PAGE 1

THE STUART DYNASTY: JAMES I When Queen Elisabeth died in 1603 without leaving a direct heir, the throne of England went to James VI of Scotland. He bacame the first of the Stuart Kings of England. From the beginning, James showed a belief in the divine right of kings to rule and in the subjection of Parliament to the King's will; he also insisted on the strict conformity to the rights of the Anglican Church. This excluded both Catholics and Puritans from government, since conformity to the Anglican Church was required to hold public offices. English Catholics organized the GUNPOWDER PLOT (November 5, 1605), so-called because they tried to blow up the King and the Parliament in session. The plot was denounced and and many Catholics were executed. Meanwhile, pesecuted Puritans were leaving the country. In 1620, a group of Puritans called the “Pilgrim Fathers” sailed to America on the Mayflower, where they founded New Plymouth in Massachusetts: it was the first English settlement in North America and the beginning of the future United States. THE CIVIL WAR AND THE COMMONWEALTH King James I's son and successor, Charles I (1625-49) pursued his father' s policy of open disregard for Parliament and opposition to all forms of religious dissent. He dissolved Parliament and ruled the country alone as an absolute monarch. Foreign and dmestic difficulties (a rebellion in Scotland) obliged Charles to call the Parliament in April 1640. It lasted as the Short Parliament. In 1641, the Long Parliament, as it is called, asked Charles to accept radical proposals for reform. The King's refusal meant the beginning of the Civil War. The struggle between Anglicans and Puritans before and during the Civil War reflected major political changes in England since the 15th Century: the centre of power in Parliament had been gradually moving from the House of Lords to the House of Commons. The House of Commons repesented the merchants and the landed gentry. The latter felt that their interests were not taken into account, especially considering that they had to pay taxes to finance the Government's policy. The conflict was also relgious bacause the mentality of these mercantile clases were better suited to Puritanism than to the position of the official Anglican Church.

PAGE 2

The reasons for the Puritans' appeal to the mercantile classes can be summed up as follows: Puritan austerity fitted in well with the lifestyle of people who made work rather than pleasure their main occupation; The strong Puritan insistence or predestination, with its belief that to have God on one's side meant success in one's business; Lastly, the Puritan belief in individual conscience as sufficient for the individual's salvation corresponded to the belief in unrestricted individualism in commercial matters, which was to form the basis of the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 18th Century. Open war broke out in 1642: the Royalists, or Cavalies, supported the Crown and the Anglican Church; the Parliamentarists, or Roundheads (so -called because they wore their hair short), stood for the supremacy of Parliament and for a puritan reformation of the Church of England. Victory went to the side whose army was better organized and which could also rely on an excellent commander: Oliver Cromwell. Defeated in battle, Charles I was tried foe treason by a Puritan jury and beheaded in 1649. From 1649 to 1658, England was a Parliamentary republic, called the Commonwealth, under the rule of the House of Commons. After 1653, even the one-house Parliament was dissolved and the country was under Cromwell's direct rule. Officially he was given the title of Lord Protector. Cromwell's victorious military campaigns against Scotland, Ireland and his naval campaign against Holland pleased the nation, but the same could not be said of certain restrictions on everyday life he introduced. In particular, the closing of the theatres in 1642, for their supposed immorality, was resented by people that clearly enjoyed and were proud of their great drama.

