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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The "Regency Romance Classics 'Äì Samuel Richardson Collection" showcases the pioneering works of Samuel Richardson, a pivotal figure in the evolution of the English novel. This collection brings together his seminal novels, characterized by their epistolary form and intricate character examinations. Richardson deftly explores themes of virtue, moral complexity, and the struggles of society, all set against the backdrop of the Regency era's social mores. His writing style, imbued with psychological depth and emotional intensity, allows readers to engage intimately with the characters' dilemmas and desires, making the narratives both compelling and reflective of the human condition. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) was not merely an author but a craftsman of culture, and his background as a printer deeply influenced his literary creations. His fascination with letters and communication in an increasingly evolving society provided a framework for his exploration of individual agency against societal constraints. Richardson's works emerged during a critical juncture in literary history when the novel began to establish itself as a serious form capable of addressing complex social issues. This collection is recommended for readers intrigued by early modern literature, the evolution of romance in fiction, or the intricacies of human relationships. With Richardson's works, one can appreciate the roots of modern narrative styles while enjoying timeless themes that resonate even today. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Regency Romance Classics – Samuel Richardson Collection
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection presents the complete novels of Samuel Richardson, uniting Pamela, Clarissa, and The History of Sir Charles Grandison in a single volume. It is intended to offer readers a continuous encounter with the author’s full narrative achievement and the distinctive moral and emotional worlds his fiction creates. While the series title evokes the refined manners and courtship interests often associated with later Regency tastes, these works originate in the mid-eighteenth century. Read together, they reveal the groundwork of sentimental and courtship fiction, highlighting the social negotiations, ethical deliberations, and intimate self-examination that would shape the English novel for generations.
Richardson’s career as a novelist unfolds across the 1740s and 1750s. Pamela first appeared in 1740, Clarissa was published in installments between 1747 and 1748, and The History of Sir Charles Grandison followed in 1753–1754. All three are epistolary narratives, framed as collections of letters (and, at times, journal-like entries) exchanged among characters. Issued in multiple volumes and intended for sustained, reflective reading, the novels were central to the rapid growth of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Their publication context—serial, expansive, and attentive to readers’ moral engagement—helps explain both their immediate impact and their lasting reputation.
The materials gathered here are works of long-form fiction—novels—composed predominantly in letters. Instead of authorial narration, the story reaches the reader through correspondents who record events, reflect on motives, and respond to each other in near-real time. This design blends narrative and discourse, action and commentary, and frequently includes dated entries that create a vivid temporal structure. The epistolary method also invites comparison among multiple perspectives, allowing characters to contradict or amplify one another. By assembling these three novels together, the collection highlights how Richardson adapts the same textual apparatus—letters, enclosures, and editorial framing—toward varied moral and social questions.
Read as a whole, the novels pursue unifying concerns: courtship as a testing ground for character, the pressures of family authority, the ethics of power within unequal relationships, and the interplay of reputation, property, and consent. Richardson dramatizes how private feeling intersects with public norms, asking how virtue is proved and recognized when social stakes are high. The letters’ intimacy foregrounds conscience, self-scrutiny, and the responsibilities attendant upon choice. These themes recur across different social settings, from households and drawing rooms to wider networks of kin and acquaintance, giving the trilogy a coherent moral landscape despite their distinct casts and plots.
Stylistically, Richardson is marked by circumstantial realism and psychological patience. The letters are thick with detail—times, places, conversations, scruples—which cumulatively render a world of manners and motives. He often frames the correspondence as documents gathered by notional editors, a device that both authenticates and interprets the narrative. The continuous exchange of letters produces immediacy and suspense without recourse to omniscient commentary, while the multiplicity of voices reveals how understanding is pieced together. The rhetoric of persuasion—characters urging, justifying, confessing—becomes a structural principle, turning reading into an active moral deliberation rather than a passive consumption of events.
These works remain significant for their formative role in the English novel and for their probing of moral psychology. Their length and epistolary design foster an uncommon closeness between reader and character, encouraging judgment, sympathy, and doubt. The novels also historicize courtship by showing how families negotiate alliances, how legal and economic constraints shape choice, and how ideals of virtue and honor are tested in practice. Together, they display an ambitious experiment in narrative form, a sustained exploration of character under pressure, and a model of fiction that entwines entertainment with ethical inquiry—attributes that continue to invite attentive reading.
Pamela (1740) introduces a young servant whose virtue is challenged when her employer’s attentions threaten her safety and autonomy. Told largely through her own letters and journal-like reflections, the narrative captures the immediacy of fear, resolve, and tactical prudence. It examines class boundaries and the credibility of a heroine who measures her conduct against religious and social ideals. The novel’s impact was swift, prompting readers to debate questions of consent, sincerity, and the persuasive power of first-person testimony. As the opening work in this collection, Pamela establishes Richardson’s hallmark: moral trial conducted through intimate correspondence.
Clarissa (1747–1748) follows a young gentlewoman whose family pressures and a charismatic pursuer set her on a path of escalating conflict. The large cast and extensive letter networks broaden the frame to include competing interpretations of duty, love, authority, and self-preservation. Clarissa’s voice, and those of other correspondents, build a rich portrait of interiority—scruple by scruple, moment by moment—while testing how far individual conscience can withstand social coercion. The novel’s scale permits a deep inquiry into trust, agency, and the consequences of manipulation without foreclosing debate. It remains a landmark for its psychological range and formal daring.
The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1754) turns to the model of a principled gentleman navigating complex obligations of friendship, family, and courtship. Its letters portray a society intent on politeness, benevolence, and measured conduct, and they balance admiration for public virtue with scrutiny of private feeling. Multiple intertwined storylines consider compatibility, admiration, and the ethics of decision in situations where kindness and candor may conflict. Without relying on a single perspective, the correspondence assembles a collective judgment about character. The novel’s emphasis on exemplary behavior complements the earlier books’ focus on trial, rounding out the trilogy’s moral spectrum.
