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Title: Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (Oxford World's Classics)
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Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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| Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (Oxford World's Classics) by Oxford University Press, USA Pamela - Dumb like a Fox | If you enjoy epistolary books this is quite enjoyable with less maddening characters than in Clarissa. I would suggest reading this prior to Clarissa.
As always, Richardson brings out the worst in people and makes each fault larger than life. Do not use this as a what I want to be when I grow up primer. | | Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (Oxford World's Classics) by Oxford University Press, USA Of dubious moral value | Samuel Johnson considered the plot of this book to be dreadful; rather, he thought one should read it for the sentiment. Unfortunately, that sentiment does not and should not play well in the 21th century. What's more interesting is that it didn't necessarily play well in the 18th century, either. Both Henry Fielding (SHAMELA--brilliant) and Eliza Heywood(ANTI-PAMELA) took it to task. The publication of this novel created divided literary society into two camps--the Pamelists and the Anti-Pamelists.
Why all the fuss and feathers? It's a fairly straight-forward story wherein a young servant girl of great virtue overcomes the lascivious and debauched designs of her employer to tame his passions and to convert him to virtue and marriage. At that point, Society, as represented by his sister, shows its violent disapproval of Pamela's sinning above her station. However, Pamela's virtue and her Christian faith overcome even this object and she and her husband go on to live happily ever after.
As a plot, it's simple, but melodramatic; frankly, the Victorians would blush. Furthermore, the characters are never fully rounded, but too often stick-figure representations of specific virtues and/or vices. For about the first 160 pages, one has a pretty good description of the power relationship between master and servant, but after that, to the modern reader, it turns into a sado-masochistic relationship wherein Pamela comes to identify with her abuser--and Mr. B does abuse her, even by the standards of the 18th century. Also, there's the technical execution--even by the standards of the 18th century, the narrative becomes repetitive and self-circling in a fashion one does not see in Fielding or Heywood or even Defoe. All-in-all, one reads this really only to understand what Fielding and Heywood are rightly mocking. | | Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (Oxford World's Classics) by Oxford University Press, USA I read most of Volume I and just couldn't take any more! | | I am generally a huge fan of 18th century Literature (even if I have not had any formal education in it), but I couldn't STAND this book! Pamela herself is a complete Mary Sue, to use the fanfiction term- she is a picture of perfection in every way, and is so insistent about how good and chaste she is that some times I just wanted to smack her! Her would-be seducer, on the other hand, is so inconsistent in his behavior that I sometimes wondered if he was the same person. Here is a man who will go to ridiculous lengths to get what he wants (He even gets his housekeeper to hold Pamela down so he can forcibly rape her!) and then drones on and on about how she is the best, most beautiful, most virtuous of women, etc. You would think that after their marriage he would be reformed, but he soon starts making silly arbitrary rules that his new wife must follow, as if apparently her only purpose was to please him- and she begs for even more of these "wise injunctions"! Some of the other characters display the same illogicality: the neighboring gentry in Lincolnshire do nothing to help her when they know she is being held against her will, and then turn around and give more of the same speeches on Pamela's perfection as if nothing had happened! The fact that Pamela is "rewarded" with marriage to the same man who spent so much of his time trying to ruin her, and that she goes on as if he were the most honorable man in the world is alone cause for complaint. I think my only consolation for having wasted so much of my free time on reading this will be being able to understand Shamela and Anti-Pamela. | | Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (Oxford World's Classics) by Oxford University Press, USA Samuel Richardson's "Pamela" was the first English Bestseller! | Pamela was published in 1740 quickly becoming a popular work of fiction. Britain was becoming a literate nation and novel reading was becoming a popular pastime in English homes. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) was a printer whose novels were epistolatory (all of them are written in the forms of letters-in Pamela her letters are to her parents who have become very poor.)
