Synopses & Reviews
Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) is often regarded as the first true novel in English and a landmark in literary history. As the best selling novel of its time, it provoked a swarm of responses: panegyrics and critiques, parodies and burlesques, piracies and sequels, comedies and operas. The controversy it inspired has become a standard point of reference in studies of the rise of the novel, the history of the book and the emergence of consumer culture. In the first book-length study of the Pamela controversy since 1960, Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor offer an original definitive account of the novel's enormous cultural impact.
Review
"A very readable book...giving an interesting picture of Grub Street, the sometimes-cutthroat world of publishing, theater before and after the Licensing Act, issues of social rank and class, and English popular culture of the time." -- Choice
Review
"As befits the topic, Pamela in the Marketplace is beautifully produced, its typeface and many illustrations crisp on bright white paper. Highly recommended for Richardson buffs and all those intrigued by the power of the marketplace to spin events right out of an author's control, even his." - Jocelyn Harris, University of Otago, New Zealand
Review
"The book is witty, lively, and studded with wonderful cameo portraits...it is an important as well as a well-researched and well-written book."
Brean S. Hammond, University of Notthingham
Review
"This new book by Messrs. Keymer and Sabor is a valuable companion to their The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, 1740-1750 (Pickering and Chatto, in six volumes, 2001), and it splendidly exemplifies what can be accomplished in the relatively new discipline of the history of the book..."
--James McLaverty, Keele University, The ScriblerianSynopsis
A fresh account of the enormous cultural impact of the first true novel in English.
About the Author
Thomas Keymer is Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. His recent books include Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (2002), Richardson's Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (paperback edition, 2004), and Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (with Peter Sabor, 2005). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to English Literature from 1740 to 1830 (with Jon Mee, 2004) and The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (in progress), and co-general editor, with Peter Sabor, of The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (in progress).Peter Sabor is Director of the Burney Centre and Canada Research Chair in Eighteenth-Century Studies at McGill University, Montreal.
Table of Contents
Introduction; 1. 'The selling part': publication, promotion, profits; 2. Literary property and the trade in continuations; 3. Counter-fictions and novel production; 4. Domestic servitude and the licensed stage; 5. Pamela illustrations and the visual culture of the novel; 6. Commercial morality, colonial nationalism, and Pamela's Irish reception; Afterword; Appendix: A chronology of publications, performances and related events to 1750; Select bibliography; Index.