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Zhang, Zaixin. ¡°Free Play in Samuel Richardson's Pamela.¡± PLL: Papers on Language and Literature 27,3 (1991): 307-319.

 As Vincent B. Leitch asserts, "deconstruction practices two interpretations of interpretation. It aims to decipher the stable truths of a work, employing conventional `passive' tactics of reading; and it seeks to question and subvert such truths in an active production of enigmatic undecidables" (175-6). In order to "decipher the stable truths" by employing conventional strategies in the present context, one ought to begin with those tactics that conceive language within the framework of the logocentric tradition. Once this tradition has been identified in the text, then it is time to deconstruct the text by tearing that tradition apart and by locating a play (or free play) of signification in the text. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's theory of language and discourse, the present paper aims, on the one hand, to examine how Richardson is operating in the logocentric tradition to discredit writing as a substitute for speech and, on the other hand, to deconstruct the text and search for discourse within which Richardson is manifesting a play of differences for signification and an endless proliferation of the signifier. While writing in Pamela at one point is debased and discredited, it is also privileged and protected since Pamela as a letter writer has to win the unintentional battle against her parents' disrupting her writing career in their call for her return. Writing has also lost its referential ties with "reality" as it reaches both back and beyond as a shaper of Pamela's experience.¡±

 In his correspondence, Richardson asks who "shall decline the converse of the pen? The pen that makes distance, presence; and brings back to sweet remembrance all the delights of presence; which makes even presence but body, while absence becomes the soul" (246). Roy Roussel applies Richardson's notion about distance and presence to the interpretation of the writer as distance or absence and the reader as presence. "The withdrawal of the writer," writes Roussel, "is balanced by a seemingly contradictory movement which carries him to an intimate union with another" (376). But Derrida would categorize Richardson's notion of writing in the logocentric tradition. "The sign," writes Derrida, "represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of the present. When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign" ("Differance" 402)1. Richardson seems to imply here that writing is only a substitute that makes distance presence or makes the absent present. The pen represents distance or "reality" in its absence through the detour of the written word as presence. Such a presence in the written form is obviously debased, for the presence for Richardson is nothing but the body while the absence constitutes the soul.

In order to bring back "all the delights" of the absent presence, Richardson initiates the technique of "writing to the moment"--"a technique that transcribed emotional tensions instantly as they arose and not (to use a later phrase) when they were recollected in tranquillity" (Sherburn 201). This technique, in the first place, emphasizes the referential function of language in the sense that language represents a signified, a referent, the absent, or "reality." Also in its function to represent instantly rather than "use a later phrase," the technique of "writing to the moment" seems to be preoccupied with an intention to privilege spontaneous speaking and thus seems to become a writing skill that imitates and emphasizes the effect of speaking. This is pretty much in the spirit of neoclassicism of Richardson's day. For the classicist, spontaneous speech (the spoken word) is much more vigorous than a speech pondered upon at a later stage (the written word ready for delivery). Cicero writes about Servius Galba, a genius orator:

When he spoke, he was perhaps so much animated by the force of his abilities, and the natural warmth  and impetuosity of his temper, that his language was rapid, bold and striking; but afterward, when he took up the pen in his leisure hours, and his passion had sunk into a calm, his elocution became dull and languid.... No man can revive at pleasure the ardor of his passions; and when that has once subsided, the fire and pathos of his language will be extinguished. (287-88).

By the same token, Richardson's Pamela is clearly an indication of this logocentric paradigm in operation, and his technique of "writing to the moment" seems to compromise between the "dull and languid" written word and the Ciceronian "fire and pathos" associated with the spoken word.

Richardson shows further manifestations of the logocentric tradition in Pamela. Writing in Pamela is considered referential to "reality," as a substitute for absence or distance, and Pamela on many occasions has indicated this function of language. Indications of Pamela's referential "scribble" abound throughout the novel. For example, in Letter 32 to her parents, Pamela writes "I will every day, however, write my sad state; and some way, perhaps, may be opened to send the melancholy scribble to you" (99). Here writing first is representation of Pamela's "sad state," and second, it will serve as a substitute as presence for absence or distance as Pamela tries to send the "melancholy scribble" to her parents. Moreover, after Mr. B. gets hold of Pamela's bundle of letters, Pamela, while still in the hope of her master's giving back to her the letters unopened, says to him: "I have no reason to be afraid of being found insincere, or having, in any respect, told you a falsehood; because, though I don't remember all I wrote, yet I know I wrote my heart" (240). Not only do the papers supplement as presence for something she cannot remember, but they also refer to truth without any insincerity or falsehood.

