Paper -2 Assigment

• Name : Asari Bhavyang  

• Roll no :-4

• Enrollment No:-3069206420200002

• Course:-M.A (English)Sem1

• Subject:- Literature of the Neo- classical period

• Topic:-What are the realistic elements in Pamela , or virtue rewarded ? 

• Teacher Name :- Dilip Barad sir 

• Batch :- 2020-2022

• Email :- asaribhavyang7874@gmail.com

• Department :- The Department of English

[1.]What are the realistic elements in Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded?

Ans :-

Samuel Richardson :-

Samuel Richardson was an English writer and printer best known for three epistolary novels: Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). He printed almost 500 works during his life, including journals and magazines, working periodically with the London bookseller Andrew Millar. Richardson was 50 years old when he wrote Pamela, but of his first 50 years little is known. His ancestors were of yeoman stock. His father, also Samuel, and his mother’s father, Stephen Hall, became London tradesmen, and his father, after the death of his first wife, married Stephen’s daughter, Elizabeth, in 1682. A temporary move of the Richardsons to Derbyshire accounts for the fact that the novelist was born in Mackworth. They returned to London when Richardson was 10. He had at best what he called “only Common School-Learning.” The perceived inadequacy of his education was later to preoccupy him and some of his critics.

Richardson was bound apprentice to a London printer, John Wilde. Sometime after completing his apprenticeship he became associated with the Leakes, a printing family whose presses he eventually took over when he set up in business for himself in 1721 and married Martha Wilde, the daughter of his master. Elizabeth Leake, the sister of a prosperous bookseller of Bath, became his second wife in 1733, two years after Martha’s death. His domestic life was marked by tragedy. All six of the children from his first marriage died in infancy or childhood. By his second wife he had four daughters who survived him, but two other children died in infancy. These and other bereavements contributed to the nervous ailments of his later life.
In his professional life Richardson was hardworking and successful. With the growth in prominence of his press went his steady increase in prestige as a member, an officer, and later master, of the Stationers’ Company (the guild for those in the book trade). During the 1730s his press became known as one of the three best in London, and with prosperity he moved to a more spacious London house and leased the first of three country houses in which he entertained a circle of friends that included Dr. Johnson, the painter William Hogarth, the actors Colley Cibber and David Garrick, Edward Young, and Arthur Onslow, speaker of the House of Commons, whose influence in 1733 helped to secure for Richardson lucrative contracts for government printing that later included the journals of the House.
In this same decade he began writing in a modest way. At some point, he was commissioned to write a collection of letters that might serve as models for “country readers,” a volume that has become known as Familiar Letters on Important Occasions. Occasionally he hit upon continuing the same subject from one letter to another, and, after a letter from “a father to a daughter in service, on hearing of her master’s attempting her virtue,” he supplied the daughter’s answer. This was the germ of his novel Pamela. With a method supplied by the letter writer and a plot by a story that he remembered of an actual serving maid who preserved her virtue and was, ostensibly, rewarded by marriage, he began writing the work in November 1739 and published it as Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded a year later.

Video :-

Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded  :-

“Pamela: or virtue rewarded” is an epistolary novel written by Samuel Johnson (1689-1761) and first published in 1740. Being one of the first – if not the first – novel told entirely through fictional letters made it very new and exciting narrative concept at the time. “Pamela” is widely considered one of the first and most influential romance novels in the english language. Many later novels were named after the female protagonist; Clarrissa (Samuel Richardson, Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla (all Frances Burney), Fantomina (Eliza Haywood), Emma (Jane Austen) etc.

