In accordance with the usual textual policy of the Cambridge Edition of theWorks of Samuel Richardson (CEWSR), this edition of Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded offers a critical unmodernized text of the first edition of the novel, published on 6 November 1740 (dated 1741); the text is based on a copy of this edition at the Newberry Library in Chicago (Call Number: VAULT Case 3A 881, v. 1–2). In preparing the text, I collated four copies of the first edition (British Library, National Library of Scotland, Newberry Library, and the University of Chicago Library) and discovered no press-variants. Because Richardson was his own printer, the distinctions in authority between substantives and accidentals advanced in classical textual theory do not entirely apply. Although it is possible that somebody other than Richardson made changes in this and subsequent editions – especially in such house-style matters as punctuation, as the texts were being set from manuscript or corrected copy – we can reasonably assume that all editions of the novel appearing during Richardson's lifetime were issued with his approval, if not his supervision, and are thus ‘authoritative’. With some caution, we can add to this group the ‘eighth’ duodecimo edition, published on 28 October 1761 (dated 1762), three months after Richardson's death, because the changes in it are consistent with those found in previous lifetime editions.More problematic in terms of its authority is the ‘fourteenth’ edition of 1801. Published forty years after Richardson's death, it claims to incorporate the author's final ‘corrections and alterations’ (title page). But, as their surviving correspondence seems to suggest, this edition was contaminated, to an extent we cannot now recover, by the editorial interference of his daughters. Thus, any case that might be made for this edition as incorporating Richardson's ‘final’ intentions for his work is undercut by the uncertain provenance of its corrections.

What we know for certain is that Richardson had intended to give his first novel his ‘last Hand’, as he writes to Johannes Stinstra on 2 June 1753, but that he died before he could publish that final version.