Carl Wells Books

Last week, on Thanksgiving Day, I began a list of things for which I am thankful. I am glad it turned into a multi-part series. Here are some more things for which I am thankful, again in no particular order.

7/Fiction writers who have brought much joy to my life. Here are a few of them. I will probably forget someone important. And I could list more than just these few. Reading fiction has been a big part of my life. Here a few of the writers for whom I am grateful, in alphabetical order, or as close to alphabetical order as I can make it: Joseph A. Altsheler, Jane Austen, L. Frank Baum, Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Walter R. Brooks, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Agatha Christie, Michael Connelly, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George MacDonald Fraser, Zane Grey, H. Rider Haggard, W. W. Jacobs, Franz Kafka, Burgess Leonard, C. S. Lewis, Talbot Mundy, J. D. Salinger, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Rex Stout, Cid Ricketts Sumner, Booth Tarkington, Leo Tolstoy, Anthony Trollope, Mark Twain, P. G. Wodehouse, Zack (pen name of Gwendoline Keats). Obviously, some of these writers have been more important to me than others. In my book The Way to Do a Thing Is to Do It: Essays, I list the ten writers I would take with me if I were exiled to a desert island. But here in this blog post I have many more than ten names. Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate bounty.

8/Jesus Christ. I am thankful that He died for sinners, and that He has granted me the ability to believe in Him, so that I have the hope of joining Him in heaven someday. Who else was going to pay for my enormous sins?

9/The biblical Christian faith. It makes intellectual sense, it rewards good and punishes evil, it gives me a solid foundation on which to live my life in hope. It suits my personality, perhaps. I hate pietism and antinomianism and the welfare state and the warfare state, and so does biblical Christianity. I love freedom and responsibility and humility and purity and generous behavior (I love them better in theory than I do in personal action, no doubt), and so does biblical Christianity.

10/High school sports. I enjoy following several of the sports teams at the local high school. Don’t misunderstand me. I hate public education. I don’t think it should exist, and it is shameful that Christians send their children to public schools, and shameful that they work in public schools at any level. I grant all that, and even insist on it. That does not change the fact that I vastly enjoy following the teams at the local public high school. High school sports get me out of the house. They are a large part of my social life. That may be pathetic, but it is what it is, and it behooves me to be grateful for any of my blessings. Often our local teams are good, which makes it easier to be a fan. And rooting for the home team does not keep me or anyone from showing respect to opponents or to officials. I hope a day comes when there is no more public education. But even such a day does come, there will still be schools, and there will still be high school teams. I will be there with my hair in a braid, as Bertie Wooster would say.

11/That I can work and earn a living. What a blessing it is to be able to earn my own living by working. I don’t have to pay for my food and shelter and clothing by taking money extracted from my neighbors by force by a vicious state or central or local government. Not everyone can work, not everyone has the physical ability to move around. But I can, and the living I earn is plenty sufficient to live comfortably.

12/The disappearance of the Soviet Union (1991) and the reemergence of Russia. What an encouraging thing it is for me that the Soviet Union ceased to exist! Here was a great evil power which had caused so much death and misery for its own people as well as for others, suddenly giving up and no longer able to do the evil it had done for almost two generations! Amazing. Few saw it coming, although Andrei Amalrik did. After the Soviet Union disappeared, Russia was back. What is so encouraging about all this is that the United States too is in danger of becoming the Soviet Union. We are in danger of being ruled by conscienceless totalitarians, and the misery, perhaps the number of deaths, will be great if that happens. And yet all will not be lost! Because if the Soviet Union can cease to exist, so can the totalitarians (soft or hard) who are volunteering to run and to ruin our lives in the immediate future. It may take two generations or more, but evil doesn’t keep on winning. Something will emerge after the totalitarians begin to lose their grasp on our lives. We could even still fend them off, but even if we don’t, our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren or our great-great-grandchildren might return to freedom and responsibility. “There is more than one hit in a game,” as Rod Laver said. We may lose Christian civilization for two generations, as Russia did, but that doesn’t mean the totalitarians will win for all time. They didn’t win in Russia for all time. Russia is back, and we might be back also.

I hope to bring you, next week, more things for which I am grateful.

This being the Thanksgiving season–in fact it is Thanksgiving Day–this seems like a good time to list a few things for which I am thankful. There seem to be quite a few depressing things going on in our country and in the world. One can get discouraged and depressed, easily, and understandably. The temptation is always to forget the many things for which we have to be thankful. To fight off that temptation, here are some things for which I am grateful. They are not in any particular order. They are of course numbered.