PAGE 3

THE RESTORATION AND THE LAST STUARTS After Cromwell's death in 1658 and a short period of uncertainty, in 1660 a new Parliament recalled the legitimate heir of the Stuart dynasty from his french exile. The Restoration was initially welcomed by the british people, who still strongly believed in the divine origins of the monarchy. Most of them also welcomed a return to a less severe way of life, after the Puritan Commonwealth. The first concern of King Charled II (1660-1685) was to reassert the predominance of the Church of England. Charles also dissolved Parliament and never again summoned it in the last four years of his reign. The first years of the Restoration were marked by two tragic events: in 1665, the Great Plague caused the death of some 70,000 Londoners; in the following year the Gre at Fire of London destroyed most of the City. James II, Charles II's brother, was a catholic and was even more absolutist than his predecessor. He claimed the divine right of Kings to decide over their country's destiny without consulting Parliament. He also began to put Catholics in positions of power in every branch of public life, including the Universities. This accelerated a secret plan to call in William of Orange, the champion of the Protestant cause in Europe and the husband of James' Protestant daughter, Mary. William of Orange landed in England on November 5, 1688, with only a small force but with most of the English on his side. William and Mary were jointly crowned king and queen in 1689. These events are usually referred to as the Glorious or Bloodless Revolution: glorious because it was bloodless. After Mary's death in 1694, William of Orange, or William III (1689-1702) reigned alone. During his reign, a series of laws were intriduced which were to fix the course of modern Parliamentary England: The Bill of Rights 1689 established that the Crown would not be able to rule the country without Parliament; The Toleration Act 1689 granted dissenters, mostly Puritans, reasonable freedom of religion; The Act of Settlement 1701 ensured that within the Royal Family only Protestants could be heirs to the throne.

PAGE 4

Queen Anne (1702-1714), the Protestant daughter of James II and the last of the Stuarts, was the ruler of Great Britain after the union of the English and Scottish Parliaments in 1707 with the Act of Union. To protect her interests abroad, Great Britain had entered the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) with Holland and Prussia against France, Spain and Portugal. Peace was made with France and Spain and the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1713. Great Britain retained Gibraltar and Minorca, strategically important for their influence in the Mediterranean, and gained: Acadia and Hudson Bay, important for the maritime control of Canada, together with the island of Newfoundland; Permission to send a ship every year to trade with the Spanish South-American Colonies, as well as monopoly of the African Slave Trade for her own North-American colonies. THE AUGUSTAN AGE The first half of the 18th Century is often referred to as the AUGUSTAN AGE. This indicates its classical outlook and imperial pretensions, modelled on those of ancient Rome under the Emperor Augustus. The 18th Century in England was not only “Augustan”or neoclassical, but was also characterized by modern phenomena such as the diffusion of newspapers and magazines and the rise of the Novel, the most innovative genre of the century, together with the affirmation of of the individual consciousness with its new sensibility, marked by a tendency to be easily and strongly affected by emotions. mselves as the true heirs of the Roman Empire. The old Roman Virtues, fortitude, perseverance, self-control, were thought to be the prerequisites of the true British gentleman. Neoclassicism became a style of life, not simply a literary or artistic theory; it was reflected in poetry, architecture, sculpture, painting and even in gardening and town planning.

PAGE 5

The great Augustan artists shared a belief in reason as capable of imposing some order an otherwise chaotic world. They all believed in the superiority of intelligence and good sense over fancy and impulse. They were critical both of the new social order brought about by the rise of the middle class, with its bad taste and cult of money, and of the corruption of the aristocracy and the political parties. They exposed all this through their sharp satire. Upper-class women came to acquire a more central role. They began to take part in the debates on the great issues of the day, and also enjoyed the freedom to travel. This literary salons were important meeting places where ideas, literature and politics were discussed. The new ideas of freedom for the individual, diffused by the Enlightenment, also began to apply to women. THE RISE OF THE NOVEL The greatest difference between 18th Century novels and the fantastic world of the prose romances of the Middle Ages and Shakespeare's romances in the Renaissance is the need for realism of the novel as a genre. The modern idea of Realism is reflected in the fact that, unlike previous fiction, novels deal with recognizably contemporary objects, language and situations, and not with extraordinary, fantastic or magical events told in highly-refined language. The language of the novel also reflects this realistic trend: it is plain, factual, quite similar to that of newspapers and magazines. Formally, the novel's main features are:

A great stress on contemporary reality

Chronological sequence of events

Abundance of realistic details The novelty of the stories

The readers of novel mostly came from the rank of the commercial and mercantile middle class, whose outlook was mainly practical and realistic. It may be said that the novel came into being to satisfy the needs of the new middle class , which demanded original stories relating ordinary experiences.

