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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.