The Post-Pamela/Shamela Feud

After its release in November 1740, Pamela’s huge success naturally created envy and resentment in London’s intense literary community. According to Bernard Kreissman, there followed many unauthorized sequels, editions, and imitations, including at least three stage productions and what seems to be a book of “Pamela Porn.”

Kreissman writes that many Londoners in the know suspected that the printer Samuel Richardson was the real author of the new bestseller, and quotes a satiric poem soon after the publication:

Advice to Booksellers (after reading Pamela),

Since Printers with such pleasing Nature write,

And since so aukwardly your Scribes indite,

Be wise in Time, and take a friendly Hint:

Let Printers write, and let your Writers print.

Shamela Arises

The most important reaction came from lawyer and essayist Henry Fielding, who five months later anonymously released another long-titled but much shorter volume directly calling out Pamela’s “falsehoods and misrepresentations”:

An Apology For The Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews

In which the many notorious Falsehoods and Misrepresentations of a Book called Pamela are exposed and refuted; and all the matchless Arts of that young Politician set in a true and just light.

Together with a full Account of all that passed between her and Parson Arthur Williams; whose Character is represented in a manner something different from that which he bears in Pamela. The whole being exact Copies of authentick Papers delivered to the editor. Necessary to be had in all families.

Notice that Fielding impishly echoes the Pamela pretense that the book consisted of actual letters delivered to the editor. Interestingly, he apparently wasn’t up on the gossip, and thought the poet Colley Cibber was the Pamela author. So when he released his “travesty”, he took on the penname “Conney Keyber” as an insult to Cibber.

This novella was immediately recognized as a vicious parody of Pamela, not-so-subtly pinpointing several unbelievable aspects of the supposed collected letters of Pamela, including the unlikelihood of a 15-year-old maid having access to paper and ink and free time sufficient to write 200,000 words of letters. Shamela, by portraying the housemaid as a shameless gold-digging hussy, also brought up the issue of what would later be called “the unreliable narrator”– we have only Pamela’s own self-serving account of her actions and motivations. Fielding’s parody inspired other rivals to write reviews and critiques, and soon Richardson’s pretense to be merely “The Editor” was punctured. “Pamela” was revealed to be a middle-aged printer, though he did not publicly admit this.

Pamela Retaliates

Richardson, understandably stung by all the satire, used the literary contacts he had as a prominent printer to track down the identity of Shamela’s author. Then Fielding compounded the attack on the Richardson book with yet another parody, Joseph Andrews, purportedly the story of Pamela’s brother, who is seduced by  “Mr. B’s” mother (the family name is now “Booby”). Though Fielding again withheld his name on the novel’s cover, his authorship was quickly discovered, and the feud was on.

Richardson retaliated with public and private gossip about Fielding’s supposedly loose morals, poverty, and poor health. But he contemptuously refused to refer to his fellow author by name, instead calling him ‘that monstrous parodist.”

We all know this dynamic– it’s the class clown vs. the church camp counselor, right?

The world of literary London was tight and almost incestuous.  Henry Fielding’s sister Sarah (an important novelist in her own right) ignored the animosity between the two male novelists and remained a close friend of Richardson. In fact, he was the printer of several of her novels.

Perhaps out of respect for Sarah, Richardson mostly kept his insults of Fielding private, writing in letters that Joseph Andrews was a “lewd and ungenerous engraftment”. Of Tom Jones, he repeatedly panned the “coarse and immoral” story:  “A book so copying a work… that has little or no invention… A thread of stories, grossly broken, and awkwardly put together.” He added that it was “spurious and a degenerate (book)… its natural tendency is to corrupt the morals of the younger part of both sexes.”

But then he wet beyond mere private insults. He supposedly “review-bombed” Fielding by enlisting friends (including the very influential Dr. Johnson) to write bad reviews of Tom Jones. Dr. Johnson’s biographer Boswell quoted him as saying, “Sir, there is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson’s, than in all Tom Jones.”  Richardson also asked his women friends to read the novel (though he claimed he could not) so that they could more authentically express their hatred of it.