Taken together, the three novels exemplify the epistolary promise of immediacy. Dated letters compress or dilate time, sustaining suspense while keeping close to the rhythms of daily life. Because knowledge is always partial and contingent, readers must weigh competing accounts and infer motives, becoming participants in the moral inquiry. The form sustains an unusual blend of narrative drive and reflective pause: moments of social encounter alternate with meditations on principle, reputation, and feeling. This dynamic illuminates the tension between private judgment and public expectation, a tension central to the novels’ courtship plots and to their broader social observations.
Although these works predate the nineteenth-century Regency, they speak directly to interests often associated with that later era: the codification of manners, the centrality of courtship, the negotiation of family expectations, and the moral stakes of marrying well. Richardson’s attention to consent, conversation, and reputation provides an earlier template for the social choreography that later readers prize. The collection’s focus on letters and interior life highlights how romance can be both a private drama and a public contract. Readers drawn to refined settings and ethical complexity will find in these pages the roots of many enduring narrative pleasures.
The purpose of this volume is to provide an integrated reading of Richardson’s complete novels, enabling comparisons across premises, perspectives, and resolutions without foreknowledge of outcomes. By setting Pamela, Clarissa, and The History of Sir Charles Grandison side by side, the collection foregrounds the continuities of theme and the evolution of craft. It invites readers to appreciate the epistolary method not as a technical curiosity but as a powerful engine of character and moral debate. Above all, it offers a sustained engagement with the questions these books keep alive: what virtue requires, how love persuades, and how society judges.
Author Biography
Samuel Richardson was an English novelist and master printer of the eighteenth century, widely regarded as a founding figure in the development of the English novel. Writing in the age of burgeoning print culture and moral debate, he helped establish the epistolary novel as a vehicle for psychological depth and social inquiry. His three major fictions—Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison—combined narrative innovation with didactic purpose, exploring virtue, power, gender, and class through intimate letters and journals. Richardson's dual identity as practitioner of the press and author shaped his understanding of readers, enabling him to craft works that provoked discussion across Britain and Europe.
Born in the late 1680s in Derbyshire and raised largely in London, Richardson received a modest education before entering a printing apprenticeship in his teens. The training grounded him in composition, proofreading, and the economics of the book trade at a time when pamphlets, sermons, and periodicals were central to public life. Early anecdotes note his facility with letters and moral counsel, habits that later informed his fictional method. He read widely in conduct literature and devotional writing, absorbing the rhetoric of self-examination that animates his novels. By the early eighteenth century, he had mastered the craft and began ascending the London print world.
Richardson established his own press and, over the next decades, built a prosperous business printing a wide range of material. His reliability and discretion won him the confidence of booksellers and authors, and he served in senior roles within the Stationers' Company, the guild that organized the trade. This professional standing brought constant contact with readers' tastes, censorship concerns, and debates over morality and manners. It also trained him to think in sequences and compilations, skills that suited the letter-by-letter structure of epistolary fiction. Before turning fully to long narrative, he produced practical manuals and occasional writings shaped by the needs of apprentices and households.
In the early 1740s Richardson published Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, a novel in letters recounting a young servant's efforts to preserve her virtue amid predatory pressure from her employer. The work's immediacy—diary-like entries and dated correspondence—invited readers to weigh motives as events unfolded. Its success was sensational, spawning sequels, rival editions, responses, and satire, and igniting a public debate about class mobility, consent, and moral exemplarity. Admirers praised its uplift and realism; detractors found it calculating or prurient. Whatever the verdict, Pamela established the epistolary novel as a dominant form in English and made Richardson a central figure in literary culture.
Richardson's next major project, Clarissa, appeared in the late 1740s in multiple volumes and is often regarded as his masterpiece. Expanding the epistolary canvas to include several correspondents, it offered an intricate anatomy of persuasion, coercion, friendship, and social constraint. The book's scale allowed unprecedented psychological detail and provoked strong reactions from readers, who wrote to Richardson with pleas and objections as the installments emerged. He revised materials across editions, attentive to these exchanges. Contemporary and later commentators, including Samuel Johnson on the depth of sentiment and Continental figures such as Rousseau and Diderot, recognized the novel's ambition and moral seriousness.
In the mid-1750s he completed The History of Sir Charles Grandison, again using letters to model conversation, civility, and Christian benevolence within courtship and society. While less incendiary than his earlier narratives, it advanced his project of depicting ethical conduct under pressure. Alongside fiction, Richardson compiled a widely circulated letter-writing manual, reflecting his long engagement with epistolary form as instruction as well as art. He carried on extensive correspondence with readers—many of them women—whose responses refined his sense of audience. Thematically, his works affirm virtue, sympathy, and domestic affection, while scrutinizing authority, gendered vulnerability, and the performance of power.
Richardson continued to manage his printing house, mentor apprentices, and maintain a literary circle in and around London during his later years. Health concerns gradually limited his activity, but he supervised new editions and defended his aims in prefaces and letters. He died in the early 1760s. His legacy rests on transforming private correspondence into a vehicle for public reflection, opening the English novel to interiority, ethical debate, and social critique. Later writers, from novelists of sensibility to early realists, drew on his methods; modern readers study his work for its narrative experimentation and searching treatment of consent, class, and moral agency.
Historical Context
Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) wrote in the early Georgian decades, yet his influence reaches into later British romance traditions often grouped under “Regency” taste. His three great epistolary novels—published in 1740, 1747–48, and 1753–54—emerged from a metropolitan culture transformed by print, commerce, and new ideals of polite sociability. London’s expanding reading public sought morally instructive entertainment, and Richardson’s narratives answered that demand with unprecedented psychological detail. The novels are inseparable from the institutions and habits of eighteenth‑century Britain: the legal framework of marriage and property, the Anglican moral climate, the postal and stage networks that connected households, and a bookselling trade increasingly adept at marketing sensation and virtue together.
