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Samuel Richardson

 
Biography: Samuel Richardson
 

The English novelist Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) brought dramatic intensity and psychological insight to the epistolary novel.>

Fiction, including the novel told in letters, had become popular in England before Samuel Richardson's time, but he was the first English novelist to have the leisure to perfect the form in which he chose to work. Daniel Defoe's travel adventures and pseudobiographies contain gripping individual episodes and an astonishing realism, but they lack, finally, the structural unity and cohesiveness characteristic of Richardson's ngthy novels. Unlike his great contemporary Henry Fielding, who satirized every echelon of English society in such panoramic novels as Tom Jones, Richardson chose to focus his attention on the limited problems of marriage and of the heart, matters to be treated with seriousness. In so doing, however, he also provided his readers with an unparalleled study of the social and economic forces that were bringing the rising, wealthy English merchant class into conflict with the landed aristocracy.

Born in Derbyshire, Richardson was one of nine children of a joiner, or carpenter. He became an apprentice printer to John Wilde and learned his trade well from that hard master for 7 years. After serving as "Overseer and Corrector" in a printing house, he set up shop for himself in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, in 1720, where he married, lived for many years, and carried on his business. Within 20 years he had built up one of the largest and most lucrative printing businesses in London. Although he published a wide variety of books, including his own novels, he depended upon the official printing that he did for the House of Commons for an important source of income.

Richardson claimed to have written indexes, prefaces, and dedications early in his career, but his first known work, published in 1733, was The Apprentice's Vade Mecum; or, Young Man's Pocket Companion, a conduct book addressed to apprentices. A Seasonable Examination … (1735) was a pamphlet supporting a parliamentary bill to regulate the London theaters.

Pamela

In 1739, while at work on a book of model letters for social occasions proposed to him as a publishing venture by two booksellers, Richardson decided to put together a series of letters that would narrate the tribulations of a young servant girl in a country house. His first epistolary novel, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, was published in two volumes in November 1740 and became an instantaneous and enormous success. When its popularity led to the publication of a spurious sequel, Richardson countered by publishing a less interesting and, indeed, less popular continuation of his work in December 1741.

Richardson claimed in a letter to the Reverend Johannes Stinstra in 1753 that the idea for the story of Pamela had been suggested to him 15 years before, a claim he repeated to Aaron Hill. Regardless of the source for the story, however, Richardson's audience accepted and praised his simple tale of a pretty 15-year-old servant girl, the victim of the extraordinarily clumsy attempts at seduction by her young master, Squire B - (later named Squire Booby in the novels of Henry Fielding), who sincerely, shrewdly, and successfully holds out for marriage.

Richardson's use of the epistolary form, which made it possible for him to have Pamela writing at the moment, enabled him to give a minutely particular account of his heroine's thoughts, actions, fears, and emotions. Pamela's letters give the reader a continuous and cumulative impression of living through the experience and create a new kind of sympathy with the character whose experiences are being shared. But Richardson's decision to have the entire story told through Pamela's letters to her parents also raised technical problems that he was not to overcome until his second novel. Because she alone must report compliments about her charms, testify to her virtue, and relate her successful attempts to repulse Squire B - 's advances, she often seems coy and self-centered rather than innocent.

Richardson's continuation of Pamela, which describes her attempts to succeed in "high life" after her marriage to Squire B - , is a less interesting story, more pretentiously told and far less moving.

He followed his triumph with Pamela in 1741 by publishing the delayed Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, Directing the Requisite Style and Forms … in Writing Familiar Letters, a collection of little interest to the modern reader.

Clarissa

By the summer of 1742 Richardson had evidently begun work on what was to become his masterpiece. Clarissa Harlowe was published in seven volumes in 1747-1748. Although he had finished the first version of the novel by 1744, he continued to revise it, to solicit the opinions of his friends (and disregard most of their advice), and to worry about its excessive length. The massive work, which runs to more than a million words and stands as one of the longest novels in the English language, contains 547 letters, most written by the heroine, Clarissa Harlowe, her friend, Anna Howe, the dashing villain, Lovelace, and his confidant, John Belford. Letters of enormous length and incredible intensity follow Clarissa's struggle with her family to avoid marriage to the odious Mr. Soames, her desperate flight from her unbending and despicable family into the arms of Lovelace, her drugged rape, her attempts to escape from Lovelace by soliciting the aid of her unforgiving family, and her dramatic death. Before the final volumes of the novel were published, many of Richardson's readers had pleaded with him to give the novel a happy ending by allowing Clarissa to live. Richardson, however, had set out to show that in losing her innocence a girl might be ennobled rather than degraded, but that no matter how much of a paragon of virtue and decorum she might be in this world, she would find true reward for her virtue only in the next. The novel shows clearly the influence of the Christian epic, the English stage, and the funereal literature popular in the period. With specific debts to Nicholas Rowe's Fair Penitent and John Milton's Paradise Lost, it explores the problem of humanity desperately, if futilely, seeking freedom in a society where duty and responsibility are constant limitations upon that search. Although its great length has earned for it the title of "one of the greatest of the unread novels," it maintains a commanding place in the corpus of major English fiction because of its exploration of property marriages in the shifting social milieu of mid-18th-century England, its dramatic and cumulative power, and its clear tie to such other great Western mythical stories as Romeo and Juliet and Tristan and Isolde.

