In 1737 we find him venturing in a very different path. “Two booksellers,” writes Richardson, “my particular friends (Rivington and Osborne), entreated me to write for them a little volume of letters, in a common style, on such subjects as might be of use to those country readers who were unable to indite for themselves. ‘Would it be any harm,’ said I, ‘in a piece you want to be written so low, if one should instruct them how they should think and act in common cases, as well as indite?’ They were the more urgent for me to begin the little volume for the hint. I set about it, and in the progress of writing two or three letters to instruct handsome girls who were obliged to go out to service, as we phrase it, how to avoid the snares that might be laid against their virtue, the above story occurred to me, and hence sprang ‘Pamela.’” The first two volumes of the story were written in three months, and never was a book of this kind more generally or more quickly admired. Pope asserted that it would do more good than twenty sermons, mindful, perhaps, of its publisher; Slocock and many other eminent divines recommended it from the pulpit; a critic declared that if all books were burnt, the Bible and ‘Pamela’ ought to be preserved; and even at fashionable Ranelagh, where the former was in but little request, “it was usual for the ladies to hold up the volume (the latter) to one another, to show that they had got the book that every one was talking of.” What, however, was more to Rivington’s purpose, the volume went through five editions in the year of publication, 1741. This success closed Charles Rivington’s business life, for he died on the 25th of February, 1742. By Ellen Pease, his wife, a native of Durham, he had six children, to whom his friend Samuel Richardson, the executor also of his will, acted as guardian.