Richardson’s career unfolded in the wake of the 1695 lapse of pre‑publication licensing and under the Statute of Anne (1710), the first modern copyright law. These measures altered the incentives of authors, printers, and booksellers, encouraging innovation and enlarging the market for prose fiction. Parliamentary politics and vigorous pamphlet culture, though sometimes litigious, created a comparatively open public sphere where new genres could flourish. In this environment, multivolume works could reach subscribers across Britain and Ireland, and reprints—authorized and pirated—spread ideas beyond London. Richardson’s trajectory from printer to best‑selling author exemplifies how the early eighteenth‑century legal and commercial architecture made long narrative fiction economically viable.
Born in 1689 in Derbyshire, Richardson moved to London as a youth to apprentice in the printing trade, a profession he pursued with notable success. By the 1720s he operated from Salisbury Court off Fleet Street, in the heart of the metropolis’s book world. His practical knowledge of paper supply, typography, distribution, and patronage networks later shaped how his novels were produced and promoted. He married twice, established a respected household, and rose within the Stationers’ Company—serving as its Master in 1754—before retiring to Parson’s Green, Fulham, where he died in 1761. The geography of his life—provincial birth, urban career, suburban retirement—mirrors the social transitions his fiction anatomizes.
Early eighteenth‑century London swelled with migrants, including servants entering great houses, clerks, milliners, and tradesmen navigating new hierarchies. Domestic service was a structured path for advancement but also a zone of vulnerability, regulated by custom more than law. Codes of deference, patronage, and libertine gallantry collided with evangelical calls for chastity and duty. These tensions inform Richardson’s recurrent attention to conduct, sexual coercion, guardianship, and household governance. The great house, the lodging, and the family parlour function as moral theatres in which virtue is tested. His fiction engages the lived reality of the “middling sorts,” whose aspirations and anxieties defined much of London’s social dynamism.
Richardson’s narrative method grew from a culture steeped in letters and periodical essays. The Tatler (1709–11) and Spectator (1711–12) promoted ideals of polite conversation, while letter‑writing manuals taught forms of self‑presentation. In 1739 booksellers Charles Rivington and John Osborn asked Richardson to compile model letters; the project sharpened his sense of epistolary voice and everyday ethics. He soon published a collection of familiar letters (1741), and his novels adapt this didactic infrastructure to dramatic ends. The epistolary frame—private sentiments addressed to intimate readers—allowed him to blend moral instruction with narrative immediacy, embedding debates on marriage, consent, and class within the trusted medium of domestic correspondence.
The “rise of the novel” was collaborative and contentious. Richardson’s moral seriousness entered dialogue with the comic realism of Henry Fielding, whose Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742) parodied popular narrative strategies while acknowledging their power. Such exchanges sharpened the public’s appetite for extended fiction and helped stabilize conventions of character, plot, and tone. Competing visions of virtue and masculinity—libertine wit versus benevolent paternalism—became arenas of literary debate rather than settled doctrine. The controversies also boosted sales, as readers compared rival treatments of seduction, reform, and marriage. Across this ferment, Richardson’s careful staging of conscience and confession secured a distinct place in the emerging canon.
Infrastructure underwrote narrative possibility. The Post Office’s expanding routes and London’s penny‑post system made letters common instruments of business, courtship, and surveillance. Turnpike roads and stagecoaches knitted provincial towns to the capital, facilitating visits, elopements, and the circulation of news. Reading spread through coffeehouses, booksellers’ shops, circulating libraries, and subscription schemes that put multivolume sets within reach of the middling classes. Richardson wrote into this mesh of routes, voices, and venues, crafting plots that rely on the speed, delay, loss, and interception of letters. His books were read aloud in parlours and debated in clubs, aligning private sentiment with an increasingly national conversation.
Religion and reform discourse provided further context. Eighteenth‑century Anglicanism emphasized conscience, charity, and the sanctity of marriage, while the Methodist revival under John Wesley and George Whitefield (from the 1730s) stirred lay piety and introspective habits. Conversion narratives, spiritual journals, and sermons on duty and grace influenced how readers understood moral struggle. Richardson’s fiction translates these concerns into secular domestic settings, asking whether repentance can redeem the libertine, whether patience can withstand persecution, and how prayer and parental counsel shape conduct. His characters’ long letters function like spiritual exercises—daily examinations of motive and will—marking the overlap between devotional practice and secular sentimental reading.
Legal frameworks sharpened the stakes of courtship. Coverture placed a married woman’s property under her husband’s control, while guardians and trustees often governed inheritances and settlements. Clandestine marriages, Fleet weddings, and breaches of promise preoccupied magistrates and pamphleteers. Debates culminated in Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (1753), which tightened formal requirements to prevent fraud and impulsive unions. Public conversations about consent, abduction, and sexual injury—voiced in newspapers, trial accounts, and sermons—supplied both vocabulary and urgency to domestic narratives. Richardson’s plots unfold amid this contested terrain, where a letter, a vow, or a forged document can alter fortunes, reputations, and the legitimacy of future generations.
Politics set the background cadence. After the Glorious Revolution, the Hanoverian succession (1714) ushered in a period of relative stability under Robert Walpole (1721–42), even as Jacobite risings in 1715 and 1745 punctuated the century with anxiety. Political moderation, commerce, and urban growth encouraged ideals of civility and improvement. In such a climate, exemplary models of benevolent authority—judicious fathers, conscientious magistrates, philanthropic gentlemen—held cultural appeal. Richardson’s imagined households often test these ideals, proposing that patriotism begins in self‑government and in the negotiated duties of kinship. The novels suggest that national order depends upon the reformation of private tyranny into public‑spirited virtue.