PAGE 6

THE REALISTIC NOVEL Detailed realism shows in the novel especially in two elements: time and place. Both underwent a radical change during the 18th Century. Time ceased to be an eternal and immutable power whose presence was mainly felt through death and physical decay. With the novel, a modern awareness of time enters literature. In his first novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), one of the most popular books ever written, Daniel Defoe carefully records his hero's experiences from year to year and oftem from day to day, and it is precisely because of this form of realism that we are made to accept the improbability of the story. Defoe is the first great writer to be seriously concerned with space as a geographical entity. His sea voyages are measured by latitude and longitude. UTOPIAN FICTION Even Utopian Fiction (a genre that went back to classical literature), was deeply influenced by the realistic trend inaugurated by the novel. A masterpiece like Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift continues the utopian tradition of showing imaginary worlds or nations which are presented as a counterpart to actual imperfect societies. Swift's book, however, is given the form of a novel: Gulliver's fantastic travels include “real” geography (Latitude, longitude, nams of seas, oceans and countries); and Gulliver too recounts his adventures with the same precision and objective details as Robinson Crusoe. THE EPISTOLARY NOVEL Epistolary novels include, in the first phase, letters written by one person, often a traveller in a real or imaginary country. A second and more complex phase inaugurated by Samuel Richardson, which presents an exchange of letters between several correspondents; in this way, the point of view are multiplied. Richardson's other great innovation was to use the letters as a means of psycological analysis. The idea of time as a shaping influence on the individual's personal development also becomes the greatest importance. The main character in Richardson's PAMELA (1740) is a girl who goes through a process of growing up, and her personal identity is greatly changed

PAGE 7

by experience. Space consciuosness also enters the novel with the descriptions of interiors. In this field Richardson was the first acknowledged master: he describes the furniture, books and pictures in a room, as well as the clothes worn by people, with great precision. THE PICARESQUE NOVEL

The Picaresque Novel, which deals with the adventures of a young, reckless hero on the road, was very popular in England in the 18th Century. The best writer in this tradition was Henry Fielding (1707-1754). With Tom Jones (1749) Fielding greatly improves on the picaresque pattern. On the one hand, he gives it classical proportions by dividing the story into three balanced parts: Tom's adventures begin in the countryside, continue on the road, and are brought to a solution in London. On the other hand, Tom's adventures are not casual, as in the typical picaresque novel, but part of a process of growing up: at the end of the story, Tom has become a responsible and reliable young man. Under the comic style of the novel, in Tom Jones, Fielding celebrates aristocratic and and Christian virtues: courage, generosity and benevolence. THE SENTIMENTAL NOVEL

The novel was also influenced by the 18th Century vogue of sentimentalism. Many novelists chose sentimental stories as their hemes and type of writing that caused intense emotional reactions. The masterpiece in this tradition is “A Sentimental Journey” (1768) by Laurence Sterne, which is half a travel diary and half a sentimentalized autobiography. During his journey, the protagonist Yorick, is moved not by the great sights of antiquity, as traditional travellers were, but by touching episodes such as a French peasant crying for his dead ass. Today Sterne is especially known for his masterpiece, “Tristram Shandy” (1760-67). It is a long, unusual novel, with pratically no time scheme or plot. It is narrated byTristram Shandy himself, who decribes his family's everyday life and eccentricities through an endless sequence of digressions, asides, long quotations, flashbacks. For its absence of conventional plot and time scheme, Tristram Shandy looks ahead to the modernist novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf in the early 20th century.

PAGE 8

DANIEL DEFOE

1660 – 1731 EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION Daniel Defoe was born in 1660 in London into a Puritan family. He was educated at one of the best Dissentig (that is, Puritan) Academies: Newton Green Defoe may be described as a part-time writer, part-time businessman. He kept changing jobs and dreaming up projects that, he thought, would make him a rich and respected gentleman. His wrong speculations, though, caused him to go bankrupt. In 1703 he was fined, pilloried and imprisoned for satire. THE NOVELIST In the middle of all his commercial, political and literary activities, in 1719 Defoe suddenly became a novelist with the story of a shipwrecked sailor who for 28 years manages to survive alone on a desert island: ROBINSON CRUSOE. The book was an immediate success, running to four editions in the space of eight months. Defoe was a prolific writer, and his novels represent only a small part of his production. He wrote almost exclusively in prose, mostly essays, pamphlets and travel books. In addition to this, he also wrote articles for newspapers and magazines.

PAGE 9

ROBINSON CRUSOE (1719)

Robinson Crusoe is Defoe's first novel. It is also one of the most popular books ever written in any language, and its popularity has been great in other media too: films, plays and comic books. In writing a novel about a shipwrecked sailor on a desert island, Defoe was using a popular theme: books about the sea and the dangers of navigation were highly popular at the beginning of the century. Robinson Crusoe is considered the first modern novel. For the first time, we have a fictious narrative which the author tries to pass off as true, where realistic elements are of the greatest importance. The story is told by a first-person narrator. To enhance its realism, Defoe supplies many facts about Robinson Crusoe: his name and surname, what part of England he comes from, who his parents and relatives are, and so on. It gives us a life-profile. The places that Robinson Crusoe visits in England and in faraway countries are not generic but carefully described and set in their geographical context. Time is accounted for in the most precise manner: at one point in the story, Robinson even starts writing a diary in which he records everything that happens to him. It is because we are able to follow Robinson's actions day by day that we are made to believe an otherwise incredible story.

Robinson as a mercantile hero Robinson Crusoe is i many ways the celebration of the English mercantile spirit. He is the archetype pioneer: he is armed only with his own strengh and intelligence, and has a Puritan's firm conviction that has God on his side.

Robinson as the archetype colonist Robinson is also the archetype colonist. This becomes clear especially in the last part of the novel, after he has met Friday. Their relation perfectly describes the pattern of the relation between colonist and native, or master and slave. Robinson's education of Friday closely recalls the processes of modern colonialism, which follows a recurrent pattern: Name giving: he gives Friday a new name which is meant always to remind the Indian of his debt to the white man (he was saved by Robinson on a Friday); Friday, on the other hand, must call him “Master”

PAGE 10

New clothes: Robinson covers Friday's nakedness by giving him worn-out European clothes. Friday was very pleased to see himself almost as well dressed as his master. New language: Robinson doesn't bother to learn Friday 's language but teaches him enough English to understand him and follow his orders New Religion: Robinson teaches Friday the principles of Christianity Technical superiority: Robinson never gives Friday a weapon and is even careful never to let him see how he loads his gun. In short, Robinson (the colonist) has over Friday (the colonized) three great advantages: a technical advantage (Robinson has weapons and more sophisticated utensils); a linguistic advantage (they only communicate in Robinson's own language); a cultural advantage (Friday is made to admit that his nation's god is inferior to the Christian God) THE STORY Robinson Crusoe, born in York, decides to go to sea despite his father's opposition. For several years he is both a sailor and a merchant and leads an adventurous life: he is taken captive by the Moors in Africa, becomes a planter in Brazil and even a slave trader. During one of his sea trips, he is shipwrecked on a desert island off the coast of South America, near the Mouth of the Orinoco River. He is the only survivor. Using some of the things he has saved from the wreck, little by little and with great effort, he manages to build himself a house, some furniture and basic utensils. To get himself food, he also learns how to cultivate the land and go hunting. Some other things saved from the ship are fundamental to Robinson: paper, pen and ink, with which he keeps a diery of his life on the island; and a Bible, which he reads every day. During an exploratory trip to the opposite side of the island on which he lives, Robinson comes across a group of Indians who are going to kill another Indian. Using his gun, Robinson frightens them away and rescues the prisoner. He decides to call him Friday because it was on a Friday that he saved his life. The two live together on the island, Robinson as the master and Friday as his servant.

