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.
Chapter One, “‘The Selling Part’: publication, promotion, profits” deals largely with Pamela’s publication and early publicity campaign. Although Pamela did appeal in the immediacy of its epistolary form, in its romantic “fantasy of rags-to-riches advancement” (21), and in its dedication to purported morality, Keymer and Sabor suggest that aspects beyond the novel itself—including oral puffs and the front matter appended to the novel—helped to beat the path for Pamela’s reception. Here, Keymer and Sabor propose that Richardson, a long-time publisher, employed his keen eye for business to locate advantageous opportunities and promote Pamela; it was Richardson’s “commercial strategy” (22) as much as anything else that secured Pamela’s position of prominence.
The Pamela publicity campaign began as a largely oral, even performative endeavor; an apt enough method, for as Keymer and Sabor note, “[i]n a culture of sociability and polite gossip, performances […] were worth bales of conventional newspaper advertisement” (25). Pamela received two particularly prominent shout-outs: a brief vocal endorsement from Alexander Pope and a “promotional sermon” (23) delivered by Dr. Benjamin Slocock. The praise from the pulpit culled particular infamy, and offered fodder for Pamela response writers (Fielding included) who mocked the preacher and his endorsement.
A rumor that Richardson had paid Slocock for his endorsement did little to hush suspicions (though all controversy meant more business, no?), and Keymer and Sabor posit that Richardson may have spread cash and called in favors to promote his novel. Pondering Richardson’s book-trade connections, suggesting that he prompted the earliest reviews and notices of Pamela, Keymer and Sabor mold a near-conspiracy theory in which Richardson stood behind every breath of support. Keymer and Sabor even suggest Richardson as the guiding force behind Pamela Censured, a pamphlet that appears to condemn Pamela, but may have served as a promotional device to stir up new readers.
The publicity campaign apparently succeeded, and Richardson found himself producing four new editions within a year of Pamela’s first publication in November of 1740. Beginning with the second edition, Richardson’s addition of a praise-swollen, self-promoting introduction created unease, if not nausea. Keymer and Sabor suggest that with its proclamations of praise for Pamela, this “promotional matter […] was the cause of the hostility” (30) that produced counter-fictions; indeed, in responding to Pamela, several writers would craft their own mocking paratexts. And as Pamela’s influence spread, these writers and their responses began to pour out in a wave of adaptations and continuations that soon spiraled beyond Richardson’s control.
Chapter Two, “Literary property and the trade in continuations” runs headlong into a few of the responses drawn by Pamela and suggests that Richardson wrote his sequel only “to reassert his right of property” (76). According to Keymer and Sabor, in writing his novel, Richardson had unwittingly created a market for a Pamela sequel, and opportunistic authors were quick to grasp the opening. Mary Kingman’s Pamela in High Life and an anonymously authored worked entitled The Life of Pamela both helped to destabilize Richardson’s authorship, their “claims to authenticity […] erod[ing] Richardson’s authority over his own imagined world” (53).
Yet perhaps the only text to pose a substantial threat was Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, written by Grubstreet scrambler John Kelly. Published in two volumes, in May and September of 1741, Pamela’s Conduct laid claims to authenticity that prompted the reluctant Richardson to write his own sequel while drawing him into a neigh-on-epic print battle with bookseller Richard Chandler. The dispute found Richardson fighting desperately to denounce Pamela’s Conduct and to assure readers that his own genuine and superior sequel was on the way. Meanwhile, Chandler suggested that Richardson himself was “the pretended author of Pamela” (63); a tricky claim to contest, given Richardson’s reluctance to announce his authorship or admit that Pamela was not based on factual incidents.
All of this raises tricky issues of authority and ownership. In the 18th-century world of rampant appropriation, who could be said to own Pamela? What did it mean that—as occurred in several cases—Pamela could be killed off without her creator’s say-so? And did readers care about the author, so long as they heard more of dear Pamela? To complicate matters further, Richardson “st[ole] back from his thieves” (80) while writing his continuation, drawing on events detailed in their supposed sequels. Casting these scenes in his own light, did Richardson somehow further abstract his authorship? Such intriguing questions resurface through Keymer and Sabor’s study.
