Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson

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and marries her; the second half of the story concerns Pamela's triumphant acclimation to her new exalted condition, her conquering of the snobbish upper class by the sheer force of her goodness. The entire novel comprises a series of letters and journal entries, a few of which (near the beginning) are written by other characters but the vast majority of which are the work of Pamela herself; this epistolary format is part of the Richardson's revolutionary contribution to the development of the novel in English, for the first-person narration of events, in nearly real-time, allows the novelist to explore, quite naturalistically, the depths and nuances of Pamela's psyche. Part of Fielding's revulsion from Richardson's creation may have been owing to this method of characterization, so different from his own and perhaps bringing the reader in too close for comfort. Thus, the great essayist Samuel Johnson distinguished Fielding from Richardson in this manner: "There is all the ...

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some of whom vented their disgust in literary parodies. One such was Fielding, whose first contribution to Anti-Pamela literature was the bawdy Shamela.
The criticisms that inform Fielding's parody are typical of the Anti-Pamela sentiment of the day, and many readers find that they remain compelling. One major problem, for Fielding and those who agree with him, arises from an unintended consequence of Richardson's narrative method: Pamela's authorship of virtually all the documents that make up the novel means that all information must come through her, with two unfortunate implications for her characterization. The fact that Richardson also needs Pamela to report other ...

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