106) English Literature
Samuel Richardson
Richardson
was a skilled letter writer and his talent traces back to his childhood.
Throughout his whole life, he would constantly write to his various associates.
Richardson had a "faith" in the act of letter writing, and believed
that letters could be used to accurately portray character traits. He quickly
adopted the epistolary novel form, which granted him "the tools, the
space, and the freedom to develop distinctly different characters speaking
directly to the reader". The epistolary form gave Richardson, as well as
others, the means to impact his audience more effectively as readers were able
to get a more intimate insight into a novel’s characters. This allowed a
stronger sense of engagement with the text to develop. Richardson structured
his epistolary work to offer multiple perspectives so readers could interpret
the text in varied ways. However, Richardson “hoped he would eventually
convince his audience to read in the ways that he chose—ways that he hoped
would lead to moral regeneration.” These epistolary novels were a “moral
project” as well as a literary one; Susan Whyman writes that Richardson’s “goal
was not only to reform reading practices but to reform lives as well.”
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. The novel was an experiment, but it allowed Richardson to
create a complex heroine through a series of her letters.[9]: 239 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. However,
the villain of the story, Lovelace, is also involved in the letter writing, and
this leads to tragedy. Leo Braudy described the benefits of the epistolary
form of Clarissa as, "Language can work: letters can be ways to
communicate and justify". 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. The letters are no longer
written for a few people, but are passed along in order for all to see. 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.
Works
Novels
Pamela;
or, Virtue Rewarded (1740–1761) – revised through 14 editions
Pamela
in her Exalted Condition (1741–1761) – the sequel to Pamela, usually published
together in 4 Volumes – revised through 12 editions
Clarissa,
or, the History of a Young Lady (1747–61) – revised through 4 editions
Letters
and Passages Restored to Clarissa (1751)
The
History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1761) – restored and corrected through 4
editions
The History of Mrs. Beaumont – A Fragment –
unfinished
Supplements
A
Reply to the Criticism of Clarissa (1749) , Meditations on Clarissa (1751)
The
Case of Samuel Richardson (1753) , An Address to the Public (1754)
2
Letters Concerning Sir Charles Grandison (1754) ,A Collection of Moral
Sentiments (1755) , Conjectures on Original Composition in a Letter to the
Author 1st and 2nd editions (1759) (with Edward Young)As editor , Aesop's
Fables – 1st, 2nd, and 3rd editions (1739–1753) , The Negotiations of Thomas
Roe (1740) , A Tour through Great Britain (4 Volumes) by Daniel Defoe – 3rd,
4th, 5th, and 6th editions (1742–1761) , The Life of Sir William Harrington
(knight) by Anna Meades – revised and corrected
Other works
The Apprentice's Vade Mecum (1734)
A Seasonable Examination of the Pleas and Pretensions
Of the Proprietors of, and Subscribers to, Play-Houses, Erected in Defiance of
the Royal License. With Observations on the Printed Case of the Players
belonging to Drury-Lane and Covent-Garden Theatres (1735)
Verses Addressed to Edward Cave and William Bowyer
(1736)
A compilation of letters published as a manual, with
directions on How to think and act justly and prudently in the Common Concerns
of Human Life (1741)
The Familiar Letters 6 Editions (1741–1755)
The Life and heroic Actions of Balbe Berton,
Chevalier de Grillon (2 volumes) 1st and 2nd Editions by Lady Marguerite de
Lussan (as assistant translator of an anonymous female translator)
No. 97, The Rambler (1751)
Posthumous works
6
Letters upon Duelling (1765) , Letter from an Uncle to his Nephew (1804)
-Samuel_Richardson_by_Joseph_Highmore
Richardson
learned to know his characters, so intimately, so thoroughly, as to triumph
over his prolixity, repetitiveness, moralizing, and sentimentality. Equally
important was his development of the epistolary novel. Other writers had used
letters as a storytelling device, but few if any of Richardson’s predecessors
had approximated his skill in recording the external events and incidents of a
narrative along with the intimate and instant revelation of a character’s
thought and emotions in the process of their taking place, a method so flowing,
so fluid, so flexible, as almost to anticipate the modern technique of stream
of consciousness. Richardson’s works, along with those of his three great
contemporaries—Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne—prepared
the way for the great achievements of the nineteenth century English novel.
