Puffing Pamela: Book hype, 18th-century style

There are quite a few candidates competing for the title of the first novel in English literature. You can make a strong case for Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, or Gulliver’s Travels of 1726, or even – at a push – argue for Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, issued over a hundred years before, but one of the super-heavyweight contenders will always be Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel-in-letters, Pamela.

When it first appeared Pamela was as much of a sensation as the X Factor and Fifty Shades rolled into one, a genuine ‘multi-media event’ more than two hundred years before that phrase was even coined. Part of that impact was down to the simple fact of its novelty – no-one had literally ever read anything like it before – but a good deal of the rest was the result of its explicit sexual content, and an extremely astute publicity campaign orchestrated by its printer-turned-author.