Pamela and the Anglican Crisis of the 1730s

Carol Stewart

doi:10.1111/j.1754-0208.2008.00109.x

Pamela and the Anglican Crisis of the 1730s

Carol Stewart

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The publication of Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded in 1739 is read as a response to the contemporary crisis of authority in the Anglican Church. Anglican clergy were commonly perceived as corrupt, weak or remote. The Church's moral authority was threatened by its subordination to Whig interests, and its power and influence in the state were endangered by anticlerical legislation put before Parliament in the 1730s. In 1739 the Methodist George Whitefield attacked the Anglican reconciliation of virtue with worldly interest. Richardson deployed fiction to defend the Anglican ethos in Pamela by emphatically rewarding his heroine's ‘virtue’.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	37-51
Number of pages	15
Journal	Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Volume	32
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2008.00109.x
Publication status	Published - Mar 2009

Keywords

novel
crisis
religion
Anglicanism
moral authority
virtue

Access to Document

10.1111/j.1754-0208.2008.00109.x

Cite this

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