Richardson
himself stated quite clearly, in his prefaces to Pamela and Clarissa, and in
his letters, that his purpose as an author was to depict “real life” and “in a manner
probable, natural, and lively.” At the same time, however, he wanted his books
to be thought of as instruments of manners and morals intended to “teach great
virtues.” Fiction, he insisted, should be useful and instructive; it should
edify readers of all ages, but particularly should be relevant and appealing to
youth. Richardson observed with passionate interest and recorded with a genius
for infinite detail the relationships between men and women, the concerns of
daily life, and the particular class and caste distinctions of mid-eighteenth
century England. This intense interest in the usual sets him apart from such
predecessors as Daniel Defoe or the seventeenth century writers of prose
romances. In all of his novels, and particularly, perhaps, in Pamela, the
relationship between his main characters has about it the quality of
traditional romantic love; at the same time, the novels are so realistically
grounded in the accumulation of a mass of day-to-day realistic details as to
create a remarkable sense of authenticity. Characteristic of this creation of
the illusion of real life is the account, possibly apocryphal, of Pamela’s
being read aloud by the local blacksmith to a small group of the village’s
inhabitants on the village green; finally, when Pamela’s triumph by her
marriage to Squire B. was assured, the villagers indulged in a spree of
thanksgiving and merrymaking; it was their Pamela who had conquered.
Richardson,
then, was both a conscious, self-avowed realist, and also an equally conscious,
self-avowed teacher and moralist. This dualism permeates all three of his
novels and is perhaps most apparent—and transparent—in Pamela. It is, indeed,
Richardson’s hallmark, and is the source both of his strength and weakness as a
novelist.
Analysis of Samuel Richardson’s Novels
Perhaps
Richardson’s (19 August 1689 – 4 July 1761) most important contribution to the
development of the novel was his concern for the nonexceptional problems of
daily conduct, the relationships between men and women, and the specific
class-and-caste distinctions of mid-eighteenth century England. He sought and
found his material from life as he had observed and reflected upon it from
childhood and youth as a member of the working class in a highly socially
conscious society to his position as an increasingly successful and prosperous
printer and publisher. He contemplated this material with passionate interest
and recorded it with a kind of genius for verisimilitude that sets him apart
from most of his predecessors. What one critic has called Richardson’s “almost
rabid concern for the details” of daily life and his continuing “enrichment and
complication” of customary human relationship account in large measure for his
enormous contemporary popularity: In Pamela, for example, the relationships
between Pamela and Squire B. are so persistently grounded in the minutiae of
ordinary life as to create a sense of reality seldom achieved in prose fiction
prior to Richardson; at the same time, the outcome of the emotional and
physical tugs-of-war between the two main characters and the happy outcome of
all the intrigue, sensationalism, and hugger-mugger have about them the quality
of conventional romantic love.
Pamela
"Pamela"
is a novel that tells the story of a 15-year-old maidservant named Pamela whose
employer, Mr. B, makes unwanted advances towards her after the death of his
mother. Pamela is determined to protect her virtue and repeatedly rejects his
advances. This leads to a series of events, including her attempted escape,
kidnapping and imprisonment. Ultimately, impressed by her virtue and integrity,
Mr. B reforms and proposes marriage to her, elevating her to a higher social
status. The novel is a pioneering work in the genre of the novel and is noted
for its detailed psychological insight into the characters.
Reduced
to its simplest terms, the “story” or “plot” of the first volume of Pamela is
too well known to warrant more than the briefest summary. The heroine, a young
servant girl, is pursued by her master, Squire B., but maintains her virginity
in spite of his repeated and ingenious efforts, until the would-be seducer,
driven to desperation, marries her. Thus is Pamela’s virtue rewarded. The
continuation of the novel in volume 2, a decided letdown, is virtually
plotless, highly repetitive, and highlighted only by Squire B.’s excursion into
infidelity. Volumes 3 and 4, written partly because of Richardson’s indignation
with the various parodies of the first volume of Pamela, have even less to
recommend them. Labeled as “virtually unreadable” by one modern commentator,
even Richardson’s most understanding criticbiographers, T. C. Duncan Eaves and
Ben D. Kimpel, have dismissed them as “Richardson at his worst, pompous,
proper, proud of himself, and above all dull.”
