Pamela Or Virtue Rewarded

by Richardson, Samuel; Keymer, Thomas; Wakely, Alice

• ISBN13: 9780192829603
• ISBN10: 0192829602
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-07-12
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

One of the most spectacular successes of the flourishing literary marketplace of eighteenth-century London, Pamela also marked a defining moment in the emergence of the modern novel. In the words of one contemporary, it divided the world "into two different Parties, Pamelists and Anti-pamelists," even eclipsing the sensational factional politics of the day. Preached for its morality, and denounced as pornography in disguise, it vividly describes a young servant's long resistance to the attempts of her predatory master to seduce her. Written in the voice of its low-born heroine, Pamela is not only a work of pioneering psychological complexity, but also a compelling and provocative study of power and its abuse. Based on the original text of 1740, from which Richardson later retreated in a series of defensive revisions, this edition makes available the version of Pamela that aroused such widespread controversy on its first appearance.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vi
Introduction	vii
Note on the Text	xxxv
Select Bibliography	xxxviii
A Chronology of Samuel Richardson	xliii
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded	1	(504)
Appendix 1: Introduction to the Second Edition of Pamela (1741)	505	(15)
Appendix 2: Extracts from Richardson's Edition of Aesop's Fables (1739)	520	(5)
Explanatory Notes	525	(15)
Glossary	540