Pamela, Shamela, and the Politics of the Pamela Vogue
Richard Gooding, Okanagan University College
Volume 7, no. 2, January 1995
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Ever since Dr Peter Shaw’s assertion in The Reflector that Pamela had created two factions called Pamelists and anti-Pamelists, the critical orthodoxy about the Pamela vogue has been that it centred on Pamela’s chastity and entailed a strict division between admirers and critics of Richardson’s heroine. At first, Shaw’s remarks certainly look like a fair account of contemporary responses to Pamela. Almost every book, pamphlet, and poem of the Pamela vogue discusses sexual morality and presents itself as an attack on Pamela or as a more authentic account of her life than Richardson’s. Even the titles of these works support Shaw’s claim of a straightforward division between opposing camps: Fielding’s Shamela, Haywood’s Anti-Pamela, Parry’s True Anti-Pamela, and the anonymous Pamela Censured constituting one side, and Kelly’s Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, Giffard’s Pamela. A Comedy, and three anonymous works — The Life of Pamela, Pamela in High Life: Or, Virtue Rewarded, and Memoirs of the Life of Lady H[esilrige], the Celebrated Pamela — constituting the other.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Pamela” include:
“Booby’s fruitless operations”: The Crisis of Male Authority in Richardson’s Pamela
by JESSICA L. LEIMAN (ECF 22.2, Winter 2009-10)
Faking It: Female Virginity and Pamela’s Virtue
by CORRINNE HAROL (ECF 16.2, January 2004)
“My Treacherous Heart”: Non-Rhetorical Registers of Truth in Pamela’s Ascent
by JACOB LITTLETON (ECF 10.3, April 1998)
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