Moving on to Chapter Three, “Counter-fiction and novel production,” Keymer and Sabor address Pamela’s many counter-fictions, the “works that borrow from, comment on and pay homage to, but also often parody and subvert” (83) Richardson’s novel. While noting that later counter-fictions “had to consider the prior claims made by Shamela” (86), Keymer and Sabor reference Fielding’s work primarily in comparisons with other pieces. Here, Keymer and Sabor again draw focus to more obscure works while indicating the ways in which Pamela’s counter-fictions responded to each other as well as to their original progenitor.
Cataloguing counter-fictions, Keymer and Sabor sketch the wide variety of responses drawn by Pamela. Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela satirized Pamela through a novel in which the Pamela counterpart—a more “plausibl[e]” character than Richardson’s “fantasy figure” (87)—“is predator rather than prey” (87) and ends up “banished from polite society” (92). With The Virgin in Eden, Charles Povey offered a moral substitute for Pamela, reflecting a widely held concern with the novel’s questionable lessons. The anonymously authored Memoirs of the Life of Lady H------ presented a possible “real-life model for Pamela” (100) in Lady Hesilrige, born a coachman’s daughter and married to a baronet (102). More overtly titillating was John Cleland’s erotic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. By pulling in these works (along with references to more sideways or minor riffs), Keymer and Sabor indicate Pamela’s ever-spreading influence.
In Chapter Four, “Domestic servitude and the licensed stage,” Keymer and Sabor use the Pamela craze to sketch the theatre culture that arose following the Licensing Act of 1737 and to consider Pamela’s reception in France and Italy. In England, Pamela found theatrical life primarily through Henry Giffard’s popular adaptation, first performed on November 9, 1741. Notably, the production featured a young but quickly rising David Garrick as Lady Davers’ nephew. Playing freely with his source, Giffard cut most of Mr. B’s lascivious actions and set a male actor in the role of Mrs. Jewkes.
Interestingly enough, in publishing his adaptation, Giffard encountered a situation similar to that faced by Richardson with Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, for an anonymously authored (and currently unidentifiable) play claimed to be “the original Pamela” (119). As Richardson before him, Giffard was compelled to defend his piece’s authenticity. This incident highlights once again the question of ownership; what claim did Giffard have to Richardson’s story, after all, and how was authorship to be considered with theatrical adaptations?
After noting a collection of British theatricalizations that either appeared only in print or proved looser adaptations, Keymer and Sabor move on to France. Amid a smattering of French adaptations, Voltaire’s Nanine, ou le pruejudge vaincu held perhaps the most staying power. Despite an initially lukewarm response, the piece eventually gained popularity, and in particular “found favor on the revolutionary stage” (210); here, as Keymer and Sabor suggest, Voltaire’s decision not to alter his heroine’s “low social rank” (210) likely proved beneficial. In Italy, meanwhile Carlo Goldoni gave his Pamela a noble birth-line to soften class tensions. The popularity of Goldoni’s adaptation prompted its own “host of translations and re-adaptations” (138), and the net of Pamela’s influence continued to spread.
Keymer and Sabor return to England with Chapter Five, “Pamela illustrations and the visual culture of the novel,” taking on image-based representations and indicating that—in circumstances recalling those that surrounded Pamela’s sequel—Richardson was pushed to provide illustrations by a flurry of unauthorized pictures. Even before Richardson’s illustrated edition, ambitious artists took swipes at etching their own Pamelas. Such efforts as John Carwitham’s engravings for The Life of Pamela and the engravings accompanying Mary Kingman’s piracy may have prodded Richardson into action of his own, and Richardson’s illustrations arrived with his pricey octavo in 1742 (an earlier plan to include two illustrations—possibly by Hogarth—in Richardson’s second edition had fallen through). Hubert Gravelot and Francis Hayman created twenty-nine illustrations in all to span the four volumes of Pamela. According to Keymer and Sabor, Richardson took a firm handing in guiding these illustrations, perhaps hoping to preserve his own image of Pamela and while staving off further censure.
The sights of Pamela could have been enjoyed outside of books, as well. Artists such as Joseph Highmore and Philip Mercier, for instance, produced paintings based on Pamela. Meanwhile, paper fans provided Pamela enthusiasts with diverting images from the novel, and from mid-1745 through August of 1746, enthusiasts could have visited the Pamela waxworks display, which first featured “a hundred Figures in Miniature” (167), and was later supplemented with additional, equally elaborate scenes.
