community based on sensibility. Sir Charles, in the vanguard of what Richardson hopes is a reforming spirit among the leaders of society, deals intelligently and gracefully with the remnants of feudal barbarism among his own people (dueling, — 80- lechery, violence, snobbery), and guides his family and friends through the intricate tangles of choosing their mates-the most painful tangle being his own. Aware that the wickedness of Lovelace generated most of the reader's interest, Grandison tries to transfer some of this interest to the Good Man, involving him in 'perverse accidents' and making him a «designer» of plots and stratagems, 'a Rake in his address, and a Saint in his heart'; those who love him also fear that 'had he been a wicked man, he would have been a very wicked one.' Twentieth-century readers have generally ridiculed this attempt to make goodness intriguing. By modern standards of quotidian realism, the bad characters are too marginal and the good too successful, too idealistic, and too articulate in moments of crisis. But we should still recognize Grandison's affinities with genres we currently value-its high flights resembling opera, and its minute analysis of elite behavior anticipating the roman-fleuves of Henry James and Proust. In terms of its literary progeny, Grandison has actually been quite influential; not only Jane Austen but George Eliot praised this panoramic and morally earnest novel centered on an outstanding heroine. Without Grandison there may have been no Middlemarch.
Virtue Rewarded? Critics have never quite accepted Richardson's attempt, in Pamela, to graft a sharply realistic narrative manner onto a fairy-tale narrative structure. But we should not underestimate that realism. In the first half of the novel, for example, Richardson's impressive social and psychological detail manages to suggest a growing attachment between Pamela and Mr. B. long before love is explicitly declared. She invents reasons not to leave his service, not to encourage other suitors, not to escape from the country house to which he abducts her (as she describes it, the bull in the next field vividly embodies her vision of male sexuality). She feels a stab of concern when an accident threatens B.'s life, and admits she 'does not hate him.' She lingers over the details of his appearance and behavior even when they intimidate her; he, meanwhile, flips hysterically between rage and tenderness, boisterous lechery and nervous hesitation, apparently in the grip of a strong if unacknowledged internal conflict. When the subject of marriage comes up, even mockingly, Pamela's reactions- sudden blushes, overprompt denials, overly detailed accounts of how she would spend her time as a wife-81- suggest that she has dreamed of the possibility and suppressed her yearning. When she does leave captivity, introspection lays bare a divided and «treacherous» heart that calls her back into bondage: 'and yet all the time this Heart is Pamela.' Struggling to understand how she could love a man who treated her so imperiously, she realizes that he has given her consequence: 'Cruel as I have thought you, and dangerous your Views to my Honesty, You, Sir, are the only Person living that ever was more than indifferent to me.'
Pamela is a social hybrid, of humble, rustic background yet brought up in privileged circumstances as the personal waiting-woman to Mr. B.'s mother. She has acquired sumptuous clothes, soft hands, and such refined accomplishments as embroidery, estate management, and letter writing; she later attributes her novelistic skills to the training she received in administering charity, when she learned to make fine discriminations between the deserving poor and their imitators. In a sense, then, she and Mr. B. are siblings, and their intimacy develops within this domestic web; the first hint of his seductive intentions comes when he offers to share his dead mother's underwear, and the first hint that she likes him comes when she refuses to leave before finishing his embroidered waistcoat. This kind of detail renders plausible, if anything could, the huge shift in character between the squire-and-wench routine at the start and the Exemplary Couple at the close of the novel. Pamela's intriguing mixture of naïveté and sophistication, which troubled the more dismissive readers, thus matches the upper servant's unique position in the household, perceptively rendered by Richardson. Less plausible, however, is her ability to recognize, and be shocked by, sexual innuendo: the adolescent may well be sensitive to the leers of the servants who 'seem as if they would look one through' and the master who kisses her 'as if he would have eaten me,' but how would she know that the corrupt housekeeper Mrs. Jewkes speaks 'like a vile London Prostitute'?
