Pamela's Richardson and Joseph's Fielding

Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's Joseph are servants who experience social rise. This study seeks to examine both protagonists in relation to their authors, problems with identity, particularly as these problems reflect broader social and moral issues of the eighteenth century.;The chapter on Pamela calls in question Richardson's representation of the heroine as the target of domestic espionage in a large country house. Such portrayal contradicts the eighteenth-century perception of servants in wealthy families as the major threat to their employers' privacy---a belief propagated by contemporary conduct manuals and reports on "criminal conversation" trials. This disjunction between fiction and history leads us to inquire into Richardson's imagination, which imputes to a servant what in reality was more likely to happen to her social superiors. By investigating Richardson's correspondence and the memoirs of his acquaintances, the chapter demonstrates that Pamela's experience obliquely expresses Richardson's own desire for display---a yearning for recognition on the part of a successful tradesman who was, at the same time, acutely conscious of his humble origins and his lack of education in a stratified society.;The chapter on Joseph Andrews is initially concerned with Fanny, a servant girl whom Fielding inserted into the narrative when he decided to expand his parody of Pamela into a full-fledged novel. Fielding's intention is to prevent Joseph from appearing a traitor to his class. But the class consciousness that informs Fielding's representation of Joseph arises from deeper springs than his animosity towards Pamela . The chapter looks at Fielding's ideas about his own social identity, using evidence that ranges from records of his debts to his published views on genteel poverty and luxury. The resultant argument is that lurking behind Joseph's faithfulness to Fanny is Fielding's notion of a stable and durable social hierarchy---a fantasy that he embraced as a man born into the highest circles of society, but excluded from those circles for lack of money.