The Final Insult in 1600 Pages

Finally he went to the greatest of lengths to bitch-slap Fielding, crafting another immense novel (750,000 words!), this one with a moral upright and unimpeachable hero. The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753) was designed as something of a rejection of the picaresque and irreverent Tom Jones. 

As reported by Emily Friedman, a modern introduction to the novel claims, “Grandison’s composition was motivated significantly by the publication and success of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Fielding’s novel (particularly its title character) was castigated for promoting moral laxity, as its happy ending depicted a rather abrupt reform on the part of its hero.”

This enormous novel in seven volumes kept the epistolary form of the two previous Richardson novels, and continues his experimentation with “paratextual framing devices” (the text that surrounds the story). These include letters exchanged by major and minor characters (which sometimes includes accounts of conversations formatted like a playscript), editorial footnotes and explanations, legal documents, and even a “Historical and Characteristical Index” at the end that guided reader to the moral lessons provided by the exemplary Sir Charles.

Though this index never explicitly mentions Fielding, its “Libertines and Rakes” entries were recognized by the early readers as a  slam on Tom Jones. Specifically, the index disputes central themes in the Fielding novel, that a “Warm Heart” and a “Sudden Reformation” can save a rake like Tom and make him into a good husband. The saintly Sir Charles is presented as the alternative of a true romantic hero.

If the index wasn’t enough of a slur on Fielding and his hero, Richardson added a “concluding note” that directly  denounces the model of Tom Jones:  “It has been said, in behalf of some modern fictitious pieces… that they have exhibited human nature as it is. Its corruption may, indeed, be exhibited in the faulty character; but need pictures of this be held out in books? Is not vice crowned with success, triumphant, and rewarded, and perhaps set off with wit and spirit, a dangerous representation?”

Fielding himself did not respond to this definitive denial of his greatest work. Unfortunately, his death– just a few months after Sir Charles’s publication– rather supported Richardson’s point. Fielding’s health had been broken by his overwork on establishing the London police force, but also perhaps by his raucous early life. His last months were spent in Lisbon, so he probably never had access to the many volumes of Richardson’s novel.

Even after Fielding’s death in 1754, Richardson was still unforgiving, turning a compliment to Sarah Fielding into an insult of her brother. He told her that she wrote with deep insight into human psychology that her brother could not achieve. But Sarah must have felt the need to defend Henry, for her next novel, The Cry, contained implied criticism of Richardson’s didactic and moralistic approach. In fact, her heroine recognizes that her “respectable” suitor Oliver is actually a hypocrite, and instead chooses to marry his flawed but “warm-hearted” brother Ferdinand.

While Sarah kept her critique of Richardson implicit, Fielding’s many friends and fans were more vituperative in his defense, especially after his death. They wrote vicious reviews characterizing the novel as bloated (fair enough– 750,000 words!) and sermonizing. One pamphlet described his many footnotes and that index as a means force-feeding his opinions on the unfortunate reader. And the editor Arthur Murphy, who in 1762 published a definitive collection of Fielding’s work, declared, “Tom Jones is the highest effort of Fielding’s genius, and indeed the most perfect composition of the kind that has ever been given to the world.” This was rightly viewed as a slight to Richardson, the other great novelist of the mid-century.

According to novelist and analyst Adelle Waldman, the rivalry carries on even almost three centuries later, between fans of the two writers: “The Richardson vs. Fielding question is commonly used as a shorthand to talk about two distinct and ostensibly competing types of novels. Richardson represents the traditional realist novel with its emphasis on characters’ inner lives; Fielding’s exuberant, wide-ranging yarns are often seen as a precursor of the more formally inventive Modernist and post-Modernist novels.”

Fielding’s contempt did more than just infuriate Richardson. It inspired him. In the next blog post, I’ll discuss how Richardson learned from the criticism to transform his “housemaid’s tale” into his masterpiece Clarissa.