One of the most spectacular successes of the flourishing literary marketplace of eighteenth-century London, Pamela also marked a defining moment in the emergence of the modern novel. In the words of one contemporary, it divided the world into two different Parties, Pamelists and Anti-pamelists, even eclipsing the sensational factional politics of the day.

Samuel Richardson emerges in Fysh's analysis as a man on the cusp of change - in the organization of the printing industry and of labor generally, and in the nature of the literary text - and his work as a printer as well as his literary works (the two being fundamentally inseparable) come to be seen as instrumental in and representative of these changes.

Benjamin Franklin's portraits and colonial printing -- Phillis Wheatley and the durability of the author portrait -- Nationalist portraiture, magazines, and political books -- Picturing the seduction heroine in the U.S -- Gothic portraiture in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and Ormond