Samuel Richardson's Pamela is the first English novel

Characters
Pamela, who is a “round Character”, is practical, passionate, humble with all, but she is intolerant of injustice both to herself and to her fellow-servants. Mr. B., the son of her mistress, is another “round” character and reflects contemporary male superiority: he tries to seduce Pamela several times, but her resistance arouses his passion and gradually changes his behaviour which becomes more mature and responsible.
The story of Pamela is a modern variant of the old “Cinderella theme”. Both stories offer compensations for the monotonous work and limited perspective of ordinary life. By projecting themselves into the position of the heroine, the readers of Pamela could pattern where each element gave excitement, admiration and love. These are the attractions of romance but here the fairy god-mother and the prince are replaced by morality, and the social importance marriage had in Richardson’s age, since it was the only way open to women to improve their social status.
Mr. B (a.k.a. "The Master" or "The Squire")
Mr. B is a wealthy gentleman and the son of Pamela's late mistress.
Mrs. Jewkes
Mrs. Jewkes is the housekeeper in Lincolnshire, which is one of Mr. B's estates.
Lady Barbara Davers
Lady Davers is Mr. B's sister. Overall, her friends and family think she's a good egg
Mrs. Jervis
Mrs. Jervis is the housekeeper at the Bedfordshire estate who, according to Pamela
Mr. Williams
Mr. Williams is Mr. B's chaplain in Lincolnshire, which means he's working as a religious leader...
Monsieur (Mister) Colbrand
When we first meet Colbrand, he's assisting Mr. B in keeping Pamela prisoner.
John the Footman
A servant at the Bedfordshire estate, he is initially responsible for delivering Pamela's letters.
Lady B
Lady B is Pamela's previous mistress; Pamela was Lady B's waiting-maid until her death

2.2 Literary significance and criticism
Considered by many literary experts as the first English novel, Pamela was the best-seller of its time. It was read by countless buyers of the novel and was also read in groups. An anecdote which has been repeated in varying forms since 1777 described the novel's reception in an English village: "The blacksmith of the village had got hold of Richardson's novel of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, and used to read it aloud in the long summer evenings, seated on his anvil, and never failed to have a large and attentive audience.... At length, when the happy turn of fortune arrived, which brings the hero and heroine together, and sets them living long and happily... the congregation were so delighted as to raise a great shout, and procuring the church keys, actually set the parish bells ringing."
The novel was also integrated into sermons as an exemplar. It was even an early "multimedia" event, producing Pamela-themed cultural artefacts such as prints, paintings, waxworks, a fan, and a set of playing cards decorated with lines from Richardson's works. In 1742, "Pamela" became the first novel printed in America when Benjamin Franklin published it in Philadelphia. However, the novel did not sell well in America.
Given the lax copyright laws at the time, many unofficial sequels were written and published without Richardson's consent, for example, Pamela's conduct in high life, published 1741 and sometimes attributed to John Kelly (1680?–1751). There were also several satires, the most famous being An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews by Henry Fielding, published under the pseudonym "Mr. Conny Keyber". Shamela portrays the protagonist as an amoral social climber who attempts to seduce "Squire Booby" while feigning innocence to manipulate him into marrying her. In this version, the author works to invalidate Pamela by pointing out the incongruities between characters and the overall plot of the story. This version suggests that she was not really as virtuous as she may have seemed to be. Another important satire was The Anti-Pamela; or Feign’d Innocence Detected (1741) by Eliza Haywood. Although not technically a satire, the Marquis de Sade's Justine is generally perceived as a critical response to Pamela, due in part to its subtitle, "The Misfortunes of Virtue".
At least one modern critic has stated that the rash of satires can be viewed as a conservative reaction to a novel that called class, social and gender roles into question by asserting that domestic order can be determined not only by socio-economic status but also by moral qualities of mind.
Richardson's revisions
The popularity of Richardson's novel led to much public debate over its message and style. Richardson was of the artisanal class, and among England's middle and upper classes, where the novel was popular, there was some displeasure over its at times plebeian style. Apparently certain ladies of distinction took exception to the ways in which their fictional counterparts were represented. Richardson responded to some of these criticisms by revising the novel for each new edition; he also created a "reading group" of such women to advise him. Some of the most significant changes he made were alterations to Pamela's vocabulary: in the first edition her diction is that of a labouring-class woman, but in later editions Richardson made her more linguistically middle-class by removing the working-class idioms from her speech. In this way, he made her marriage to Mr. B less scandalous as she appeared to be more his equal in education. The greatest change was to have her his equal too in birth—by revising the story to reveal her parents as reduced gentlefolks. In the end Richardson revised and released fourteen editions of Pamela, the last of which was published in 1801 after his death. In consideration of authorial intent, some believe that Pamela was a latent fetishization of Richardson's own fantasies and beliefs regarding women in society. Even though Richardson did openly revise Pamela multiple times, the justification of male aggression in a "loving" domestic relationship, as evidenced between Pamela and Mr. B, remains controversial to this day.
Original sources
A publication, Memoirs of Lady H, the Celebrated Pamela (1741), claims that the inspiration for Richardson's Pamela was the marriage of a coachman's daughter, Hannah Sturges, to the baronet, Sir Arthur Hesilrige, in 1725. Samuel Richardson claimed that the story was based on a true incident related to him by a friend about 25 years before, but did not identify the principals.
Prof Hubert McDermott has posited Vertue Rewarded, a 1693 Irish novel by an unknown author, as a possible influence – the two books have similar plots: "a beautiful and virtuous young woman of little or no social status falls in love with a prince or libertine who is equally besotted but whose wealth, rank and ambition make him desire only to seduce and debauch the chaste heroine, without having to marry her." Also, the title "virtue rewarded" is not found in any other work of the period.