Pamela is a maid in the home of the wealthy Mrs. B. The good lady dies and we see Master B the scion of the family seeking to seduce the virtuous 16 year old girl. Pamela is abducted and taken to an isolated estate being held in genteel captivity by servants in the employ of Master B.
Pamela seeks to escape but her plans are foiled. She falls in love with Mr B. In part two we see Pamela being introduced into polite society by her wealthy husband. We even learn that he has fathered a child by a woman now living in Jamaica who was once his mistress. The novel ends with virtue triumphant as the good Christian Pamela becomes a trophy wife of Mr. B.
The plot, therefore, is a simple one in which a Cinderella/Jane Eyre heroine spotless for her virginal purity wins the heart of a rake. What makes Richardson worth reading is his psychological depth in analyzing why characters acts as they do in the objective world.
Pamela is much shorter in pagination that the massive Clarissa novel of 1747 (over 1500 pages long!) and is lighter in tone. There are comic characters presaging the work of Dickens in the Victorian age. Clarissa Harlowe is a rich young lass while Pamela comes from the ranks of the lowborn seeking to exist in a very class bound conservative social milieu.
The characters speak in high-flown language which makes the 21st century reader skeptical that anyone (much less a teenaged Pamela could speak or write in such words!) The second half of the novel is slow and
somewhat tedious as we see the happily married Pamela tell us how great Mr. B is and how grateful she is to him to have been elevated to a higher social class than the one in which she was born. This old novel would not win applause by modern day feminists!
The novel does have more movement than the very static "action" in "Clarissa." We travel to eighteenth century manor homes; inns on the roadside and see the slow pace in which life was lived in the
English countryside.
This novel would be parodied by the witty Henry Fielding who wrote "Shamela" in imitatiion of the pieties uttered in prose by Richardson.
Anyone who is interested in the birth of the English novel needs to read
"Pamela." It has its moments and its dull stretches but it is worthy of attention for its historical and literary importance. | | Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (Oxford World's Classics) by Oxford University Press, USA Saucy, engaging 18th century soap opera...and more! | NOTE: I have read several editions of Pamela, and they vary quite a bit, as Richardson frequently revised his books. I can't say one version is better than another, so this review is general to all the ones that I have read.
REVIEW: This novel written in the form of letters started a revolution in fiction, and was an enormous best seller in its own day and beyond. Pamela, the working class heroine, was loved, hated, imitated and satirized. She was called a model of female virtue, a conniving slut, and everyting in between, and plenty has been written on all sides of the question.
What was all the fuss about? Well, for one thing the story is a cliff-hanger, with the teenage heroine constantly escaping danger at the last moment. In addition to suspense, this book also gives insights into the 18th century British class system, the status of women, and the then quite radical ideas of social mobility and self-improvement. Richardson did something quite innovative when he created a heroine who was young, rural and from the servant class. His point was that a working class woman of good morals and good sense could be just as worthy of admiration as the upper class ladies who had always played the starring roles in serious works of literature.
But if you're not writing a scholarly paper on Pamela, never mind all that. Pamela is an engrossing novel with lots of momentum, intresting characters, a quirky love story, and a happy (maybe) ending. | | Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (Oxford World's Classics) by Oxford University Press, USA Product Description | One of the most spectacular successes of the flourishing literary marketplace of eighteenth-century London, Pamela also marked a defining moment in the emergence of the modern novel. In the words of one contemporary, it divided the world "into two different Parties, Pamelists and
Anti-pamelists," even eclipsing the sensational factional politics of the day. Preached for its morality, and denounced as pornography in disguise, it vividly describes a young servant's long resistance to the attempts of her predatory master to seduce her. Written in the voice of its low-born
heroine, Pamela is not only a work of pioneering psychological complexity, but also a compelling and provocative study of power and its abuse.
Based on the original text of 1740, from which Richardson later retreated in a series of defensive revisions, this edition makes available the version of Pamela that aroused such widespread controversy on its first appearance. |
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