'Pamela' in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland by Thomas Keymer, Peter Sabor

Abstract

I I44 Reviews 'Pamela' in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture inEighteenth Century Britain and Ireland. By THOMAS KEYMER and PETER SABOR. Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005. x+295 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-o-52I 8I337-2. This excellent book derives fromThomas Keymer and Peter Sabor's previous joint work-The 'Pamela' Controvery: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson's 'Pamela', 1740-I750, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 200I), which provided headnotes to the facsimiles of themany pamphlets, parodies, plays, verses, illustra tions, and other printed matter generated by the 'Epidemical Phrenzy' caused by Richardson's best-seller. Providing awealth of new information in a crisp,witty nar rative, itgoes farbeyond the previous commentaries on the subject of Pamela as a phenomenon of the commercial marketplace. Chronologically and generically organized, the six chapters concern theparticular formsof publication thatemerged in thePamela/Anti-Pamela controversy. Chapter I interprets thevarious strategies employed inpromoting Richardson's novel, including Benjamin Slocock's possibly bribed praise from thepulpit at Southwark, Alexander Pope's suspiciously equivocal endorsement before thepublic atBath, and well-placed notices in theHistory of the Works of the Learned and theGentleman's Magazine. Per haps the most ingeniousmechanism ofpromotion was in matching Fielding's parodic Shamela (2April I74I) with thepuritanical Pamela Censured only a fewweeks later. Usually read as an Anti-Pamelist set piece, the authors set forth the circumstan tial evidence that allows the possibility thatRichardson himself was involved in this equivalent of fightinga fire with gunpowder, a not infrequent trickof thebookselling trade. In this same year (I74I) William Webster, editor of theWeekly Miscellany, which Richardson printed and partly financed,wrote a pamphlet, The Draper Con futed, to attack his own tractThe Consequences of Trade (I740), which went through fiveeditions in one year. Sales were apparently increased by thisnegative publicity. Chapter 2 gives a fullaccount of thebookseller Richard Chandler's negotiations to launch a sequel written by thehack JohnKelly, Pamela's Conduct in High Life (I 74 I), which rivalled the original novel to the extent that its two volumes were printed to match the size ofRichardson's foruniform binding as a four-volume set. Except for Shamela, the numerous fictional replies toRichardson's novel have received little commentary; and in their thirdchapter theauthors thrownew lighton suchworks as Eliza Haywood'sAnti-Pamela (June 174 1),Charles Povey's The Virgin inEden (I 74), the anonymous Memoirs of theLife ofLady H (I 74I ), JohnCleland's Memoirs of a Woman ofPleasure ( 748-49), and Henry Brooke's Juliet Grenville ( 774). The fourth chapter surveys the staggering array of stage adaptations ofRichard son's novel, including not only Henry Giffard's comedy Pamela (I74 ), the anony mous Pamela; or, Virtue Triumphant (1741), two ballad operas in I742, Edward Moore's The Foundling (I748), Isaac Bickerstaff's comic opera TheMaid of the Mill (I765), and Samuel Foote's puppet-show farcePiety inPattens (I773), but also stage adaptations produced in France by Louis de Boissy, Nivelle de La Chaussee, and Voltaire and in Italy by Carlo Goldoni. Besides the engravings byHubert Gravelot and Francis Hayman thatRichardson ordered for the sixth, octavo edition of Pamela (1742), and the paintings by Joseph Highmore and Philip Mercier, the fifth chapter discusses much lesser-known graphi cal representations. In the last chapter the authors document thePamela controversy thatplayed out in Ireland, resulting in such works as amock-epic poem Pamela; or, The Fair Impostor (I743) and a newly discovered farce Mock-Pamela (I750). A brief Afterword recounts the continuing debate about Pamela during the 1790s, where French Jacobins praised its revolutionary attack on class hierarchy, and not surpris inglyAnti-Jacobins deplored it for the same reason. MLR, I02.4, 2007 I I45 Paradoxically, asmuch as thisbook's dazzling command ofhistorical evidence ren ders indepth thewhole complex dynamics of eighteenth-century cultural production, until some overlooked archive suddenly appears we still have little idea of how much money Richardson earned fromhis blockbuster. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN JOHN A. DUSSINGER Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, andMelancholy, I790-I840. By THOMAS PFAU. Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press. 2005. xii + 572 PP. $65. ISBN 978 o-8oI8-8I97-8. This is a long and densely argued book thatmakes unusually heavy demands of its reader...