1/My family–parents and siblings. My father is deceased, but I had him for over 45 years. My mother is still clicking at–drum roll please–99 2/3. I have three living siblings. Our family has been far from an ideal family. Often we put the fun in dysfunctional, as the old saying goes. We always did, and we still do. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the perfect family, and 9 being the practical upper limit that probably even the most promising families reach on earth, our family would probably rate somewhere between a 5 and a 6. Call it 5.5. Not sparkling, perhaps, in competition with the 7s, the 8s, and the occasional rare 9, but still not too doggone bad. Our parents gave us a chance. Some families don’t give their kids much chance. I can’t imagine going through life without my siblings there. I was the first born child. What if I had been the only child born? Then not only would I have been without the good of having brothers and sisters–mixed in with occasional pain, of course, none of which has ever been my fault–but also I would have been alone to take care of my Aged Parent. Thank heaven she is our Aged Parent, not just my Aged Parent. It is truly a blessing to have siblings. It must be really tough to be an only child. After I was born my mother had two miscarriages. The first one was a boy, on the second one the doctors didn’t tell her. Three more children were eventually born. But it fascinates me to think that if the God of the Bible is real–and I am betting He is–that I have two siblings just slightly younger than me, to meet someday in Paradise. I look forward to that meeting.

2/Families in general. I think families were and are a wonderful way to organize reality. I congratulate God on having organized earthly life so that families are so important and so useful to almost everyone. Of course there are families which are not good, and there are families which are horrible. Some children experience physical, psychological, and/or sexual abuse in their families. This is not the fault of God, unless we blame God for allowing people to have moral responsibility. The general plan was good, but when we fail to fulfill our responsibilities, bad things can happen.

3/My eyesight. I can see to read, see to maneuver in the world, see to watch DVDs, see to watch sports, see to cook my meals, see to do what needs to be done in countless everyday events. I know there are people who are not so blessed. It is difficult for me to imagine that I could have lived my life without being able to see. Did God miraculously preserve my eyesight on occasion? Maybe. God may have known I couldn’t have made it without being able to see. He has been merciful to me, at least, in allowing my vision to continue to a relatively old age.

4/Modern dentistry and dentists. Three plus months ago I had a wisdom tooth and one other tooth taken out at the same time. Needless to say, I wasn’t anticipating that day with joy. But in almost no time at all, with almost no pain at all, both teeth were out. The pain medication prescription was filled, and I began taking the pills. I ended up having to take only a first pill, then a second pill four hours later, and that was the end of the need for pain pills, since the pain (always minor) was so quickly gone. I had eight or ten pills I didn’t need.

5/The free market. Leaving people alone to buy and sell, to work and to keep the fruit of their labors, works out incredibly well for everyone. But not only is the free market productive of, and protective of, physical wealth, it also has a moral loveliness. Oh the joy of not trying to steal from other people, not trying to bully other people, not trying to live as a parasite. Oh the joy of being able to earn one’s own living (perhaps even earn and have enough to share with others, as Ephesians 4:28 recommends), to work at a job and be paid for it, to be able to provide for one’s own living. The free market really helps me keep my expenses down to a minimum, and yet still live in relative luxury. I am not a big wage earner, have no particularly marketable skills, and yet even so I am able to live comfortably–because the free market rewards me with enough income to get by without major problems.

6/People who know how to do stuff. I am thinking of people like plumbers, electricians, mechanics, heating and air conditioning specialists, computer makers and repairers, carpenters. But actually the list is quite endless. The above-mentioned dentists (see # 4) certainly fit in here. Doctors and nurses, linemen (whether from Wichita or anywhere else) who work on electric lines, people who lay down asphalt, make concrete blocks, produce bags, and on and on world without end amen. So many people do so many things we take for granted, but doing them takes knowledge and ability and willingness to work. I can’t do any of those things. If it had been left to me to figure out how to do things, I am pretty sure the wheel would never have been invented. Yet despite my own lack of ability to do tens of thousands of things, I benefit daily from the ability of other people–and usually the financial cost to me of using the abilities of knowledgeable others is surprisingly small (see # 5).

It turns out I have enough other things for which I am thankful, to make this a several part series. Look for more next week, if possible, and be thankful I didn’t list them all at once and make this too long to read easily.

