Most people who are familiar with the history of English literature know of Samuel Richardson’s sensational work of fiction, Pamela, and many have heard it characterized as "the first" English novel because of its enormous popularity at the time of its publication. In its first edition (1740), the text of Pamela filled two volumes. Until very recently, however, few people have acknowledged that Pamela is actually a work in four volumes, the last two of which readers have either ignored or dismissed as inferior because of their heavily moralizing tone. Indeed, the classroom editions now available from Penguin, Oxford, and Houghton Mifflin reproduce only volumes 1 and 2. During the twentieth-century, the only readily available editions of all four volumes were published by Everyman in1914 and the Shakespeare Head in1929. By remaining in print, the first of these two has actually contributed to a misunderstanding of the novel; its text was based on an expurgated nineteenth-century edition, and because of its silent ellipses and omitted passages, the Everyman Pamela has its moments of sheer incoherence.

As a result of this vexed printing history, most readers also do not know that in the sixth corrected edition of 1742, all four volumes of Pamela were handsomely illustrated. This point is especially important because Samuel Richardson was a professional printer. All three of his novels (Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison) issued from his own printing house, so that the author himself participated directly in their production as physical artifacts. Richardson chose Francis Hayman and Hubert François Gravelot as the illustrators for Pamela, the only one of his novels to be embellished in this way. Richardson may also have had a hand in determining which scenes to illustrate, as I have variously argued in a series of articles listed in the Bibliography for this website. Remarkably few readers have ever seen these pictures, however, since they were never republished as a whole in later editions of the text. For that reason, the MLA has asked that I develop this website for use by classroom teachers.

The website provides, first and foremost, images of the twenty-nine openings within Pamela where the illustrations appear, scanned from photographs. Because of the very clear correspondences between each picture and the particular section of Richardson’s verbal text that falls upon the facing page, I have reproduced the full openings so that students can view both the engravings and the pages of text they face. The artists call attention to the visual/verbal connection by noting, at the top of each engraved illustration, the volume and page number to which it relates.

In addition to studying the illustrations themselves, by using this website students have the opportunity to puzzle over two questions of binding. First, the illustration designed to face page 11 in volume 3 depicts, among other things, the house that Pamela’s new husband offers to her parents. Was it merely by simple error that in some copies of the novel this illustration was bound facing page 2 instead of page 11, or was there some other reason? The website enables students to debate this question by reproducing the opening found at pages 2-3 in volume 3. Students should consider what this error in binding, if it is an error, may tell us about the ways in which the illustrations were designed to amplify the visually rich, scenic aspects of Richardson’s verbal narrative. Second, students should consider what we are to make of the final illustration in volume 4 which was designed to "illustrate" or correspond in some way to two pages of text (474-475) and also to refer the reader, by way of Richardson’s own footnote, to a third (page 417). Through this tripartite reference--the direct relation of a single illustration to three different pages in the printed verbal text--were Richardson and his illustrators inviting us to read this novel as a form of eighteenth-century hypertext? What, indeed, does it mean to "illustrate" the written word with a picture?

Creating the website has forced me to make some problematic technological choices. The most obvious is that when a viewer clicks on a particular illustration, the image is too large to be seen in its entirety on a typical computer screen. Initially this struck me as a flaw; ultimately, however, I settled on this format because in their very enlarged size details within the illustrations that are otherwise almost undecipherable for the naked eye become visible and raise questions for discussion. For example, in volume 4, in the illustration facing page 372, what might explain Gravelot’s decision to place a fire screen decorated with the image a man (possibly meant to be seen as either an embroidery or a drawing of Pamela’s own implied creation) and a blank sheet of writing paper on the table in front of the seated Mrs. B.? Do these details relate in some way to the ostensible subject of the illustration--the nurse’s action of handing young Billy to his mother, Pamela--or, instead, to the text corresponding to the illustration in which Pamela debates with herself about the corporal punishment of children? For those readers who wish to see each illustration in its entirety and at a single glance, each one can be printed out by following the instructions included here. The resulting print-out produces an image that closely approximates the original text in which each engraving is roughly three inches wide and five inches high. Given variations in both hardware and software, some users of the website may encounter unforeseen technological difficulties, and I would welcome suggestions for improvement.

As other useful information within the website I have included brief biographies of Richardson and his two engravers, a selected bibliography of relevant scholarship on the illustrations, and photographic reproductions of two title pages from what most scholars refer to as the four-volume, sixth corrected and illustrated edition of Pamela (1742). I have also included an informal summary of what scholars have determined about this novel’s curious printing history and the revisions that Richardson made from edition to edition.

T. C. Duncan Eaves was the first scholar to bring the Pamela illustrations to scholarly attention. Eaves wrote his dissertation on the Graphic Illustrations of the Principal English Novels of the Eighteenth Century, and he subsequently published one of the earliest articles to treat the Hayman and Gravelot engravings: "Graphic Illustration of the Novels of Samuel Richardson, 1740-1810" The Huntington Library Quarterly 14 (1950-1951): 349-83. Within the article Eaves provided a list of the engravings designed by Hayman, differentiating them from those designed by Gravelot. In a separate section of this website I have reproduced Eaves’ lists, together with the "subjects of [the] designs" as he identified them, to be used as a classroom tool. Neither the artists nor Richardson himself ever provided such a list "subjects"; Eaves’ attempt to do so was an interpretive gesture that posited an implied reading of the images as a narrative. Using Eaves’ lists as a starting place, students can experiment with alternative readings of the pictures’ implied meanings and potential enhancements of Richardson’s text. For example, what Eaves characterizes in literal terms as "Pamela taking refuge in the woodhouse after her attempted escape" (Vol. I, p. 290) might instead be interpreted as a depiction of Pamela’s mind at work: "Pamela visualizing the response to her suicide." The scene in the background featuring frantic servants fishing her clothing out of the pond as well as the verbal text in which Pamela reasons herself out of the suicide could support such an alternative a reading. According to Eaves’ hypothesis ("taking refuge . . . after her attempted escape") the illustration emphasizes Pamela’s state as victim, while the alternative hypothesis ("visualizing the response to her suicide") suggests a very different reading of the text according to which Pamela is as much a manipulator of her captors as they are of her.

My essay on "Pamela Illustrations in the Classroom" offers many other suggestions for classroom use of the Hayman and Gravelot illustrations with the help of this website. I also hope that the accessibility of these images will enhance scholars’ understanding of Pamela as a novel in four volumes, the third and fourth of which remain largely unread, even today.