However, Pamela shows a doubleness or an ambivalence towards writing. At the same time when writing is debased as supplemental or secondary to speaking2, it is also no different from the spoken word. One obvious instance of the debasement of writing is when Mrs. Jewkes wants to see what a good hand Pamela writes. Pamela is playful with writing in addressing questions on paper to Mrs. Jewkes, in her presence, instead of asking them. In this manner, Pamela "fooled on" to show Mrs. Jewkes her "fondness for scribbling." But the game serves more than one purpose. Pamela not only displays her handwriting but also expects Mrs. Jewkes to participate in such a distorted way of communication: "She would have made me write on a little further. No, said I; you have not answered me" (125). Such a face-to-face communication in writing on Pamela's part only shows the supplementality of writing to speech, and the playful tone of the passage indicates the debased nature of writing in the sense that writing, in such a situation where nothing is absent, is unnecessary, and actual communication takes place as Pamela later quits writing and starts to converse with Mrs. Jewkes. On the other hand, this distorted way of communicating with Mrs. Jewkes is a way of dismantling the hierarchy between writing and speaking. By writing even when her interlocutor is directly in front of her, Pamela is both marking and unmarking the difference between writing and speaking, and asserting and undermining the logocentric preference for speaking over writing. This passage thus becomes a text that deconstructs itself in the sense that it undercuts the logocentric debasement of writing.

Also, due to the form of the epistolary novel itself, letter writing in Pamela cannot be completely discredited, for the letter writer has to privilege writing and has to write to someone in order to keep the plot going. In the very beginning of the novel, Pamela's parents have warned her: "If you find the least attempt made upon your virtue, be sure you leave every thing behind you, and come away to us" (6). Not until the second half of the novel, Pamela seems to abide by their instructions and seems to desire a happy family reunion in her parents' house. Although her parents' call for her return serves to reinforce her sense of virtue, it ultimately disrupts writing on the whole, for Pamela is certain that she will have "no writing, nor writing-time" when she goes home to her parents (80). Thus, the novel, from the outset, buries a destructive seed of tearing apart the text and sets a tension between her parents' disrupting writing and Pamela's protecting and preserving it if she is to survive as the letter writer.

Pamela's efforts to protect and preserve her writing against disrupting are not difficult to find in the novel. Apart from making direct statements like "I love writing" (10), Pamela has to make excuses to prevent her letter writing from ending, even if she has to put her virtue at stake. For instance, Pamela hesitates for the family reunion under the pretext that she finds it hard to leave the kind Mrs. Jervis--"I love you next to my own father and mother," says Pamela to Mrs. Jervis, "and to leave you is the chief concern I have at quitting this place" (33); she delays her departure because she has to fulfill her duty of servitude to finish the waistcoat for Mr. B.; then she "was forced to stay until John returned" because she does not trust Isaac in substitution for John, who usually goes her homeward direction (39). Even though she is given opportunities to escape, she has to reason herself out of the attempt. At first she tries to walk away to town but worries about being well-dressed and about coming to "some harm, almost as bad as what I would run away from" (18). Another time when she has ventured to escape by the back door, she says she is too frightened to pass the scary bulls in her way and retreats from the attempt (157).

The importance of writing for Pamela is even one of the reasons why she quits the idea of drowning herself after her failure to escape. Sheila C. Conboy thinks of Pamela's attempt to suicide as "the way that she can write her own ending to Mr. B.'s story; if she cannot conquer him, she will at least thwart his plan from reaching its desired effect" (89). However, such an ending is not what Pamela really wants. As she tries to reason herself out of this ending of her writing, Pamela contemplates that "the young men and maidens all around my dear father's will pity poor Pamela! But, O! I hope I shall not be the subject of their ballads and elegies" (181). Although in despair she thinks she may face death, Pamela indeed wants to write her own ballads or even her own elegies to her parents while she is still alive. Nothing is more important than her writing and her stories, which she has to tell despite everything until the end of the novel where her parents come to join her, rather than she them, in Mr. B.'s house; hence, the ending of the novel marks the triumph of writing.

