The disappearance of Pamela

In the database we see that Samuel Richardson is available in late eighteenth-century Norway with all three of his novels. However, it is Sir Charles Grandison that makes Richardson’s most prominent entry with five copies in Danish, French and English. Pamela is only available in one Danish copy at Diurendahl’s lending library in Christiania, along with Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela, and in a French translation in the library of Christiania military school. Clarissa can be found in three copies in Danish translation. Why is Richardson’s most popular novel, Pamela, the one that we find least often in Norwegian book collections?

The novel Pamela, published in 1740, appears to have coincided happily with the emergence of the circulating library. In Britain the term ‘circulating library’ is first recorded in 1742.4 H. M. Hamlyn, ‘Eighteenth-Century Circulating Libraries in England’, The Library, 5th Series, 1 (1947), 197–222, at p. 197 The circulating libraries would not only attract readers who wanted to borrow Richardson’s novel but also its numerous imitations in novel and drama form.5 A. D. McKillop, ‘English Circulating Libraries, 1725–1750’, The Library, 4th Series, 14 (1934), 477–85, at p. 484. If readers in the eighteenth century indeed moved from an intensive mode of reading (that is, reading and re-reading an individual book extensively) to an extensive mode of reading (that is, going through very many books at great pace), as Rolf Engelsing proposes it, then reading societies and lending libraries were necessary to steadily supply readers with more books.6 See Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser. Indeed, Norwegian book collections from the eighteenth century also hold imitations of Pamela, such as Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s Schwedische Gräfin (1747) and Carlo Goldoni’s dramatic adaptation La Pamela fanciulla (1750). Nevertheless, these imitations are not exactly numerous with two copies each of Gellert’s novel and Goldoni’s play.

Engelsing’s account is not uncontested. His hypothesis echoes how eighteenth-century commentators themselves perceived the new reading practices connected to sentimental novels such as Pamela as extensive, superficial and fast.7 R. Wittmann, ‘Was there a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?’, in G. Cavallo and R. Chartier (eds), A History of Reading in the West (Oxford, 1999), pp. 284–312. However, it can be shown that many readers engaged repeatedly and deeply with these texts, leading to an intensive reading experience. Sir Charles Grandison might have better suited the practice of reading for self-cultivation, which emerged in the second half of the century, because it is thematically and narratively closer to the pattern of the Bildungsroman.8 K. Littau, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania (Cambridge, 2006). This might explain the stronger showing in the database. Generally speaking, however, multiple reading practices were at play in different contexts, including shared reading in company.9 A. Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven, 2018).

For Denmark, Stangerup reports that Pamela was translated very swiftly into Danish (in 1743 and 1746), but observes after that a general drop in translations of what he calls ‘the bourgeois novel’ followed in mid-century.10 See H. Stangerup, Romanen i Danmark, p. 227. He claims that Richardson and the bourgeois novel only came into their own with the rise of the sentimental novel in the 1780s, when we also have the first Danish translations of Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison. Most of the editions of Richardson in the book collections sampled are indeed from the 1780s, even those in English. Perhaps Pamela was no longer as current as reading material in 1766, when it came to Norway.11 See also A. Nøding, Vittige kameleoner. The earliest catalogues in the sample included in the database are from the 1780s, so that the snapshot in the database might simply be too late. It appears, then, that Pamela did not have much staying power with the Norwegian reading public, unlike Cervantes’ Don Quixote or Holberg’s Peder Paars, for example. An investigation of ‘long-sellers’, or books with a first publication date that comes much earlier than the compilation date of the catalogue, in the database might indeed throw interesting light on canonisation processes in Norway in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Stangerup hypothesises that Pamela was eclipsed in Denmark by the ‘adventure novels’ of Le Sage, Defoe and others, which saw much higher publication figures in the period.12 See H. Stangerup, Romanen i Danmark, p. 227. It is not certain that the same is the case for Norway, because the Norwegian book collections sampled hold only one copy of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and most copies of Le Sage’s novels only in translations from the 1780s. It might also be the case that Stangerup’s narrow focus on the novel, instead of literary fiction more generally, limits his view on the disappearance of Pamela.