Last week’s blog post pointed out how government spending takes an enormous amount of our earnings, to subsidize things that should not even exist in the first place–as for example the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, and the bloated military.

The situation is even worse than that, of course. Other things are impoverishing us. Manufacturing is driven out of the country, by huge U.S. taxes, thus subtracting the number of good jobs we have. Inflation–creating money out of thin air–raises our cost of living as prices go higher. We could go on and on about bad things happening to our ability to earn a living.

Are we doomed to poverty for the next fifty years, until the parasites are swept away and the new Golden Age begins?

Not necessarily. But most of us are going to have to do some thinking, planning, and acting. Few of us have huge incomes–and even people with huge incomes can get in financial trouble more quickly than we would expect.

Many of us are living from hand to mouth. One study showed that 40% of U.S. adults did not have enough savings on hand to cover a possible $400.00 emergency. That is an incredibly bleak statistic. My instinct tell me it may be a slightly exaggerated statistic! But still it may be in the ballpark of being correct, because most of us know lots of people who seem to be living hand to mouth.

It actually becomes pretty easy to become a person who lives paycheck to paycheck, or at least it seems to be easy because so many people do it.

But living hand to mouth is not necessary for us, and in fact it seems to be a rather foolish way to live.

It can be avoided. And it can be avoided by people on a small weekly income.

For absolutely zero charge–you’re off to a good start already!–here are a few ideas about how a person can avoid living hand to mouth, and can have at least $401.00 saved up for an emergency. (Just kidding about the amount; we can all do much better than that.) I’ll number these ideas just because I like numbering things.

1/Drop the entitlement mentality. Most Americans have an entitlement mentality. We think we deserve to have lots of good things, and we need to have them now. We are ticked off that we didn’t have them yesterday. So we think we deserve to have expensive things. So we get expensive things, even though we really can’t afford them on our current income.

2/Drop the notion that you deserve immediate gratification. That goes along with #1, obviously. Immediate gratification is a way of life for many people. It’s deadly to their financial condition.

3/Avoid debt. When you are in debt, you are paying interest. Your freedom of action is limited by your need to keep paying interest on your debt.

4/Don’t buy a new car, or even an expensive used car, on time. Buy two decent used cars, for cash, and keep them both running. That’s less expensive than buying a new car or an expensive used car. How do you get the cash to do that?

5/Save like crazy. Then you can pay $3,000.00 cash for one decent used car. When you have cash, people will work with you in selling you stuff, because they appreciate cash in hand (as they should). So you can bargain for a used car, and you can negotiate a good price for a home–if you have significant cash.

6/Avoid college like the plague. It is a plague, both financial and spiritual. It bankrupts people financially. Colleges want to make you into a mindless snowflake. If you are capable of doing something with the hard sciences, you may need college, but there are few such people.

7/Consider a year or two at a technical school or a business school. But be certain you know what your aptitude is. If you want to be an electrician or a mechanic or a bookkeeper, great, but do you have a native ability in something, or are you just hoping you will find your way somehow or other? Wait until you know what you really can do. God gives us each certain gifts–and He withholds others.

8/Get a job, and work 40 hours a week. It doesn’t have to be a high-paying job. You can save a lot on even a small income. Don’t have long gaps in your working time. For example, don’t quit a job just because you don’t like it, unless you already have another job lined up. Give your current employer plenty of notice, when you switch jobs.

9/Be a good worker. People appreciate reliable people who work diligently. Learn new skills as you work. If you can also maintain a pleasant demeanor as you go about your work, all the better. Everything connected to being a good worker means your pay will go up eventually, whether you stay in the first job or move on to another.

10/Learn to live simply. Take your lunch to work rather than eat out all the time. Cut your heating bill by lowering where you have the heat set. Turn off your electric water heater for most of the time. I save about $11.00 a month by turning off my water heater for approximately 98% to 99% of the time. Peanuts? Not worth worrying about? It’s $132.00 a year. In ten years it’s $1,320.00.

11/Avoid a big cable TV bill. If you have to have TV, buy the cheapest package and learn to live with it. I know people living hand to mouth, who have an enormous cable TV bill each month. Anyway, your life will be better off if you limit the amount of TV you watch. Read more. Take a walk. Clean the garage.

12/Avoid expensive bad habits. If you smoke a pack a day of cigarettes, that’s about $2,000.00 a year. I know married couples living from hand to mouth who both smoke. They could have $4,000.00 cash after one year–not to mention improve their health–just by not smoking.

