Strange Antics

Literary success seldom comes without controversy; Pamela bred critics as well as fans. These critics can be loosely divided into satirists and moralists. The former consisted of the writers, critics and readers who were sceptical of Pamela’s claim to realism. They saw in Pamela’s rise from servant to lady of the manor a tale of canny social climbing, not the triumph of morality. Surely, they argued, if moral values were distinct from, and superior to, material values then rewarding the first with the second – which was what the book’s subtitle seemed to celebrate – made nonsense of the novel’s value system. The result was a chorus of scabrous criticism emanating from the capital’s pleasure districts. In June 1741 Eliza Haywood, the best-selling female novelist of the age, published Anti-Pamela; or Feign’d Innocence Detected, which recounted in the original’s epistolary format the rapid social ascent of Syrena Tricksy. Haywood’s work came a few months after a more complete parody of Richardson’s moralising: Henry Fielding’s Shamela, whose anti-heroine is a courtesan on the make until she realises she can dupe Mr Booby into marriage instead. ‘I thought once of making a little fortune by my person,’ she writes to her bawdy mother. ‘I now intend to make a great one by my vartue.’

Shamela and Anti-Pamela are but two examples among many. The satirical attacks on Pamela probed the holes in Richardson’s worldview. They also demonstrated how opposing views of morality could cohabit in the same period. Richardson’s morality, as we shall see, may have been ascendent but it still had to contend with the more permissive attitudes of Fielding and Haywood and their Covent Garden milieu. Any one sexual ideology rarely attains hegemonic status. The question is not which one triumphs but who attains cultural top billing. The rivalry between Pamela and Shamela is not simply an episode from English literary history but a permanent feature of the history of seduction.

As a printer and a longstanding participant in the London literary scene, Richardson could not have been surprised by the satirical attacks that came his way. Friends wrote to console him of the barbs hurled his way – the ever-faithful Aaron Hill prayed that some higher power might ‘Deliver Pamela from these cold Killers, who assume a Merit in destroying her!’[24] – Richardson’s occupation of the moral high ground was, however, impregnable and he could readily shrug off such attacks. More worrying were the criticisms of his work that came from fellow moralists. In works like Pamela Censur’d and The Virgin in Eden, Richardson was attacked by conservatives for writing little better than pornography. Pamela, they argued (and not without reason), was needlessly salacious and possessed of a wholly perverse moral lesson. It would doubtless corrupt more youths than it would save. They scorned the notion that this was suitable reading material for their daughters. The anonymous author of Pamela Censur’d went further, declaring that Pamela functioned as incitement to seduction:

The Advances are regular, and the amorous Conflicts so agreeably and warmly depicted, that the young Gentleman Reader will at the best be tempted to rehearse some of the same Scenes with some Pamela or other in the Family, and the Modest Young Lady can never read the Description of Naked Breasts being run over with the Hand, and Kisses given with such Eagerness that they cling to the Lips; but her own soft Breasts must heave at the Idea and secretly sigh for the same Pressure; what then can she do when she comes to the closer Struggles of the Bed, where the tender Virgin lies panting and exposed, if not to the last Conquest … at least to all the Liberties which ungoverned Hands of a determined Lover must be supposed to take?[25]

The passage inadvertently demonstrates the author’s own criticism of Pamela. Writing about seduction, even for moral or instructive purposes, brings with it the unavoidable risk that the realistic portrayal of sexual collision will tip into salaciousness and pornography. The charge stung Richardson and he quietly modified the text in response to such criticisms.[26]

The controversies surrounding Pamela add to the sense that if Richardson’s work cannot be confirmed as the first novel of the English language, then its publication must surely be considered the first great literary event in the history of the form. Its local and international popularity; the fervid debates it triggered; the parodies it spawned; the conversations and correspondences it informed; the sheer quantity of copies it sold: all militate towards the view that this was the moment when the Western world fell in love with the novel. Richardson courted his readers no less assiduously than Mr B— pursued Pamela, and in so doing acknowledged how the strategies of fiction mimicked the stratagems of the seducer. The novelist spins fictions to win an audience just as the seducer contrives to win his intended – and with much the same artistry. Richardson seems to nod to this symbiosis between real and fictional worlds in a brilliant passage put into the unlikely mouth of Mr B— shortly before he marries Pamela. Seeing his fiancée writing away, he expresses an interest in reading her letters and journals, and puns upon the similarities between reading, writing and courting:

I long to see the particulars of your plot, and your disappointment, where your papers leave off: for you have so beautiful a manner, that it is partly that, and partly my love for you, that has made me desirous of reading all you write; though a great deal of it is against myself; for which you must expect to suffer a little: and as I have furnished you with the subject, I have a title to see the fruits of your pen.

The passage could act as epigraph for Pamela’s enduring cultural resonance. Its publication was the moment that the fiction of seduction affirmed the seduction of fiction.

***

Before the publication of Pamela, Richardson was prospering; after it he was on his way to being rich. In Georgian England, wealth brought with it obligations to the poor and needy in one’s extended social group, and a man in or above Richardson’s position could expect a steady stream of petitioners and supplicants to make their way to his door. Early in 1743, one such indigent was directed to his offices at Salisbury Court by one of his clients, Dr Patrick Delany, an Irish cleric. Her name was Laetitia Pilkington and her life and career captured some of the vagaries of womanhood at the dawn of the modern age.

Born Laetitia van Lewen in either Cork or Dublin around 1710, Pilkington was the daughter of a Dutch doctor and an Irish Protestant mother. After a bookish childhood in Dublin, she was married in her mid-teens to Matthew Pilkington, a young clergyman with literary ambitions. Their courtship had been defined by mutual dissimulation as to the wealth and status of each family on the part of Matthew and Mr and Mrs van Lewen, and an understandable naivety, not to mention powerlessness, on that of Laetitia, matched by her husband-to-be’s cynical persistence in an affair of the heart that would not long detain him. The newlyweds’ precarious prospects were reflected in the material belongings he brought to their new home: a harpsichord, a cat and an owl, which ‘were all his worldly goods’ at the age of twenty-five. Both Pilkingtons sought literary recognition, a fact that might have given them common cause and certainly gave them social access – Jonathan Swift became a great friend to the couple and an enthusiastic supporter of Matthew’s work – but it also seems to have driven a wedge between them, largely on account of Matthew’s vanity. Pilkington would later write, apropos of literary jealousy,

And if a man cannot bear his friend should write, much less can he endure it in his wife; it seems to set them too much upon a level with our lords and masters; and this I take to be the true reason why even men of sense discountenance learning in women, and commonly choose for mates the most illiterate and stupid of the sex, and then bless their stars their wife is not a wit. But if a remark be true which I have somewhere read, that a foolish woman never brought forth a wise son, I think the gentlemen should have some regard to the intellects of those they espouse.

Her husband’s true feelings towards her were revealed in 1732 when he obtained a year’s posting in London, to be supplemented by a commission from Swift to act as his agent in the capital.[27] Laetitia was desperate to accompany him, but that September, as Matthew prepared to leave, he told her quite frankly that ‘he did not want such an Incumbrance as a Wife, that he did not intend to pass there for a married Man, and that in short he could not taste any Pleasure where I was’. Laetitia was shocked; this admission was only the beginning of her marital woes.

Soon after his arrival in London, Matthew began neglecting his clerical duties and instead devoted himself to the pleasures of the West End. In Covent Garden he went to the theatre daily after work and spent the night carousing with the fast set. Among his new rakish acquaintances was James Worsdale, a painter, poet, musician, wit and libertine with at least four illegitimate children, possessed of an immense and indefatigable charm, and who moved easily among the liberal-living aristocracy. Pilkington was soon to know all about Worsdale’s charms. In 1733 she joined her husband in London, where she found him immersed in the nightlife: drinking, attending the theatre, and in hot pursuit of a Drury Lane actress (one Mrs Heron). ‘I thought this but an odd manner of Life for a Clergyman,’ she recalled. Matthew was by now convinced that he had to rid himself of the burden of a wife and set about trying to lure Laetitia into adultery. His first port of call, Worsdale, soon set about seducing his friend’s wife. ‘He did everything in his power to afford and encourage an amour between his friend and me,’ Pilkington wrote of her husband. Matthew’s efforts included the organisation of a romantic weekend trip to Windsor, the party consisting solely of Laetitia and Worsdale. After fending off her companion’s hands for much of the coach ride there, Pilkington then had to barricade herself in the hotel bedroom at night in order to keep her suitor out. The evening’s shenanigans made for a frosty morning’s sightseeing. She made it back to London assailed but unconquered.