Despite
his frequent excursions into bathos and sentimentality, when he is not
indulging in sermonizings on ethics and morality, the Richardson of the first
volume of Pamela writes vigorously, effectively, and with keen insight and
intimate understanding of his characters. Pamela contains many powerful scenes
that linger long in the reader’s memory: the intended rape scene, the sequence
in which Pamela considers suicide, even parts of the marriage scene (preceded
by some prodigious feats of letter-writing to her parents on the day prior to
the wedding, from six o’clock in the morning, half an hour past eight o’clock,
near three o’clock [ten pages], eight o’clock at night, until eleven o’clock
the same night and following the marriage) are the work of a powerful writer
with a keen sense for the dramatic.
In
the final analysis, however, the novel succeeds or fails because of its
characters, particularly and inevitably that of Pamela herself. From the
opening letter in which she informs her parents that her mistress has died and
Squire B., her mistress’s son, has appeared on the scene, to the long sequence
of her journal entries, until her final victory when her would-be seducer, worn
out and defeated in all his attempts to have her without marriage, capitulates
and makes the “thrice-happy” Pamela his wife, she dominates the novel.
In
effect, and seemingly quite beyond Richardson’s conscious intent, Pamela is two
quite different characters. On one hand, she is the attractive and convincing
young girl who informs her parents that her recently deceased mistress had left
her three pairs of shoes that fit her perfectly, adding that “my lady had a
very little foot”; or having been transferred to Squire B.’s Lincolnshire
estate, laments that she lacks “the courage to stay, neither can I think to
go.” On the other hand, she is at times a rather unconvincing puppet who thinks
and talks in pious platitudes and values her “honesty” as a very valuable
commodity, a character—in Joseph Wood Krutch’s words—“so devoid of any delicacy
of feeling as to be inevitably indecent.”
Squire
B. is less interesting than Pamela, and his efforts to seduce Pamela tend to
become either boring or amusing. Her father, the Old Gaffer, who would disown
his daughter “were she not honest,” similarly frequently verges upon caricature,
although one distinguished historian of the English novel finds him extremely
convincing; and Lady Davers, Squire B.’s arrogant sister, tends to be more
unbelievable than convincing, as do Pamela’s captors, the odious Mrs. Jewkes
and the equally repulsive Colbrand.
In
spite of its shortcomings, Pamela cannot be dismissed, as one critic has
commented, as “only a record of a peculiarly loathsome aspect of bourgeois
morality.” Pamela has great moments, scenes, and characters that pass the
ultimate test of a work of fiction, that of memorableness: scenes that remain
in the reader’s consciousness long after many of the events have become blurred
or dimmed. It is equally important historically: Among other things, its
popularity helped prepare the way for better novelists and better novels,
including what Arnold Bennett was to call the “greatest realistic novel in the
world,” Richardson’s Clarissa.
Clarissa
The
novel revolves around the beautiful and virtuous Clarissa Harlowe, a young
woman from a wealthy family who is pursued by the villainous Robert Lovelace.
Despite her attempts to maintain her virtue and independence, she is tricked
into running away with Lovelace and is subsequently held against her will.
Lovelace's relentless pursuit and Clarissa's steadfast resistance culminate in
her tragic end, making the novel a complex exploration of power, morality, and
the vulnerability of women in society.
Clarissa,
Richardson's masterpiece, was published in 1748, and later published in revised
editions. It is an exceptionally long novel; excepting novel sequences, it may
well be the longest novel in the English language. The full volume of its third
edition, the edition most extensively revised by Richardson, spans over 1
million words. One of the most beautifully written of all epistolary novels,
Clarissa is also notable for its extended ventures into philosophical and
ethical questions, making it one of the most insightfully instructive works of
the eighteenth century.