Before their eyes mist over with sentimental gratitude, Pamela (and her author) convincingly reveal the sociopolitical tensions played out in the amorous maneuvers of squire and servant. Her ability to swallow her fear and answer back when bullied, dismissed by Mr. B. as sexy «sauce» or criminal insubordination, suggests (to the alert reader) not cheek but courage in the face of tyranny, and as her «trials» become grimmer, so does the tone of her defiance: 'Oh! what can the abject Poor do against the mighty Rich, when they are determin'd to oppress?' — 82- Pamela's «Virtue» becomes essential because she has no other property in a world where status, identity, and personal value all depend on property; she resists not merely the man's sexual predation, but the landowner's assertion of absolute power over his chattels. 'How came I to be his Property?' she asks; 'What Right has he in me, but such as a Thief may plead to stolen Goods?' This political acuity (Mr. B.'s bawd and collaborator calls Pamela's observation 'downright Rebellion') may support Terry Eagleton's view of Richardson as a revolutionary class warrior-not, of course, for the proletariat, but for the virtuous and hardworking bourgeoisie. Certainly his villains are either flaming aristocrats or hapless servants corrupted by them, though after Pamela his sympathetic characters (Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison, Harriet Byron) likewise stem from the gentry. Militant class hatred certainly sharpens the realism of Pamela and wells up at moments throughout Richardson's work. Pamela's failure to escape across the open fields is credible, not just because she feels ambivalent fear and attraction for the rampant male, but because the country was indeed a war zone, patrolled and mined by 'the mighty Rich' in league with one another. Mr. B. asserts class power to shut off every avenue for the imprisoned woman, corrupting the postal service and intimidating any local clergy (like the sweet but powerless Williams) who might offer refuge; his peers meanwhile dismiss the affair as an inconsequential frolic: 'What is all this, but that the 'Squire our Neighbour has a mind to his Mother's Waiting-maid?… He hurts no Family by this.' Nevertheless, in Pamela (as later in Grandison) these towering abuses are cured by a voluntary surrender to middle-class values, not by total war; repeatedly the vicious snob, once touched by the fairy wand of goodness wielded by Pamela (or Sir Charles), converts on the spot to piety, sobriety, and early dining. Except in the case of Lovelace, Richardson's imagination seems reformist rather than revolutionary.
This transition from social drama to wish fulfillment drains much of the novel's artistic vitality. Pamela's sharply phrased class awareness dissolves, except for the occasional flicker of sarcasm, into sugary glorification of her lord and master. Richardson's aristocrats, particularly Mr. B.'s tumultuous sister, Lady Davers, come to life when they unleash their violent prejudice (and stoke the middle-class reader's indignation), but the magic of Pamela transforms them into cardboard figures who mouth statements like 'I believe there is something in Virtue, that we had not well considered' or 'We People of Fortune… are general-83- ly educated wrong.' Reformist zeal may also blind Richardson to the vulgarity of the values that triumph in this story of 'Virtue Rewarded.' What kind of reward does Pamela receive for her refusal to submit to a man who thinks her entire being, sex and soul, can be purchased for cash? Why, that same man (to whom she yields her entire being in a vow of marital obedience), and copious quantities of the very cash that would have supported her as a kept mistress (handed over, a hundred guineas at a time, the morning after the wedding night). As her parents, former ditch-diggers, enumerate the splendors of the farm they have been given in Kent, they exult 'that all is the Reward of our Child's Virtue!' and Pamela herself reminds us that 'the Kentish Estate was to be Part of the Purchace of my Infamy.' Of course, there is all the difference between skulking in private as an insecure concubine and basking in public recognition as a wife, commanding a large budget for charitable works-though throughout part 2 Pamela still agonizes over her unworthiness, shuns public gatherings, and fears that Mr. B. will turn her away. But Richardson's economic realism, which gives palpable solidity to the «happy» scenes as well as the «trial» scenes, does tend to undermine that difference.
Satirical «anti-Pamelists» were quick to exploit the vein of materialism that runs through Richardson's arriviste fantasy. The best known among them is Henry Fielding, whose Shamela (1741) parodies both the epistolary novel itself (Shamela is a Covent Garden whore angling for the innocent Squire Booby after bearing a child by the well-hung Parson Williams) and the rapturous readers' testimonials appended to Richardson's second edition: Parson Tickletext gives new meaning to the cult of sensibility and the technique of 'writing to the moment'-'Oh! I feel an Emotion even while I am relating this: Methinks I see Pamela at this Instant, with all the Pride of Ornament cast off!' — but Parson Oliver brings him down to earth with a pungent critique of Richardson's subversive, pornographic novel. Oliver then supplies the true letters of Pamela, in which lewd reality