The reach of his work rapidly extended beyond Britain. Dublin reprinters moved swiftly on London successes, while Scottish presses served a voracious market for cheap editions. On the Continent, translations carried his plots into salons and academies. Abbé Prévost’s French version of Clarissa (1751) catalyzed European enthusiasm for sentimental fiction, helping to prepare readers for Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Themes of inner sincerity, domestic virtue, and the reform of manners fit Enlightenment debates about authenticity and sociability. By mid‑century, Richardson’s heroines and heroes circulated as moral exemplars in multiple languages, shaping transnational conversations on sensibility, marriage, and social responsibility.
Women’s reading communities were central to this reception. The mid‑century saw expanding female education, subscription libraries, and sociable letter networks. Richardson’s Parson’s Green gatherings welcomed learned women—figures such as Hester Mulso (later Chapone) and other blue‑stocking associates—who discussed manuscript chapters and corresponded about endings and exemplarity. This coterie review, neither courtly nor strictly academic, influenced revision practices and reinforced the novels’ orientation toward domestic audiences. Printed prefaces, editorial notes, and italics signaled moral emphases for family reading. The author’s reciprocal exchange with women readers helped fix the domestic novel as a pedagogical instrument for households intent on forming taste and conscience.
Book design and visual culture magnified impact. Multivolume sets with engraved frontispieces presented scenes of distress, prayer, or reconciliation, guiding interpretation before a page of prose was read. Moral series by artists like William Hogarth, though independent, occupied the same cultural conversation about vice and reform. Elegant bindings, pagination conducive to reading aloud, and indexes to moral topics treated the novel as both aesthetic object and ethical manual. The commerce of prints, fans, and tea equipage decorated with literary motifs disseminated narrative icons into parlours, making characters and exemplary moments part of everyday domestic display and reinforcing the texts’ didactic prestige.
Controversy accompanied popularity. Clergymen warned of novel‑reading’s dangers while also praising works that edified; periodical critics debated whether tears in the parlour softened vice or merely indulged it. Philanthropic ventures, such as the Foundling Hospital (chartered 1739), channeled sentiment into institution‑building and offered a model for linking private feeling to public good. Richardson’s fiction engages this moral economy, insisting that emotions must be disciplined by principle, community counsel, and law. The novels are not escapist romances but case studies in prudence—how to choose companions, masters, spouses; how to interpret flattering letters; how to withstand intimidation without forfeiting duty to family and faith.
His distinctive contribution was to make interiority legible. The letter, with its datelines, postscripts, enclosures, and authenticating hand, becomes a technology of truth. Readers track time through postal rhythms, reconstruct journeys from place names, and weigh testimony as if in a courtroom of conscience. Depositions, wills, settlements, and physician’s reports enter the narrative as documents within documents, blending forensic and devotional genres. This apparatus allowed Richardson to examine remorse, self‑deception, and resolution with unusual granularity. The result is a new kind of narrative authority: credibility generated not by an omniscient narrator but by a chorus of partial witnesses whose records must be judged.
The cultural phenomenon was immediate. From 1740 into the 1750s, his novels went through rapid editions, provoked replies, and inspired stage adaptations and paratexts. The “Pamela craze” included embroideries, musical settings, and conversation manuals, while competing pamphlets argued over the plausibility of virtue in service and the reformation of libertinism. Reading circles scheduled shared sessions to process distressing scenes; correspondents petitioned the author for altered fates. Booksellers coordinated advertisements across London and provincial papers, and Dublin houses issued swift reprints to meet demand. This intense participation reveals a public using fiction to negotiate real social questions under the pressure of feeling.
By the time he died in 1761, Richardson had established templates for domestic moral fiction that shaped later writers—from Frances Burney to Jane Austen—active into the Regency years. His fusion of conduct discourse, legal detail, and sentimental experiment set expectations for courtship plots centered on consent, character, and the testing of power. The three novels operate as a collective inquiry into benevolent authority, female agency, and reformed masculinity, forging a common context that later romances could refine rather than discard. Thus the historical world of early Georgian London, not Regency drawing rooms, generated the forms and ideals that sustained nineteenth‑century courtship narratives.
Synopsis (Selection)
Pamela
A young servant, Pamela Andrews, chronicles her steadfast resistance to her employer’s advances, using letters and journals to explore virtue, class mobility, and the dynamics of power in courtship.
Clarissa Harlowe
Told through an intricate web of letters, a principled young woman resists a mercenary marriage and becomes entangled with the charismatic Lovelace, probing autonomy, coercion, reputation, and social constraint.
Sir Charles Grandison
An epistolary portrait of an exemplary gentleman who navigates the affections and trials of friends—especially Harriet Byron and the Italian Clementina—while modeling ideals of duty, courtship, and Christian charity.
Regency Romance Classics – Samuel Richardson Collection
Pamela
LETTER I
DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER,
I have great trouble, and some comfort, to acquaint you with. The trouble is, that my good lady died of the illness I mentioned to you, and left us all much grieved for the loss of her; for she was a dear good lady, and kind to all us her servants. Much I feared, that as I was taken by her ladyship to wait upon her person, I should be quite destitute again, and forced to return to you and my poor mother, who have enough to do to maintain yourselves; and, as my lady's goodness had put me to write and cast accounts, and made me a little expert at my needle, and otherwise qualified above my degree, it was not every family that could have found a place that your poor Pamela was fit for: but God, whose graciousness to us we have so often experienced at a pinch, put it into my good lady's heart, on her death-bed, just an hour before she expired, to recommend to my young master all her servants, one by one; and when it came to my turn to be recommended, (for I was sobbing and crying at her pillow) she could only say, My dear son!—and so broke off a little; and then recovering—Remember my poor Pamela—And these were some of her last words! O how my eyes run—Don't wonder to see the paper so blotted.