13/This is counter-intuitive: give away a significant portion of your income. If you are a Christian, tithe (give 10%) to a good Bible-believing church. Then plan on giving away another 1% to 5% of your income. If you are a non-Christian, support charities you think God would support if He existed. For example, don’t give money to Planned Parenthood which helps kill unborn children, but do give money to a crisis pregnancy center helping girls and women bring their babies to birth. God seems to bless those who are generous. He will appreciate even non-Christians whom He sees trying to be generous to causes He also supports.

14/Pay your bills promptly and completely. God appreciates honesty, and rewards it. If God does not exist, somehow even the Godless universe seems to appreciate and reward honesty.

15/Learn something. What good will it do you to have a large income, and even become a millionaire, if you are clueless as to what life is about? Most people live in vast ignorance, but not because they are stupid. They are not stupid. They just don’t want to learn. Read history and economics, and great fiction, and a lot more. The parasites running our world prefer that you remain ignorant. That way they can run your life, and they can continue to be well-paid parasites. They can continue to be a boot stomping on a human face, as O’Brien explained to Winston Smith in 1984 by George Orwell. So just getting rich is not going to be enough for you and for the rest of us, if the parasites can continue to run our world.

16/Consider becoming a Christian. Of course if you are not a sinner and don’t need a Savior, fantastic! However, if you are more like the rest of us and are in fact a sinner, you need to find a Savior. Once you do, Christianity will give you an intellectual foundation from which to think about all of life with common sense as the Bible defines common sense.

We are going to be struggling financially, probably for quite a long time. Eventually a reset may come, honest money (gold and silver) may reappear, taxes may be cut dramatically, parasites may be forced by circumstances to get productive jobs, and our take-home pay may increase. That is probably quite a long time in the future. Meanwhile, we need to hunker down, and be proactive in how we handle our finances. We can avoid living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck. It will take some planning, and some changes of attitude on our part. But such planning will bring vast rewards, both financial and emotional.

It might even be fun.

I don’t want to keep you in suspense!

The answer is: no.

The federal budget for fiscal year 2019 is for 4.407 trillion dollars. That includes a $985 billion deficit. That is taking place under the leadership of President Trump and the Republicans. To a man (well, no doubt a few women are involved as well), the Republicans are budget hawks keeping costs down to a minimum. Not.

And the Democrats would like to spend even more. Now that those generous-spirit people have recaptured the House of Representatives, maybe we can finally get some spending done around here. The national debt is currently about $22 trillion, but very likely we are just getting started.

My experience has been that big numbers are hard for us to process intellectually. Maybe it’s just me, of course. Maybe I should be able to process 4.407 trillion and 985 billion, and just don’t do it as well as I should.

Anyway, I have found that breaking numbers down to smaller units helps me. So here goes.

For the 2015 budget–2015 was not so very long ago–the interest payment on the national debt amounted to 6% of the budget, a figure of $229.2 billion. That’s a number still hard to process. Figuring a population of about 320,000,000 (close enough for government work), that amounts to every person having to pay $716.00 to pay his share of the interest on the debt. Not pay toward lowering the debt–just pay his share of the interest on the debt. A modest-sized family of four would have a bill of $2,864.00. Not chump change, for most of us. That is just to pay the interest on the national debt for 2015.

Jump forward to the 2019 budget, and the interest on the debt which will be due will be $363 billion. That is $1,135.00 per person. A small family of four would be pitching in $4,540.00. So $363 billion turns out to be quite a lot of money, when we break it down to per person cost.

$363 billion is very little compared to big items like the military, Medicare and other health payments, and Social Security. But let’s go the opposite direction. Let’s look at one of the smaller federal costs. The Department of Energy spent a measly $44.8 billion in 2015. That was about 1% of the budget (rounding). How can 1% of anything be worth quibbling over?

Still, $44.8 billion amounts to $140.00 per person–$560.00 for our family of four. What value do we gain from that expense?

The Department of Energy was formed in 1977. Remember those two hundred years we spent as a nation from 1776 to 1976, shivering over the occasional outdoor fire when the children could scavenge enough twigs and leaves to make it worth while to light them up? Remember when we couldn’t drive prior to 1977 because there was no gasoline to put in cars?

You don’t remember that? Oh.

