In the light of this letter, the second edition of Pamela attests a curious fact: while Hill pontificates in the introduction about ignoring such vulgarity of mind, Richardson has tiptoed back to Volume Two and changed the questioned passages. From the second edition forward, Pamela trembles during her wedding not “betwixt Fear and Delight” but “betwixt Fear and Joy”; and although Richardson leaves Pamela her shift on page 181, he changes her remark about appetite: “I made shift to get down a
bit of Apple-pie, and a little Custard; but that was all.” By omitting the specific objections from his summary, Richardson managed at one stroke to save his righteousness in the introduction and his face in the text.
Hill’s authorship of the introductory letters is easily established. Anna Laetitia Barbauld includes Hill’s signature with a reduced version of the one which here begins on page xvi (December 17, 1740).[9] Thereafter, Richardson’s italicized remarks, two of them added in later editions, provide the links: “Abstract of a second Letter from the same Gentleman,” etc.
With wonderful indirection, Richardson had sent a copy of Pamela to Hill’s daughters, along with some other books, and, as Hill writes Mallet, “without the smallest hint, that it was his, and with a grave apology, as for a trifle, of too light a species.”[10] Hill thanked Richardson in the letter of December 17, 1740. Hill asks who on earth the author might be, hinting, the while, by returning Richardson’s own phrase, that he understands that it is Richardson himself: “this Trifle (for such, I dare answer for the Author, His Modesty misguides him to think it).” Though Hill tells Mallet that Richardson was “very loth ... a long time, to confess it,” Richardson did not dally long. By December 29, 1740, he has confirmed Hill’s guess. On that date Hill writes:
Acquainted with the amiable goodness of your heart, I can foresee the pleasure it will give you, to have given another pleasure: and you heap it on me in the noblest manner, by the joy you make me feel, at finding Pamela’s incomparable author is the person I not only hop’d to hear was so, but whom I should have been quite griev’d, disturb’d, and mortified, not to have really found so.
Yet, I confess, till I began to read, I had not the least notion of it. But I presently took notice, that whatever Pamela thought, said, or did, was all transfusion of your own fine spirit. And as I know not if there lives another writer, who could furnish her with such a sapid sweetness as she fills the table with, I could not therefor chuse but name you to my hope, as moulder of this maiden model.[11]
Mrs. Barbauld omits this letter but prints another from Hill to Richardson, not to be found now in the Forster collection, bearing the same date -- December 29, 1740 (I, 56ff.). This letter furnishes the “delightful Story, so admirably related” beginning on page xxxi. From the second paragraph on (“We have a lively little Boy in the Family”), the Pamela text is substantially the same as Barbauld’s. But the first paragraph Richardson has contrived to suit his editorial fiction.
The delightful story so gratified Mr. Richardson that he sent lively little Harry Campbell (“the dear amiable boy”) two books, an event almost enough to finish him:
Out burst a hundred O Lords! in a torrent of voice rendered hoarse and half choaked by his passions. He clasped his trembling fingers together; and his hands were strained hard, and held writhing. His elbows were extended to the height of his shoulders, and his eyes, all inflamed with delight, turned incessantly round from one side, and one friend, to the other, scattering his triumphant ideas among us. His fairy-face (ears and all) was flushed as red as his lips; and his flying feet told his joy to the floor, in a wild and stamping impatience of gratitude.[12]
The only other part of the introduction to Pamela elsewhere in print is the concluding poem. This, too, is Hill’s, printed in The Weekly Miscellany, February 28, 1741, along with his December 17 letter, and collected with Hill’s Works (III, 348-350). This is the poem, it would seem, of which Hill boasts that he has given “Pamela” a short “e” as Richardson intended, asserting that “Mr. Pope has taught half the women in England to pronounce it wrong.”[13] Pope in his Epistle to Miss Blount (line 49), had made the “e” long: