How not to raise a reader

It Starts With...Pamela

It’s Banned Books Week in the United States. Every year, I somehow forget that the Canadian version of this event, Freedom to Read week, does not coincide with the American one in late September, a.k.a the most lovely and logical season for literary activism—the school year is newly underway, publishers are busy releasing all their biggest, most anticipated titles, and that crisp, fresh-start feeling has not quite worn off.

Freedom to Read week is, mystifyingly, held the third week of February here in Canada, a generally bleak period known for short, grey days, head colds, and 50% off sales on heart-shaped boxes of chocolate. I missed it completely this year (and pretty much every other year), probably because I was busy hanging onto the will to live. But banned books are on my mind now, so here we are.

Right after Labour Day, G. and I went through the store, picking out the titles that will be assigned to this year’s crop of middle and high schoolers, many of which we read as students, many decades ago. Though the schools still provide class sets of assigned books at this level, G. says that a few keeners still come in, looking for their own copies, ones that aren’t falling apart or already full of goofy marginalia.

As we piled the books on top of the wheelie cart we use for seasonal displays, I got to thinking about the irony of it all. If you want a teenager to truly engage with a particular book, you really shouldn’t force them to read it. In fact, you should probably try to ban it or at the very least, disparage it. Tell them it’s trash, or—even better—that it’s totally inappropriate for someone their age.

This is a strategy that has worked for oh, exactly 284 years and counting.

I love the gently arched eyebrow. This AI-generated Victorian Lady is into some spicy stuff. Photo courtesy of Stockcake

When Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded was first published, anonymously, by Samuel Richardson in 1740, it caused quite the stir. “Everybody read it,” writes literary scholar Margaret A. Doody: “there was a ‘Pamela’ rage, and Pamela motifs appeared on teacups and fans.” Essentially, it was the first smash hit bestseller in literary history. It inspired “spurious continuations” (ie fan-fic!), parodies (most notably Shamela, by Henry Fielding), and so. much. pearl-clutching.

Pamela is an extremely lengthy epistolary novel, in which a young servant girl goes to work for her late mistress’s young son. He threatens, bamboozles, and even abducts her, stopping just shy of rape when she faints. He does all this, first out of lust and later, he says, out of love, a love so strong it is making him ill—which (spoiler alert!) she somehow manages to sincerely reciprocate. They get married, she wins over his social circle with her beauty and charm, and they live happily ever after, all the while generously showering money on the poor, for she has not forgotten her origins.

It was, and still is, a highly controversial book. At the time it was published, it drew much praise for its “liveliness and morality” but also, much condemnation, particularly from privileged readers who saw it as a direct threat to the social order. Some readers saw a “pernicious ‘levelling’ tendency,” as Doody delicately puts it, in Pamela’s rags-to-riches narrative arc, and it just really freaked them out. Though I don’t have any direct quotes (I wish!), it’s a safe bet that many parents saw the novel as most unsuitable for their young lords and ladies, for in fact, many adult readers saw all novels this way.

From the late 18th century through the middle of the 19th, young readers—particularly young women, says scholar Margaret Cohen—“were considered to be in danger of not being able to differentiate between fiction and life.” Critics and concerned parents were worried about young women getting lost in books, filling their heads with fantasies instead of finding a husband and having babies—or worse, a la Emma Bovary, becoming dissatisfied with the ‘real life’ laid out for them, as a direct result of comparing their personal experience with romantic fiction.

Like all moral panics, the one around novels came out of fear—fear of a major, disruptive social change already on the horizon. Basically, older folks were worried that novels might (gasp!) get young women thinking about other ways to live, ways that their parents might not understand or like.

It’s tempting to laugh, perhaps a little bitterly, at our ancestors’ concerns, now that we have come full circle, and “raising a reader” is one (among many) of a parent’s moral duties. Parents, deservedly, take enormous pride in children who learn to read easily and early in life, as they do in children who master the skill after a long, arduous journey. And the parents whose kids willingly read for fun? Whose teenagers read for fun, instead of warping their young minds with TikTok for hours on end? They’re smug as hell.

Up until last year, I was so sure I would be walking among their exalted ranks. I was already mentally wearing the invisible sash and tiara all moms of teenage leisure-readers get, you know? But then my daughter turned thirteen, and decided that, books are annoying and weird because her mom likes books and her mom is extremely annoying and weird, so. Here we are.

We have a Penguin Classics edition of Pamela in the store and frankly, having leafed through it to see what the fuss was about—which is always, always my first move with an expressly forbidden book—well, I don’t think today’s youngsters are in any danger of getting past page one, even if we casually compare Samuel Richardson to, say, Colleen Hoover, which actually might…stand up? I suppose I’d have to read more than a few snippets of their books to really be certain. Perhaps there is a Phd candidate out there somewhere doing this, right now.

Coincidentally, It Starts With Us is one of the last books my daughter asked me to buy, and even though I like to think of myself as a liberal, open-minded, somewhat with-it parent—I said absolutely not.

Some tales are nearly as old as time.