Pamela in Her Exalted Condition, the third and fourth volumes of Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, ‘By the Editor of the TWO FIRST ‘ (title page), was published on 7 December 1741. Thirteen months earlier, when the first two volumes had appeared, Richardson had managed to conceal his authorship, at least initially, from all but a handful of friends and associates. The spectacular and controversial success of the original, however, had ensured that, by the time he published the sequel, he no longer had ‘the umbrage of the editor's character to screen myself behind’. Indeed, it was the umbrage (in a different sense) he took at the theft of his literary property, and the ensuing public quarrel with ‘the High-Life Men’ over who had the right to continue Pamela's story, that irretrievably ended any hopes he might have had of keeping up at least the appearance of anonymity. Thus, while retaining ‘the editor's character’, he uses the word ‘editor’ on the title page, in the clause quoted in our opening sentence, not so much to apprise readers of his narrative strategy as to declare his ownership of Pamela's story, with the italicized and capitalized ‘TWO FIRST ‘ emphasizing both the original (and originating) position of this particular ‘editor’ and the belatedness of all others. Richardson completes his re-appropriation by inserting the phrase ‘Printed for S. Richardson’ in the colophon, a phrase that, also serving as an acknowledgement of authorship, would later appear on the title pages of the octavo edition of Pamela (1742), the first edition comprising all four volumes of the novel, as well as of all lifetime editions of Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison.

If Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded had ‘sprung’ from him, as Richardson would later explain to Johannes Stinstra, the Dutch translator of Clarissa, in a seemingly spontaneous overflow of recollection and composition, Pamela in Her Exalted Condition owed its origins to the rough-and-tumble London publishing world of which Richardson, by the early 1740s, had become a respectable and prosperous citizen. As Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor have observed, ‘Pamela inspired … a Grubstreet grabfest in which a hungry succession of entrepreneurial opportunists and freeloading hacks … moved in for a slice of the action.’