PAGE 11

One day an English ship taken over by a group of mutineers anchors by the island. Robinson defeats the mutineers and rescues the legitimate crew. At last, Robinson and the ship's crew sail back to England. After 28 years on the island and 35 years of total absence from England, Robinson finally returns home.

PAGE 12

JONATHAN SWIFT

1667 – 1745 Jonathan Swift was born in Ireland in 1667 of English parents. He was also educated there and became a priest. He left Dublin for England in 1689. Swift became one of the most influential writers of the Augustan Age. He wrote satirical works against political corruption. He spent the last part of his life in Ireland where he became a sort of national hero because of his pamphlets in defence of the Irish. In 1713 he was made Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. His final years, from 1742 to his death, were spent in lethargy because of an illness that caused the loss of his mental powers. All of Swift's works are characterized by his polemical genius, expressed in various literary genres. Swift's satirical vein is also clear in his most famous work: “Gulliver's Travels”. In which he mixed utopian fiction and travel writing in a novel form. The bok deals with the fantastic voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon on a merchant ship, and it is both a satire on man and institutions and a fascinating travel book. It was first published in 1726 in Dublin, anonymously because of the many dangerous allusions to contemporary politics it contained.

PAGE 13

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

1726 Gulliver's Traveles is a novel in four books. On a first level, it reads like a travel story, a genre that was immensely popular at that time. Lemuel Gulliver , the narrator and protagonist, is an ordinary man, a ship's surgeon, who makes a series of voyages into several remote regions of the world. The geography of the book, though imaginary, is made to seem real by Swift. He mixes the fantastic and the real: his imaginary lands are all placed in known oceans or continents. He is also very careful about the names of the ships Gulliver sails on, their captains' names, the degrees of latitude and longitude they sail into, and so on. Swift, however, only uses the form of the tale of travel and adventures to submit civilized society to a complete criticism through his sharp satire. His book belongs to the tradition of utopian narratives. Like Thomas More's “Utopia”, it is centred on a voyaage or a series of voyages and it is set in fantastic faraways islands inhabitated by strange races – Lilliputians, giants,speaking horses. The adventures of the hero bring him, and the reader, into contact with peoples who are either more civilized or obviously reflect our worse habits and defects. Gulliver is forced to examine his country's and his own position in the light of the new realities he meets.

UTOPIA VS REALITY The contrast in Gulliver's Travels takes different forms: In the first book very small Lilliputians exemplify the meanness and pettiness of our own world; the Lilliputians are cruel and treacherous, only great in their thirst of power; In the second book, proportions are reversed. The gigantic size of the people of Brodingnag allows Gulliver to see all the physical imperfections of man as if seen through the lens of a microscope; on the other hand, they are wise and good and, after hearing Gulliver describe English civilisation, conclude that it is barbarous;

PAGE 14

The voyage to Laputa, in the third book, is a more direct satire of contemporary England. Swift satirizes modern philosophies and science, and their presumptuousness in claiming to be able to solve all of mankind's problems; In the last voyage, in the fourth book, Gulliver is faced with the degraded humanity of the Yahoos (which he recognizes as his own: they belong to the same race) and at the same time, with the superior intelligence of the wise horses. Gulliver, a confused ordinary man, is caught in the middle; when the story ends, he no longer knows to which world he belongs.