So, being very intrigued, I ordered the book and started reading it as soon as it arrived. I had very low expectations and certainly didn’t expect this book to be a pleasure read and I intended to read it for the analytical and historical value. Also, I was/am kind of intimidated by 18th century literature as I’m not an avid reader by any means. English isn’t my native language either so I expected to understand very little of an english text that is almost 300 years old. But I was positively surprised. The edition that I bought had modernised the 18th century grammar for the convenience of the reader though still left in some of the original spelling to give it an old-fashioned feel like instead of spelling it “show” it was spelled “shew”.
Plot-wise the book did drag sometimes for my taste. The main character reiterated the same thing again and again which becomes quite tiresome to read. Although the book definitely afforded much insight into fictional but contemporary 18th century accounts of servitude, marriage life, gender roles. Even the way that the letters were written, the formal, elegant style of letter-writing by the main character was very intriguing to me. It’s such a stark contrast to the way that we communicate today, and our messages are often brief and direct instead of long-winded, sincere and sentimental. I scribbled down some of my thoughts on topics like gender, class etc. while reading the book, and will be sharing them in this blogpost. It’s not an in-depth analysis by any means but just some observations I made.
Pamela’s lady-in-waiting dies shortly before the beginning of the story, and the household management is consequently left to her son Mr. B. The wealthy young ‘gentleman’ sexually harasses Pamela, and when she refuses his advances, he abducts her and keeps her prisoner in a mansion. In the end, Pamela ends up falling in love with Mr. B and marries him. So, essentially, it’s about a victim of sexual harassment and abduction falling in love with the perpetrator. No wonder a lot of people find this story strikingly similar to the  ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ condition.
As a modern reader, you can’t shake off the uncomfortable fact that Samuel Richardson barely acknowledges that Mr. B is a for the majority of the book a sexual predator and attempted rapist. Everything even ends well for Mr. B – he is given a happy ending and marries the underage waiting-maid he’s been trying to seduce. What kind of message does that convey? Because of this, the romantic relationship doesn’t seem very believable. But of course, putting it into historical context, 18th century notions of consent and sexual harassment were radically different than how we see it now. I think the very regressive and problematic understanding of consent and ‘virtue’ is what makes the book interesting.
Like I mentioned, this epistolary novel is one of the first of its kind and caused quite a sensation when it was first released. It was a bestseller. Samuel Richardson had popularised the epistolary novel. Pamela was a bestseller and people were apparently divided into those who were pro-pamela and anti-pamela. Some people the didactic element of the novel was a great way to teach young women about virtue and chastity, while those in the other camp thought the character of Pamela seemed deceitful and hypocritical.

 Samul Richardson may have based his first novel on the story of a real-life affair between Hannah Sturges, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a coachman, and Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Baronet of Northampton, whom she married in 1725. He certainly based the form of the novel on his own aptitude for letter-writing: always prolific in private correspondence, he had recently tried his hand at writing fictionalized letters for publication, during which effort he had conceived the idea of a series of related letters all tending to the revelation of one story. He began work on Pamela on November 10, 1739 and completed it on January 10, 1740.
Richardson’s objects in writing Pamela were moral instruction and commercial success, perhaps in that order. As he explained to his friend Aaron Hill in a famous letter, his goal was to divert young readers from vapid romances by creating “a new Species of Writing that might possibly turn young People into a Course of Reading different from the Pomp and Parade of Romance-writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous, with which Novels generally abound, might tend to promote the Cause of Religion and Virtue.” The nature of this “new species of writing” may seem obscure at first. Richardson felt that the best vehicle for a moral lesson was an exemplary character; he also felt that the most effective presentation of an exemplary character was a realistic presentation that evoked the reader’s sympathy and identification, as opposed to an ideal one that rendered the character as inhumanly perfect. For the project of rendering an exemplary character in a realistic manner the appropriate form, he reasoned, was the novel, providing as it did ample scope in which to flesh out psychological complexities and mix dominant virtues with smaller but significant flaws. In itself, Richardson’s idea of combining instruction with entertainment was, of course, hardly original; then as now, it was a highly traditional argument for the moral utility of art. Richardson’s innovation was a generic one consisting, in part, of his producing a respectable and morally elevating work in the despised genre of the novel, hitherto the province of only the cheapest diversions.
Pamela achieved extraordinary popularity among three groups whose tastes do not often coincide: the public, the litterateurs, and the professional moralists. It went through five editions in its first year and inspired a market for Pamela-themed memorabilia, which took such forms as paintings, playing cards, and ladies’ fans. Pre-publication hype doubtless encouraged sales, as the novel’s backers secured and publicized endorsements by such major literary figures as Alexander Pope, and there is some indication that Richardson, with his many connections in the London literary world, may have incentivized some of this “buzz” under the table. The novel had a legitimate claim to its wide audience, however: in addition to its moral utility, there was the aesthetic achievement of Richardson’s narrative method, quite avant-garde at the time. The epistolary form presented Pamela’s first-person jottings directly to the reader, dispensing with the imperious traditional narrator and allowing unmediated access to her personality and perceptions. The intimacy and realism of this method, which Richardson called “writing to the moment,” combined with the liveliness of Pamela’s language and character, proved highly attractive.
Not all were won over, however, and part of what makes the publication of Pamela such a phenomenon in English literary history is the controversy that greeted it and the legion of detractors and parodists it inspired. A Danish observer went so far as to say that England seemed divided.

Reference :-

1. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Pamela". Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 Mar. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pamela-novel-by-Richardson. Accessed 15 February 2021.
2. Sale, William Merritt. "Samuel Richardson". Encyclopedia Britannica, 30 Jun. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Richardson. Accessed 15 February 2021.
3. Yost, Julia. Wang, Bella ed. "Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded Bibliography". GradeSaver, 8 August 2010 Web. 15 Feburuary 2021

 

Thank you 

Dilip Barad sir

words :-1921