One of Mr. B’s plots against Pamela is to have sham marriage. One of her former fellow-servants sneaks Pamela a note to the effect that Mr. B is going to propose, and they are going to have a wedding ceremony, but that Mr. B has already engaged a disreputable lawyer to pose as the minister. This way he can get his hands on Pamela’s sweet virtue without the commitment.
Pamela is of course horrified by the danger of a sham marriage, because once she’s been warned about it and the idea is in her mind, there’s no real way to trust Mr. B when he does propose. In the end she can be safe and sure because he goes to the trouble of procuring a marriage license and the clergyman who performs the ceremony is known to her, but the really scary thing about the sham marriage is that there’s almost no discernible difference between the sham and the real thing.
This is even more true when you consider Mr. B’s actual plan:
‘I had intended that he should have read some part of the ceremony (as little as was possible, to deceive you) in my chamber; and so I hoped to have you mine upon terms that then would have been much more agreeable to me than matrimony. Nor did I intend that you should soon be undeceived: so that we might have lived for years, perhaps, very agreeably together; while it would have been in my power to confirm or abrogate the marriage, as I pleased.’
He lists several compelling reasons why he ultimately settled against this, chief among them the potential illegitimacy of his children with Pamela and the fact that he had once spoken out against another man who carried out a similar deceit, and didn’t want to be unoriginal. As a bonus, he uses the speech as a way to blame Pamela yet again, this time for not simply writing him to clear up the matter rather than assuming he might have evil designs.
The sham marriage, though, illuminates the absurdity with which marriage is treated by both Mr. B and Pamela. Mr. B wants to avoid getting married at all costs for the first half of the book, but he’s perfectly willing to live for years with Pamela, have children with her, and settle on her a generous income. Some of this can be ascribed to the class issues between him and Pamela, but Mr. B feels this aversion to matrimony in general, and just doesn’t want to tie himself down to anyone. Because he realizes he was spoiled as a child and just can’t put aside his selfishness to get along with anyone else.
Meanwhile, Pamela ascribes magical properties to a ritual that can’t even be reliably identified from a false version of itself. Unmarried sex=super evil, married sex=all good, and yet the whole time she can’t actually tell the difference between married and unmarried sex. And it’s not just because unmarried sex would leave her vulnerable to a loss of support. She fully believes that she would lose her virtue, be ruined, etc., if she found out years after the fact that her and Mr. B hadn’t been “really” married.
Of course, my more cynical side takes this another depressing step. That is to say, married sex and unmarried sex really are alike for Pamela; they are both rape. It’s just that marital rape is okay. She does want to avoid getting married at all, at first. She doesn’t want to marry Mr. Williams and she writes to her parents that she wants to continue in her maiden state, being so young. She seems to get particularly nervous about that maiden state as her diary entries become more and more frequent and frantic as her wedding night approaches. We never hear the least thing about it though—disappointing, frankly, after so many naughty scenes early on. But probably relevant.
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