An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews

Summary

An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews appeared in April 1741 under the pseudonym 'Mr. Conny Keyber', a name that jabs at both the actor-laureate Colley Cibber, whose Apology for his own life had appeared the year before, and the minister Conyers Middleton. Fielding never acknowledged it, but its attribution to him is now generally accepted. Its target is Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), the epistolary novel in which a fifteen-year-old maidservant resists her master's attempts on her and is finally married to him. Pamela had been praised from pulpits and puffed in commendatory letters printed with its second edition, and Fielding's pamphlet answers the book and its admirers together. The frame is a correspondence between two clergymen. Parson Tickletext sends his friend Parson Oliver a copy of Pamela with gushing praise borrowed from those prefatory puffs. Oliver replies that he knows the real story from his neighbourhood to the scene of action, that the girl's true name is Shamela, and that he holds her authentic letters. The letters that follow show a servant who has already borne a child to Parson Arthur Williams, who is coached by her mother (an orange-seller at the playhouse) and by the housekeepers Mrs. Jervis and Mrs. Jewkes, and who stages swoons, scratches and sermons on her 'Vartue' to bring Squire Booby to marriage. Once married she demands money by the hundred guineas, spends it at once, and keeps Williams as her lover. Oliver closes with a numbered list of charges against Pamela's moral tendency, and a postscript reports that Booby has caught his wife in bed with the parson. The parody works at several levels. It mimics Richardson's 'writing to the moment' (Shamela narrates a bedroom assault in the present tense as it happens), his heroine's reading list, and her habit of turning every trial into an occasion of pious reflection. Its deeper charge is that Pamela confuses a prudential bargain with virtue: chastity held out for the highest price is not chastity at all. Parson Williams's sermon on 'Be not Righteous over much', which teaches that belief rather than conduct saves, extends the attack to clergy who confuse doctrine with license, and to the fashion for Methodist preaching that Fielding distrusted. Parson Oliver, by contrast, speaks for a sober Anglican moralism in which honour to the clergy must be earned by conduct. Shamela is short, coarse in places, and best read as a pointed reply rather than a novel. Fielding returned to the same targets in Joseph Andrews (1742), where Pamela's brother resists Lady Booby, but there the satire is set within a larger comic world and a positive portrait of goodness in Parson Adams. Read together, the two books show the same author moving from exposure to construction.

Plot or Argument

• Title page, dedication and self-puffing letters

  The title promises that the 'notorious Falshoods' of Pamela will be exposed. 'Conny Keyber' dedicates the work to 'Miss Fanny' in a mock panegyric, and two prefatory letters (one from 'The Editor to Himself', one from 'John Puff, Esq.') parody the commendatory letters Richardson printed with Pamela's second edition.

• Tickletext's rapture and Oliver's rebuttal

  Parson Tickletext recommends Pamela as the only education daughters and servant-maids will need. Parson Oliver answers that the book teaches maids to look out for their masters, that some of its scenes are unfit for his daughter, and that he possesses the heroine's true letters, which show her real name and parentage.

• Letters I-VIII: the plot laid at the Bedfordshire house

  Shamela writes to her mother about Parson Williams, the child she has had by him, and her master's advances. With Mrs. Jervis she lays a trap: in Letter VI she narrates, as it happens, the Squire's entry into the bed they share, her counterfeit swoon, and the two women's laughter after he leaves. Mrs. Jervis then reports her removal to Lincolnshire.

• Letters IX-XII: Lincolnshire, Mrs. Jewkes and the 'Vartue' campaign

  Under Mrs. Jewkes's eye Shamela meets Williams, hears his sermon that belief rather than good works saves, and resolves to win a great fortune by her 'Vartue'. Booby's letters and visits alternate with her calculated resistance; she leaves for home and is recalled, packing a library that includes The Whole Duty of Man with the duty to one's neighbour torn out.

• Mrs. Booby's letters after the wedding

  Married, Shamela feigns a bride's modesty, wheedles and fakes a fit to extract hundred-guinea gifts, takes Williams into her coach while her husband rides, and plans to disown her mother once in London. Her postscript reports that a parson 'who writes Lives' will turn her history into a book and change her name to Pamela.

