ABSTRACT
This investigation into deception and reading habits has covered a considerable amount of ground from coffee-house hoaxing in the mid-seventeenth century, via the propaganda wars of the Popish Plot and Revolution to arrive now at the controversy surrounding Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in the early 1740s. Admittedly, this is an unusual path: it is not, for example, immediately obvious what the Popish Plot – a national crisis of the late 1670s involving invasion scares, major constitutional issues and the inception of party politics – has in common with the fuss surrounding a determinedly domestic tale of 1740, albeit one credited with helping to establish the novel as a major literary genre in subsequent centuries. The Pamela controversy has indeed been described in terms which imply, in my view wrongly, that it was a symptom of a profound crisis over fact and fiction. Lennard Davis states that ‘many did consider Pamela to be a true story’. Writers and readers, as Davis describes them, found the experience of distinguishing fact from fiction worrying, perhaps even traumatic: readers felt increasing ‘ambivalence and uncertainty’ about Pamela; commentators risked ‘a violation of the news/novel discourse’ by labelling Pamela fictional; and authors encountered ‘real difficulties’ writing in ‘a discourse that was in the active process of rupture’.1 Davis’s often thoughtful account of Pamela is skewed by his accepting at face value the dramatic and rather sly rhetoric deployed by participants in the controversy. At the risk of stating the obvious, Pamela was recognised as a story which had been designed to entertain; readers were intrigued by the tale’s relation to truth, but profound disquiet about distinguishing fact from fiction was reserved for other cases where the political and financial stakes were far higher.