Pilkington was as frank as any of her female contemporaries about the existence of her own desires, and used the language and literary stylings of moral outrage more as a satirical device than as an actual expression of her private beliefs. She wanted love; she wanted intimacy. As an educated woman she knew that the costs of seeking either were infinitely greater than those faced by men. She was instantly aware that her husband’s inducements to adultery could be lethal to her life fortunes. Women lost more in sexual adventure than men. They risked pregnancy and death and, at a minimum, pariahdom. ‘’Tis play to you, ’tis but death to us,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had said of seduction. This double standard was embedded in the law. Male infidelity within marriage was not apt cause for divorce; female infidelity was – and Matthew Pilkington well knew it.

At the end of 1733 the unhappy couple returned to Dublin. They were joined there by Worsdale, who became a leading figure in the Dublin Hell-Fire Club, an outfit that far exceeded its English model in its transgressions. Its members dined at a table with a seat left spare for the devil. Their mascot was a black cat who was served first at supper. Their womanising, drinking, and harassment of the subject local population soon passed into lore. As a divine, Matthew could not easily associate himself with such a group and had to content himself on its fringes. But he remained committed to losing his wife. Laetitia had to fend off the advances of a young poet named William Hammond, from whom she later extracted the following confession:

Mr Pilkington described you to me, as a Lady very liberal of your Favours, and begged I would be so kind as to make him a Cuckold, so that he might be able to prove it, in order to [get] a Separation from you; promising to give me Time and Opportunity for it: he assur’d me, it would be no difficult Task; that I need but throw myself at your Feet, whine out some tragedy, and you would quickly yield.

After several years of such antics, Pilkington was by 1737 understandably fed up with her husband’s behaviour and admitted in her poems that she considered herself free of her marital vows. That summer she fell in love with a young surgeon named Robert Adair. An affair began, and at some point later in the year the two were disturbed in bed by Matthew, with posse concomitant, who having finally succeeded in proving his wife’s infidelity broke out the wine, toasted their freedom, and kicked her out of the house at two in the morning. A divorce was granted by a Dublin court in February 1738; Adair vanished from her life soon afterwards. Unmarried, unsupported, and terrifyingly free, Pilkington made her way back to London at the end of the year.

Her journey to London was a taste of things to come. On the crossing from Ireland a wealthy rake propositioned her to be his kept woman. She refused. In the stagecoach from Chester to London a Welsh parson bought her food and then ‘began to offer a little more of his civility than I was willing to accept of’. Spurned but not embittered, he ‘made me a present of a ginger-bread-nut, curiously wrapped up in white paper’. The scene so amused their fellow passengers that they invited her to dine with them at a tavern in Barnet. There another man swooped down upon her, insisting that this ‘little Hibernian nymph should dine with him’, regaling her with tales of his wealth while she ate. She finally made it to London with three guineas to her name.

There her chief patron and support was Colley Cibber, actor and poet laureate, who set her up as the in-house wit and writer for the moneyed men of White’s, the exclusive club (originally a coffee-house) in St James’s. Pilkington lived for a period directly opposite the site, and played host to its members who came to enjoy her humour, partake of her conversation, or have her write love letters or political pamphlets on their behalf. This in turn funded her own literary outings, including the 1739 poem ‘The Statues: or, The Trial of Constancy. A Tale for the Ladies’. Here she bemoaned the ‘changeful’ male sex, who

in perfidy delight,

Despise perfection, and fair virtue slight;

False, fickle, base, tyrannick, and unkind,

Whose hearts nor vows can chain, nor honour bind,

Mad to possess, by passion blindly led,

And then as mad, to stain the nuptial bed.