The Department of Energy is more than useless. It is a dead loss. We are paying a fortune to pay people to do nothing. (Or to do worse than nothing, such as force ethanol down the throats of consumers, or subsidize electric cars.) The free market would arrange for us to buy energy, without wasting $44.8 billion. The free market would allow us to buy energy at the market price, and lots of people will compete to make that market price reasonable for all of us.

Our loss is more than just $44.8 billion, however. Currently the Department of Energy has 12,944 employees, with 93,094 other workers on some kind of contract. If those people entered the market place as employees providing something of value, they would add to our national wealth. When we free up these people to get a real job, everyone benefits–us, them, the nation, the world. Admittedly, the ex-Energy Department workers might not feel like they benefited, because many of them would be making less money. But the money they would be making would be earned income, for a real service provided.

What we say about the Department of Energy, we could say about every U.S. federal line item on the budget. Education? In 2015 that cost was more than twice the Department of Energy, clocking in at $102.3 billion. Remember those horrible days when we had no Department of Education, when no one could read and write and add and subtract and divide and multiply? You don’t? You say you don’t think the Department of Education is doing a very good job of seeing that ordinary children do ordinary tasks revolving around education? You have a bad attitude.

Military expense is budgeted for $886 billion in 2019. That’s $2,766.00 per person, $11,064.00 for that spendthrift family of four. The last time I looked, the Atlantic Ocean was on one side of our country, the Pacific Ocean on the other, relatively peaceful Canada was on our north, and Mexico (no military threat, I think we all would agree) on the south. We could defend this country for the money in your coin jar.

But we won’t. We’ll spend lots of money that we have, and lots of money that we don’t have, to butt our noses into the business of other countries, and to fund military toys that we don’t need.

As a nation, we have a sense of entitlement. We think we deserve to live high on the hog. No money? We’ll borrow it. We’ll pay interest on what we borrow. We’ll pay for people to do nothing or worse than nothing.

It is not going to change. The budget will not be tamed. We as a people are deliriously corrupt. I’ve said it so many times I am almost ashamed to say it again, but the central source of the problem is us Christians. We pay the church 1/4 of the tithe God requests. We want free public education, and free Medicare, and Social Security money until the cows come home.

We ain’t gonna change. The only thing that will change us, is if/when we have to change. Right now almost everyone thinks the spending can go on. Enormous debt doesn’t work for individuals, but people still believe it can work for a nation.

A per person share of the $22 trillion national debt is about $68,750.00. ($275,000.00 for our beleaguered family of four.) Most people know they could not really stay afloat if they had to manage a personal debt of $68,750.00. A time of reckoning would come, probably well before they got so far in hock.

A time of reckoning is coming for our nation, as well. Maybe after that we will sober up. Meanwhile, don’t count on anything changing. Someone has said that we go broke slowly, then all at once. When all at once comes, it may be painful. But, “What, me worry?” as Alfred E. Neuman says.

It would help a lot if the church would preach on these issues, and start us thinking, and learning to accept responsibility for our own lives, without expecting the federal government (or the state government) to keep us supplied with all kinds of goodies. Ha, ha–sometimes I crack myself up.

Pamela by Samuel Richardson is one of those books I have heard of most of my life, but never got around to reading. You guessed it: I finally jumped in and got the job done. I finished just a few weeks ago.

Pamela is sometimes called the first modern novel. It was an epistolary novel (the story unfolds almost entirely in letters written by the various characters, for the most part written by Pamela herself).

The full title of the book is Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. The title itself gives away part of the plot. Be warned that this review will give away more.

Richardson (b. July or August, 1689–d. July 4, 1761) was a printer. He also did some writing of his own on the side. On Nov. 10, 1739, he began writing Pamela. He was age 50. He was finished on January 10, 1740. The book is long–503 pages in my edition. So he was writing at a white hot pace. Clearly, the story gripped him. When published, it gripped a lot of people, and rapidly became famous.

Pamela is a 15-year old servant girl, born of a respectable but poor family which had fallen on hard times. Prior to the opening of the book, she had become a servant in the home of a wealthy and godly woman, who had been a loving mentor to Pamela. Pamela’s first letter recounts the death of her beloved mistress. The new master of the household is the son of the woman who just died.

Pamela is astonishingly beautiful. The new master, Mr. B., is not blind. You can see where this is heading. But Mr. B.’s intentions are not strictly honorable. He wants to get Pamela into bed with him, and is willing to stoop to just about any stratagem to accomplish that goal. Will he go so far as rape? We will have to read the book to find out.