Well, but God's will must be done!—And so comes the comfort, that I shall not be obliged to return back to be a clog upon my dear parents! For my master said, I will take care of you all, my good maidens; and for you, Pamela, (and took me by the hand; yes, he took my hand before them all,) for my dear mother's sake, I will be a friend to you, and you shall take care of my linen. God bless him! and pray with me, my dear father and mother, for a blessing upon him, for he has given mourning and a year's wages to all my lady's servants; and I having no wages as yet, my lady having said she should do for me as I deserved, ordered the housekeeper to give me mourning with the rest; and gave me with his own hand four golden guineas, and some silver, which were in my old lady's pocket when she died; and said, if I was a good girl, and faithful and diligent, he would be a friend to me, for his mother's sake. And so I send you these four guineas for your comfort; for Providence will not let me want: And so you may pay some old debt with part, and keep the other part to comfort you both. If I get more, I am sure it is my duty, and it shall be my care, to love and cherish you both; for you have loved and cherished me, when I could do nothing for myself. I send them by John, our footman, who goes your way: but he does not know what he carries; because I seal them up in one of the little pill-boxes, which my lady had, wrapt close in paper, that they mayn't chink; and be sure don't open it before him.
I know, dear father and mother, I must give you both grief and pleasure; and so I will only say, Pray for your Pamela; who will ever be Your most dutiful DAUGHTER.
I have been scared out of my senses; for just now, as I was folding up this letter in my late lady's dressing-room, in comes my young master! Good sirs! how was I frightened! I went to hide the letter in my bosom; and he, seeing me tremble, said, smiling, To whom have you been writing, Pamela?—I said, in my confusion, Pray your honour forgive me!—Only to my father and mother. He said, Well then, let me see how you are come on in your writing! O how ashamed I was!—He took it, without saying more, and read it quite through, and then gave it me again;—and I said, Pray your honour forgive me!—Yet I know not for what: for he was always dutiful to his parents; and why should he be angry that I was so to mine? And indeed he was not angry; for he took me by the hand, and said, You are a good girl, Pamela, to be kind to your aged father and mother. I am not angry with you for writing such innocent matters as these: though you ought to be wary what tales you send out of a family.—Be faithful and diligent; and do as you should do, and I like you the better for this. And then he said, Why, Pamela, you write a very pretty hand, and spell tolerably too. I see my good mother's care in your learning has not been thrown away upon you. She used to say you loved reading; you may look into any of her books, to improve yourself, so you take care of them. To be sure I did nothing but courtesy and cry, and was all in confusion, at his goodness. Indeed he is the best of gentlemen, I think! But I am making another long letter: So will only add to it, that I shall ever be Your dutiful daughter, PAMELA ANDREWS.
LETTER II
[In answer to the preceding.]
DEAR PAMELA,
Your letter was indeed a great trouble, and some comfort, to me and your poor mother. We are troubled, to be sure, for your good lady's death, who took such care of you, and gave you learning, and, for three or four years past, has always been giving you clothes and linen, and every thing that a gentlewoman need not be ashamed to appear in. But our chief trouble is, and indeed a very great one, for fear you should be brought to anything dishonest or wicked, by being set so above yourself. Every body talks how you have come on, and what a genteel girl you are; and some say you are very pretty; and, indeed, six months since, when I saw you last, I should have thought so myself, if you was not our child. But what avails all this, if you are to be ruined and undone!—Indeed, my dear Pamela, we begin to be in great fear for you; for what signify all the riches in the world, with a bad conscience, and to be dishonest! We are, 'tis true, very poor, and find it hard enough to live; though once, as you know, it was better with us. But we would sooner live upon the water, and, if possible, the clay of the ditches I contentedly dig, than live better at the price of our child's ruin.
I hope the good 'squire has no design: but when he has given you so much money, and speaks so kindly to you, and praises your coming on; and, oh, that fatal word! that he would be kind to you, if you would do as you should do, almost kills us with fears.
I have spoken to good old widow Mumford about it, who, you know, has formerly lived in good families; and she puts us in some comfort; for she says it is not unusual, when a lady dies, to give what she has about her person to her waiting-maid, and to such as sit up with her in her illness. But, then, why should he smile so kindly upon you? Why should he take such a poor girl as you by the hand, as your letter says he has done twice? Why should he stoop to read your letter to us; and commend your writing and spelling? And why should he give you leave to read his mother's books?—Indeed, indeed, my dearest child, our hearts ache for you; and then you seem so full of joy at his goodness, so taken with his kind expressions, (which, truly, are very great favours, if he means well) that we fear—yes, my dear child, we fear—you should be too grateful,—and reward him with that jewel, your virtue, which no riches, nor favour, nor any thing in this life, can make up to you.
I, too, have written a long letter, but will say one thing more; and that is, that, in the midst of our poverty and misfortunes, we have trusted in God's goodness, and been honest, and doubt not to be happy hereafter, if we continue to be good, though our lot is hard here; but the loss of our dear child's virtue would be a grief that we could not bear, and would bring our grey hairs to the grave at once.
If, then, you love us, if you wish for God's blessing, and your own future happiness, we both charge you to stand upon your guard: and, if you find the least attempt made upon your virtue, be sure you leave every thing behind you, and come away to us; for we had rather see you all covered with rags, and even follow you to the churchyard, than have it said, a child of ours preferred any worldly conveniences to her virtue.
We accept kindly your dutiful present; but, till we are out of pain, cannot make use of it, for fear we should partake of the price of our poor daughter's shame: so have laid it up in a rag among the thatch, over the window, for a while, lest we should be robbed. With our blessings, and our hearty prayers for you, we remain,
Your careful, but loving Father and Mother, JOHN AND ELIZABETH ANDREWS.