Unlike
Pamela, Clarissa did not have its origins in “real life”; his characters,
Richardson insisted, were “entirely creatures of his fantasy.” He commenced the
novel in the spring or summer of 1744; it was three years in the making, two of
which were primarily devoted to revision (it has been said that when his old
friend Aaron Hill misread Clarissa, Richardson devoted a year to revising the
text for publication). Almost a million words in length, the plot of Clarissa
is relatively simple. Clarissa Harlowe, daughter of well-to-do, middle-class
parents with social aspirations, is urged by her family to marry a man, Solmes,
whom she finds repulsive. At the same time, her sister Arabella is being
courted by an aristocrat, Robert Lovelace. Lovelace, attracted and fascinated
by Clarissa, abandons his lukewarm courtship of Arabella and, after wounding
the girl’s brother in a duel, turns his attention to Clarissa, in spite of her
family’s objections. Clarissa lets herself be persuaded; she goes off with
Lovelace, who imprisons her in a brothel, where he eventually drugs and rapes
her; she finally escapes, refuses the contrite Lovelace’s offers of marriage,
and eventually dies. Lovelace, repentant and haunted by his evil act, is killed
in a duel by Clarissa’s cousin, Colonel Morden.
Counterpointing
and contrasting with these two major characters are Anna Howe, Clarissa’s
closest friend and confidante, and John Belford, Lovelace’s closest friend.
Around these four are a number of contrasting minor characters, each of whom
contributes to the minutely recorded series of events and climaxes, events
which in their barest forms verge upon melodrama, and at times even farce. Even
so, the novel in its totality is greater than the sum of its parts: It has
about it the ultimate power of Greek tragedy, and Clarissa herself, like the
major characters of Greek drama, rises above the occasionally melodramatic or
improbable sequences to attain a stature not seen in English prose fiction
before, and seldom surpassed since.
Much
of the power and the drama of Clarissa grows out of the author’s effective use
of contrast—between Clarissa and Anna Howe; between Lovelace and Belford; and
between the country life of the upper middle class and the dark, rank side of
urban England. This and the richness and variety of incident redeem the
sometimes improbable events and lapses into didacticism and give the novel a
sense of reality larger than life itself.
In
the final analysis, the great strength of the novel is the creation of its two
main characters. Clarissa, with her pride and self-reliance, “so secure in her
virtue,” whose feelings of shame and self-hatred are such that she begs
Lovelace “to send her to Bedlam or a private madhouse” (no less a master than
Henry Fielding praised Clarissa’s letter after the rape as “beyond anything I
had ever read”), could have degenerated into bathos or caricature but instead
attains a level of intensity and reality unique in the novel prior to 1740.
Though
Clarissa dominates the novel, Richardson is almost as successful with Lovelace,
despite the fact that in the early portions of the novel he seems for the most
part like Squire B., just another Restoration rake. His transformation,
following his violation of Clarissa, grows and deepens: “One day, I fancy,” he
reflects, “I shall hate myself on recollecting what I am about at this instant.
But I must stay till then. We must all of us have something to repent of.”
Repent he does, after his terse letter announcing the consummation of the rape:
“And now, Belford, I can go no further. The affair is over. Clarissa lives.”
Belford,
like the reader, is horror-stricken. By the rape, Lovelace has acted not as a
man, but as an animal, and his expiation is, in its own way, much more terrible
than that of Clarissa, who at times somewhat complacently contemplates her own
innocence and eventual heavenly reward. Lovelace remains a haunted man (“sick
of myself! sick of my remembrance of my vile act!”) until his death in a duel
with Colonel Morden, a death which is really a kind of suicide. The final scene
of the novel, and Lovelace’s last words, “Let this Expiate!,” are among the
most memorable of the entire novel, and Richardson’s portrayal of a character
soiled and tarnished, an eternally damaged soul, is unforgettable.