• Oliver's five charges and Tickletext's recantation

  Oliver lists five objections to Pamela's moral tendency, from its lascivious images to its rewarding of Mrs. Jewkes, and sends the letters as an 'Antidote to this Poison'. Tickletext admits he was imposed upon; his postscript reports that Booby has caught his wife with Williams and is prosecuting the parson in the church court.

Characters

• Shamela Andrews, letter-writer and anti-heroine

  A maidservant who calls herself Pamela, writes in a lively misspelled idiom ('Vartue', 'Ludgin'), and treats chastity as a bargaining position. Her letters condemn her by their candour.

• Henrietta Maria Honora Andrews, Shamela's mother

  A former orange-seller at the playhouse, now lodging in Drury Lane, who advises her daughter to be well paid beforehand and sends her Whitefield's sermons.

• Squire Booby, master and husband

  Fielding's version of Richardson's Mr. B., given a name that announces his gullibility. He is frightened by a feigned swoon and later bullied out of his money by a feigned fit.

• Parson Arthur Williams, clergyman and lover

  Richardson's virtuous young cleric turned into a poacher, borrower and adulterer whose sermon reduces religion to churchgoing, psalm-singing and honouring the clergy.

• Mrs. Lucretia Jervis, housekeeper and accomplice

  In Pamela a motherly protector; here a fellow conspirator who shares the staged bed scene and applauds Shamela's acting.

• Mrs. Jewkes, Lincolnshire housekeeper

  Richardson's gaoler-housekeeper, here an old acquaintance of Shamela's mother who catechizes the girl on her 'Vartue' and drinks to the scheme.

• Parson Thomas Tickletext, frame correspondent

  An enthusiast who repeats the published praise of Pamela and wants it read from pulpits, then recants when he sees the letters.

• Parson J. Oliver, frame correspondent and moral voice

  A country clergyman who disputes Pamela's claim to teach morality, insists that clerical honour must be earned by conduct, and presents the letters as an antidote.

Lessons

• Counterfeit chastity and the price of a bargain

  Shamela's line about making a great fortune by her 'Vartue' is the pamphlet's thesis in one sentence. Fielding's charge against Pamela is not that chastity is foolish but that a chastity held out for marriage to a rich man has been turned into a commodity. Students should distinguish a virtue practised for its own sake from a reputation managed for profit.

  • What does Shamela mean by 'Vartue', and how does the misspelling help Fielding's argument?
  • Is Fielding fair to Richardson's Pamela, who also prays, weeps and resists? What would Richardson answer?
  • How can a reader tell from deeds, not professions, whether a character is chaste or merely calculating?

• Writing to the moment as a comic trap

  Richardson's heroine records her trials as they happen. Fielding exposes the absurdity by having Shamela write 'in the present Tense' while the Squire is in her bed. The joke teaches students to ask who is holding the pen, when, and why, whenever a narrator reports her own virtue.

  • Why is it funny that Shamela is writing during the bed scene in Letter VI?
  • Which details in her letters (counting guineas, listing her books) reveal more than she intends?
  • What advantages and dangers does the letter form give a writer who wants readers to trust a narrator?

• Parson Williams and religion without neighbour-love

  Williams preaches that going to church, praying, singing psalms and honouring the clergy is true religion, and that doing good to others for its own sake is a sin. Shamela's copy of The Whole Duty of Man has the duty to one's neighbour torn out. Fielding's satire defends the moral law by caricaturing a faith that has cut it away; Parson Oliver supplies the sober counter-voice.

  • What exactly is wrong with Williams's sermon on 'Be not Righteous over much'?
  • How does James 2 or Matthew 22:37-40 answer the torn-out duty to one's neighbour?
  • Does Oliver's letter defend the clergy, rebuke them, or both?

• Puffs, reviews and the reading public of 1741

  The pamphlet opens with self-congratulating letters and closes with a recantation by a reader who was 'hastily prevailed on' to praise. Fielding is satirizing not only one novel but a culture of advertisement, clerical endorsement and fashionable enthusiasm. Students can study how a book's reputation is manufactured.

  • What do 'The Editor to Himself' and 'John Puff' mock about Pamela's second edition?
  • Why does Tickletext want Pamela read from pulpits, and why does Oliver object?
  • What would a Tickletext or an Oliver look like among readers of a bestseller today?

