Pamela, Shamela, and the Politics of the Pamela Vogue
There are Swarms of Moral Romances. One, of late Date, divided the World into such opposite Judgments, that some extolled it to the Stars, whilst others treated it with Contempt. Whence arose, particularly among the Ladies, two different Parties, Pamelists and Antiparnelists. ... Some look upon this young Virgin as an Example for Ladies to follow; nay, there have been those, who did not scruple to recommend this Romance from the Pulpit. Others, on the contrary, discover in it, the Behaviour of an hypocritical, crafty Girl, in her Courtship; who understands the Art of bringing a Man to her Lure.'
The Anxiety of Affluence: Family and Class (Dis)order in Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded
In seeking to explain the contemporary popularity of Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, critics often point out that as a master printer, pious Protestant, strict family authoritarian, and political conservative, Richardson, and by extension his art, perfectly embodied a bourgeois class that was consolidating its power, challenging aristocratic institutions of control, and transforming cultural as well as economic means of production. Terry Eagleton, for example, argues that Richardson participated in a revolutionary practice which had to engage in "a fierce conflict over signs and meanings." The novels "are an agent, rather than mere account, of the English bourgeoisie's attempt to wrest a degree of ideological hegemony from the aristocracy in the decades which follow the political settlement of 1688."' Certainly Richardson's stories show the imprint of a cultural revolution involving the rise of a bourgeois class. Yet Pamela's history, while it registers the exhilaration of class ascent, also stresses the anxieties accom
Richardson's Politics
You will find a strange, strange heart laid open to you," Harriet Byron says to Sir Charles in Sir Charles Grandison, that novel of frankness and opening of hearts.1 But hearts were laid open in a more macabre fashion in England at the time. On 7 June 1753, a few months before the publication of the first volumes of Sir Charles Grandison, a shocking event took place in London. Archibald Cameron, a Jacobite physician who had officiated as physician to the followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie, was executed for treason. The Gentleman's Magazine gives a detailed account of the event: