3 - The Secret Textual History of Pamela, Methodist

Summary

Mrs. Jewkes went in with me, and helped me to pack up my little All, which was soon done; being no more than … some few Books: as, a full Answer to a plain and true Account, &c. The Whole Duty of Man, with only the Duty to one's Neighbour, torn out. The Third Volume of the Atalantis. Venus in the Cloyster: Or, the Nun in her Smock. God's Dealings with Mr. Whitefield. Orfus and Eurydice. Some Sermon-Books; and two or three Plays, with their Titles, and Part of the first Act torn off.

During this scene in Henry Fielding's Shamela, the title character describes her ‘modest’ possessions – detailing a collection of books that includes: ‘A full Answer to a plain and true Account, &c. The Whole Duty of Man, with only the Duty to Neighbour, torn out … . God's Dealings with Mr. Whitefield … [and] Some Sermon-Books’, all books that were important to the contemporary evangelical movement that was sweeping the nation with almost as much controversy as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, the text which Fielding is so openly mocking. This was a connection that Fielding clearly understood, with the unreflective enthusiasm (or claim to divine revelation) that characterizes books such as God's Dealings reflected in Pamela's claim to immediate revelation in Richardson's text. A careful reading of Shamela indicates that the portions of Pamela that come in for the severest censure all have to do with religion and specifically with the types of behavior that Fielding believes Pamela's unreflective reading and writing authorize.

In fact, the links between the discourse of evangelicalism and the discourse of the early novel are very clear – most notably in the shared textual histories and similar protocols of mediation that define early works in each field. For example, Shamela's copy of God's Dealings with Mr. Whitefield was published in 1740, around the same time as Pamela, and it elicited almost as much controversy owing to its detailed descriptions of the author's struggle with his ‘secret and darling Sin’ of masturbation, ‘the dismal Effects of which I have felt, and groaned under’, until he came to realize that nothing could ‘pluck me out of [God’s] hands’. Its inclusion by Fielding as one of Shamela's books was thus no accident, as the two texts were easily associated with each other in the public mind because of their overt sexual content.