NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1] Aaron Hill to Samuel Richardson, 17 December 1740, printed in "Introduction to this Second Edition," Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1971), p. 9; Knightley Chetwood to Ralph Courteville, 27 January 1741, cited in Pamela, ed. Eaves and Kimpel, p. vi; Gentleman's Magazine, 11 (1741), 56.
[2] For dates of publication, see T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 127, 129; concerning Fielding's composition of Shamela, see Charles B. Woods, "Fielding and the Authorship of Shamela," PQ, 25 (1946), 248-72.
[3] B. W., "Introduction," Pamela's Conduct in High Life (London: Ward and Chandler, 1741), I, xii-xiii; Alan Dugald McKillop, Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1936), p. 78; The Richardson-Stinstra Correspondence and Stinstra's Prefaces to Clarissa, ed. William C. Slattery (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1969), pp. xxiii-xxiv.
[4] Collier, A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (London: S. Keble, R. Sare, and H. Hindmarsh, 1698), chap. I; A Vindication of the Stage, with the Usefulness and Advantages of Dramatick Representations (London: Joseph Wild, 1698), p. 6; Pamela's Conduct, I, xiii.
[5] The Progress of Romance and the History of Charoba, Queen of AEgypt (1785; rpt. New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), II, 78.
[6] A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), pp. 138-39.
[7] As twentieth-century readers, we are probably more familiar with—and more sympathetic to—the side that supported the ethical superiority of novels over romances. Much of Catherine Moreland's education in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), for instance, involves her gradual realization of the inferiority of romances. Her errors continue as long as she expects to lead a life like that of Emily in Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Crucial to Catherine's education is her discovery "that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England," is not "to be looked for" in romances (chap. xxv). Romances can be dangerous since they often provide faulty models of moral action for readers who are likely to confuse romantic adventures with the roles they must assume in real life. This attack on romances in Northanger Abbey, moreover, is neither new nor unique, Catherine Moreland being but the literary descendant of such eighteenth-century "female quixotes" as Polly Peachum, Lydia Languish, Polly Honeycomb, and Lydia Melford.
[8] Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, p. 129.
[9] For a more thorough discussion of Richardson's revisions, see T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, "Richardson's Revisions of Pamela," Studies in Bibliography, 20 (1967), 61-88.
[10] Richardson's letter to William Warburton, 14 April 1748, cited in Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, p. 118.
[11] "Defoe, Richardson, Joyce, and the Concept of Form in the Novel," in Autobiography, Biography, and the Novel (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1973), p. 36.