Richardson turned fifty on July 4, 1739, and not long thereafter began writing fiction for the first time. At this point in his life he was one of the most prominent printers in London. He set to work on his first novel, Pamela, immediately after having completed, printed, and published an illustrated edition of Aesop’s fables, as well as a book of "familiar letters on the useful concerns in common life," as Richardson himself described it, a project he had undertaken at the urging of Charles Rivington and John Osborne, two of the booksellers with whom he worked most closely (Eaves and Kimpel, 89). Scholars agree in regarding Pamela as an outgrowth of these texts, both in its epistolary form and its didactic content. As is also well known, within his personal correspondence Richardson mentioned a possible source for his novel. He recalled having heard "such a story as that of Pamela" about twenty-five years earlier from a "gentleman" who, himself, had heard the story "on one of his tours" (Eaves and Kimpel, 88). Tantalizing though this detail may be, no scholar has been able to identify the mysterious traveler whose tale may have provided the inspiration for Richardson’s fictional narrative. In addition to these hints about the origin of Pamela, Richardson’s family situation suggests at a further motivation for his turn to authorship and his choice of subject.

Pamela is, among other things, a book about courtship, domesticity, and the education of children, matters which profoundly concerned its author in the 1720s and 1730s. Richardson was married twice, first to Martha Wilde, the daughter of John Wilde, the printer to whom Richardson had been apprenticed. He married her in 1721, which was also the year in which he went into business himself as a printer. At the time, he was thirty-two, and she was twenty-three. Baptismal records show that between 1722 and 1730 Martha gave birth to six children, five sons and a daughter, each of whom died within their first three years of life. Martha herself died on January 23, 1731, leaving Richardson as the single parent of their sixth and last child and the third son to whom he had given his own name. Sadly, young Samuel himself died on October 3, 1732, and four months later (February 3, 1733) and at the age of forty-three, his father married thirty-five-year-old Elizabeth Leake, the daughter of another former employer.

Eaves and Kimpel remark that we know almost nothing about his first wife, Martha; however, they characterize Elizabeth in the following way: "We get numerous glimpses of his second wife in his later correspondence, and though they had their little quarrels and their relationship hardly seems to have been passionate, there is every reason to think of his as a happy marriage, as marriages go" (Eaves and Kimpel, 39). The biographers do not offer reasons for their speculation about a lack of passion between the Richardsons, although they do grant that Richardson and his second wife "had better luck with their children" (Eaves and Kimpel, 49). Between 1733 and 1740 five daughters and a son issued from this second marriage, and of those, four daughters lived to adulthood.

Richardson’s children by Elizbeth Leake Richardson had a special connection with the genesis of Pamela. Certainly birth and death were a preoccupation in the Richardson household during the time that he was composing this novel. At the time when Richardson was drafting the Pamela manuscript, his wife was pregnant with the last of their children, a daughter who was born in early 1740 and who appears seated on her mother’s lap in Francis Hayman’s portrait of the Richardson family. Young Samuel, the last of Richardson’s six sons and the fourth to whom he gave his own name (baptized on April 26, 1739), does not appear in the painting, for he died in the spring of 1740 at the time when Richardson was preparing Pamela for publication (Eaves and Kimpel, 50). Later in life Richardson spoke of the sorrow he experienced from the loss of so many children and other family members in a relatively short period and at the precise moment when Pamela came into being both within his imagination and in his printing house.

Richardson’s expressed emotion about these matters suggests that he was not immune to passions of various kinds within marriage, although evidence of such emotional life does not readily appear in his correspondence which has typically been the major source for his biographers. The mere fact, however, that Richardson did not voice intimate details about his married life within his personal letters does not necessarily mean that was devoid of passion. The detailed and intense depictions of passion in Richardson’s fictional characters surely suggest that the printer/author had a much richer emotional life than his correspondence reveals or than Eaves and Kimpel wish to allow. Richardson’s imagination was capable, after all, of conceiving Mr. B.; Mrs. Jewkes; Pamela; Sally Godfrey; and Lady Davers in his first novel and, in his second, Clarissa; her abductor and rapist, Lovelace; her tyrannical father, brother and sister; and the vile Mrs. Sinclair, to name only a few striking examples.

The details of Richardson’s family life offer a way to think about his motivation in writing Pamela at the particular time that he did. Pamela’s anonymous title page announces that the book has been "Publish’d in order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes." His personal circumstances would support the notion that within these words Richardson was implicitly expressing concern for his own children’s future lives and that writing Pamela was a gesture of parental guidance. It must surely have been a comfort to him in 1739, when he set about writing Pamela, to realize that his three daughters then living had all managed to survive to and beyond the age of three, as seven of his other children had failed to do. In the story of Pamela he offered to his daughters an exploration into the complex and at times painful transition that young women of his time made into adult married life.