Sir Charles Grandison

Richardson toiled for 5 years to depict the perfect Christian gentleman, especially in order to answer criticisms that he had allowed Lovelace to become too attractive a figure in Clarissa. His third and final novel, Sir Charles Grandison, was published in 1753-1754. Richardson's contemporaries, who had found Lovelace a fascinating and dramatic villain, thought Sir Charles chilly and priggish. Richardson's story of the earnest Christian gentleman who must choose between the English maiden, Harriet Byron, and the more attractive and more interesting Clementina della Porretta pleases few readers. Because Sir Charles is too faultless and too moral, he does not win the reader's sympathies.

After this Richardson wrote no more novels. He died in London on July 4, 1761.

Further Reading

The major biography is T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson (1971). Important studies of Richardson include Alan D. McKillop, Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (1936); William M. Sale, Samuel Richardson, Master Printer (1950); Morris Golden, Richardson's Characters (1963); and Ira Konigsberg, Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel (1968). Also useful are the chapters on Richardson in Alan D. McKillop, The Early Masters of English Fiction (1956); Ian P. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957); and Robert A. Donovan, The Shaping Vision: Imagination in the English Novel from Defoe to Dickens (1966). Recommended for general historical and social background are Louis Kronenberger, Kings and Desperate Men: Life in Eighteenth-Century England (1942); J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (1951); and A. R. Humphreys, The Augustan World: Life and Letters in Eighteenth-Century England (1954).

Additional Sources

Thomson, Clara Linklater, Samuel Richardson: a biographical and critical study, Philadelphia: R. West, 1977.

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German Literature Companion: Samuel Richardson
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Richardson, Samuel (Derbyshire, 1689-1761, London), the author of the novels Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (2 vols., 1740-1), Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady (7 vols., 1747-8), and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-4), which by their combination of sentiment and morality influenced German literature in the middle of the 18th c.

Gellert in his novel Das Leben der schwedischen Gräfin von G … and Lessing in his play Miß Sara Sampson are clearly indebted to Richardson. Pamela, as a novel presented in letters (see Briefroman), influenced German writers both directly and indirectly, through La Nouvelle Héloïse of J.-J. Rousseau. Pamela was translated into German in 1742, Clarissa 1748-51, and Grandison 1754-9. A parody of the last by J. K. A. Musäus (Grandison der Zweite) appeared in 1760-2.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Samuel Richardson
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Richardson, Samuel, 1689–1761, English novelist, b. Derbyshire. When he was 50 and established as a prosperous printer, Richardson was asked to compose a guide to letter writing. The idea of introducing a central theme occurred to him, and he interrupted his task to write and publish his novel of morals in letter form, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (2 vol., 1740). The novel tells the story of a virtuous young maidservant who so successfully eludes the lecherous assaults of her employer's son that the young man finally marries her. The guide, known now as Familiar Letters, came out in 1741, just before Vol. III and IV of Pamela. Richardson wrote two more long, epistolary novels, Clarissa Harlowe (7 vol., 1747–48), the tragic story of a girl who runs off with her seducer, regarded today as his best work, and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (7 vol., 1753–54). All Richardson's novels were enormously popular in their day. Although he was a verbose and sentimental storyteller, his emphasis on detail, his psychological insights into women, and his dramatic technique have earned him a prominent place among English novelists.

Bibliography

See his correspondence, ed. by A. L. Barbauld (6 vol., 1804; repr. 1966); biographies by T. C. D. Eaves and B. D. Kimpel (1971) and J. Harris (1987); studies by J. W. Krutch (1930, repr. 1959), J. J. Carroll (1969), M. Kinkead-Weekes (1973), C. G. Wolff (1973), and W. B. Warner (1979), C. H. Flynn (1982), and M. Doody and P. Sabor, ed. (1989).

 
History 1450-1789: Samuel Richardson
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Richardson, Samuel (1689–1761), English novelist. Samuel Richardson was born at Mackworth in Derbyshire. His father was a joiner, and his family were farmers. Richardson's poverty precluded a classical education, and he went to a common school. Apprenticed for seven years to a printer, John Wilde, Richardson became a Freeman of the Stationers' Company and of the City of London in 1715. He married his employer's daughter, Martha, in 1721, and they had six children, all of whom died in childhood.

Hardworking and diligent, Richardson established himself as a prosperous stationer and printer in 1721 near St. Bride's Church off Fleet Street, London. Renowned for his charity and generosity, he printed the novels Moll Flanders and Roxana by Daniel Defoe, the duke of Wharton's periodical the True Briton, and works by the philosopher Francis Hutcheson. Characterized as an extreme Tory printer, he was impeached by the secretary of state in 1722. Two years after his wife's death in 1733, Richardson married Elizabeth Leake; they had four daughters, Mary, Martha, Anne, and Sarah. He moved his business to Salisbury Square, which became his home until his death, and did not travel far outside of London.

Richardson's first work was The Apprentice's Vade Mecum; or, Young Man's Pocket Companion (1733), a book of letters of advice on model behavior for apprentices. Addressed to his own nephew and apprentice, Thomas Richardson, the book expounds on the importance of the moral duties between employer and employee, especially obedience and mutual respect. In 1735 he printed the progovernment Daily Gazetter. Richardson's revisions and prefaces to Defoe's The Complete English Tradesman and Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain display his interest in the cultural aspects of Britishness. Richardson was asked by the Society for the Encouragement of Learning to write a book of model letters on how to act morally in different situations.