Shirin and Pamela

Pamela has significant similarities to the famous Persian tragic romance of Khosrow and Shirin by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. In both tales a rich, famous, and hedonistic man is trying to seduce the main female character of the story. Even though the female character is truly in love with the male counterpart, she resists his seductions and requests marriage. At the end the male character gives in to marrying the woman he loves and this love causes a gradual and positive change in the male character. The moral of both stories is the triumph of patience, virtue and modesty over despotism and hedonism.
Feminism in Pamela
Some believe that Richardson was one of the first male writers to take a feminist view while writing a novel. Pamela has been described as being a feminist piece of literature because it rejects traditional views of women and supports the new and changing role of women in society. One of the ways in which feminism is shown in the text is through allowing readers to see the depths of women (i.e. their emotions, feelings, thoughts) rather than seeing women at surface level. However, the poor treatment of Pamela herself, and her intense consideration to her virtue- a societal construct founded in moral religion- might also suggest the opposite. Richardson himself was not a feminist, and Pamela consisted of the traditional lily-white heroine trope embellished with a sense of naivety (with Pamela being only fifteen years old.) With respect to authorial intent, Pamela was only driven by here intense fear of having her virtue compromised, and her motivation to keep her virtue intact provided a very narrow scope of womanhood and the sex as a whole. The controversy over the novel is present and ongoing.
The epistolary form in which Pamela is written enables readers of the novel to see inside Pamela's mind and, in doing so, readers are able to better understand her identity and the ways her identity as a woman of lower socioeconomic status intersect and are bound up in that identity. Kacy Tillman compares the written "letter" to the body of the scribe (or "paper body" of which writers and readers of letters struggle to control. Tillman's writes, "...in early American novels, the letter served as a kind of paper body, a contested space where women writers and their readers vied for control over the female body, symbolizing the broader cultural struggle in which women were enmeshed during and shortly after the Revolution" (124), and in Tillman's article she posits that a relationship exists between “epistolarity and gender construction in early American novels: that women were expected to follow an epistolary code of ethics, which men could violate or manipulate as they saw fit: the control of a paper body was connected to the control of a physical one; and that women who failed (even despite trying to abide by the rules of epistolarity) risked ruin" (125). Within the first few chapters of Pamela, Virtue Rewarded, Pamela is concerned because one of her letters has been lost. Also, in an instance when Mr. B notices Pamela writing a letter, he asks to read it and, because he's her master, she allows him to do so. Of course, Mr. B doesn't find anything written in the letter that he doesn't like, but Mr. B's encroachment on Pamela's privacy mirrors his encroachment on the privacy of her body as he attempts to seduce her over and over again. Tillman argues that, in early modern times when letter-writing was an important and popular method of communication, “male letter readers could intercept and interpret those representations in a way that could void female agency" (125) and, because “letters an extension of the self" (Tillman 126), Pamela's privacy is at risk in myriad ways. At the end of Tillman's article, she addresses the relationship between the experience of letter-writing and the experience of sharing the letters once written are bound up in the writers’ identities and social expectations: "Just as women must dress according to their station, so letters should adopt a tone and style that fits their situation. Just as women must protect their bodies from seduction, so missives must carefully regulate what they say to a suitor" (127). The letter is performative in that it forms “a paper body that had to be carefully crafted and regulated since every part of it--from the handwriting, to the paper, to the content--could be subject examination and judgment" (Tillman 126). In this way, the letter works to enact and sustain writers’ identities and the relationships cultivated between writers and readers of the letters.
Pamela is strewn with contemporary themes that handle gender roles, male aggression, false imprisonment, classism, and the hierarchy of power evident through her forced stay at Mr. B’s estate and seen through her kidnapping. Pamela had little to no choice in the arrangement and was a victim of Mr. B’s sexual advances. Mr. B saw Pamela as an object of affection, and a pawn to his game.