Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela

This introduction assembles the author's preface, editorial remarks and a series of contemporary letters to trace the work's early reception and successive revisions. It reproduces complimentary and critical responses, summarizes reader objections, and explains specific alterations made across editions to address questions of tone, propriety and meaning. The text documents editorial decisions and printing variants, marks deletions and substitutions, and notes how certain passages were softened or recast. Altogether it offers a close account of the author's intentions, defenses of the moral aims of the novel, and the practical changes undertaken to make the text more acceptable to its original readership.