Swift's pessimism Critics and readers alike have been divided on the issue of Swift's pessimism.Like all sairical writers, Swift eludes definiton. In Gulliver's final retreat from the world, he may have intended to show an individual's alienation: Gulliver alienates himself from his fellow beings because he is thoroughly disgusted by them. Swift's pessimism is only one of the critical issues that have made Gulliver's Travels a controversial book. The novel has puzzled countless generations of readers and critics. It has alternately been considered a children's story, a philosophical tale whose depth still evades us, or an extended metphor, full of mysterious allusions. FIRST PERSON NARRATOR Gulliver's Travels is the first work of fiction, together with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, to make a modern use of what we now call “first person narrator”. By narrator, we are not to understand the author himself, as a physical person, but rather the voice that tells the story. In the case of a first-person narrator, the story is told by an “I” who may have a name: here, Lemuel Gulliver . First person-narrators tend to be felt as “authoritative” by the reader: they tell us what is happening. It is their point of view that is given, the whole story is seen through their eyes. The reader, besides, has the impression of listening to a first-hand account of things, to a confession: he feels emotionally involved. Stories like the one told by Gulliver are thus quite close to diaries, and not too distant from autobiographies, two prose genres that contributed much to the modern novel.

PAGE 15

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS – THE STORY THE FIRST VOYAGE On his first voyage, Gulliver is shipwrecked in the empire of Lilliput, inhabitated by a people so small they look like insects compared to Gulliver. At first, the Lilliputians make him prisoner but they gradually come to trust him, and even try to use him in their wars against the neighbouring country. In the end, Gulliver is allowed to leave the country, which he does on a boat where he has stored the meat of a hundred oxen and three hundred sheep (all of lilliputian size)

THE SECOND VOYAGE On his second voyage, Gulliver lands in the country of Brobdingnag. This time he is surrounded by giants; he is used as a toy and has to defend himself from the attacks of rats as big as large dogs. He is treated with great kindness by the Brobdingnagians, who are a highly civilized and tolerant people. Gulliver leaves the country by accident: the house-box in which he is kept is picked up by an eagle which carries it above the open sea and lets it drop. Gulliver is then rescued by an English ship. THE THIRD VOYAGE On his third voyage, while fleeing from some pirates, Gulliver lands in Laputa, a flying island moved by a great magnet. The inhabitants have heads bent to one side and an eye turned inward. They live in badly bult houses and their fields are badly worked because they despise all practical occupations; their knowledge is all theoretical, abstract, and therefore, faulty. Their Scientific Academy in the town of Lagado, where absurd experiments are conducted, is the supreme example of how the Laputians are totally out of touch with reality. THE FOURTH VOYAGE

PAGE 16

Gulliver's final adventure takes him to the country of the intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms. The country is also inhabitated by a race of monstrous creatures, the Yahoos, that closely resemble men (in fact, they look more like apes). The Houyhnhnms are a rational and perfectly just race, whereas the Yahoos are cruel and filthy. Gulliver is painfully forced to admit that the Yahoos are very much like men, and he decides to stay with the horses for ever. Unfortunately for him, the Houyhnhnms cannot tolerate the presence of a Yahoo (Gulliver) and he has to leave.

PAGE 17

SAMUEL RICHARDSON 1689 – 1761

Samuel Richardson was born in 1689 in Derbyshire into a lower middle-class family. He moved to London quite young, and there he started working as a printer. At the age of 51, when he was one of London's most reputable and prosperous printer, he unexpectedly turned novelist. In 1740 he published “Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded”, an epistolary novel about a young servant girl who is pesecuted by her master, a young nobleman. The book was immensely successful, but it also caused a great debate in England for the way it represented the relationship between the different social classes. After the success of Pamela, Richardson wrote a second epistolary novel, “Clarissa”, published in 1747-48. In his old age, Richardson was revered as a great novelist and a public figure. He died in London in 1761 Richardson was the first writer to dramatize letter-writing. His epistolary novels combine the urgency and direct speech of drama with an accurate and detailed description of people, places and objects, typical of the novel. He uses manu devices for making his letters lively and intensely dramatic, as if they were really “written to the moment”, he said. A typical letter, for instance, opens with Pamela hiding the letter she is writing and pretending to be occupied with her needlework: her fear at the arrival of Mr B. is almost tangible in the letter. Such is the dramatic, or melodramatic power of Richardson's novels that letters in them seem to have a life of their own; they are interrupted, hidden, lost, found, stolen, given back and counterfeited. Richardson's historical importance is twofold. On the one hand, he reflected in his novels the rise to power of the new mercantile Protestand middle class. Pamela is, in this respect, exemplary: the virtue that is rewarded in the novel is that of a middle class girl who does not accept her noble master's love unitl he marries her. In a literary and historical perspective, Pamela, anticipates the era of the French Revolution and of Romanticism. It was to influence Rousseau, Diderot and Goethe. On the other hand, Richadson began the sentimental novel, which became very popular in the second half of the Century. More specifically, he inaugurated the theme of the persecuted virgin, which will be taken up by the gothic novel in the second half of the 18th Century and survive well into the later phases of Romanticism