Richardson's first novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740–1741) developed from a further morally improving project called Letters Written to and for Particular Friends on the Most Important Occasions (known as Familiar Letters and published in 1741). One of the letters, "A Father to a Daughter in Service, on Hearing of Her Master's Attempting Her Virtue," inspired Richardson to explore "practical examples, worthy to be followed in the most critical and affecting cases" (Pamela, Preface). Pamela writes to her parents about her master, Mr. B., who locks her up and tries to rape her. She evades this fate by marrying him. A critical success and praised for its heroine's steadfast virtue, Pamela was reprinted four times in 1741 and inspired imitations, a play by Henry Gifford, and Pamela merchandise including wax dolls. Novelist Henry Fielding, however, denounced Pamela as an opportunistic example of virtue and parodied the novel with Shamela (1741). Responding to this criticism, Richardson published Pamela in Her Exalted Condition (1741), but the sequel was less successful. That year also saw Richardson elected to the Court of Assistants of Stationers' Company.

Written "in a double yet separate correspondence," (Clarissa, Preface) Richardson's epic novel Clarissa (published in installments between 1747 and 1748) allows him as self-styled editor to effectively depict the subtleties of the voices of the four principal characters, reflecting their unfolding emotional states. Begun in 1744, the novel explores the interior life of the bourgeois paragon Clarissa Harlowe, who is disowned by her family after not marrying the man of their choosing. Duped by the aristocratic rake Robert Lovelace, whom she loves, she believes she can "rescue" him to virtue, but he deceives her, imprisoning her in a brothel and raping her. Her hopelessness causes her death, and Lovelace dies in a duel with her cousin. Instantly successful, the novel was translated into French by writer and priest Abbé Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles; with Pamela, Richardson founded the sentimental novel.

Richardson encouraged women's writing among his fellow novelists and friends, Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, and Charlotte Lennox, and engaged in extensive literary and moral debate with women. Shocked by female readers' attraction to the character of Lovelace, he revised the novel in the 1750s and extracted "instructive" passages from it for publication.

The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1754), his last novel, creates a virtuous male equivalent of Clarissa, who is desired by two very different women. The novel's light satire of "vicious" individuals influenced novelist Jane Austen. Richardson died in July 1761 and is buried in St. Bride's Church in London.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady. Edited by Angus Ross. Harmondsworth, U.K.; New York, 1985.

——. Pamela. Edited by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely. Oxford and New York, 2001.

Secondary Sources

Blewett, David. Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Toronto and Buffalo, 2001. Fourteen essays on two of the most central concerns of Richardson's fiction by leading Richardsonian scholars.

Eaves Duncan, T. C., and Ben D. Kimpel. Samuel Richardson: A Biography. Oxford, 1971. The most comprehensive and standard biography.

Gwilliam, Tassie. Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender. Stanford, 1993. A stimulating investigation of how Richardson's fiction exposes the instability of eighteenth-century gender models.

Keymer, Tom. The Life of Samuel Richardson. Oxford, 2002. A biography contextualizing Richardson's life and works within literary and political developments and examining the relationship between literary form and unresolved ideological conflicts in Richardson's beliefs.

—MAX FINCHER

 
Quotes By: Samuel Richardson
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Quotes:

"Calamity is the test of integrity."

 
Wikipedia: Samuel Richardson
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Samuel Richardson

1750 portrait by Joseph Highmore
Born 19 August 1689(1689-08-19)
Mackworth, Derbyshire, England
Died 4 July 1761 (aged 71)
Parson's Green, London, England
Occupation Writer, printer & publisher
Spouse(s) Martha Wilde, Elizabeth Leake

Samuel Richardson (19 August 1689 – 4 July 1761) was an 18th-century English writer and printer. He is best known for his three epistolary novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Outside of his writing career, Richardson was an established printer and publisher for most of his life and printed almost 500 different works and various journals and magazines.

During his printing career, Richardson was to experience the death of his first wife along with their five sons, and eventually remarry. Although with his second wife he had four daughters who lived to become adults, they never had a male heir to continue running the printing business. Although his print shop slowly faded away, his legacy was certain when, at the age of 51, he wrote his first novel and immediately became one of the most popular and admired writers of his time.

He was surrounded by some of the leading figures in 18th century England, including Samuel Johnson and Sarah Fielding. Although he was known by most members of the London literary community, he was rivals with Henry Fielding, and the two started responding to each other's literary styles in their own novels.

Contents

Biography

Richardson, one of nine siblings, was born in 1689 in Mackworth, Derbyshire, to Samuel and Elizabeth Richardson.[1] It is unsure where in Derbyshire he was born because Richardson always concealed the location.[1] The older Richardson was, according to the younger:

"a very honest man, descended of a family of middling note, in the country of Surrey, but which having for several generations a large number of children, the not large possessions were split and divided, so that he and his brothers were put to trades; and the sisters were married to tradesmen."[2]

His mother, according to Richardson, "was also a good woman, of a family not ungenteel; but whose father and mother died in her infancy, within half-an-hour of each other, in the London pestilence of 1665".[3]

