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.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

This book charts the novel's vibrant engagement with clothes, examining how fiction revises and reshapes material objects within its pages.