For all the outward glamour, Pilkington still existed from commission to commission and was always only a misstep from calamity. The crisis came in 1742, when an unscrupulous landlady lured her into accepting a trifling loan – forty shillings – and then had her arrested for debt. In October she began a three-month stint at the Marshalsea prison, where the costs of survival only exacerbated her financial crisis. Half-starved, she wrote to everyone and anyone for help. Cibber secured a guinea each from sixteen dukes. Her Irish acquaintance Dr Delany sent her twelve guineas, to be collected from his printer, Samuel Richardson of Salisbury Court.

Shortly after her release, Pilkington presented herself with some trepidation at the home and office of the author of the ‘incomparable Pamela’ – a work she had read and admired. She was impressed by Richardson’s obvious wealth (his house, she reported, was ‘of a very grand outward appearance’) and his unfailing generosity. Richardson introduced her to his wife and children and invited her to stay for lunch and dinner. That evening he gave her the twelve guineas from Delany, as well as two of his own, and sent on her way with an encouragement to write to him. This she did, though only her portion of the correspondence survives.

Over the next few years, Pilkington would continue to experience setbacks and would return again and again to Richardson’s generosity. When she needed a letter of credit to establish a print and pamphlet store she wrote to him. When her store was robbed and her home burgled, and her daughter Betty arrived on her doorstep penniless and heavily pregnant, Richardson sent money, linen and clothing. When her prodigal son appeared home from sea in rags, Richardson sent money to clothe him. When, at length, she decided to return to Ireland in 1747, once more it was Richardson who conveyed the money to make her final departure from London possible.

Richardson was a great collector of women – and of their stories, which he needed as the raw material for his books. In supporting Pilkington he was doing his duty as a man of wealth and Christian charity, but he was also accessing a world he would otherwise have known next to nothing about. But the literary transaction – though he did not know it – went both ways. For, back in Dublin, Pilkington did something both very innovative and very much of her time: she wrote her autobiography. The Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, published in three volumes from 1748, first in Dublin and then in London, was Pilkington’s magnum opus, the work that, after a lifetime of impoverished scribbling, made her famous and financially stable.

The tone and style of the Memoirs is Swiftian but the content is Richardsonian. Pilkington’s life in her telling was one long battle against the cruelties of a male world, made manifest time and again in the licence men displayed towards her body. She had seen ‘the world from the palace to the prison’ and the one constant was male rapacity to women. Clergymen were ‘generally the first seducers of innocence’; one swinish aristocrat she met had ‘devoted himself entirely to Belial’ and then had ‘the cruelty to attempt his virgin daughters’; the rakes of White’s boasted to her of their conquests of girls’ chastity (‘a loss,’ she knew, ‘never to be retrieved’), while some lived lives of Caligulan debauch, like her acquaintance and client General Ligonier, who kept four adolescent mistresses in a single house in Mayfair. At the end of it all, women were discarded by their exploiters and shunned by wider society. The injustice was outrageous, Pilkington declared:

Of all things in nature, I most wonder why men should be severe in their censures on our sex, for a failure in point of chastity: is it not monstrous that our seducers should be our accusers? Will they not employ fraud, nay, often force to gain us? What various arts, what stratagems, what wiles will they use for our destruction? But that once accomplished, every opprobrious term with which our language so plentifully abounds, shall be bestowed on us, even by the very villains who have wronged us.