The trade his father pursued was that of a joiner (a type of carpenter, but Richardson explains that it was "then more distinct from that of a carpenter than now it is with us").[1] In describing his father's occupation, Richardson stated that "he was a good draughtsman and understood architecture", and it was suggested by Samuel Richardson's son-in-law that the senior Richardson was a cabinetmaker and an exporter of mahogany while working at Aldersgate-street.[1] The abilities and position of his father brought him to the attention of James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth.[3] However this, as Richardson claims, was to Richardson senior's "great detriment" because the loss of the Monmouth Rebellion, which ended in the death of the Scott in 1685. After Scott's death, the elder Richardson was forced to abandon his business in London and live a modest life in Derbyshire.[3]

Early life

The Richardsons were not constantly exiled from London, but they eventually returned for the young Richardson was educated at Christ's Hospital grammar school.[4] The extent that he was educated at the school is uncertain, and Leigh Hunt wrote years later:

"It is a fact not generally known that Richardson... received what education he had (which was very little, and did not go beyond English) at Christ's Hospital. It may be wondered how he could come no better taught from a school which had sent forth so many good scholars; but in his time, and indeed till very lately, that foundation was divided into several schools, none of which partook of the lessons of the others; and Richardson, agreeably to his father's intention of bringing him up to trade, was most probably confined to the writing school, where all that was taught was writing and arithmetic."[5]

However, this conflicts with Richardson's nephew's account that "'it is certain that [Richardson] was never sent to a more respectable seminary' than 'a private grammar school" located in Derbyshire".[6]

I recollect that I was early noted for having invention. I was not fond of play, as other boys; my school-fellows used to call me Serious and Gravity; and five of them particularly delighted to single me out, either for a walk, or at their father's houses, or at mine, to tell them stories, as they phrased it. Some I told them, from my reading, as true; others from my head, as mere invention; of which they would be most fond, and often were affected by them. One of them particularly, I remember, was for putting me to write a history, as he called it, on the model of Tommy Pots; I now forget what it was, only that it was of a servant-man preferred by a fine young lady (for his goodness) to a lord, who was a libertine. All of my stories carried with them, I am bolt to say, an useful moral.
— Samuel Richardson on his storytelling.[6]

There is little known of Richardson's of his early years beyond the few things that Richardson was willing to share.[6] Although he was not forthcoming with specific events and incidents, he did talk about the origins of his writing ability; Richardson would tell stories to his friends and spent his youth constantly writing letters.[7] One such letter, when Richardson was almost 11, was directed to a woman in her 50s that would constantly criticize others, and, after "assuming the style and address of a person in years", wrote her a letter which cautioned her about her actions.[7] However, his handwriting was used to determine that it was the young Richardson's, and she complained to his mother.[7] The result was, as he explains, that "my mother chid me for the freedom taken by such a boy with a woman of her years" but also "commended my principles, though she censured the liberty taken".[7]

After his writing ability was known, he began to help others in the community write letters.[8] In particular, Richardson, at the age of thirteen, helped many of the girls that he associated with to write responses to various love letters that they received.[8] As Richardson claims, "I have been directed to chide, and even repulse, when an offence was either taken or given, at the very time that the heart of the chider or repulser was open before me, overflowing with esteem and affect".[8] Although this helped his writing ability, he cautioned in 1753 to the Dutch minister Stinstra to not draw to great a conclusion from these early actions:

"You think, Sir, you can account from my early secretaryship to young women in my father's neighbourhood, for the characters I have drawn of the heroines of my three works. But this opportunity did little more for me, at so tender an age, than point, as I may say, or lead my enquiries, as I grew up, into the knowledge of female heart."[9]

He continued to explain that he did not fully understand females until after he was writing Clarissa, and these letters were only a small beginning.[9]

Early career

The elder Richardson originally wanted his son to become a clergyman, but he was not able to afford the education that the younger Richardson would require, so he let his son pick his own profession.[9] He selected the profession of printing because he hoped to "gratify a thirst for reading, which, in after years, he disclaimed".[9] At the age of seventeen, in 1706, Richardson was bound in seven-year apprenticeship under John Wilde as a printer. Wilde's printing shop was in Golden Lion Court on Aldersgate Street, and Wilde had a reputation as "a master who grudged every hour... that tended not to his profit".[10]

I served a diligent seven years to it; to a master who grudged every hour to me that tended not to his profit, even of those times of leisure and diversion, which the refractoriness of my fellow-servants obliged him to allow them, and were usually allowed by other masters to their apprentices. I stole from the hours of rest and relaxation, my reading times for improvement of my mind; and, being engaged in correspondence with a gentleman, greatly my superior in degree, and of ample fortune, who, had he lived, intended high things for me; these were all the opportunities I had in my apprenticeship to carry it on. But this little incident I may mention; I took care that even my candle was of my own purchasing, that I might not, in the most trifling instance, make my master a sufferer (and who use to call me the pillar of his house) and not to disable myself by watching or sitting-up, to perform my duty to him in the day time.
— Samuel Richardson on his time with John Wilde.[11]

While working for Wilde, he met a rich gentleman who took an interest in Richardson's writing abilities and the two began to correspond with each other. When the gentleman died a few years later, Richardson lost a potential patron, which delayed his ability to pursue his own writing career. He decided to devote himself completely to his apprenticeship, and he worked his way up to a position as a compositor and a corrector of the shop's printing press.[12] In 1713, Richardson left Wilde to become "Overseer and Corrector of a Printing-Office".[10] This meant that Richardson was running his own shop, but the location of that shop is unknown.[10] It is possible that the shop was located in Staining Lane or may have been jointly run with John Leake in Jewin Street.[13]