To privilege writing as a mediation between the spoken word and the signified is to stay within the logocentric tradition. But it is not the case in ¡±Pamela?, although our heroine claims her letters represent the absent presence. Not only does the text of Pamela privilege writing, but it also deconstructs itself where writing does not merely represent a signified or reality out there, but acts as the shaper of Pamela's experience, and reality becomes a fabrication of her own interpretation. Terry Castle, in her discussions of Richardson's Clarissa, comments on the author's technique of "writing to the moment," which, according to Castle, "represents an ongoing effort to inscribe a vision--an interpretation--of the world;" the prolific `scribbling' of the characters "reflects a will to define experience, to transform the elusive moment into discourse (20). Temma F. Berg argues that Pamela's letters become "the mainspring for the continuation of the novel's action. The letters Pamela writes become the impetus for even more letters.... What he will do depends upon how she interprets what he has ¡±already done" (117). For Richard Hauer Costa, "Pamela's letters advance the action, not only by chronicling it, but by their softening effect on Mr. B." (45), and Conboy maintains that Pamela, in attaining her freedom through letter writing, has succeeded as the "artistic weaver" and as the shaper of her own experience while Mr. B. has "provided her with the necessary materials" (91). If letter writing is not a means to merely signify a referent or to record "reality," for which Pamela seems to employ her time in writing, but is used to interpret the world, to advance actions, and to shape the human experience, then this form of writing completely subverts the logocentric notion about writing in its referential ties with "reality" or "truth." "Truth" or "reality" never exists outside of the linguistic sign and is only part of the free play of significance. What Pamela preserves and privileges is the secondariness of both writing as a signifier and absence as a signified.

Derrida argues in Writing and Difference (279-80) that "the entire history of the concept of structure...must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center," and the center receives different names related to fundamentals or principles or truth such as essence, existence, substance, God, man, etc. The substitutions for the center, for Derrida, indicate that the center "was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play." This is the moment "when language invaded the universal problematic," Derrida maintains, "the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse..., a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences." All terms in a linguistic system, both the signifier and the signified, are secondary, since we cannot distinguish between the two signifying terms as they both are substitutions for each other within the linguistic system.

Also drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure's notion of the arbitrary nature of language3, Derrida (Of Grammatology 44) argues that since the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, "one must exclude any relationship of natural subordination, any natural hierarchy among signifiers or orders of signifiers." Thus the referential bond between "reality" and the logos has been dismantled. The spoken word in Derrida is no longer the proximity to the origin or the referent, and the written word is never discredited simply on the basis of its distance from the origin, for the notion of such distance itself is arbitrary. This arbitrariness prevents any exteriority of "truth" apart from the linguistic system and limits the origin of "truth" within the play of linguistic signification. That is why Derrida asserts that "from the moment that the sign appears, that is to say from the very beginning, there is no chance of encountering anywhere the purity of `reality'" (¡±Of Grammatology? 91). Since the linguistic sign opens the possibility of playing, Derrida has made the logocentric tradition invalid. The referential function of language has been undermined the super-signified or the referent has lost its usual traditional identity. Writing is no longer debased as a secondary elaboration or as a substitute for full presence on paper, and the referent or "reality" that linguistic signs represent is only a fabrication of play and delusion. The written word, the spoken word, and the referent thus are all thrown into a realm of free play, and they constitute an endless proliferation of the signifier, one moving on to another, as Jonathan Culler has put it: "What we may at one point identify as a signified is also a signifier. There are no final meanings that arrest the movement of signification" (188).