Richardson began writing the novel on November 10, 1739, and completed it on January 10, 1740, in exactly two months. He did not publish it until November 6, 1740, however, and its "composition" did not cease until his death, in 1761. When he first began to draft the manuscript, its first audience consisted of Mrs. Richardson and a Miss Midwinter, a young woman, the daughter of a deceased bookseller, who was then living with the Richardson family. She had come under Richardson’s protection after her father left a legacy to a son whom he had fathered by his own serving maid (an eerie anticipation of the fate that Pamela manages to avoid) and shortly before Miss Midwinter’s own marriage (Eaves and Kimpel, 90). In the evenings she and Mrs. Richardson would listen to portions of the Pamela manuscript read aloud and offer suggestions as the writing progressed. As I have argued elsewhere, the fact that Francis Hayman included Miss Midwinter in the oil portrait that he painted of the Samuel Richardson family at this crucial time implies that the subject of the painting is not most accurately described as a portrait of "the Samuel Richardson family" but rather as a portrait of "the author of Pamela." For more information about the portrait and its connection with Pamela’s inception, readers may consult "Picturing ‘Samuel Richardson’: Francis Hayman and the Intersections of Word and Image," listed in the bibliography.

Richardson published the first edition of Pamela on November 6, 1740. It proved to be so enormously popular that the first edition was followed by a second on February 14, 1741, a third on March 12, 1741, and a fourth on May 5, 1741, all in a two-volume, duodecimo format. Two days later, on May 7, Richardson announced volumes 3 and 4 for future publication. In order to appreciate the significance of the twenty-nine illustrations that Francis Hayman and Hubert François Gravelot created for this novel, it is important to understand the history behind his composition of these two additional volumes.

What prompted Richardson to write what many scholars have referred to as "the sequel" but that Richardson himself ultimately regarded as volumes 3 and 4 of a single, four-volume work of fiction was the publication of what he called, in his announcement to the public, "a spurious continuation" (Sale, 27). The book in question was Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, written by John Kelly, at the instigation of a rival bookseller, Richard Chandler. As Sale has established, Richardson was angered by this appropriation of his work and began writing his own continuation of Pamela about the middle of April, 1741. He finished his manuscript by October 8 of the same year. On September 22, 1741, he had published a fifth edition of volumes 1 and 2, in duodecimo, and he went on to publish the first edition of volumes 3 and 4 on December 7, 1741, again in duodecimo, thereby matching the format of all prior editions of volumes 1 and 2. Between December, 1741, and May, 1742, Richardson then set about producing the much more expensive and elaborate octavo (larger format) sixth edition of volumes 1 and 2 that was to be published on May 10, 1742 together with the octavo third edition of volumes 3 and 4. That is, all four of these octavo volumes were published together as a single work, and they were embellished with twenty-nine illustrations designed and engraved by Francis Hayman and Hubert François Gravelot.

Oddly Richardson did not publish the second edition of volumes 3 and 4 in duodecimo until much later, on January 30, 1743, according to Sale’s dating, although he was in the process of preparing both the second and third editions of those two volumes at the very time. One reason for the delayed publication of the second edition of 3 and 4 may have been that Richardson overestimated the popular demand for the duodecimo format among those who already owned duodecimo copies of volumes 1 and 2.

The chronology of Hayman and Gravelot’s work on the engravings is relatively easy to establish. A letter of December 29, 1740, from Richardson’s friend, Aaron Hill, reveals that by that date the author had enlisted William Hogarth to create frontispieces for Pamela, one each for volumes 1 and 2. In the Preface to the second edition of the novel, published on February 14, 1741, Richardson explained why he ended up rejecting Hogarth’s designs, leaving the novel unillustrated in its second edition. Sometime shortly thereafter, presumably, Hayman and Gravelot set about their work in the very period in which Richardson himself began to work at drafting the manuscript for volumes 3 and 4. As I have argued in "Picturing ‘Samuel Richardson,’" the chronology offers strong support for a case of mutual influence among Richardson and his two illustrators.

Richardson made many changes in the text of Pamela from edition to edition, the most substantial of which occurred between the first and second editions of volumes 1 and 2, between the fifth and sixth editions of volumes 1 and 2, and between the first and the second and third editions of volumes 3 and 4. Arguably Richardson regarded sixth corrected edition of 1742 (which includes what was technically the third edition of volumes 3 and 4) as the definitive text of his novel, given its expensive octavo format, the high quality of its paper, and the costly illustrations. That notwithstanding, during the 1750s Richardson undertook yet another extensive revision of Pamela, although he did not print the revised text himself. Instead, he interleaved his changes and additions into a copy of the octavo edition and left it in this unprinted state to his daughters at his death. Many years later, in 1801, they used it as the copytext for a much expanded edition of Pamela.

What I have offered here is an informal summary of information scholars have amassed about Samuel Richardson’s life and career, his decision to turn to writing novels late in life, the genesis of Pamela, its complex printing history, and the presence of the illustrations in the sixth corrected edition of the text. Neither this summary nor the bibliography included in the website attempt to be comprehensive. Instead their purpose is to provide an introduction to Samuel Richardson’s pioneering work as a printer and novelist and to offer suggestions for classroom explorations into the meaning and significance of the original Pamela illustrations.