PamelaCharacter Analysis Pamela Andrews is a 15-year-old servant girl from

a relatively impoverished background who, after the death of her old

master, Lady B, starts a new job working for Lady B’s son, Mr. B. Pamela is a
skilled and prolific writer, and she conveys her story through journal entries
and through letters she writes to with her mother and father. Pamela’s other
important trait is her “virtue”—she has a strong faith in God and as a result,
she feels that she must remain chaste until marriage. This puts her in
constant conflict with Mr. B, who lusts for Pamela—but initially has no desire
to marry her. When Pamela refuses Mr. B’s advances, he kidnaps and
imprisons her, straining the limits of Pamela’s willpower. Pamela often lacks
agency in her own story; she’s repeatedly unable to escape Mr. B and
depends on the aid of characters who try to help her, like Mrs.
Jewkes and Mr. Williams. Nevertheless, she accomplishes something
extraordinary: when the rakish Mr. B finally reads Pamela’s journal entries
about her imprisonment, he’s so moved that he begins to treat her better.
After a long period of virtuous suffering, Pamela finally gets rewarded when
Mr. B agrees to marry her. Pamela takes her new role seriously, trying to be
as charitable as she can with her husband’s money. As the Editor states
directly in the epilogue, Pamela is a role model: both for other characters in
the story and for the audience. Pamela’s life story suggests that people who
endure suffering with grace will eventually reap the benefits of their good
behavior.

Mr. BCharacter Analysis Mr. B is a rich libertine who is the son of Lady B and
the brother of Lady Davers. When the death of Lady B leaves him in charge of
the servant girl Pamela, Mr. B wastes no time before taking “liberties” with
her, repeatedly holding her and giving her unwanted kisses. As Pamela later
learns, Mr. B has a scandalous past—in his younger days, he used to get into
duels and even fathered a child (Miss Goodwin) with the unmarried Sally
Godfrey. As Mr. B spends more time with Pamela, his actions become
increasingly aggressive—at one point, he kidnaps her, imprisons her at his
Lincolnshire country estate, then impersonates a maid (Nan) in order to get
into bed with Pamela. But perhaps the most important characteristic of Mr. B
is his ability to change. While Mr. B plans to trick Pamela into a sham-
marriage, he ultimately changes his plans after reading several of Pamela’s
letters and journal entries, which make him more sympathetic to her situation.
He reforms his old ways and marries her properly in his family chapel, and
with Pamela’s help, he starts to finally live up to his reputation as a
gentleman. Mr. B represents the flaws and hypocrisies of the gentry in 18th-
century Britain, but he also shows the potential of people to change,
particularly after being exposed to a positive role model.
Pamela as a literary phenomenon in 18th-century England Pamela, or Virtue
Rewarded appeared in two volumes in November 1740 and soon turned into
what we nowadays call a "best-seller," the first example of that phenomenon
in the history of English fiction. Everybody read it; there was a 'Pamela' rage,
and Pamela motifs appeared on teacups and fans, as Margaret Ann Doody
reports in her introduction to a modern day edition. The novel was praised for
its psychological veracity and its moral influence on the readers. Some critics
condemned Pamela as a representation of the undignified and the low, seeing
in the story of a servant girl "climbing the ladder" of social class, a pernicious
'levelling' tendency. Pamela has had significant impact on the novel as a
literary genre, as an experiment in epistolary form, as a study of ethics,
human (and particularly women's) psychology, and as a case of early
negotiation between literature as education and literature as entertainment.
Samuel Richardson, the author of the novel, spends a lot of breath at the
beginning of the novel trying to convince the readers that Pamela is based on
a true story. The connection between truth and literature was meant to
persuade the readers that the moral of Pamela's character's story is "real,"
and therefore an efficient tool of ethical edification of young women, who were
at the time devouring all kinds of prose, regardless of its moral turpitude.