'Pamela' in the Marketplace Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) is often regarded as the first true novel in English and a landmark in literary history. The best-selling novel of its time, it provoked a swarm of responses: panegyrics and critiques, parodies and burlesques, piracies and sequels, comedies and operas. The controversy it inspired has become a standard point of reference in studies of the rise of the novel, the history of the book and the emergence of consumer culture. In the first book-length study of the Pamela controversy since 1960, Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor offer a definitive account of the novel's enormous cultural impact. Above all, they read the controversy as a market phenomenon, in which the writers and publishers involved were competing not only in struggles of interpretation and meaning but also in the larger and more pressing enterprise of selling print.

Introduction; 1. 'The selling part': publication, promotion, profits; 2. Literary property and the trade in continuations; 3. Counter-fictions and novel production; 4. Domestic servitude and the licensed stage; 5. Pamela illustrations and the visual culture of the novel; 6. Commercial morality, colonial nationalism, and Pamela's Irish reception; Afterword; Appendix. A chronology of publications, performances and related events to 1750; Select bibliography; Index.

Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) is often regarded as the first true novel in English and a landmark in literary history; it also produced one of the greatest literary controversies in its time. Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor offer a fresh and definitive account of the novel's enormous cultural impact.

Thomas Keymer is Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. His recent books include Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (2002), Richardson's Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (2004), and Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (with Peter Sabor, 2005). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to English Literature from 1740 to 1830 (with Jon Mee, 2004) and The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (in progress), and co-general editor, with Peter Sabor, of The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (in progress).
Peter Sabor is Director of the Burney Centre and Canada Research Chair in Eighteenth-Century Studies at McGill University, Montreal.