For Norway, Aina Nøding outlines how Pamela makes her entry into the Norwegian public sphere with a serialisation in the weekly Norske Intelligenz-Sedler, running from April to July 1766, so exactly the period when Stangerup records no entries for the ‘bourgeois novel’.13 See A. Nøding, Vittige kameleoner. The Pamela serialisation is not based on Richardson’s novel but on Ditlevine Feddersen’s Danish translation of the French version of Goldoni’s Pamela. As Nøding shows, the serialisation probably served both as a page filler and as advertisement for a print run of the book version of Feddersen’s translation.14 A. Nøding Vittige kameleoner, p. 164. However, the book also did not sell well.15 Ibid, p. 168. Goldoni’s Pamela, Nøding tells us, was performed privately in 1765–6 in Feddersen’s home with the translator herself in one of the roles.16 Ibid, p. 166. Norway at this time did not have a public theatre. However, private performances and convivial readings of play texts were a common occurrence.17 H. J. Huitfeldt-Kaas, Christiania Theaterhistorie (Oslo, 1876). Dramatic societies joined the reading societies in the late eighteenth-century cultural landscape in Norway, and some of these dramatic societies had their own libraries of play texts.18 For the example of dramatic societies in Bergen, see the essays collected in R. M. Selvik, E. K. Gjervan and S. Gladsø (eds), Lidenskap eller Levebrød? Utøvende Kunst i endring rundt 1800 (Bergen, 2015). The popularity of dramatic societies and theatrical readings is also reflected in the holdings of many book collections. About 40 per cent of the database entries across all catalogues are play scripts or collections of plays. The most prominent collection is Holberg’s Danske skueplads with more than ten entries and various individual plays from that collection listed individually in addition. Norwegian readers apparently had a keen taste for reading plays. The commercial lending library Schousted in Drammen holds no fewer than four plays by Goldoni (but not Pamela) and four by Charlotte Biehl, his Danish translator and imitator.19 See M. Olsen, ‘La Recezione di Goldini in Danimarca’, in G. D’Amico and M. P. Muscarello (eds), Terre Scandinave in Terre d’Asti (Asti, 2009), pp. 37–49, for Biehl’s artistic relationship to Goldoni. Diurendahl’s lending library in Christiania, on the other hand, only has a few play texts, probably because this demand had been met by other book collections in the city. Carl Deichman’s collection had a solid holding of French contemporary plays, ranging from the sentimental to the frivolous, as well as classics such as Molière and Voltaire. The cathedral school library in Christiania held French plays as well as German and English texts in the original languages. The reading society for foreign-language literature in Bergen made available plays by Lessing, Kotzebue, Schiller, Iffland and others, but these also can be found elsewhere in Norway throughout the collections. Compared to French and German plays, English and particularly Shakespeare’s plays are under-represented in the book collections sampled, with only four of the collections holding any of Shakespeare’s plays.20 While Danish literary criticism considered Shakespeare as lacking in command of the neoclassical rules of writing plays, Norwegian intellectuals (like Fasting; see A. Nøding, Claus Fasting, pp. 169–71) appeared to side with the emerging appreciation of Shakespeare’s expressive qualities in German criticism. Christoph Martin Wieland for example translated twenty-two of Shakespeare’s plays into German in 1762. Note, however, that the book collections sampled hold mostly English versions of Shakespeare plays and Danish translations from the 1790s.

It appears to be the case that Norwegian readers interested in the theatre had access to a substantial number of play texts, which could be borrowed for an evening’s entertainment (much like renting a video in more recent times) to be read together with the family and at other convivial gatherings. The serialisation of Goldoni’s Pamela in Norske Intelligenz-Sedler would be ill-suited to such a practice because it only gave readers individual scenes with multiple weeks’ wait between instalments. Moreover, if play texts were more or less single-use items, to be borrowed for an evening’s entertainment, then only a few readers would be ready to spend significant amounts of money on a print copy of their own, and this might also account for the failure of Feddersen’s project. The disappearance of Pamela from Norwegian book collections may then be explained by broader international moves towards reading practices suited to the Bildungsroman and a more particular mismatch with local shared reading practices. Narve Fulsås has argued that Norway’s relative tardiness as to the emergence of the novel as a dominant literary form along with its interest in the theatre could have contributed to the literature of Norway starting as world literature, especially with Ibsen, rather than as observed elsewhere as a literature of nation-building.21 N. Fulsås, ‘Noreg som kulturell eksportnasjon’, in J. E. Myhre (ed.), Myten om det fattige Norge. En misforståelse og dens historie (Oslo, 2021), pp. 261–308. Indeed, one could argue for a straight line from Pamela, and other evidence for Norwegian readers’ taste for European plays recorded in the database, to Henrik Ibsen’s formation as a dramatist thanks to his participation in Bergen’s Dramatiske Selskab.22 A. S. Andersen, Deus ex machina? Henrik Ibsen og teatret i norsk offentlighet, 1780–1864 (Oslo, 2010).