Context

Richardson's Pamela was published in November 1740 and became a sensation through the winter of 1740-41, with new editions, sermons, imitations and attacks. Fielding, then a barrister recently driven from the stage by the Licensing Act of 1737 and writing for the opposition paper The Champion, answered it within months. The pseudonym 'Conny Keyber' merges Colley Cibber (whose Apology for his own life appeared in 1740 and whose style the parsons mock) with Conyers Middleton, whose dedication of his Life of Cicero to Lord Hervey is parodied in the dedication to 'Miss Fanny'.

Composition

Published anonymously by A. Dodd on 2 or 4 April 1741 at one shilling and sixpence, with a second edition later that year. Fielding never claimed it, and contemporaries did not uniformly identify him; modern scholarship treats the attribution as secure on internal and circumstantial evidence. The library text is the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1741 printing, with printer's errors corrected and Fielding's comic misspellings retained.

Reception

Shamela was one of many anti-Pamelas of 1741, but it is the one still read, largely because of Joseph Andrews (February 1742), which began as a second Pamela parody and grew into a comic novel. Richardson resented both and believed Fielding wrote Shamela. Twentieth-century editors, beginning with the facsimile and critical editions of the 1920s-1950s, restored the pamphlet to Fielding's canon and to the study of the early English novel.

Comparisons

• The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews

  Joseph Andrews begins where Shamela ends, with Pamela's chaste brother fending off Lady Booby, but it adds Parson Adams as a true clergyman to set against Parson Williams. Shamela only unmasks; Joseph Andrews also shows what goodness looks like.

• The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

  Tom Jones (1749) treats sexual failure with a warmer charity: Tom sins and repents, whereas Shamela never repents and never needs to. Comparing the two shows how Fielding's narrator moved from a parodist's contempt to a moralist's mercy.

• Candide: Or Optimism

  Both are short, fast parodies aimed at a fashionable doctrine, Pamela's 'virtue rewarded' and Leibnizian optimism. Voltaire's target is a philosophy of providence; Fielding's is a moral fable and its clerical cheerleaders.

• The Rape of the Lock

  Pope's mock-epic and Fielding's mock-letters both shrink a fashionable world by imitating its own forms. Pope lets Belinda keep some beauty; Shamela is allowed none.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The prefatory letters 'The Editor to Himself' and 'John Puff, Esq.' Each praises the book in a way that mocks the commendatory letters printed in Pamela's second edition.
• Parson Oliver's long opening letter. Note his five-part case against Pamela and his view that clerical honour must be earned rather than sought.
• Letter VI, the 'Thursday Night' scene, where Shamela writes in the present tense while the Squire is in the room. Ask what the joke says about Richardson's method of 'writing to the moment'.
• Every use of the word 'Vartue'. Track who says it, what it is worth to them, and how the misspelling changes its meaning.
• Shamela's book list in Letter XII and Parson Williams's sermon in Letter IX. Both show a religion with its outward forms intact and its duty to others removed.

Key terms and names

Anti-Pamela

Any of the pamphlets, parodies and counter-novels written in 1741 in reply to Richardson's Pamela; Shamela is the best known.

Conny Keyber

The pseudonymous 'author', a name blending Colley Cibber, the actor-manager and Poet Laureate, with Conyers Middleton, the biographer of Cicero.

Writing to the moment

Richardson's own phrase for letters written in the midst of events; Fielding pushes it to absurdity in Shamela's bedside narration.

Puff

An eighteenth-century word for an exaggerated advertisement or paid praise; 'John Puff, Esq.' personifies it.

Methodism and Whitefield

George Whitefield was the most famous evangelical field-preacher of 1739-41. Shamela's mother sends his sermons; Fielding, like many Anglicans of his day, associated the movement with faith divorced from works.

The Whole Duty of Man

A widely read Anglican devotional manual (1658) setting out duties to God, to oneself and to one's neighbour.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Who are Tickletext and Oliver, and how do their letters frame Shamela's correspondence?
2. Comprehension What does Shamela plan with Mrs. Jervis, and what actually happens when the Squire comes to the bed in Letter VI?
3. Comprehension How does Shamela get money from Mr. Booby after the wedding, and what does she do with it?
4. Interpretation Why does Fielding give the heroine's 'real' name as Shamela and her master the name Booby? What does each name claim about Richardson's characters?
5. Interpretation Parson Williams teaches that belief, not conduct, saves. How does the rest of Shamela's behaviour illustrate the consequences of that teaching?
6. Interpretation Is Parson Oliver a satirical target, or does Fielding mean us to agree with him?
7. Big Question Can mocking a counterfeit virtue strengthen the real one, or does laughter at false chastity make every claim to chastity look suspect?

Faith Connections

• Matthew 23:27-28 (Scripture)

  Jesus' image of tombs whitewashed outside and full of corruption within fits Shamela, whose 'Vartue' is a coat of paint on a bargain.

• James 2:14-17 (Scripture)

  James answers Parson Williams's sermon directly: a faith that sets aside works toward others is dead.

• Ecclesiastes 7:16 (Scripture)

  Williams's text, 'Be not righteous over much', is real Scripture twisted; students can read it in context and see how the Preacher's warning differs from Williams's license.

• Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (Parson Adams) (Great Conversation)

  Fielding's own corrective: an absent-minded, generous clergyman who practises the neighbour-love Williams tore out.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Through Oliver's letters and Shamela's own words, the pamphlet argues that Pamela confuses prudent self-interest with virtue, that its heroine's chastity is a negotiation for a fortune, and that clergy who preached it up mistook a sentimental bestseller for moral instruction. True religion, Oliver insists, is shown in conduct and needs no such slender support.

Rhetorical device: parody through self-incrimination. Shamela's letters never need an accusing narrator: her own boast about winning a great fortune by her 'Vartue' convicts her.

Debate: Resolved: That Fielding's Shamela is a fair criticism of Richardson's Pamela.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Parson Oliver calls Shamela's letters an 'Antidote to this Poison'. Using three episodes, argue whether the antidote works: does Shamela correct Pamela's moral errors, or only mock them?

Comparison with The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews: Compare Parson Williams in Shamela with Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews. How does Fielding move from exposing a bad clergyman to portraying a good one?

Medical Lens

Shamela has no medical subject, but it is a small document in the eighteenth-century culture of the swoon and the fit. Richardson's Pamela faints under assault; Fielding presents fainting as a performance that the servants treat with the period's standard restoratives (lavender water, hartshorn, smelling-bottles, rubbing the temples). The comedy assumes a reading public that knew women's fits as both a real complaint and a social tactic. Parson Oliver's phrase 'epidemical Phrenzy' for the Pamela craze borrows medical language for a reading fashion. Any reading of Shamela's fits as clinical 'hysteria' would be anachronistic; the text presents them as deliberate counterfeits.

• Letter VI, 'Thursday Night, Twelve o'Clock'

  Shamela counterfeits sleep and then a swoon in the shared bed; Mrs. Jervis applies lavender water and hartshorn for half an hour while the Squire sits pale and trembling.

  Hysteria
• Shamela Booby to her mother, after the wedding

  A feigned fit after a quarrel over money; Mrs. Jewkes and a maid rub her temples and hold smelling-bottles to her nose, and Booby fetches the hundred guineas.

  Hysteria
• Parson Oliver to Tickletext, opening

  Oliver calls the enthusiasm for Pamela an 'epidemical Phrenzy now raging in Town', a medical metaphor for a reading fashion.

  Hysteria

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Read a short passage of Pamela's own letters (supplied by the teacher) beside Shamela's Letter VI. List three features of Richardson's method that Fielding exaggerates, with one line of evidence for each.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation between Parson Oliver and Parson Adams of Joseph Andrews if they met on the road and discussed Parson Williams. Keep both voices in eighteenth-century idiom.

• Essay

  Parson Oliver says Pamela is 'by no means innocent'. Write a defence of Richardson against two of Oliver's five objections, then a reply in Oliver's voice.

• Fiction

  Write a mock-commendatory letter, in the manner of 'John Puff, Esq.', for a book or film currently fashionable, so that the praise gives itself away.

Further Reading

• Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, Samuel Richardson

  The 1740 novel Shamela answers; read Mr. B.'s bedroom assault and the wedding letters for direct comparison.

• Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding

  Fielding's 1742 comic novel that grew out of the Pamela parody.

• An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Colley Cibber

  The 1740 autobiography whose title and style 'Conny Keyber' mocks.

• Joseph Andrews and Shamela, Henry Fielding, ed. Douglas Brooks-Davies, rev. Thomas Keymer

  Oxford World's Classics edition with notes on the pamphlet's targets.

• Henry Fielding: A Life, Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin

  Standard biography (1989), with the evidence for Fielding's authorship of Shamela.