Pamela, meanwhile, is fully determined to be neither seduced nor raped. She had wonderful godly parents (to whom her letters go), and also her late mistress had also been a Christian lady of high character. These godly influences on her had not fallen on rocky soil. Pamela is a Christian to the core, and moreover had taken the Christian virtue of sexual purity to heart as something that she could not and would not compromise.

Under constant siege from Mr. B., Pamela soon knows she has to get home to her parents, where she will be safe. This was not as easy as walking out the door and taking a Greyhound Bus home. Once she thinks she is on the way home, but in fact Mr. B. has arranged for her to be kept captive in another of his homes in a different shire. There the unscrupulous Mrs. Jewkes, housekeeper to Mr. B., keeps Pamela under close watch.

Pamela tries to escape, but fails. She contemplates suicide, but by God’s grace does not kill herself.

Mr. B. is not wholly vicious, however. He begins to be attracted to Pamela for more than just her physical beauty. Pamela, in turn, has never hated her master. She is also attracted to him, despite his attempts on her purity.

He asks Pamela to marry him. But is he playing a trick, trying to get her into an imitation marriage, just so that he can get her to bed? This was one potential plot discussed earlier in the book. We are kept in suspense for a while, but finally it dawns upon us, and upon Pamela, that he is quite sincere. Pamela gladly becomes his wife, and the two are married.

Mr. B. clearly understands why he has fallen in love with Pamela. Her beauty overwhelmed him, of course, as it does every man who sees her. But it was her virtue that made him want to marry her. He tells Pamela, “I am the conquest more of your Virtue than your Beauty” (p. 351).

Pamela is indeed a person of rare virtue. Her beauty has not spoiled her. She is humble, and treats everyone with kindness, whether she is a poor servant girl, or raised to the position of wife of a wealthy and powerful man. Her intention is to serve God, in whatever position in life He puts her.

Some people are not going to be able to enjoy this book. It got a 2.8 rating (out of 5) on Goodreads, which is a very poor rating indeed. Some people hated it. At least a few others loved it. The style will probably seem a bit archaic to modern readers. The edition I read (Oxford World’s Classics) had no quote marks, which I found inconvenient.

I am very glad I read it, and not just to mark it off my bucket list of famous books read. I think Samuel Richardson did a wonderful job of showing how biblical Christianity can cause one to live an uncompromised and godly life. This would be an excellent book for a Christian family with older children to read together. With the parents guiding the discussion, a great deal of progress could be made in finding out what biblical Christianity looks like. And the story will hold the interest of many, if not of all.

It is astonishing that Richardson could enter so fully into the heart of a young woman, and could portray her psychology so brilliantly through many small twists of plot. To pour out this book in two months he must have been in some sense demented–in a good way.

The book Pamela was controversial in its day (so it is not surprising that a difference of opinion continues in our day). Henry Fielding, author of the famous book Tom Jones, was one well-known opponent of Pamela. I was surprised and pleased to discover one who sympathized with my liking for the book–none other than the great eighteenth century writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson. Johnson said, “Sir, there is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson’s, than in all of Tom Jones.” . . . “Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.” (The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell, Part V, 1771-75) I can see where impatience could enter in, to someone reading Pamela! But I was never tempted to hang myself, and indeed Richardson’s “knowledge of the heart” is superb.

Samuel Richardson’s books were an influence on Jane Austen.

Richardson had six children by his first wife, who then died, and six children by his second wife. As was commonplace in those days, death came early for many of the children. He knew the fragility of life. Pamela, in her glorious beauty, was also fragile. Death can come at any time, even for the beautiful. Pamela was beautiful on the outside, but she was just as beautiful on the inside. She is a brave and principled heroine.

The book can be obtained for very little money at AbeBooks. I saw a price today, for the excellent Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition, of $3.64 (shipping included). Thomas Keymer co-edited (with Alice Wakely) that edition, and Mr. Keymer also wrote an incredibly informative introduction. The Penguin edition might be good also, but I have not seen it. Some editions are split into two volumes, which obviously would double your cost.

Samuel Richardson wrote two other famous books, Sir Charles Grandison, and Clarissa. The latter is considered his masterpiece. It is one of the longest novels ever written. I won’t predict that I will read it, but I would not be surprised to find myself doing so. Pamela the book and Pamela the person earned my respect and admiration.

Samuel Richardson died at age 71. Pamela has been read and quarreled over since 1740. I hope that continues for a much longer time. May Samuel Richardson rest in peace.