Pamela's writing is characteristic of such a Derridean free play and in one sense is both a signifier and a signified. In the first place, it is the activator of the things that happen to her rather than merely representations of "reality." Pamela's parents first of all fully realize how Pamela's letters have influenced her master, and they write to her: "Seeing your virtue, his heart is touched; and he has, no doubt, been awakened by your good example" (166). Mr. B. even admits to Pamela that "I see you so watchful over your virtue, that though I hoped to find it otherwise, I cannot but confess my passion for you is increased by it (223), and that the letters he has seen through the hands of John "were not to your disadvantage, I'll assure you; for they gave me a very high opinion of your wit and innocence" (239). In other words, if it were not for Pamela's letters, Mr. B. would not have taken actions toward Pamela and treated her reasonably though passionately. This way, writing produces reality that requires more writing to represent, which in turn produces another level of reality, and the process goes on. Another instance of Pamela's writing which immediately activates the courting squire's action is the garment scene. As Mr. B. later explains to Pamela, he tried to search her garment for the letters she was trying to hide, that "glorious pretence to search" having been activated by the impetus from Pamela's papers, in which she mentioned the reason why she wanted to bury her letters in the garden--for fear of being searched (249). Thus, although Pamela is trying hard to represent in her letters the absent presence (distance) to her parents, part of her writing as presence goes outside the closure of presence, for the part of her writing that shapes her future experience is not ¡±represented? within that closure. That is, her letters are both referential and action-provoking; writing does not merely signify the referent or "reality" but also precedes "reality" and helps shape the heroine's experience to win Mr. B.'s heart. This is an epitome of the Derridean endless proliferation of the signifier and the signified that itself is a signifier, a dissemination where writing (the signifier) produces "reality" (the signified) which requires more writing to represent, another signifier which in turn produces another domain of "reality" (the signified), etc. There is no natural bond between the logocentric primary signified and the secondary signifier. The free play of signs for signification and the secondariness of both the signifier and the signified are obvious here. As "reality" (the signified) becomes a signifier of writing, it becomes a never ceasing process that one signifier gives way to another and functions in its turn as still another signifier.

Furthermore, Pamela's writing does not simply represent the signified in the sense that in some cases it is only her own interpretations of the world around her, her own way of defining "reality." For instance, after Robin has carried Pamela to her master's country house instead of her parents', Mr. B., for fear that Pamela's parents may be worried about her conditions, writes a model letter for her to copy, addressed to Mrs. Jervis, who will forward it to the anxious parents. The model letter (119) tells the "truth" about Pamela's kidnap, a letter that fully serves the function of signifying distance as presence in Richardson's sense of the word. However, Pamela does not follow exactly what Mr. B. says in the model letter; the actual letter that she sends to Mrs. Jervis shows her own interpretations of the circumstances besides the plain "truth" presented in the model letter. Her own way of interpreting the event is given in italics, such as "I have been vilely tricked" and "This is the only time my low estate has been troublesome to me, since it has subjected me to the frights I have undergone" (97). Also Mr. B. seems to appreciate Pamela's accounts of events rather than the events themselves, because what counts is her interpretations of them. His way of thinking is clearly indicated after he has confiscated all Pamela's letters except those in her parents' hands. He encourages her to write on: "Yes, said he, I would have you continue your penmanship by all means; and, I assure you, in the mind I am in, I will not ask you for any after these; except any thing very extraordinary occurs" (251).

When Pamela writes to her mother telling her why her father comes to the squire's house to look for her and how he gets there, she is not representing "reality" based on what her father tells her but "reporting" what may have happened as real according to her own imagination. Again both her master and her father, writes Pamela, "enjoined me to write how the whole matter was, and what my thoughts were on this joyful occasion" (305). She never uses her father as a narrator or repeats what he says but simply tells his story by using it seems to illustrate her guesswork: "It seems, then, my dear father and you were so uneasy to know the truth of the story which Thomas had told you...." and "he had, it seems, asked, at the alehouse, what family the 'squire had down here, in hopes to hear something of me" (306). What purports to be "truth" or "reality" in her letters is only her own imagination or her own interpretation within the linguistic system.