LETTER III
DEAR FATHER,
I must needs say, your letter has filled me with trouble, for it has made my heart, which was overflowing with gratitude for my master's goodness, suspicious and fearful: and yet I hope I shall never find him to act unworthy of his character; for what could he get by ruining such a poor young creature as me? But that which gives me most trouble is, that you seem to mistrust the honesty of your child. No, my dear father and mother, be assured, that, by God's grace, I never will do any thing that shall bring your grey hairs with sorrow to the grave. I will die a thousand deaths, rather than be dishonest any way. Of that be assured, and set your hearts at rest; for although I have lived above myself for some time past, yet I can be content with rags and poverty, and bread and water, and will embrace them, rather than forfeit my good name, let who will be the tempter. And of this pray rest satisfied, and think better of Your dutiful DAUGHTER till death.
My master continues to be very affable to me. As yet I see no cause to fear any thing. Mrs. Jervis, the housekeeper, too, is very civil to me, and I have the love of every body. Sure they can't all have designs against me, because they are civil! I hope I shall always behave so as to be respected by every one; and that nobody would do me more hurt than I am sure I would do them. Our John so often goes your way, that I will always get him to call, that you may hear from me, either by writing, (for it brings my hand in,) or by word of mouth.
LETTER IV
DEAR MOTHER,
For the last was to my father, in answer to his letter; and so I will now write to you; though I have nothing to say, but what will make me look more like a vain hussy, than any thing else: However, I hope I shan't be so proud as to forget myself. Yet there is a secret pleasure one has to hear one's self praised. You must know, then, that my Lady Davers, who, I need not tell you, is my master's sister, has been a month at our house, and has taken great notice of me, and given me good advice to keep myself to myself. She told me I was a pretty wench, and that every body gave me a very good character, and loved me; and bid me take care to keep the fellows at a distance; and said, that I might do, and be more valued for it, even by themselves.
But what pleased me much was, what I am going to tell you; for at table, as Mrs. Jervis says, my master and her ladyship talking of me, she told him she thought me the prettiest wench she ever saw in her life; and that I was too pretty to live in a bachelor's house; since no lady he might marry would care to continue me with her. He said, I was vastly improved, and had a good share of prudence, and sense above my years; and that it would be pity, that what was my merit should be my misfortune.—No, says my good lady, Pamela shall come and live with me, I think. He said, with all his heart; he should be glad to have me so well provided for. Well, said she, I'll consult my lord about it. She asked how old I was; and Mrs. Jervis said, I was fifteen last February. O! says she, if the wench (for so she calls all us maiden servants) takes care of herself, she'll improve yet more and more, as well in her person as mind.
Now, my dear father and mother, though this may look too vain to be repeated by me; yet are you not rejoiced, as well as I, to see my master so willing to part with me?—This shews that he has nothing bad in his heart. But John is just going away; and so I have only to say, that I am, and will always be,
Your honest as well as dutiful DAUGHTER.
Pray make use of the money. You may now do it safely.
LETTER V
MY DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER,
John being to go your way, I am willing to write, because he is so willing to carry any thing for me. He says it does him good at his heart to see you both, and to hear you talk. He says you are both so sensible, and so honest, that he always learns something from you to the purpose. It is a thousand pities, he says, that such worthy hearts should not have better luck in the world! and wonders, that you, my father, who are so well able to teach, and write so good a hand, succeeded no better in the school you attempted to set up; but was forced to go to such hard labour. But this is more pride to me, that I am come of such honest parents, than if I had been born a lady.
I hear nothing yet of going to Lady Davers; and I am very easy at present here: for Mrs. Jervis uses me as if I were her own daughter, and is a very good woman, and makes my master's interest her own. She is always giving me good counsel, and I love her next to you two, I think, best of any body. She keeps so good rule and order, she is mightily respected by us all; and takes delight to hear me read to her; and all she loves to hear read, is good books, which we read whenever we are alone; so that I think I am at home with you. She heard one of our men, Harry, who is no better than he should be, speak freely to me; I think he called me his pretty Pamela, and took hold of me, as if he would have kissed me; for which, you may be sure, I was very angry: and she took him to task, and was as angry at him as could be; and told me she was very well pleased to see my prudence and modesty, and that I kept all the fellows at a distance. And indeed I am sure I am not proud, and carry it civilly to every body; but yet, methinks, I cannot bear to be looked upon by these men-servants, for they seem as if they would look one through; and, as I generally breakfast, dine, and sup, with Mrs. Jervis, (so good she is to me,) I am very easy that I have so little to say to them. Not but they are civil to me in the main, for Mrs. Jervis's sake, who they see loves me; and they stand in awe of her, knowing her to be a gentlewoman born, though she has had misfortunes. I am going on again with a long letter; for I love writing, and shall tire you. But, when I began, I only intended to say, that I am quite fearless of any danger now: and, indeed, cannot but wonder at myself, (though your caution to me was your watchful love,) that I should be so foolish as to be so uneasy as I have been: for I am sure my master would not demean himself, so as to think upon such a poor girl as I, for my harm. For such a thing would ruin his credit, as well as mine, you know: who, to be sure, may expect one of the best ladies in the land. So no more at present, but that I am
Your ever dutiful DAUGHTER.
LETTER VI
DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER,
My master has been very kind since my last; for he has given me a suit of my late lady's clothes, and half a dozen of her shifts, and six fine handkerchiefs, and three of her cambric aprons, and four holland ones. The clothes are fine silk, and too rich and too good for me, to be sure. I wish it was no affront to him to make money of them, and send it to you: it would do me more good.