PAGE 18

PAMELA, OR VIRTUE REWARDED 1740 Pamela was Richardson's first work of fiction It was an epistolary novel, that is one written in letters; most of the letters are written by the protagonist, Pamela Andrews, a young servant girl, to her parents. Pamela was the first example of a best-seller in the history of English literature. Its publication was followes by endless discussions, public debates, letters written to journals and newspapers. The country was divided into Pamelists and Anti-Pamelists. Imitations, sequels and parodies soon came out, so that Richardson felt compelled to write his own sequel to the novel, in 1741. The book was immensely popular not only in England but also in Europe where it was soon translated into all the major languages and turned into a play. The reason for such widespread yet contrasted success was implicit in the theme of the novel: a poor fifteen-year-old girl dares to resist her master's improper sexual advances, and does so with a sense of the moral value of her resistence; in the end, she makes the young nobleman marry her on her own conditions: he must accept to lead a sober , Christian married life. To many readers, Pamela was a heroine and hers was the triumph of virtue or, as the subtitle to the novel stated, “virtue rewarded”. For a porion of the reading public, however, Pamela was not so much a virtuous girl as a crafty young lady who tried to climb the social ladder by becoming a nobleman's wife. Quite aside from the moral question, Pamela was felt by many to be a socially dangerous book, encouraging servant maids to oppose their master's wishes. There was some truth in these objections: Pamela, in fact, put forward the values of a middle class that prided itself on its rectitude and morality as opposed to the freer lifestyle of the nobles. When Pamela sys “my soul is of equal importance with the soul of a princess”, she not just making an abvious Christian statement, but also strongly stating her right to be respected quite apart from her social status. The novel symbolically celebrates not just the marriage of Pamela to Mr B., first her persecutor, and then her loving husband, but also the union of England's two most powerful classes: the nobilty and the bourgeoisie, or middle class. And, in real history as in the novel, it was the new middle class that forced the nobilty into acceptance of their ideals and way of life.

PAGE 19

Sexual violence is always present or latent in Richardson's stories, and the heroines' feelings about their persecutors are not clear-cut. This ambiguity makes Pamela the first psychological novel written in English.This study of the characters' feelings and their inner motivations was achieved by Richardson through a clever and innovative use of epistolary technique. The letters are in fact full of incidents, and the dialogues are mostly in direct speech. This corresponds to Richardson's idea of letter-writing, which was that the characters write down their thoughts and feelings immediately after an incident has occurred or an event taken place. THE STORY Pamela has been the servant girl of Lady B. for many years. When the noblewoman dies, Pamela is very sad: she loved Lady B. because she had been very good to her and had given her an education far beyond her means. Mr B., Lady B.'s son, offers to let her remain in the household, and Pamela accepts with gratitude, but it soon becomes clear that Mr B. intends to seduce her. He then offers to send her home to her parents, but the coachman, who is one of Mr B.'s men, drives her instead to Mr B.'s country house, where she is virtually a prisoner. The girl, however, resists all of her master's advances until Mr B., who is really in love with Pamela, finally asks her to marry him. The second part of the book shows Pamela and Mr B.'s married life. Pamela is a model wife and Mr B. too is in the end converted to a sober well-regulated life.