Writing to the moment / moments of reading: Pamela, the epistolary complex and eighteenth-century reading practices

<i:p>This article uses the debate raging around Samuel Richardson’s novel-inletters Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) as a case study in eighteenthcentury reading practices. At a time when reading took place both in shared public spaces and the privacy of the home and was performed aloud as well as in solitary silence, the form of the epistolary novel rendered Richardson’s Pamela suitable to a variety of reading practices – yet with widely differing assessments as to the rewards of ‘virtue’ promised in the novel’s subtitle. By focusing on what is introduced as the ‘epistolary complex’, the article aims to show how one and the same novel could encourage diametrically opposed protocols of reading. Viewed through the prism of the epistolary genre, one answer to Pamela’s success as a novel for public consumption (mirrored in the commodity culture surrounding the text) is its sententiousness and easy extricability.</i:p>