In 1719, Richardson was able to take his freedom from being an apprentice and was soon able to afford to set up his own printing shop, which he did after he moved near the Salisbury Court district close to Fleet Street.[13] Although he claim to business associates that he was working out of the well-known Salisbury Court, his printing shop was more accurately located on the corner of Blue Ball Court and Dorset Street in a house that later became Bell's Building.[13] On 23 November 1721 Richardson married Martha Wilde, the daughter of his former employer, and it was "prompted mainly by prudential considerations" although Richardson would claim later that there was a strong love-affair between him and Martha.[14] He soon brought her to live with him in the printing shop that served also as his home.[15]

Richardson's career expanded on 6 August 1722 when Richardson took on his first apprentices: Thomas Gover, George Mitchell, and Joseph Chrichley.[16] He would later take on William Price (2 May 1727), Samuel Jolley (5 September 1727), Bethell Wellington (2 September 1729), and Halhed Garland (5 May 1730).[17] One of Richardson's first major contracts to print came in June of 1723 when he began to print the bi-weekly The True Briton for Philip Wharton, 1st Duke of Wharton. This was a Jacobite political paper which attacked the government and was soon censored for printing "common libels". However, Richardson's name was not on the publication, and he was able to escape any of the negative fallout, although it is possible that Richardson participated in the papers as far as actually authoring one himself.[18] The only lasting effect from the paper would be the adoption of Wharton's libertine characteristics being incorporated into Richardson's Clarissa in the character of Robert Lovelace, although Wharton would be only one of many models of libertine behaviour that Richardson would find in his life.[19] In 1724, Richardson befriended Thomas Gent, Henry Woodfall, and Arthur Onslow, the latter of those would become the Speaker of the House of Commons.[20]

Over their ten years of marriage, the Richardsons had five sons and one daughter, and three of the boys were named Samuel after their father, but all of the boys died after just a few years.Soon after, William, their fourth child died, Martha died on 25 January 1731. Their youngest son, Samuel, was to live past his mother for a year longer, but succumbed to illness in 1732. After his final son died, Richardson attempted to move on with his life; he married Elizabeth Leake and the two moved into another house on Blue Ball Court. However, Elizabeth and his daughter were not the only ones living with him since Richardson allowed five of his apprentices to lodge in his home.[21] Elizabeth had six children (five daughters and one son) with Richardson; four of their daughters, Mary, Martha, Anne, and Sarah, reached adulthood and survived their father.[22] Their son, also a Samuel, was born in 1739, but soon died in 1740.[22]

In 1733, Richardson was granted a contract with the House of Commons, with help from Osnlo, to print the Journals of the House. [20] The twenty six volumes of the work soon improved his business.[21] Later in 1733, he wrote The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum, urging young men like himself to be diligent and self-denying.[23] The work was intended to "create the perfect apprentice".[23] Written in response to the "epidemick Evils of the present Age", the text is best known for its condemnation of popular forms of entertainment including theatres, taverns and gambling.[24] The manual targets the apprentice as the focal point for the moral improvement of society, not because he is most susceptible to vice, but because, Richardson suggests, he is more responsive to moral improvement than his social betters.[25] During this time, Richardson took on five more apprentices: Thomas Verren (1 August 1732), Richard Smith (6 February 1733), Matthew Stimson (7 August 1733), Bethell Wellington (7 May 1734), and Daniel Green (1 October 1734).[17] His total staff during the 1730s numbered 7, as his first three apprentices were free by 1728, and two of his apprentices, Verren and Smith, died soon into their apprenticeship.[17] The loss of Verren was particularly devastating to Richardson because Verren was his nephew and his hope for a male heir that would take over the press.[26]

First novel

Work continued to improve, and Richardson printed the Daily Journal between 1736 and 1737, and the Daily Gazetteer in 1738.[22] During his time printing the Daily Journal, he was also printer to the "Society for the Encouragement of Learning", a group that tried to help authors become independent from publishers, but collapsed soon after.[22] In December 1738, Richardson's printing business was successful enough to allow him to lease a house in Fulham.[21] This house, which would be Richardson's residence from 1739 to 1754, was later named "The Grange" in 1836.[27] In 1739, Richardson was asked by his friends Charles Rivington and John Osborn to write "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".[28] While writing this volume, Richardson was inspired to write his first novel.[29]

Title page of Pamela

Richardson transitioned from a master printer in Salisbury Court to novelist on 6 November 1740 with the publication of Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded.[30] Pamela was sometimes regarded as "the first English novel".[30] Richardson explained the origins of the work when he said:

"In the progress of [Rivington's and Osborn's collection], 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, and hence sprung Pamela ... Little did I think, at first, of making one, much less two volumes of it ... I thought the story, if written in an easy and natural manner, suitably to the simplicity of it, might possibly introduce a new species of writing, that might possibly turn young people into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance-writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous, with which novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and virtue."[31]

After Richardson started the work on 10 November 1739, his wife and her friends became so interested in the story that he finished it on 10 January 1740.[32] Pamela Andrews, the heroine of Pamela, represented "Richardson's insistence upon well-defined feminine roles" and was part of a common fear held during the 18th century that women were "too bold".[33] In particular, her "zeal for housewifery" was included as a proper role of women in society.[34] Although Pamela and the title heroine were popular and gave a proper model for how women should act, they inspired "a storm of anti-Pamelas" (like Henry Fielding's Shamela and Joseph Andrews) because the character "perfectly played her part".[35]