Pilkington was far from alone in her diagnosis. The middle of the century saw an explosion in women’s writing, and a recurring theme was the sexual wrongs women endured at the hands of licentious men. Memoirs that told of women’s real-life struggles, like Teresia Constantia Phillips’ Apology (1748) and the eponymous The Narrative of the Life of Charlotte Charke (1755) by the daughter of Colley Cibber, met with enormous public success. In 1744 veteran female writer Eliza Haywood established The Female Spectator, the first publication of its kind aimed at and written by women, and one whose early issues consisted almost entirely of tales of sexual entrapment. Many of the new female writers were friends, correspondents or clients of Samuel Richardson. His long-standing correspondent Sarah Chapone wrote a proto-feminist critique of English marital laws. His printers produced some of the later editions of Charlotte Lennox’s brilliant burlesque of sentimental culture, The Female Quixote (1752), and supported satirical essayist Jane Collier’s work from the outset. His dear friend Sarah Fielding (sister of Henry) published a long essay on his own work, and he encouraged and mentored a raft of aspiring female writers through his prodigious daily regimen of letter writing.

The 1740s and 1750s were a period when women discovered and rejoiced in what Thomas Seward (himself the father of a prominent female belle-lettrist, Anne Seward), in 1748, called ‘the female right to literature’ in a poem of the same name. Male writers and moralists understood the right of women to enter the literary space as of a piece with the expanding work of Enlightenment and as a hallmark of England’s generous and far-sighted civilisation. The new chorus of female voices, and the tales of suffering and adversity they related, also inspired a revolution in sexual ideology. For centuries it had been taken for granted that men were morally superior to women. The Bible and the church fathers had said as much. In eighteenth-century England the exact reverse came to be widely believed: namely, that women were morally superior and that men were vicious, predatory and lustful.

Seduction narratives proselytised this new paradigm. Richardson had done his part with Pamela, but the long war to change perceptions and win new sympathy and respect for women could not have been won without the legion of new female voices. Male control of the cultural means of production, Samuel Johnson wrote in a typically perspicacious Rambler essay in 1750, had been a constant since antiquity, and as a consequence ‘the reproach of making the world miserable has been always thrown upon the women’. But that stranglehold had now been broken. ‘The pleas of the ladies appeal to passions of more forcible operation than the reverence of antiquity,’ he wrote, and they were likely to win the day, he concluded, for ‘they have stronger arguments’.

***

The arrival in some numbers of female writers with lived experience of womanhood might have been Richardson’s cue to leave the literary field to those who knew better than he whereof they wrote. This, however, was not Richardson’s way. No sooner had the final revisions to Pamela been completed than he plunged into a new and more ambitious work, ultimately published in instalments between 1747 and 1748 as Clarissa: or, the History of a Young Lady.

Clarissa and Pamela have much in common. Richardson claimed that his second novel was based on the same real-life tale of seduction that had inspired Pamela. Their basic literary and dramatic structures are very similar. Both are epistolary novels. Both involve pursuit, abduction, deception and assault on the part of their male characters, and virtue, eloquence and sublime forbearance on the part of their female ones. Where they part ways is in their endings. Pamela, for all its moralising, is essentially a comedy that concludes, in the Shakespearean mode, in marriage. Clarissa is a tragedy that ends in the death of its titular heroine. These conflicting finales reveal a major departure in Richardson’s moral message. As explained by its subtitle, the story of Pamela Andrews is one of virtue rewarded. The humble servant is elevated in stature and ultimately in station by her unerring commitment to her moral principles. In practical terms Mr B—’s attempted ‘seduction’ of Pamela amounts to little more than severe workplace harassment. The disparity in power between seducer and seduced is so great as to deny the novel any great psychological depth. Richardson’s decision to have Pamela end with Mr B—’s moral reformation and his marriage was probably necessary to make the book at all readable. If Pamela had ended with Mr B—’s rape of his servant and her subsequent death, then his novel would have been little more than an exercise in literary sadism.

Rape and death, however, are exactly what befall the heroine of his second novel. The first quarter of Clarissa follows Clarissa Harlowe’s desperate attempts to avoid marrying Roger Solmes, a doltish local squire, whom her family insist she wed for his money. Her steadfast refusal to marry a man she loathes drives her into the arms of Robert Lovelace, a rakish aristocrat with designs on her heart and body. Lovelace engineers her escape from the Harlowe home and then sets about his epic attempt on her virtue. His pursuit ends neither with her capitulation nor in his reformation. Instead, after close to a million words of text, Lovelace transports Clarissa to a Hampstead bordello where he drugs and rapes her.