Pamela (1740) was not the first novel to start a craze – Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) inspired sequels, pamphlets, and even a restaurant – and nor was it the first novel to be denounced; but the quality and intensity of attention it received resonated far beyond that particular book and the characters and fashions described therein. Pamela, and the controversy it sparked, transformed a loose, inchoate form into the modern novel. Pamela shifted attention away from events and questions of truthfulness onto character and questions of believability. Early novels, like Oroonoko and Moll Flanders, made truth claims, stressing that the events they described really happened. Pamela purported to be a true story as well, but because the stakes were so high – social advancement through the power of narrative – Pamela's believability, rather than Pamela's fictiveness, took center stage: responses such as Henry Fielding's Shamela (1741) argued that Pamela was a hypocrite; he asserted that her virtue was fictional, not her existence. Pamela's epistolary format, its insistent location in the present tense, instantly raised questions of character, of self-presentation, and of the ability ever really to gain access to the workings of another person's mind, in life or fiction. Pamela did not just spark a craze: it redefined the way both writers and readers approached the novel. Carolyn Steadman argues that Pamela “is all selfhood, all inside, and [her] depth as a point of reference for female interiority has been immense.” But it was not only women who viewed both Pamela and Pamela as touchstones.