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This paper examines the narrative shift from the epistolary form to the journal form in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). While the majority of literary critics do not seriously consider Richardson’s use of different narrative forms in his epistolary novel, I argue it deserves our notice, for it is only after the novel transitions into the journal form that Mr. B begins to sympathetically identify with Pamela, which Richardson employs as his primary means of moral instruction. In examining how the eighteenth-century familiar letter, a form that was greatly popular during this period due to recent developments in the English postal system, simultaneously promotes and impedes sympathetic identification due to its dual capacity for intimacy and duplicity, I discuss how Richardson employs Mr. B, Pamela’s primary internal reader, to consider the potential advantages and disadvantages of using the epistolary form to inculcate morality in his external readers, a matter in which he was greatly interested and invested throughout the entirety of his literary career. We can see the narrative experimentation in Pamela as an extension of such interest, for Richardson endeavors to rid the epistolary form of its aforementioned complexity by using the journal form, which he presents as maintaining the letter’s sense of intimacy without retaining its potential for duplicity. Although it is difficult to determine how successful he was in addressing the potential problems familiar letters pose to his moral project, Richardson seems to have interpreted the overwhelming criticism from anti-Pamelists as an indication of his limited success. This helps explain why he resumed his narrative experimentation with the epistolary form in his later novel Clarissa, an attempt that similarly incited mixed responses in his readers, which I suggest might not have had much to do with Richardson and his abilities (or lack thereof), but rather the limitations of the epistolary novel itself, a genre that fell out of favor in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
