social situations. From this grew the idea ofPamela; or Virtue Rewarded(1740), a
young servant’s account in letters and a journal of the attempts of her rich master
(‘Mr. B.’) to isolate and seduce her. The epistolary form of the first English novel
sounds artificial, yet the effect is immediate. Her resistance leads him eventually to
recognize her qualities, and to marry her. To read the letters addressed to her parents
is to overhear confidences and to feel sympathy: the formula of soap opera. Pamela’s
situation is morally interesting, as is the unfolding drama. Richardson, relying on his
readers to know that virtue is its own reward, shows a good daughter becoming a
very good wife, in conditions that are comic and trying. The 18th-century social
order is a shock to modern readers, to whom the reward of becoming Mrs B. seems
a very earthly one. The prudential subtitle was too much for Henry Fielding, who
wrote a brilliant take-off,Shamela, in which a young prostitute’s vartue is a sham
designed to put up her price.
Richardson’s advance in Clarissa (1747–8) is astonishing. It is a mature and
complex society novel, epistolary, with several correspondents. The heroine and her
oppressor are more interesting than in Pamela, and the action and the texture
richer. Clarissa is hounded and persecuted by the evil but attractive Lovelace. He
cannot wear her down, and she fights him and his accomplices all the way, but she
is outwitted, abducted and raped, and eventually dies a saintly death. This sounds
sensational and conventional, but the effect is otherwise. Its remorseless logic
makes it the only tragedy of the 18th century which still succeeds. Those who have
submitted themselves to the toils of this million-word boa-constrictor acknowledge
it as the most involving English novel, perhaps even the greatest. It beats its succes-
sor,Sir Charles Grandison, whose hero saves women from potentially tragic situa-
tions to general satisfaction. Sir Charles, ‘the best of men’, was regarded in the 18th
ce ntury with a complacency which readers, since Jane Austen, have not been able to
reproduce.
Henry Fielding
Richardson’s psychology had an effect on the European novel. He deserves credit
also for stimulating Henry Fielding (1705–1754) into fiction.Fielding found Pamela
so sanctimonious that he began a second burlesque of it,Joseph Andrews. J oseph is
Pamela’s virtuous brother who (like Joseph in Genesis), rejects the amorous
advances of his mistress, Lady B[ooby], and is sacked. Parody is forgotten in the
perpetual motion of laughable adventures on the road and in the inns, and in the
richly comic character of Parson Adams, a guilelessly good-hearted truth-teller in a
wicked world.
Fielding had written twenty-five plays before he took up the law, driven from the
stage by Walpole’s censorship. He confronted London’s corrupt system of justice,
and tried to reform the justice meted out to the poor. In his experiments with the
new form of novel, he was uninterested in realistic detail and individual psychology.
Since he offers neither pictorial realism nor inner life, to read him demands a generic
readjustment. He is an Augustan prose satirist, classically educated, brisk, high-spir-
ited and discursive, a narrator who is perpetually present, outside his story, not
absorbed into it. The narrative itself takes its sense of pace, scene and plot from the
theatre.
Fielding is a cheerful moralist. Thus, when Joseph is robbed, stripped, beaten and
thrown into a ditch,
THE NOVEL 201