Throughout this chapter, Keymer and Sabor suggest possible influences among the illustrations and paintings, noting that several illustrations in Richardson’s own octavo were likely based on earlier pieces. With all its talk of images, this chapter falls somewhat short in its own illustrations. Although Keymer and Sabor provide scattered examples to pique curiosity and give some sense of various artists’ work, further samples might help to illuminate Keymer and Sabor’s suggestions while allowing readers to form conclusions of their own.
In the sixth chapter, “Commercial morality, colonial nationalism, and Pamela’s Irish reception,” Keymer and Sabor examine the Dublin response to Pamela, viewed primarily through the Protestant “community that would come to be termed Anglo-Irish” (182). The members of this community dominated Dublin and had largely “descended [...] from waves of English colonizers” (182). While they refused to take on the traditional Irish culture, they found themselves breaking further away from England, and so sought to establish an identity of their own¬. To do so, they “appropriated the label ‘Irish’” (183) and attempted to tie the label to their ideas of virtue and morality, to make it particularly their own.
Keymer and Sabor illustrate this drive toward self-definition by noting two Irish works—both featuring young woman of low birth—that preceded Pamela: the anonymously authored Vertue Rewarded; or, the Irish Princess (183) and Charles Shadwell’s Irish Hospitality; or, Virtue Rewarded. Both pieces, Keymer and Sabor note, claimed virtue for the Anglo-Irish while criticizing England. Entering Dublin, then, Pamela encountered a community that sought ownership of the very quality most touted by Richardson’s title character, and that proved less than eager to swallow English assertions of excellence.
Keymer and Sabor focus on three Irish-written responses to Pamela, all of which seem to emphasize true virtue as an Irish (or Anglo-Irish) province while casting unfavorable light on England. Charlotte McCarthy’s The Fair Moralist; or, Love and Virtue was advertised “as Pamela rewritten for Ireland” (200), and McCarthy’s Irish heroine rejects the marriage and corruptive wealth that Richardson’s English Pamela embraces. Meanwhile, the anonymously authored farce, Mock-Pamela: or, a Kind Caution to Country Coxcombs, acknowledged Shamela as “its most obvious model” (202) and featured a scheming heroine who eventually wheedles money out of Mr. B’s counterpart, exposing England as “a place of greedy fools and acquisitive hunters” (204). The majority of attention is given to J---- W----’s Pamela; or, The Fair Imposter, a mock-heroic poem whose author may or may not have been Irish; Keymer and Sabor dig up evidence to suggest “may,” and see in the piece a critique of England. Keymer and Sabor seem most interested in this satirical piece as “a pastiche of The Rape of the Lock” (195), examining the poems against each other and noting the ways in which Pope’s form allows The Fair Imposter a more cutting critique of English life. Here, as in other Irish responses, it was not only Pamela’s virtue that stood at stake, but the whole of English society.
In their afterword, Keymer and Sabor follow Pamela’s descent from the heights of its media craze and the embrace of popular favor. As time passed, perceptions of Pamela shifted, and Richardson’s supposedly moral messages and treatment of social class (among many, many other topics) came ever-more into question. Yet Pamela never quite faded away, resurfacing time and again for examinations and publication.
Although it raises a few interesting points and helps to enforce an impression of Pamela’s staying power, this afterword strikes an unsatisfactory chord. The study ends rather abruptly after Keymer and Sabor stumble a few steps into the 19th Century, giving no indication as to why they end where they do, why they do not trace the novel’s reception to the present. Indeed, after Keymore and Sabor dabble here and there, draw a few tenuous connections, and toss in a few final details, the afterword fizzles into a small, half-hearted half-conclusion. Given the work’s general strength, this puzzles somewhat.
Still, the book more often intrigues and informs, presenting well-ordered information and thought-provoking possibilities. Keymer and Sabor offer details and insight perhaps not to be had elsewhere, and are careful to indicate their own sources and point toward further paths of exploration. This book would doubtless serve as a valuable resource for guiding further Pamela-related studies, and might supplement an investigation of 18th-century media. All in all, Pamela in the Marketplace proves a useful and quite fascinating read and resource, illuminating Pamela itself, along with the culture that received and responded to the novel in all of its manifestations.
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