Contradictory to the logocentric tradition that always debases writing as doubly fallen from the signified, the referent, or "reality," the text of Pamela so far has indicated that writing is privileged and crucial for Pamela's narrative, advances future actions, and is a fabrication of the heroine's own interpretation. The text also deconstructs itself in presenting reality as a book already written. In other words, rather than referential to "reality" as an external entity, writing itself constitutes "reality"; reality never resides outside the domain of writing. Discussing Pamela's reading of the books in her mistress' library, Berg (120-1) has a stimulating argument about Pamela's re-creation of the reality that she is desperately trying to represent accurately in writing. Berg maintains that "Pamela has read and assimilated what she has read and now acts upon it without quite realizing what she is doing," and that Pamela has often been seen as a novelization of traditional fairy-tale romance. That is certainly how Pamela and Mr. B. read their story. Cinderella gets Prince Charming." Although she may not be self conscious about what she is doing, Pamela is writing her story based on another story or signifying a referent based on another signifying process, thus illustrating a free play of signification or intertextuality. After all, the "reality" Pamela has presented for her readers is never an external referent that her writing is supposed to signify but is itself a book she is reading and re-creating.

First, Berg is certainly right that Mr. B. is reading Pamela's story as romance, as Pamela tells us after the comic pond scene: "Besides, said he, there is such a pretty air of romance, as you relate them, in your plots, and my plots, that I shall be better directed in what manner to wind up the catastrophe of the pretty novel" (242). Also even in the beginning of the book, Pamela seems to look at what has happened in the summer-house as a book she is reading to Mrs. Jervis. In Letter 5 Pamela talks a great deal about Mrs. Jervis' assets as a bosom friend, one of which Pamela has singled out: She "takes delight to hear me read to her; and all she loves to hear read, is good books, which we read whenever we are alone" (9). When she later relates to Mrs. Jervis what Mr. B. did to her in the summer-house, a conventional locale for romance, Pamela describes the situation in which she is alone with Mrs. Jervis. Pamela's best friend makes excuses to the servants that "she could not rest well, and would get me [Pamela] to read her to sleep; for she knew I loved reading." Then what immediately happens is "when we were alone, I told her all that passed" (19) about Mr. B.'s summer-house approach. As Pamela juxtaposes the phrase "when we were alone" and the book reading activity with her relating the summer-house scene to Mrs. Jervis, the reader cannot help associating what Pamela tells Mrs. Jervis about the summer-house with reading a chapter in those "good books" Pamela reads to her whenever they are alone. Thus, Pamela's representation of what she deems as "reality" may only be a fragment of a book derived from her reading in the library.

Finally, "reality" never gets free from the play of significance, and Pamela's writing predetermines and constitutes reality rather than signifies it. Writing seems like a magical axis that extends both to the past and to the future. While her writing reaches beyound itself, produces "reality," and advances Mr. B.'s actions toward Pamela, as mentioned earlier, her writing also reaches backwards and predetermines what has already happened. For instance, when Pamela is writing to her mother about the scene of the warm reception of her father's coming to Mr. B.'s house, she again uses the "writing to the moment" technique and depicts it in the following manner: "I found myself encircled in the arms of my dearest father--tell me, said I, every thing! How long have you been here? when did you come? How does my honoured mother?" (310). Here Pamela inquires about both her father and mother. What a virtuous and caring daughter! This is what she is supposed to be, but what is more revealing than what she is interested in asking lies in what she does not ask. Why "How does my honoured mother?" as if she, when asking the question, already knew her mother was at home supposedly waiting for her letters that would represent this scene as the absent presence? Why not "Did my honoured mother come along with you?" or "Why didn't my honoured mother come along with you?" Because Pamela is aware she is writing to her mother, and she does not have to ask stupid questions like that. Thus, significantly this part of "reality" or distance (the actual greetings), which she is representing to her mother as presence, is predetermined by the letter she is writing; "reality" is already within the scope of the free play of differences in writing; and what is presented as the past, the absent, is molded by the present letter she is writing.