You will be full of fears, I warrant now, of some design upon me, till I tell you, that he was with Mrs. Jervis when he gave them me; and he gave her a mort of good things, at the same time, and bid her wear them in remembrance of her good friend, my lady, his mother. And when he gave me these fine things, he said, These, Pamela, are for you; have them made fit for you, when your mourning is laid by, and wear them for your good mistress's sake. Mrs. Jervis gives you a very good word; and I would have you continue to behave as prudently as you have done hitherto, and every body will be your friend.
I was so surprised at his goodness, that I could not tell what to say. I courtesied to him, and to Mrs. Jervis for her good word; and said, I wished I might be deserving of his favour, and her kindness: and nothing should be wanting in me, to the best of my knowledge.
O how amiable a thing is doing good!—It is all I envy great folks for.
I always thought my young master a fine gentleman, as every body says he is: but he gave these good things to us both with such a graciousness, as I thought he looked like an angel.
Mrs. Jervis says, he asked her, If I kept the men at a distance? for, he said, I was very pretty; and to be drawn in to have any of them, might be my ruin, and make me poor and miserable betimes. She never is wanting to give me a good word, and took occasion to launch out in my praise, she says. But I hope she has said no more than I shall try to deserve, though I mayn't at present. I am sure I will always love her, next to you and my dear mother. So I rest
Your ever dutiful DAUGHTER.
LETTER VII
DEAR FATHER,
Since my last, my master gave me more fine things. He called me up to my late lady's closet, and, pulling out her drawers, he gave me two suits of fine Flanders laced headclothes, three pair of fine silk shoes, two hardly the worse, and just fit for me, (for my lady had a very little foot,) and the other with wrought silver buckles in them; and several ribands and top-knots of all colours; four pair of white fine cotton stockings, and three pair of fine silk ones; and two pair of rich stays. I was quite astonished, and unable to speak for a while; but yet I was inwardly ashamed to take the stockings; for Mrs. Jervis was not there: If she had, it would have been nothing. I believe I received them very awkwardly; for he smiled at my awkwardness, and said, Don't blush, Pamela: Dost think I don't know pretty maids should wear shoes and stockings?
I was so confounded at these words, you might have beat me down with a feather. For you must think, there was no answer to be made to this: So, like a fool, I was ready to cry; and went away courtesying and blushing, I am sure, up to the ears; for, though there was no harm in what he said, yet I did not know how to take it. But I went and told all to Mrs. Jervis, who said, God put it into his heart to be good to me; and I must double my diligence. It looked to her, she said, as if he would fit me in dress for a waiting-maid's place on Lady Davers's own person.
But still your kind fatherly cautions came into my head, and made all these gifts nothing near to me what they would have been. But yet, I hope, there is no reason; for what good could it do to him to harm such a simple maiden as me? Besides, to be sure no lady would look upon him, if he should so disgrace himself. So I will make myself easy; and, indeed, I should never have been otherwise, if you had not put it into my head; for my good, I know very well. But, may be, without these uneasinesses to mingle with these benefits, I might be too much puffed up: So I will conclude, all that happens is for our good; and God bless you, my dear father and mother; and I know you constantly pray for a blessing upon me; who am, and shall always be,
Your dutiful DAUGHTER.
LETTER VIII
DEAR PAMELA,
I cannot but renew my cautions on your master's kindness, and his free expression to you about the stockings. Yet there may not be, and I hope there is not, any thing in it. But when I reflect, that there possibly may, and that if there should, no less depends upon it than my child's everlasting happiness in this world and the next; it is enough to make one fearful for you. Arm yourself, my dear child, for the worst; and resolve to lose your life sooner than your virtue. What though the doubts I filled you with, lessen the pleasure you would have had in your master's kindness; yet what signify the delights that arise from a few paltry fine clothes, in comparison with a good conscience?
These are, indeed, very great favours that he heaps upon you, but so much the more to be suspected; and when you say he looked so amiably, and like an angel, how afraid I am, that they should make too great an impression upon you! For, though you are blessed with sense and prudence above your years, yet I tremble to think, what a sad hazard a poor maiden of little more than fifteen years of age stands against the temptations of this world, and a designing young gentleman, if he should prove so, who has so much power to oblige, and has a kind of authority to command, as your master.
I charge you, my dear child, on both our blessings, poor as we are, to be on your guard; there can be no harm in that. And since Mrs. Jervis is so good a gentlewoman, and so kind to you, I am the easier a great deal, and so is your mother; and we hope you will hide nothing from her, and take her counsel in every thing. So, with our blessings, and assured prayers for you, more than for ourselves, we remain,
Your loving FATHER AND MOTHER.
Be sure don't let people's telling you, you are pretty, puff you up; for you did not make yourself, and so can have no praise due to you for it. It is virtue and goodness only, that make the true beauty. Remember that, Pamela.
LETTER IX
DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER,
I am sorry to write you word, that the hopes I had of going to wait on Lady Davers, are quite over. My lady would have had me; but my master, as I heard by the by, would not consent to it. He said her nephew might be taken with me, and I might draw him in, or be drawn in by him; and he thought, as his mother loved me, and committed me to his care, he ought to continue me with him; and Mrs. Jervis would be a mother to me. Mrs. Jervis tells me the lady shook her head, and said, Ah! brother! and that was all. And as you have made me fearful by your cautions, my heart at times misgives me. But I say nothing yet of your caution, or my own uneasiness, to Mrs. Jervis; not that I mistrust her, but for fear she should think me presumptuous, and vain and conceited, to have any fears about the matter, from the great distance between such a gentleman, and so poor a girl. But yet Mrs. Jervis seemed to build something upon Lady Davers's shaking her head, and saying, Ah! brother! and no more. God, I hope, will give me his grace: and so I will not, if I can help it, make myself too uneasy; for I hope there is no occasion. But every little matter that happens, I will acquaint you with, that you may continue to me your good advice, and pray for
Your sad-hearted PAMELA.
