SOURCE: Golden, Morris. “Public Context and Imagining Self in Pamela and Shamela.” ELH 53, no. 2 (summer 1986): 311-329.

In the following essay, Golden examines the social and cultural context in which Pamela and Shamela were written, which he argues is of particular interest because it sheds light on the origins of the novel.

Most people would grant that Pamela, Fielding's responses, and the modern novel generally rose out of the powerful economic, demographic, religious, folkloric, and literary forces and traditions that have been so ably defined in the scholarship of the past few decades. But we may still ask why and how one particular printer and one particular journalist, of widely differing histories and self-perceptions, imagined the England of their specific time (1739-41) into the burgeoning English novel. Any answer would have to be tentative, but when the subject is the origin of our dominant literary genre, even partially increased...