The Pre-modern Post-Modern Novelist: Samuel Richardson, I mean, “The Editor”

Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. In a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to her Parents. Now first published in order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of both Sexes (1740) is not just one of the longest titles in novel history. It is one of the first and most controversial epistolary novels. In almost every aspect, it was, well, a work of fiction.

The author was Samuel Richardson, a master printer in London. Long before he took up his pen, he was a successful man, the official printer for the House of Commons. In fact, he became a novelist in the course of his printing business. A client asked him to create a little book to help country people learn to read, and he fashioned this as a letter to a young maidservant urging her to protect her virtue from rapacious employers.

Well, many novelists will understand how Richardson got carried away and just kept writing. He was so inspired by this fictional housemaid that in just a couple months, he wrote the first half of the story as a series of letters from young Pamela to her parents back in the country. He even wrote two letters back from the parents, yes, urging her to protect her virtue. As he developed the plot and added conflict as we writing teachers suggest, well, he really got carried away… and so did his heroine. Her employer, the predatory Mr. B, discovers this secret correspondence and abducts her away to his remote estate. She can no longer write to her parents, so she resorts to keeping a secret diary recounting her continued efforts to stave off his ever-more forceful attentions. Finally Mr. B. finds the diary, and wonder of wonders, reads it and, overcome with remorse, he proposes marriage. Happy ending… I guess? (Eight years later, he created something of a corrective in Clarissa, another maidservant-in-peril novel, much darker and with a very grim ending.)

As impressive as Pamela is as a novel, the account of its publication and reception is even more fascinating. Richardson pretended to be just the printer of the book on behalf of “The Editor”, who had been tasked presumably by Pamela herself to bring this collection to a public in need of moral enlightenment.

This “fiction about the fiction” proved remarkably successful. Newly literate Londoners were understandably more familiar with letters than with novels (this was, after all, only about the fourth English novel), and many initially assumed that Pamela was a real housemaid in real-time in real peril of losing her virtue to a real employer.

Mid-century London responded with Beatlemania-level fervor. In a time where the average book was lucky to sell 500 copies over many years, Pamela sold an unprecedented 20,000 copies just in the first year. That was just the official publication (printed by Richardson himself). In the pre-copyright era, pirated editions were common, and soon copies were being printed across the continent. In fact, Pamela was the first novel published in America, and you’ll never guess who printed it! (Well, you might guess. Ben Franklin.)

As popular as the novel was, there were of course mixed reviews, some perhaps inspired by envy. In fact, as Dr. Octavia Cox explains, soon the town was riven into two camps, the Pamelists (who admired Pamela and believed she was an honest correspondent), and the Anti-Pamelists (who suspected that she was at best an exaggerator and perhaps even a gold-digger).

(More on the exuberantly vicious response of rival novelist Henry Fielding in a coming post.)

One aspect of the narrative that triggered both Pamelists and Anti-Pamelists was Richardson’s innovative use of what he called “writing to the moment”—that is, showing the act of writing the experience even as it unfolded. The Pamelists were overwhelmed by the emotion and immediacy of the simultaneous action/narration, and the Anti-Pamelists sensibly pointed out its unlikelihood.

I guess I’m something of a Pamelist, because I think Richardson’s use of “writing to the moment” is brilliant, and truly demonstrates the power of the epistolary.

“Writing to the Moment”

That term was coined by Richardson himself (speaking presumably as “the printer,” not “The Editor” and certainly not “The Author”!) in a letter to a fan: “The letters are written, as I may say, to the moment, while the heart is agitated by hopes and fears… They are written before the writer knows what the next turn will produce.”

Dr. Cox explains, “So this idea of writing to the moment was really essential to the epistolary novel form … (conveying) immediacy and therefore authenticity. (With) writing to the moment, what you are reading as the reader is what a character wrote down in the moment of the action. So just as they’re experiencing this, they’re writing what they’re experiencing…. (The effect) is to convey the immediacy of that emotion.”

That kind of immediacy is a hallmark of the epistolary, done with exceptional adroitness here. Richardson/Pamela makes constant reference to the act of writing, and incorporates the concreteness of the physical letters—the paper, the pen, the ink— into the action and conflict of the plot. Pamela’s difficulty to acquire and hide the pages the story is written on becomes an essential element of the plot.

And then in the letters, she often narrates the very moment she is putting down these words, as if the plot events are happening as she writes. In an early letter, she writes to her parents that her employer Lady B (Mr. B’s mother) has just died and her last thought was of Pamela herself:

She could only say, My dear son!—and so broke off a little; and then recovering—Remember my poor Pamela—And these were some of her last words! O how my eyes run—Don’t wonder to see the paper so blotted.

So the tear-stained page becomes part of the story it records. (How like a printer to be preoccupied by paper and ink!)

In a later passage, Pamela hears Mr. B approaching her hiding place, and she describes her reaction in that very moment: “I hear him coming! I must hide my papers!” The action of the scene includes the act of writing and the panic at possibly being discovered writing these very words.

The Pamelists interpreted this as a sign of authenticity. The Anti-Pamelists saw this as proof of  inauthenticity—how could she be writing on the pages she is simultaneously writing hiding?

The modern reader, on the other hand, might recognize this “textual” preoccupation the “po-mo” trick of  “meta-fiction”. “Meta” means “about,” and “meta-fiction” that subtextually reminds us that this is not real, that this is just a story about a character writing a story (about… writing a story).

Post-modern Pamela

For a very early novel, Pamela is ingenious, with several features that would much later be considered “post-modern,” like:

• a meta-narrative (the fake story of the letters and diary and how they came to the public)
• “the plot as the text” (the creation of the letters and diary themselves propel the story events and provide the entire narrative, and also are the catalyst for the climax of Mr. B’s redemption)
• the unreliable narrator (Pamela, and even more intriguing, “The Editor” who supposedly found this account and presented it to the world)
• and hyperreality (the simulation of Pamela through the letters is more real to Mr. B than her real self, and—layers upon layers!– the simulation of the letters became more real to the early readers than the reality that it was a novel).

I’ve speculated before that Trollope was a post-modernist, but Richardson had him beat by a century. My favorite tactic was the invention of this supposed “Editor”, who uses his introduction to humbly assert that he is providing this collection of letters as a moral lesson to naïve young women and rapacious young men. In later editions, he occasionally inserts comments and footnotes into the text as a real editor might annotate an edition.

“The Editor” as a device shows up centuries later in Vladimir Nabokov’s brilliant Pale Fire, and (with considerably less sophistication but far greater commercial success) in Bridges of Madison County, another epistolary novel that utterly fooled many thousands of its readers. I remember a friend of mine swearing it was all real, this was a real farm-wife’s real journal, and when I proved it wasn’t, said dismissively, “Well, then, I don’t like it if it’s just a story.” Even after 250 years, Richardson’s bag of meta-tricks could fool the foolish!

Richardson the Influencer

Richardson also devised a very post-modern multi-phase marketing campaign, starting with the initial teasers of a fake preface from “The Editor”, the invented mystery of the authorship, and the dire warnings that a lawsuit from “Mr. B” might be incoming. Then came the advanced reading copies (easy for the printer to provide cheaply!) sent to ministers who obligingly promoted it in their sermons, sponsorship of book clubs for communal readings, fake glowing reviews printed in the introduction of later printings, publicity stunts like parishioners ringing the church bell to celebrate the marriage of Pamela and Mr. B….

And then there was the “merch”. Richardson could take advantage of his printing business and contacts to create and sell paper fans and playing cards with illustrations from the novel, artprints and engravings of characters and scenes, and china and pottery with Pamela themes. An enterprising nearby modeler—the wax-maker Ann Salmon, who was a precursor to Madame Tussaud– created a gallery of life-sized waxworks of the characters. Richardson didn’t get royalties for the tickets or the small waxwork figurines Mrs. Salmon sold, but he cashed in on the customer traffic just down the street from his shop with the additional sales of the novel and his own merch.

Later Works of “The Editor”

While Richardson “confessed” his authorship privately soon after the publication, he maintained the public persona of “The Editor” for at least a decade. He even doubled down in 1748 with another “anonymous” novel, Clarissa, “Published by the Editor of PAMELA” proudly proclaimed on the frontispiece. (He didn’t take authorial credit even for his last book, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), but the title page was emblazoned “By the Editor of PAMELA and CLARISSA”.

You know, along with hyperreality and meta-fiction, I think Richardson invented the art of the “humble brag”. He wasn’t the best-selling novelist, but just a hard-working editor who somehow kept finding these masterpieces by authors who craved privacy.

The story of this story is just too complex for one blog post! Next week I’ll tell you about the rival novelist who punctured Richardson’s fictitious balloon and then profited by it, and the fabulous feud that resulted.

I tell you, those early novelists knew how to THROW DOWN!

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Two entertaining academic articles (and how often can we use that oxymoron?) about this crazy Pamela phenomenon are:

Turner, James Grantham. “Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s Pamela.” Representations, no. 48, 1994, pp. 70–96. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2928611. Accessed 31 July 2026.

Wills, Matthew. “Why the First Novel Created Such a Stir.” JSTOR Daily, 11 Jan. 2018, daily.jstor.org/why-the-first-novel-created-such-a-stir/.