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"Ciceronian Eloquence": The Politics of Virtue in Richardson's PamelaJohn A. Dussinger It has usually been taken for granted that the author of Pamela was wholly sympathetic with the titular heroine in her struggle against her master to maintain her chastity and that her triumph in reforming this upper-class rake was the reward of virtue. I argue here, however, that the novel has a much larger significance in the history of the printing press as a paradoxical and dialogical rendering of the conflict between private expression and public authority. More concretely, Richardson's long experience as a London printer before producing his first novel at just past the age of fifty, especially his role during the tumultuous years of Robert Walpole's ministry, helps to account for the central action in Pamela about desire and resistance. In the context of the ferocious print wars between opposition writers and government defenders, the novel's erotic focus on a fifteen-year-old servant-girl trying to withstand seduction by the power of her pen resembles the tendentious fables of Aesop, which Richardson had edited shortly before composing his novel. While her young master indulges her love of scribbling and is her most avid reader, he is nevertheless worried about the damage done to his reputation by some ofthe news she is spreading outside his household. At times when the narrative draws our attention to the heroine's secreting away her supplies ofpens, ink, paper, wax, and wafers, she becomes at one with the whole scribal technology that subverts all efforts of authority either to silence itoratleastto controlits news-making capacity. Throughoutthe story, Mr B. tries to exert his authority as the censor of Pamela's writing, intercepting her mail before it goes out ofthe house and sometimes withholding EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 1, October 1999 40 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION seditious information. Yet, ironically, despite times when her known writing utensils are confiscated at Lincolnshire, as the most assiduous reader of her letters, Mr B. does not really want to eradicate her activity and rob himself of his voyeuristic pleasures. Although this seesaw between freedom of expression and censorship also exists in Richardson's later novels, especially in Clarissa, the fable-like quality ofPamela helped to make it instantly a popular success while casting the seemingly innocent protests of moral virtue in a generally unstable discourse.1 As critics have emphasized, the many imitations of the Pamela story also exerted an enormous influence on its immediate reception, notably Henry Fielding's brilliant parody, An Apologyfor the Life ofMrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), which ridicules the "Ciceronian Eloquence" of this epistolary narrative. Since at first Richardson was so secretive about his authorship of this work that not even his closest friends knew the truth, when writing this satire Fielding apparently either suspected Conyers Middleton was the author of Pamela or at least wanted to compare the novel to the latter 's highly acclaimed biography of Cicero, which had appeared only two months before the publication of Shamela in April. Thus, Parson Oliver writes to Parson Tickletext: Indeed I was in hopes that young Woman would have contented herself with the Good-fortune she hath attained; and rather suffered her little Arts to have been forgotten than have revived their Remembrance, and endeavoured by perverting and misrepresenting Facts to be thought to deserve what she now enjoys: for though we do not imagine her the Author of the Narrative itself, yet we must suppose the Instructions were given by her, as well as the Reward, to the Composer. Who that is, though you so earnestly require of me, I shall leave you to guess from that Ciceronian Eloquence, with which the Work abounds; and that excellent Knack of making every Character amiable, which he lays his hands on.2 To judge by this passage, "Ciceronian Eloquence" appears to mean "perverting and misrepresenting Facts" to inflate one's moral character. Since elsewhere he usually speaks approvingly of Cicero, Fielding's attack on 1 See Thomas Keymer, "Pamela's Fables: Aesopian Writing and Political Implication in Samuel Richardson and Sir Roger L'Estrange," xvtt-xvw: Bulletin de la société d'études anglo-américaines...

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