Ecologies of the Page: Text and Textile in the “Papers” of Pamela

This article re-reads the epistolary form of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in the context of book history and eighteenth-century material culture. Drawing attention to the rag paper upon which both Richardson’s novel was printed and Pamela’s letters composed, the author uses an ecological model of relation to investigate the connections between bodies, clothing, and texts present in their textured surface. Recuperating the extensive material literacies of Pamela’s original readerships and arguing for a renewed attention to the interactions of text and textile in the novel, this work foregrounds the primacy of touch in reading practices of the rag paper period and reconceives Pamela’s pages as an agentic participant in the novel’s formation. In doing so, the author demonstrates how an ecological attunement to the book’s nonhuman elements discloses Pamela’s implication in the gendered labours of paper’s production, revealing new avenues for feminist bibliographers looking to account for women’s contributions in the history of the book.