Directorate of Distance Education

Swami Vivekanand Subharti University

III Year
Course Code : BAENG- 601
Course Title : 19th Century English Literature
Assignment No. : BAENG- 601/2023

Q2. What does Richardson suggest has been the effect of class
on Mr. B.’s psychological makeup? What moral strengths or
weaknesses has his upbringing imparted?
Ans - In his 1740 novel Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, Samuel
Richardson suggests that Mr. B's class and upbringing
have significantly impacted his psychological makeup and moral
character. Richardson's novels have moral purposes, and he uses
contrasting features of human nature and behavior to manipulate
moral ideals.
Richardson's novel provides a social picture of the tension between
classes and criticizes the moral corruption of the upper
class. Richardson also seems to suggest that Mr. B is struggling with
having fallen in love with a servant.
While Mr. B has some positive qualities, such as a sense of duty and
responsibility, his entitlement and arrogance make him a flawed
character. Overall, Mr. B's class and upbringing have had a
significant impact on his psychological makeup and moral character.
While he has some positive qualities, such as a sense of duty and
responsibility, his entitlement and arrogance make him a flawed
character.
Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded was written by Samuel Richardson and
published in 1740. Its purpose is to instruct readers about proper
behavior, showing that virtuous conduct leads to positive results.
Richardson began writing Pamela after he was approached by two
book-sellers, who requested that he make them a book of letter
templates. Richardson accepted the request, but only if the letters
had a moral purpose. As Richardson was writing the series of letters
turned into a story. Pamela's epistolary accounts of her heroic
attempts to preserve her virgini ty produce evidence about her
interiority and thus allow readers to evaluate her "virtue." While her
virtue depends upon preservation of her virginity (while she
remains unmarried), it ultimately transcends physicality.
Q3. Discuss Richardson’s handling of physical detail. What
sorts of details does he include, and how do they contribute
to our understanding of the characters and themes?
Ans - Samuel Richardson, (baptized Aug. 19, 1689, Mackworth,
near Derby, Derbyshire, Eng.—died July 4, 1761, Parson’s Green,
near London), English novelist who expanded the dramatic
possibilities of the novel by his invention and use of the letter form
(“epistolary novel”). His major novels were Pamela (1740)
and Clarissa (1747–48).

Richardson was 50 years old when he wrote Pamela, but of his first
50 years little is known. His ancestors were of yeoman stock. His
father, also Samuel, and his mother’s father, Stephen Hall,
became London tradesmen, and his father, after the death of his first
wife, married Stephen’s daughter, Elizabeth, in 1682. A temporary
move of the Richardsons to Derbyshire accounts for the fact that the
novelist was born in Mackworth. They returned to London when
Richardson was 10. He had at best what he called “only Common
School-Learning.” The perceived inadequacy of his education was
later to preoccupy him and some of his critics.
Richardson was bound apprentice to a London printer, John Wilde.
Sometime after completing his apprenticeship he became associated
with the Leakes, a printing family whose presses he eventually took
over when he set up in business for himself in 1721 and married
Martha Wilde, the daughter of his master. Elizabeth Leake, the sister
of a prosperous bookseller of Bath, became his second wife in 1733,
two years after Martha’s death. His domestic life was marked by
tragedy. All six of the children from his first marriage died in infancy
or childhood. By his second wife he had four daughters who
survived him, but two other children died in infancy. These and
other bereavements contributed to the nervous ailments of his later
life.

In his professional life Richardson was hardworking and successful.

With the growth in prominence of his press went his steady increase
in prestige as a member, an officer, and later master, of
the Stationers’ Company (the guild for those in the book trade).
During the 1730s his press became known as one of the three best
in London, and with prosperity he moved to a more spacious
London house and leased the first of three country houses in which
he entertained a circle of friends that included Dr. Johnson, the
painter William Hogarth, the actors Colley Cibber and David
Garrick, Edward Young, and Arthur Onslow, speaker of the House of
Commons, whose influence in 1733 helped to secure for
Richardson lucrative contracts for government printing that later
included the journals of the House.

In this same decade he began writing in a modest way. At some

point, he was commissioned to write a collection of letters that
might serve as models for “country readers,” a volume that has
become known as Familiar Letters on Important
Occasions. Occasionally he hit upon continuing the same subject
from one letter to another, and, after a letter from “a father to a
daughter in service, on hearing of her master’s attempting her
virtue,” he supplied the daughter’s answer. This was the germ of his
novel Pamela. With a method supplied by the letter writer and a plot
by a story that he remembered of an actual serving maid who
preserved her virtue and was, ostensibly, rewarded by marriage, he
began writing the work in November 1739 and published it
as Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded a year later.

Most of the story is told by the heroine herself. On the death of

Pamela’s mistress, her son, Mr. B, begins a series of stratagems
designed to end in Pamela’s seduction. These failing, he abducts her
and then uses an elaborate ruse that results in a threatened, if not
attempted, rape. Pamela faints, and, when she recovers, Mr. B claims
“that he had not offer’d the least Indecency”; he soon afterward
offers marriage. In the second half of the novel Richardson shows
Pamela winning over those who had disapproved of the misalliance.
Though Pamela was immensely popular, Richardson was criticized
by those who thought his heroine a calculating social climber or his
own morality dubious. Pamela is, ultimately, a 15-year-old servant
who, by Richardson’s telling, faces a dilemma because she wants to
preserve her virtue without losing the man with whom she herself
has fallen in love (and whose family employs her). More obliquely,
because he wrote the novel from Pamela’s point of view, Richardson
also seems to suggest that Mr. B is struggling with having fallen in
love with a servant, who, traditionally, would have been merely a
target for seduction or sexual violence. (In a clever twist, he is
converted by her letters, which he has been intercepting and
reading.) The author resolved the conflicts of both characters too
facilely, perhaps, because he was firmly committed to the plot of the
true story he had remembered. When the instantaneous popularity
of Pamela led to a spurious continuation of her story, he wrote his
own sequel, Pamela in her Exalted Condition (1742), a two-volume
work that did little to enhance his reputation.
Q4. How does Pamela’s “low” style of speaking and writing
affect our perceptions of her character and her story?