Later that year, Richardson printed Rivington and Osborn's book which inspired Pamela under the title of Letters written to and for particular Friends, on the most important Occasions. Directing not only the requisite Style and Forms to be observed in writing Familiar Letters; but how to think and act justly and prudently, in the common Concerns of Human Life.[29] The book contained many anecdotes and lessons on how to live, but Richardson did not care for the work and it was never expanded even though it went into six editions during his life.[36] He went so far as to tell a friend, "This volume of letters is not worthy of your perusal" because they were "intended for the lower classes of people".[36]

In September 1741, a sequel of Pamela called Pamela's Conduct in High Life was published by Ward and Chandler.[37] Although the work lacks the literary merits of the original, Richardson was compelled to publish two more volumes in December 1741 to tell of further exploits of Pamela, the title heroine, while "in her Exalted Condition".[38] The public's interest in the characters was waning, and this was only furthered by Richardson's focusing on Pamela discussing morality, literature, and philosophy.[38]

Later career

After the failures of the Pamela sequels, Richardson began to compose a new novel.[39] It was not until early 1744 that the content of the plot was known, and this happened when he sent Aaron Hill two chapters to read.[39] In particular, Richardson asked Hill if he could help shorten the chapters because Richardson was worried about the length of the novel.[39] Hill refused, saying,

"You have formed a style, as much your property as our respect for what you write is, where verbosity becomes a virtue; because, in pictures which you draw with such a skilful negligence, redundance but conveys resemblance; and to contract the strokes, would be to spoil the likeness."[40]

Title page of Clarissa

In July, Richardson sent Hill a complete "design" of the story, and asked Hill to try again, but Hill responded, "It is impossible, after the wonders you have shown in Pamela, to question your infallible success in this new, natural, attempt" and that "you must give me leave to be astonished, when you tell me that you have finished it already".[41] However, the novel wasn't complete to Richardson's satisfaction until October 1746.[41] Between 1744 and 1746, Richardson tried to find readers who could help him shorten the work, but his readers wanted to keep the work in its entirety.[41] A frustrated Richardson wrote to Edward Young in November 1747:

"What contentions, what disputes have I involved myself in with my poor Clarissa through my own diffidence, and for want of a will! I wish I had never consulted anybody but Dr. Young, who so kindly vouchsafed me his ear, and sometimes his opinion."[42]

Richardson did not devote all of his time just to working on his new novel, but was busy printing various works for other authors that he knew.[43] In 1742, he printed the third edition of Daniel Defoe's Tour through Great Britain. He filled his new few years with smaller works for his friends until 1748, when Richardson started helping Sarah Fielding and her friend, Jane Collier to write novels.[44][45] By 1748, Richardson was so impressed with Collier that he accepted her as the governess to his daughters.[46] In 1753, she wrote An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting with the help of Sarah Fielding and possibly James Harris or Samuel Richardson[47], and it was Richardson who printed the work.[48] But Collier was not the only author to be helped by Richardson, as he printed an edition of Young's Night Thoughts in 1749.[43]

His novel, Clarissa, was finally printed in its seven volumes by 1748: two volumes in November 1747, two in April 1748, and three in December 1748.[49] Unlike the novel, the author was not doing as well as the work.[50] By August 1748, Richardson was in poor health.[51] He had a sparse vegetarian diet that consisted mostly of vegetables and drinking vasts amount of water, and he was not robust enough to prevent the effects of being bled upon the advice of various doctors throughout his life.[51] He was known for "vague 'startings' and 'paroxysms'", along with experiencing tremors.[50] Richardson once wrote to a friend that "my nervous disorders will permit me to write with more impunity than to read" and that writing allowed him a "freedom he could find nowhere else".[52]

Portrait of Richardson from 1750s by Mason Chamberlin

However, his condition did not stop him from continuing to release the final volumes Clarissa after November 1748.[49] To Hill he wrote: "The Whole will make Seven; that is, one more to attend these two. Eight crouded into Seven, by a smaller Type. Ashamed as I am of the Prolixity, I thought I owed the Public Eight Vols. in Quantity for the Price of Seven"[49] Richardson later made it up to the public with "deferred Restorations" of the fourth edition of the novel being printed in larger print with eight volumes and a preface that reads: "It is proper to observe with regard to the present Edition that it has been thought fit to restore many Passages, and several Letters which were omitted in the former merely for shortening-sake."[49]

The response to the novel was positive, and the public began to describe the title heroine as "divine Clarissa".[53] It was soon considered Richardson's "masterpiece" and his greatest work.[54] There was particular emphasis on Richardson's "natural creativity" and his ability to incorporate daily life experience into the novel.[55] However, the final three volumes were delayed, and many of the readers began to "anticipate" the concluding story and some demanded that Richardson write a happy ending.[56] One such advocate of the happy ending was Henry Fielding, who previous wrote Joseph Andrews to mock Richardson's Pamela.[57] Although Fielding was originally opposed to Richardson, Fielding supported the original volumes of Clarissa and thought a happy ending would be "poetical justice".[57]

Others wanted Lovelace to be reformed and for Clarissa and he to become married, but Richardson would not allow a "reformed rake" to be her husband, and was unwilling to change the ending.[58] In a postscript to Clarissa, Richardson wrote:

"if the temporary sufferings of the Virtuous and the Good can be accounted for and justified on Pagan principles, many more and infinitely stronger reasons will occur to a Christian Reader in behalf of what are called unhappy Catastrophes, from a consideration of the doctrine of future rewards; which is every where strongly enforced in the History of Clarissa."[59]

Although few were bothered by the epistolary style, Richardson feels obligated to continue his postscript with a defense of the form based on the success of it in Pamela.[59]

Title page of Gradison

However, some did question the propriety of having Lovelace, the villain of the novel, act in such an immoral fashion.[60] The novel avoids glorifying Lovelace, as Carol Flyn puts it,

"by damning his character with monitory footnotes and authorial intrusions, Richardson was free to develop in his fiction his villain's fantasy world. Schemes of mass rape would be legitimate as long as Richardson emphasized the negative aspects of his character at the same time."[61]

But Richardson still felt the need to respond by writing a pamphlet called Answer to the Letter of a Very Reverend and Worthy Gentleman.[60] In the pamphlet defends his characterizations and explains that he took great pains to avoid any glorification of scandalous behaviour unlike many others that rely on characters of such low quality.[60]

In 1749, Richardson's female friends started asking him to create a male figure as virtuous as his heroines "Pamela" and "Clarissa" in order to "give the world his idea of a good man and fine gentleman combined".[62] Although he did not at first agree, he was pressured to this end in June 1750 and he complied.[63] Near the end of 1751, Richardson sent a draft of the novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison to Mrs Donnellan, and the novel was being finalized in the middle of 1752.[64] When the novel was being printed in 1753, Richardson discovered that Irish printers were trying to pirate the work.[65] He immediately fired those he suspected as giving the printers advanced copies of Grandison and relied on multiple London printing firms to help him produce an authentic edition before the pirated version was sold.[65] The first four volumes were published on 13 November 1753, and in December the next two would follow.[66] The remaining volume was published in March to complete a seven volume series while a six volume set was simultaneously published, and these were met with success.[67] In Grandison, Richardson was unwilling to risk having a negative response to any "rakish" characteristics that Lovelace embodied and degraded any of his immoral characters "to show those mischievous young admirers of Lovelace once and for all that the rake should be avoided".[68]

Death

Bust of Richardson

In his final years, Richardson received visits from Archbishop Secker,other important political figures, and many London writers.[69] By that time, he enjoyed a high social position and was Master of the Stationers' Company.[69] In early November 1754, Richardson and his family moved from the Grange to a home at Parson's Green.[69] It was during this time that Richardson received a letter from Samuel Johnson asking for money to pay for a debt that Johnson was unable to afford.[70] On 16 March 1756, Richardson responded with more than enough money, and their friendship was certain by this time.[70]

Besides associating with important figures of the day, Richardson's career began to conclude.[71] Grandison was his final novel, and he stopped writing fiction afterwards.[71] However, he was continually prompted by various friends and admirers to continue to write along with suggested topics.[71] Richardson did not like any of the topics, and chose to spend all of his time composing letters to his friends and associates.[71] The only major work that Richardson would write would be A Collection of the Moral and Instruction Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison.[72] Although it is possible that this work was inspired by Johnson asking for an "index rerum" for Richardson's novels, the Collection contains more of a focus on "moral and instructive" lessons than the index that Johnson was seeking.[72]

After June 1758, Richardson began to suffer from insomnia, and in June 1761, he was afflicted with apoplexy.[73] This moment was described by his friend, Miss Talbot, on 2 July 1761:

"Poor Mr. Richardson was seized on Sunday evening with a most severe paralytic stroke.... It sits pleasantly upon my mind, that the last morning we spent together was particularly friendly, and quiet, and comfortable. It was the 28th of May - he looked then so well! One has long apprehended some stroke of this kind; the disease made its gradual approaches by that heaviness which clouded the cheerfulness of his conversation, that used to be so lively and so instructive; by the encreased tremblings which unfitted that hand so peculiarly formed to guide the pen; and by, perhaps, the querulousness of temper, most certainly not natural to so sweet and so enlarged a mind, which you and I have lately lamented, as making his family at times not so comfortable as his principles, his study, and his delight to diffuse happiness, whereever he could, would otherwise have done"[74]

Two days later, 4 July 1761, Richardson died at Parson's Green and was buried at St. Bride's church near his first wife Martha.[75]

During Richardson's life, his printing press produced nearly five hundred different books.[76] He wanted to keep the press in his family, but after the death of his four sons and a nephew, his printing press would be left in his will to his only surviving male heir, a second nephew.[77] This happened to be a nephew that Richardson did not trust and Richardson doubted his nephew's abilities as a printer.[77] Richardson's fears proved to be warranted for after his death, the press stopped producing quality works and eventually stopped printing all together.[77] Richardson owned copyrights to most of his works, and these were sold after his death.[78] They were sold in twenty-fourth shares, with Clarissa bringing in 25 pounds each, Grandison bringing in 20 pounds each, and Pamela, which only had sixteenth shares sold, received 18 pounds each.[78]

