" Ciceronian Eloquence": The Politics of Virtue in Richardson's Pamela

Abstract

I t has usually been taken for granted that the author of Pamela was wholly sympathetic with the titular heroine in her struggle against her master to maintain her chastity and that her triumph in reforming this upper-class rake was the reward of virtue. I argue here, however, that the novel has a much larger significance in the history of the printing press as a paradoxical and dialogical rendering of the conflict between private expression and public authority. More concretely, Richardson's long experience as a London printer before producing his first novel at just past the age of fifty, especially his role during the tumultuous years of Robert Walpole's ministry, helps to account for the central action in Pamela about desire and resistance. In the context of the ferocious print wars between opposition writers and govemment defenders, the novel's erotic focus on a fifteen-year-old servant-girl trying to withstand seduction by the power of her pen resembles the tendentious fables of Aesop, which Richardson had edited shortly before composing his novel. While her young master indulges her love of scribbling and is her most avid reader, he is nevertheless worried about the damage done to his reputation by some of the news she is spreading outside his household. At times when the narrative draws our attention to the heroine's secreting away her supplies of pens, ink, paper, wax, and wafers, she becomes at one with the whole scribal technology that subverts all efforts of authority either to silence it or at least to control its news-making capacity. Throughout the story, Mr B. tries to exert his authority as the censor of Pamela's writing, intercepting her mail before it goes out of the house and sometimes withholding