LETTER X
DEAR MOTHER,
You and my good father may wonder you have not had a letter from me in so many weeks; but a sad, sad scene, has been the occasion of it. For to be sure, now it is too plain, that all your cautions were well grounded. O my dear mother! I am miserable, truly miserable!—But yet, don't be frightened, I am honest!—God, of his goodness, keep me so!
O this angel of a master! this fine gentleman! this gracious benefactor to your poor Pamela! who was to take care of me at the prayer of his good dying mother; who was so apprehensive for me, lest I should be drawn in by Lord Davers's nephew, that he would not let me go to Lady Davers's: This very gentleman (yes, I must call him gentleman, though he has fallen from the merit of that title) has degraded himself to offer freedoms to his poor servant! He has now shewed himself in his true colours; and, to me, nothing appear so black, and so frightful.
I have not been idle; but had writ from time to time, how he, by sly mean degrees, exposed his wicked views; but somebody stole my letter, and I know not what has become of it. It was a very long one. I fear, he that was mean enough to do bad things, in one respect, did not stick at this. But be it as it will, all the use he can make of it will be, that he may be ashamed of his part; I not of mine: for he will see I was resolved to be virtuous, and gloried in the honesty of my poor parents.
I will tell you all, the next opportunity; for I am watched very narrowly; and he says to Mrs. Jervis, This girl is always scribbling; I think she may be better employed. And yet I work all hours with my needle, upon his linen, and the fine linen of the family; and am, besides, about flowering him a waistcoat.—But, oh! my heart's broke almost; for what am I likely to have for my reward, but shame and disgrace, or else ill words, and hard treatment! I'll tell you all soon, and hope I shall find my long letter.
Your most afflicted DAUGHTER.
May-be, I he and him too much: but it is his own fault if I do. For why did he lose all his dignity with me?
LETTER XI
DEAR MOTHER,
Well, I can't find my letter, and so I'll try to recollect it all, and be as brief as I can. All went well enough in the main for some time after my letter but one. At last, I saw some reason to suspect; for he would look upon me, whenever he saw me, in such a manner, as shewed not well; and one day he came to me, as I was in the summer-house in the little garden, at work with my needle, and Mrs. Jervis was just gone from me; and I would have gone out, but he said, No don't go, Pamela; I have something to say to you; and you always fly me when I come near you, as if you were afraid of me.
I was much out of countenance, you may well think; but said, at last, It does not become your good servant to stay in your presence, sir, without your business required it; and I hope I shall always know my place.
Well, says he, my business does require it sometimes; and I have a mind you should stay to hear what I have to say to you.
I stood still confounded, and began to tremble, and the more when he took me by the hand; for now no soul was near us.
My sister Davers, said he, (and seemed, I thought, to be as much at a loss for words as I,) would have had you live with her; but she would not do for you what I am resolved to do, if you continue faithful and obliging. What say'st thou, my girl? said he, with some eagerness; had'st thou not rather stay with me, than go to my sister Davers? He looked so, as filled me with affrightment; I don't know how; wildly, I thought.
I said, when I could speak, Your honour will forgive me; but as you have no lady for me to wait upon, and my good lady has been now dead this twelvemonth, I had rather, if it would not displease you, wait upon Lady Davers, because—
I was proceeding, and he said, a little hastily—Because you are a little fool, and know not what's good for yourself. I tell you I will make a gentlewoman of you, if you be obliging, and don't stand in your own light; and so saying, he put his arm about me, and kissed me!
Now, you will say, all his wickedness appeared plainly. I struggled and trembled, and was so benumbed with terror, that I sunk down, not in a fit, and yet not myself; and I found myself in his arms, quite void of strength; and he kissed me two or three times, with frightful eagerness.—At last I burst from him, and was getting out of the summer-house; but he held me back, and shut the door.
I would have given my life for a farthing. And he said, I'll do you no harm, Pamela; don't be afraid of me. I said, I won't stay. You won't, hussy! said he: Do you know whom you speak to? I lost all fear, and all respect, and said, Yes, I do, sir, too well!—Well may I forget that I am your servant, when you forget what belongs to a master.
I sobbed and cried most sadly. What a foolish hussy you are! said he: Have I done you any harm? Yes, sir, said I, the greatest harm in the world: You have taught me to forget myself and what belongs to me, and have lessened the distance that fortune has made between us, by demeaning yourself, to be so free to a poor servant. Yet, sir, I will be bold to say, I am honest, though poor: and if you was a prince, I would not be otherwise.
He was angry, and said, Who would have you otherwise, you foolish slut! Cease your blubbering. I own I have demeaned myself; but it was only to try you. If you can keep this matter secret, you'll give me the better opinion of your prudence; and here's something, said he, putting some gold in my hand, to make you amends for the fright I put you in. Go, take a walk in the garden, and don't go in till your blubbering is over: and I charge you say nothing of what is past, and all shall be well, and I'll forgive you.
I won't take the money, indeed, sir, said I, poor as I am I won't take it. For, to say truth, I thought it looked like taking earnest, and so I put it upon the bench; and as he seemed vexed and confused at what he had done, I took the opportunity to open the door, and went out of the summer-house.
He called to me, and said, Be secret; I charge you, Pamela; and don't go in yet, as I told you.
O how poor and mean must those actions be, and how little must they make the best of gentlemen look, when they offer such things as are unworthy of themselves, and put it into the power of their inferiors to be greater than they!
I took a turn or two in the garden, but in sight of the house, for fear of the worst; and breathed upon my hand to dry my eyes, because I would not be too disobedient. My next shall tell you more.
Pray for me, my dear father and mother: and don't be angry I have not yet run away from this house, so late my comfort and delight, but now my terror and anguish. I am forced to break off hastily.
Your dutiful and honest DAUGHTER.
LETTER XII
DEAR MOTHER,