Ans - Pamela tells the story of a fifteen-year-old maidservant named

Pamela Andrews, whose employer, Mr. B, a wealthy landowner,
makes unwanted and inappropriate advances towards her after the
death of his mother. Pamela strives to reconcile her strong religious
training with her desire for the approval of her employer in a series
of letters and, later in the novel, journal entries all addressed to her
impoverished parents. After various unsuccessful attempts at
seduction, a series of sexual assaults and an extended period of
kidnapping, the rakish Mr. B eventually reforms and makes Pamela a
sincere proposal of marriage. In the novel's second part, Pamela
marries Mr. B and tries to acclimatise to her new position in upper-
class society.
The full title, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, makes plain Richardson's
moral purpose. A best-seller of its time, Pamela was widely read but
was also criticised for its perceived licentiousness and disregard for
class barriers. Furthermore, Pamela was an early commentary on
domestic violence and brought into question the dynamic line
between male aggression and a contemporary view of love.
Moreover, Pamela, despite the controversies, shed light on social
issues that transcended the novel for the time such as gender roles,
early false-imprisonment, and class barriers present in the
eighteenth century. The action of the novel is told through letters
and journal entries from Pamela to her parents.
Richardson highlights a theme of naivety, illustrated through the
eyes of Pamela. Richardson paints Pamela herself as innocent and
meek and further contributes to the theme of her being short-
sighted to emphasize the ideas of childhood innocence and naivety
Two years after the publication of Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded,
Richardson published a sequel, Pamela in her Exalted
Condition (1742). He revisited the theme of the rake in
his Clarissa (1748), and sought to create a "male Pamela" in Sir
Charles Grandison (1753).
Since Ian Watt discussed it in The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe,
Richardson and Fielding in 1957, literary critics and historians have
generally agreed that Pamela played a critical role in the
development of the novel in English.

Q8. What is 19th century English literature?

Ans - 19th-century literature refers to writing published roughly
between the years 1800 and 1899. The period is often referred to as
the Victorian Era as it spanned the reign of Queen Victoria and was
known as a time of prosperity and social mobility, resulting in
substantial class division. Themes include “childhood and
adulthood,” “country and city,” “Romanticism and Realism” and
“religion and science”; cultural contexts include industrialization,
nationalism, and environmentalism. Literature of the 19th century
refers to world literature produced during the 19th century. The
range of years is, for the purpose of this article, literature written
from (roughly) 1799 to 1900. English Literature refers to the study
of texts from around the world, written in the English language. By
studying a degree in English Literature, you will learn how to
analyze a multitude of texts and write clearly using several different
styles. Victorian literature is English literature during the reign of
Queen Victoria (1837–1901). The 19th century is considered by
some to be the Golden Age of English Literature, especially for
British novels. It was in the Victorian era that the novel became the
leading literary genre in English.
As industrialization in general accelerated forms of material
production, writers expressed their creativity in experimental,
innovative literary forms. Narratives of self-invention achieved
prominence while tradition was mined in an effort to adjust to the
disorienting advent of modernity. countable noun. A century is a
period of a hundred years that is used when stating a date. For
example, the 19th century was the period from 1801 to 1900.
English Literature studies give an opportunity to discover how
literature makes sense of the world through stories, poems, novels
and plays. Learning English Literature also gives a chance to
sharpen your own ability to write, read, analyze and persuade.
Poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and prose are the five main genres
of literature. Writers can then further categorize their literature into
subgenres. Subgenres are smaller and more specific versions of a
genre.

Q10.What are some major characteristics of the 19th

century English novel?
Ans - Common characteristics found in 19th-century literature
include the topics of realism, politics and class, anthropology,
gender, and feminism. People read many forms of writing due to the
increase in publication. The 19th Century was defined by three key
trends. These were industrialization, imperialism, and the rise of
new ideologies, such as liberalism and nationalism. The 19th-
century novel is often characterized by a shift towards realism,
reflecting a focus on depicting everyday life and common people.
Writers sought to portray the realities of society, including its social,
economic, and political aspects. The poetry of the mid- to late-19th
century was characterized by a creative and imaginative
examination of the inner workings of the human experience. The
poets of this period used lyrical and contemplative language to
examine issues such as identity, love, and death.

Its four important qualities are: (1) faith in progress; (2) validity of
democracy; (3) a sense of equality everywhere in all aspects and
walks of life, and (4) the ultimate triumph of right over wrong.
Through out the nineteenth century, the sense of equality
permeated American's life and thought.

A key concern in the eighteenth century novel is its preoccupation

with realism, and realistic depiction of society. Broadly speaking,
'realism' is a term that can be applied to the accurate depiction of
the everyday life of a place or period in a literarily work.