Pamela event largely “as a market phenomenon: as a product, agent, and uniquely visible trace of the new consumer culture” (15), all the while filling in gaps of Pamela scholarship and provoking enticing questions.

Through their study, Keymer and Sabor create a vast and intricate web of relationships in which many of the players in the Pamela controversy knew one another and fed off of each others’ works. Keymer and Sabor use these connections to reveal echoes—similar themes and twists on storylines—that resonate through the web of Pamela manifestations. Meanwhile, rather than focusing on Richardson or such prominent works as Henry Fielding’s Shamela, Keymer and Sabor emphasize figures and works obscured by history, those long-forgotten pieces that helped propel Pamela to its lasting position of fame (or, if you like, infamy).

Pamela in the Marketplace does fall somewhat short where Keymer and Sabor overstretch their attempts to draw connections, stumbling over an excess of tangled associations or faltering in links based on weak speculations. Then, too, the book occasionally veers from its main drive in giving excessive attention to biographies that trail far from Pamela, creating interesting but ultimately distracting sidetracks. And occasionally, Keymer and Sabor skip perhaps too quickly from one subject to the next, planting possible conclusions but declining to develop these.

Still, the book’s virtues far outweigh its faults, and Pamela in the Marketplace offers a thorough introduction to both the Pamela craze and the culture in which it thrived. The study itself is divided into six chapters, with an introduction and an afterword. In the introduction, Keymer and Sabor sketch the extent of Pamela’s influence, rehash recent scholarly approaches to Richardson’s work, and lay the groundwork for their own study of the novel’s reception (17), which moves from page to stage to images to Ireland.

Pamela, Pamela, everywhere...

More details to be added when I'm not working at the report, but thought I might share a few links. Whilst reading Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor's Pamela in the Marketplace, I've been intrigued by a number of the responses culled by Richardson's novel.

So. To share a few of the written responses.

Pamela Censured

Pamela's Conduct in High Life, John Kelly

The Virgin in Eden, Charles Povey

The True Anti-Pamela: or, Memoirs of James Parry, James Parry

And for a couple of image-based sites. The first offers images from Richardson's octavo (believe Joan linked to this in her blog), while the second offers illustrations created for editions beyond Richardson's own.

Just a bit to glance through, should you be interested. All fortune permitting, I'll be adding to this post... But either way, hey, look what one little Pamela can yield....

Oh brave new world, that has such Wretches in't!

And here cometh Pamela, in all her unparalleled virtue. Pamela who has the strength to overcome all. Pamela who remains constant in her devotion to her honor. Pamela, who seems to float above the world—

Well, in a way. Maybe. Because while she begins the novel on almost a cloud of her own, fully trusting and blinded to the harder realities before her eyes, Pamela is eventually forced to recognize the world and its wickedness. And as soon as she has seen the world’s uglier face, she must reorder her notions of innocence and change tactics in order to safeguard her virtue.

Through the opening sections of the novel, Pamela appears naïve indeed, unable to think ill of the world. In a vague sense she almost resembles The Tempest’s Miranda (this is not to claim any direct link between the two, but there seems an interesting connection in their seeming purity and confrontation with humanity; not overwhelming, but something that came to mind). Consider Miranda’s response upon first seeing the gaggle of treacherous men who have—courtesy of her truly not-so-sainted father—been wrecked and washed ashore. Having lived long from the sight of men, Miranda is awed by their appearance: “How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! Oh, brave new world / That has such people in it!” (5.1.184-6) After what we have seen and heard throughout the play—the tale of Prospero’s exile, Sebastian and Antonio’s plot to murder the king, and so forth—this impression may strike as rather misplaced. But Miranda has known nothing beyond the island and her father’s close care. She (and perhaps, to some extent, Ferdinand) is an innocent voice among those sullied by experience.

So too Pamela, when we first encounter her voice. Having for so long believed in virtue alone, protected by her parents and then by her kind Lady, she cannot initially (or even for quite some time) recognize vice or ill-intent, thinking the best of all people and situations. Thus, through the early sections of the novel, Pamela speaks in a voice blithe as Miranda’s, her mind shedding a positive light on all actions, her trust ever-strong. (As a side note, while we’re talking about over-trusting characters, we might just give a nod back to Oroonoko….)

Playwrights selling plays? Well, whoa, there.

With such talk of (er, reading related to) the 18th-century print industry and its increasing mass of paper-paper-PAPER, I’ve been drawn toward a bit of poking around at the publication of play scripts during the 18th Century. How did scripts fit into this flurry of available works? How were scripts presented to the public, in what fashion offered and to what presumed purpose? How closely were the scripts tied to the theatres that presented the original production, and how closely to the authors? While all of these questions continue to roil and multiply in mind, it is toward the last-mentioned—that of scripts and authors—that I now turn.

A look into Paulina Kewes’s Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710* offered some intriguing matter for mulling. Kewes discourses at length on the matter of originality** in theatrical writing, particularly as it played into consideration during the 17th and 18th Centuries. As a part of this, Kewes draws attention to the playwright’s role, suggesting that playwrights rose toward greater prominence—or perhaps independence—as they received the power to sell their own scripts to publishers. Prior to the Restoration, theatre companies had held tight reins on and rights to the scripts of their productions (ownership being thus identified with performance, with those who used the script rather than the one who composed it). And as Kewes notes, “[c]ompanies tended to withhold their scripts from the press, especially the most popular ones” (20); whatever the author might have wished, a script could easily be denied distribution, never to see the light of day or reach the hands of public readers.

On influences (ancient or otherwise)

Last week’s confrontation with Swift’s Battle of the Books (maybe less a confrontation, more an entertainingly provocative encounter) left impressions from that most bitter battle of ancients versus moderns, of whether classical authors ought to be read and praised or tossed to the wayside. The modern mania (whether speaking of Swift’s case or a more recent modern) for distancing a supposed genius from his influences seems to aim toward a superlative being, a man who can stand completely free from the world. A pleasant thought, perhaps (if a lonely one, and I’ll refrain from going on an East of Eden sidetrack), but how likely a possibility? What of the implications beyond the ancients’ influence, or beyond literature? What does it mean to stand so apart? Questions upon questions, as ever, all buzzing in the brain.

The debate returned to mind whilst reading selections from The Spectator in which Addison apparently fall quite soundly on the side of the ancients. Addison’s talk of imagination, among other topics, appears to suggest that all authors attend to the same general themes or stories—the “same Thought[s]” (384)—that are “cloathed in” or interpreted through “the Specifick Qualities of the Author” (384). Addison seems to indicate that these qualities may be observed by noting in any author “the several Ways of thinking and expressing himself, which diversify him from all other Authors, with the several Foreign Infusions of Thought and Language, and the particular Authors from whom they were borrowed” (383). In creating a fictional work, then, an author pulls from three sources: first, a sort of universal theme or sentiment; second, his own particular inclinations and ideas; and third, a collection of outside influences from which he might—guided by his own tastes—draw anything from ideas to form. Through these sources, he crafts thoughts and words into a work of his own.

As suggested above, while individual viewpoints are essential and separate one author from another, adept writers must look outside of themselves and admit influences, thereby enhance their own works. For Addison, these influences extend beyond past masters; the writer is daily influenced by all that he sees and hears, even while influencing those around him. Hence Addison’s note on engaging in conversation with others: “Every Man […] forms several Reflections that are peculiar to his own manner of Thinking; so that Conversation will naturally furnish us with Hints which we did not attend to” (385). Outside views open unexpected avenues of thought, from which a writer might craft further reflections of his own. In a sense, writing comes out of (and may become part of) a social dialogue, an exchange of ideas.