Samuel Richardson might have stood for Hogarth’s “Industrious Apprentice.”  When a printer’s boy, young Samuel stole from his hours of rest and relaxation the time to improve his mind.  He was careful not to tire himself by sitting up too late at night over his books, and purchased his own candles, so that his master, who called him the “pillar of his house,” might suffer no injury from his servant’s improvement.[162] Thus Richardson persevered in the path of virtue, until, like the “Industrious Apprentice,” himself, he married his master’s daughter, succeeded to his business, and lived happy and respected, surrounded by all the blessings which should fall to the lot of the truly good.

“I was not fond of play, as other boys,” says the author of “Pamela”; “my school-fellows used to call me Serious and Gravity; and five of them particularly, delighted to single me out, either for a walk, or at their fathers’ houses, or at mine, to tell them stories, as they phrased it.  Some I told them from my reading, as true; others from my head, as mere invention; of which they would be most fond. * * * All my stories carried with them, I am bold to say, an useful moral."[163] In such a manner, and with such an intention, Richardson began his career as a novelist.

The life of the stout, vain little printer was already well advanced, his fortune was assured, and he was surrounded by a group of affectionate relatives and admiring female friends, when he was asked by a publisher to write “a little book of familiar letters on the useful concerns in common life.”  While thinking over this proposal, be recollected a story once told him of a young servant-girl, whose honor was long attempted by a dissolute master, and who, by her resolute chastity, finally conquered his vicious intentions, and was rewarded by honorable marriage with her thwarted seducer.  And then it occurred to Richardson, that this story, “if written in an easy and natural manner, suitable to the simplicity of it, might possibly introduce a new species of writing, that might possibly turn young people into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance writing, and, dismissing the improbable and marvellous, with which novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and virtue.”  Such was the origin of a novel destined to make a new era in English fiction.  It is evident that Richardson placed before himself two aims:  to promote the cause of religion and virtue, and to introduce a new species of writing, and in both he succeeded.

The name, “Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded,” sounds like a tract, and “Pamela” is, indeed, a very long tract.  The contrast is curious between the moral object of the work and its contents.  In the preface we are told that “Pamela” is to inculcate religion and morality in an easy and agreeable manner; it is to make vice odious, to make virtue truly lovely, and to give practical examples,