Virtue is not so much rewarded as kidnapped...

Pamela - a teenage girl is sexually molested, but displays the strength to fight off her attacker and shame him with her speech. Unused to rejection as the finest and most powerful man around, he stoops to such great lengths as kidnapping her and holding her ransom to his own demands of while simultaneously employing people to either look the other way, or to AGREE that she is the sort that you just don't let go. And of course, if she would just submit to his wishes, everything would be fine.
And it makes for such great fiction (I do hope it is fiction...) that I am not surprised at all of the anecdotal blacksmith in the introduction reading the copy on long summer nights to the gathered villagers. Yet, what I find most compelling is that Pamela's main argument seems to be closer to an economic one than one of love, or age, or even proper behavior as Richardson seems to have written so many conduct manuals. Before she is kidnapped to Lincolnshire, the character ominously referred to as Mr. B offers her a literal sack load of money, and a yearly sackful to her father as well as gainful employment. While Mr. B never fully names the price of this, which I assumed at this point would make Pamela a mistress or even a wife, her argument against acceptance is as much for her father as it is for her. She seems to be stating that her father rejecting the money is as much a matter of virtue as it is for rejecting becoming a mistress. She asks, "How many ways are there to undo poor creatures?" on page 84, but she does not seem to be referring only the assumed loss of innocence from sexual behavior.
There is definitely a connection between the hard work and poverty of her parents, and her idea of a virtuous life as evidenced by her repeated embrace of their poverty (My poor parents, with their poor house...) and by their willingness to borrow money in order to pay back a gift to a man that continually attempts harm to their daughter. I wonder if there is not a connection here as well to the life of Robinson Crusoe and his finding God, and therefore the supposed virtuous life that accompanies it, only when he has no room for considerations other than his very survival. It seems that the idea stretching between them is that money and power bring with them wicked diversions, and abuses of power through money. While the opposite is the idea of virtue and innocence through poverty and labor.  It seems that what Mr. B could not take by force, he was more than willing to buy what was not for sale, but is unable to understand why poor people might reject wanting to be made rich. So I wonder, is Mr B. not a similar case to D'elmont, in that he seems to want only those things that reject him? If Pamela, like Melliora, had been less conscious of their virtue, would the interests of their respected crazy men have persisted?