‘Poor Pamela’s Married At Last!’
A beautiful girl, the daughter of humble parents of true respectability, honest, loving, patient, and pious goes forth from her home to be a servant in a rich family. Her master is drawn as one of the coarsest of libertines; proud, selfish, of no tenderness of nature; a slave to his passionate impulses; and yet, after attempts which could scarcely be called seduction,* she cherishes designs, amidst all her virtuous resistance, to become honourably allied to him, and she completes her purpose.
Nevertheless, there is so much of truth and nature in the conduct of the story that we may have perfect confidence in the anecdote told by Sir John Herschel, of the blacksmith of a village who read ‘Pamela’ to his neighbours collected round his anvil.* When the hero and heroine were brought together to live long and happily, according to the most approved rules, the congregation were so delighted as to raise a great shout, and procuring the church keys, actually set the parish bells ringing.*
* Mr B. (her employer) secreted himself in Pamela’s closet to watch the fifteen-year-old undress; he pounced on her with unwelcome kisses; he drew up a contract for Pamela to be his mistress (since her low birth ruled out marriage); he even crept into her bed disguised as Nan, the housemaid. There were many other scenes that some felt did not tally with Richardson’s assurance in the Author’s Preface that he would teach virtue “without raising a single idea throughout the whole, that shall shock the exactest purity”, but Richardson had also undertaken “to paint Vice in its proper colours, to make it deservedly odious”.
* Sir John Frederick William Herschel (1792-1871), son of the pioneering astronomer Sir William Herschel (1738-1822) and Mary Baldwin (1750-1832). His remarks were made, according to Sir Walter Scott’s biographer George Allan, in Herschel’s opening address to the subscribers of the Windsor and Eton Public Library, of which Sir John, a native of Slough, was President. Novelist Cecil Roberts (1892-1976) stated that the blacksmith attended horses on the road from London to Bath at Salt Hill near Slough in Berkshire.
* Apparently the same idea occurred to avid readers far beyond Slough. Hester Thrale’s aunt told her that the townspeople of Preston in Lancashire rang the church bells when the news reached them. “Her Maid came in bursting with Joy,” Thrale recalled in her diary Thraliana, “and said why Madam poor Pamela’s married at last; the News came down to us in this Mornings Paper.”