Deconstructing the logocentric tradition that debases writing as distantly signifying the referent or "truth," Pamela undermines the referential ties between writing and "reality" by presenting distance as the projection of her own sense of the real and by presenting "reality" as constituted in her own writing. Writing no longer signifies a "reality" outside her letters but falls within a discourse that marks a free play of differences for signification, for her writing serves to reach both back and beyond--to predetermine what happened and to shape what is to come in her stories. Also "reality" signified by Pamela's writing is already written as a book; thus "reality" is only a play, "delusion, misperception, dream" (to use Leitch's terms), or a signifying process embedded in another signifying process, and the referent or the Richardsonian notion of distance is never brought present free from such a play.

Rather than referring to an external "reality," Pamela is writing about writing. On the one hand, her intention to make distance presence, in writing letters and journals, might be a project of her writer becoming. This is a project she cannot accomplish unless she fights against her parents' destructive force on her writing in their call for her return. She also has to compromise with them in presenting distance as presence to them in order to show her virtue, both as a daughter and as a servant girl, and the ordeal she has to go through to test her virtuous quality, although her miserable experience is to a large extent the fabrication of her own imagination. On the other hand, critics like Berg (116) and Conboy (82), among others, have gained insights about the fact that Pamela has attained her freedom and rise in society through her writing. Most importantly, Pamela has betrayed Richardson, her creator, in disrupting his logocentric ideas about epistolary writing, but she has had to become a good writer inthe first place to be successful in her social mobility. She did it as a fascinating writer to win Mr. B.'s love by telling her stories to him. It is another game a servant girl plays on her master, and it is ?a game she plays on writing, a free play of signification.

Notes

 1 Leitch has supplied an excellent explication for this logocentric concept from which Derrida departs:

 Classically formulated, the semiological signifier refers to a signified, that is, an acoustic image signifies an ideal concept--both of which are present to consciousness. The sound cluster "chair," for instance, indicates the idea chair. The real chair, the referent, is not present. The sign marks an absent presence. Rather than present the object, we employ the sign. We postpone or defer producing the referent. (44)

In other words, in the logocentric tradition the written letters c-h-a-i-r as a signifier refer to the sound cluster "chair" which is again a primary sign of the absent referent (the object that we call "chair"). Writing as a sign to convey or to imitate the voice within this tradition is only a substitute for another sign (the spoken word), doubly fallen from its referential absent or "reality."  

 2 Due to the mimetic nature of the written word, logocentricity always assigns truth to the logos or voice which is considered closer and more responsive to the referent. In contrast, writing is debased as "mediation of mediation and as a fall into the exteriority of meaning," and reading and writing "allow themselves to be confined within secondariness. They are preceded by a truth, or a meaning already constituted by and within the element of the logos." For the discussion of the logocentric "absolute proximity of voice and being" and the debasement of writing, see Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 10-14.

3 For Saussure, "the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary" (150). This arbitrariness, for instance, is seen in the fact that the idea of "pin" is not connected by any internal relationships to the sound /pin/, for signifiers in other languages for this same idea are totally different. Apart from the arbitrariness of language, Saussure also tells us that "whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system," and that "a linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas" (167). In other words, any spoken signifier denotes any meaning only because it is different from any other; the word ¡±red? signifies the idea of "red" only because "red" in both the sound and the idea is different from any "non-red." See Saussure, Excerpts from Courses in General Linguistics, ed. Mark C. Taylor, Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1986, pp. 141-68.

Works Cited

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Cicero. Brutus; or, Remarks on Eminent Orators. Ed. & Trans. Ralph A. Michen. Cicero on Oratory and Orators. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1970. 262-367.

Conboy, Sheila C. "Fabric and Fabrication in Richardson's Pamela." ELH (1987): 81-96.

Costa, Richard Hauer. "The Epistolary Monitor in Pamela." Modern Language Quarterly 31 (1970): 38-47.

Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.

Derrida, Jacques. "Differance" Ed. Mark C. Taylor. Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1986. 396-420.

---. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.

---. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1978.

Leitch, Vincent B. Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction. New York:Columbia UP, 1983.

Richardson, Samuel. Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. Ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld. New York: AMS P, 1966.

---. Pamela. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1958.

Roussel, Roy. "Reflections on the Letter: The Reconciliation of Distance and Presence in Pamela." ELH 4 (1974): 375-99.

Sherburn, George. "`Writing to the Moment': One Aspect." Ed. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1963. 201-9.