“O, Soften him! or harden me!”: Childbirth, Torture, and Technology in Richardson’s Pamela

July 15, 1998

"But don't you wonder to find me scribble so much about family and birth?" –Pamela Andrews, in a letter to her parents Scribbling about childbirth [1] In The London Hanged, a painstaking catalogue of eighteenth-century juridical practice, Peter Linebaugh briefly laments the absence of equivalent work on childbearing of the...