Here’s a paper I wrote for my ENGL 448 class: The English Novel to Jane Austen about Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel, Pamela. On the surface, the novel seems to be a criticism of eighteenth-century England’s strict social hierarchy. Readers follow the eponymous character as she transcends social classes through her virtue alone. I argue that the author thoroughly characterizes Pamela as extraordinary, and in doing so presents her rise from one social class to another as an exception to an otherwise stable system, rather than a disruption of it.