Epistolary novel

Richardson was a skilled letter writer and his talent traces back to his childhood.[7] Throughout his whole life, he would constantly write to his various associates.[71] Richardson had a "faith" in the act of letter writing, and believed that letters could be used to accurately portray character traits.[79] He quickly adopted the epistolary novel form, which granted him "the tools, the space, and the freedom to develop distinctly difference characters speaking directly to the reader".[79] The characters of Pamela, Clarissa, and Grandison are revealed in a personal way, with the first two using the epistolary form for "dramatic" purposes, and the last for "celebratory" purposes.[80]

In his first novel, Pamela, he explored the various complexities of the title character's life, and the letters allow the reader to witness her develop and progress over time.[81] The novel was an experiment, but it allowed Richardson to create a complex heroine through a series of her letters.[82] When Richardson wrote Clarissa, he had more experience in the form and expanded the letter writing to four different correspondents, which created a complex system of characters encouraging each other to grow and develop over time.[83] However, the villain of the story, Lovelace, is also involved in the letter writing, and this leads to tragedy.[84] Leo Braudy described the benefits epistolary form of Clarissa as, "Language can work: letters can be ways to communicate and justify".[85] By the time Richardson writes Grandison, he transforms the letter writing from telling of personal insights and explaining feelings into a means for people to communicate their thoughts on the actions of others and for the public to celebrate virtue.[86] The letters are no longer written for a few people, but are passed along in order for all to see.[87]

References

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d Dobson p. 1
  2. ^ Dobson p. 1-2
  3. ^ a b c Dobson p. 2
  4. ^ Dobson p. 3
  5. ^ Hunt, Leigh. London Journal Supplement No 2, 1834
  6. ^ a b c Dobson p. 4
  7. ^ a b c d e Dobson p. 5
  8. ^ a b c Dobson p. 6
  9. ^ a b c d Dobson p. 7
  10. ^ a b c Sale p. 7
  11. ^ Dobson p. 8-9
  12. ^ Dobson p. 9
  13. ^ a b c Sale p. 8
  14. ^ Dobson p. 10
  15. ^ Sale p. 9
  16. ^ Sale p. 15
  17. ^ a b c Sale p. 351
  18. ^ Dobson p. 12
  19. ^ Dobson p. 13
  20. ^ a b Dobson p. 14
  21. ^ a b c Sale p. 11
  22. ^ a b c d Dobson p. 15
  23. ^ a b Flynn p. 6
  24. ^ Flynn p. 7
  25. ^ Flynn p. 8
  26. ^ Sale p. 18
  27. ^ Dobson p. 17
  28. ^ Dobson p. 18
  29. ^ a b Dobson p. 19
  30. ^ a b Sale p. 1
  31. ^ Dobson p. 26
  32. ^ Dobson p. 27
  33. ^ Flynn p. 56
  34. ^ Flynn p. 67
  35. ^ Flynn p. 136
  36. ^ a b Dobson p. 25
  37. ^ Dobson p. 38
  38. ^ a b Dobson p. 39
  39. ^ a b c Dobson p. 73
  40. ^ Dobson p. 73-74
  41. ^ a b c Dobson p. 74
  42. ^ Dobson p. 75
  43. ^ a b Dobson p. 77
  44. ^ Letter from Collier to Richardson 4 October 1748
  45. ^ Sabor p. 150
  46. ^ Rizzo p. 45
  47. ^ Rizzo p. 46
  48. ^ Sabor p. 151
  49. ^ a b c d Dobson p. 83
  50. ^ a b Dobson p. 82
  51. ^ a b Dobson p. 81
  52. ^ Flynn p. 287
  53. ^ Dobson p. 86
  54. ^ Dobson p. 94
  55. ^ Flynn p. 286
  56. ^ Dobson p. 95-96
  57. ^ a b Dobson p. 96
  58. ^ Dobson p. 97
  59. ^ a b Dobson p. 99
  60. ^ a b c Dobson p. 101
  61. ^ Flynn p. 230
  62. ^ Dobson p. 141-142
  63. ^ Dobson p. 142
  64. ^ Dobson p. 144
  65. ^ a b Sale p. 26
  66. ^ Dobson p. 145
  67. ^ Dobson p. 146
  68. ^ Flynn p. 231
  69. ^ a b c Dobson p. 170
  70. ^ a b Dobson p. 177
  71. ^ a b c d e Dobson p. 178
  72. ^ a b Dobson p. 183
  73. ^ Dobson p. 186
  74. ^ Dobson p. 186-187
  75. ^ Dobson p. 187
  76. ^ Sale p. 3
  77. ^ a b c Sale p. 2
  78. ^ a b Sale p. 90
  79. ^ a b Flynn p. 235
  80. ^ Flynn p. 236
  81. ^ Flynn p. 237
  82. ^ Flynn p. 239
  83. ^ Flynn p. 243
  84. ^ Flynn p. 245
  85. ^ Braudy p. 203
  86. ^ Flynn p. 258
  87. ^ Flynn p. 259

Bibliography

  • Braudy, Leo. "Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa," New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature: Selected Papers from the English Institute edited by Philip Harth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.
  • Dobson, Austin. Samuel Richardson. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003.
  • Flynn, Carol. Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.
  • Rizzo, Betty. Companions Without Vows: Relationships Among Eighteenth-Century British Women. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1994. 439 pp.
  • Sale, William M. Samuel Richardson: Master Printer. Ithica, N. Y.:Cornell University Press, 1950.
  • Sabor, Peter. "Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Sarah Fielding", in The Cambridge companion to English literature from 1740 to 1830 edited by Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee, 139–156. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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