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reforms, falls in love with her and makes her his wife and mistress of his estates.
Pamela
was a huge popular success. Industries sprang up to produce the print, the stage show, the ballad and the teasetof the novel. And, as that level of popularity testifies, the figure of Pamela herself became a kind of cultural myth: the virtuous woman who reforms the rake came to embody the impact of middle-class values on a corrupt ruling class and the possibility of wider social access to wealth and power.
    In spite of the sixty or so years and obvious differences between them,
Pamela
and
Pride and Prejudice
are recognizably part of the same woman-centred, middle-class fictional tradition. Unlike Mr B., Darcy is not a rake: the housekeeper at Pemberley very explicitly describes him as ‘Not like the wild young men now-a-days, who think of nothing but themselves’ (III, i). But though Elizabeth may not be in danger of direct physical assault, Darcy’s insulting dismissal of her family and his interference in Jane’s happiness are only more subtle modes of violation. Echoing Pamela, who cannot ‘look upon [Mr B.] as a gentleman’, and doesn’t think she could take him as a husband because of his sexual ‘rudeness’, 21 Elizabeth refuses Darcy’s first proposal with a cutting critique of his manners – indeed, of his very identity: ‘“You are mistaken, Mr Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner”’ (II, xi). As we learn later, these are the words that subsequently ‘torture’ Darcy (III, xvi) and produce the new man who greets Elizabeth and the Gardiners at Pemberley. Like Richardson’s Mr B. who, like all ‘people of fortune’, had been ‘unaccustomed to controul’, 22 Darcy confesses to having been ‘spoilt’ by parents who ‘almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing’ (III, xvi). As in
Pamela
, desire opens up that faulty class education to the possibility of correction; the shock of resistance and criticism from the lower-class woman excites upper-class masculinity into change: ‘“You [Elizabeth] taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled”’ (III, xvi). Elizabeth’s lesson in
Pride and Prejudice
is to learn that she loves the man whose social pride prejudiced her against him; Darcy’s is to adjust that ‘mistaken pride’ (III, x) and welcome into his intimate ‘family party’ Elizabeth’s ‘low connections’, the relations fromCheapside who he once thought must ‘very materially lessen [her] chance of marrying [a man] of any consideration in the world’ (I, viii).
    Elizabeth and Darcy’s ‘family party’ at Pemberley represents the nation: as in Burke’s focus on the ‘little platoon’, the intimate, domestic group is both the image and the source of national order and responsibility. In the final chapter of
Pride and Prejudice
, the membership of the Pemberley family is carefully defined. It includes Jane and Bingley, of course, and Georgiana Darcy; Mr Bennet is a regular visitor, and Caroline Bingley, Lady Catherine de Bourgh (eventually), and even Lydia, are occasionally entertained; only Mrs Bennet, Mary and Wickham remain remote. But ‘with the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms’, since it was they who, ‘by bringing [Elizabeth] into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them’ (III, xix). At its most intimate level, then, this ideal community effects an alliance between the traditional ruling élite and a new order: between Darcy, a member of the landowning aristocracy, and the Gardiners, important figures in
Pride and Prejudice
, and representative of that growing commercial and professional class whose ‘excursive flights of ambition’ Wollstonecraft so admired. The alliance is mediated and secured by Elizabeth. In terms of