Plot
summary
Clarissa
Harlowe, the tragic heroine of Clarissa, is a beautiful and virtuous young lady
whose family has become very wealthy only in recent years and is now eager to
become part of the aristocracy by acquiring estates and titles through
advantageous pairings. Clarissa's relatives attempt to force her to marry a
rich but heartless man against her will and, more importantly, against her own
sense of virtue. Desperate to remain free, she is tricked by a young gentleman
of her acquaintance, Lovelace, into escaping with him. However, she refuses to
marry him, longing—unusually for a girl in her time—to live by herself in
peace. Lovelace, in the meantime, has been trying to arrange a fake marriage
all along, and considers it a sport to add Clarissa to his long list of
conquests. However, as he is more and more impressed by Clarissa, he finds it
difficult to keep convincing himself that truly virtuous women do not exist.
The continuous pressure he finds himself under, combined with his growing
passion for Clarissa, forces him to extremes and eventually he rapes her.
Clarissa manages to escape from him, but remains dangerously ill. When she
dies, however, it is in the full consciousness of her own virtue, and trusting
in a better life after death. Lovelace, tormented by what he has done but still
unable to change, dies in a duel with Clarissa's cousin. Clarissa's relatives
finally realize the misery they have caused, a discovery that comes too late
for Clarissa.
Sir Charles Grandison
As
early as February, 1741, an anonymous correspondent had asked Richardson to
write the “history of a Man, whose Life would be the path that we should
follow.” By the end of the decade, with Pamela and Clarissa behind him, and
influenced by old friends, including Lady Bradshaigh, Richardson began thinking
seriously about such a novel. Despite increasing ill health and the continuing
demands of his business, he was soon immersed in the project, a novel designed
to “present” the character of a “Good Man,” and to show the influence such a
character exerted “on society in general and his intimates in particular.”
Although he had at one time decided not to publish the novel during his
lifetime, the first volumes of Sir Charles Grandison came out in 1753. Even
before the seventh and last volume was in print the following year, some
critics were stating their dissatisfaction with Sir Charles’s “Unbelievable
Perfection,” a criticism Richardson repudiated in a concluding note to the last
volume: “The Editor (that is, Richardson himself) thinks human nature has
often, of late, been shown in a light too degrading; and he hopes from this
series of letters it will be seen that characters may be good without being
unnatural.”
Subsequent
critical opinion of the novel has varied widely, a few critics considering it
Richardson’s masterpiece, while many regard it as his least successful novel.
Sir Charles Grandison differs dramatically from its predecessors in its concern
with the English upper class and aristocracy, a world which Richardson freely
acknowledged he had never known or understood: “How shall a man obscurely
situated . . . pretend to describe and enter into characters in upper life?” In
setting, too, the novel was a new departure, ranging as it does from England to
Italy and including a large number of Italians, highlighted by Clementina,
certainly the most memorable character in the novel. The conflict in
Clementina’s heart and soul, her subsequent refusal to marry Sir Charles
because he is a Protestant, and her ensuing madness are as effective as
anything Richardson ever wrote, and far more convincing than Sir Charles’s
rescue of Harriett Byron following her abduction by Sir Hargrove Pollexfen and
their eventual marriage. Harriett, though not as interesting a character as
either Pamela or Clarissa, shares with them one basic habit: She is an
indefatigable letter writer, perhaps the most prolific in the history of
English prose fiction, at times sleeping only two hours a night and, when not
admiring Grandison from afar, writing letters to him (not uncharacteristic of
her style is her appeal to the clergyman who is supposed to marry her to Sir
Hargrove: “Worthy man . . . save a poor creature. I would not hurt a worm! I
love everybody! Save me from violence!”).
Sir
Charles himself is similarly less interesting than either Squire B. or Lovelace,
and it is difficult today for even the most sympathetic reader to find a great
deal to admire in the man who is against masquerades, dresses neatly but not
gaudily, is time and time again described as a “prince of the Almighty’s
creation,” an “angel of a man,” and “one of the finest dancers in England.”
Most of the other characters, including the Italians (with the notable
exception of Clementina), are similarly either unconvincing or uninteresting,
except for two small masterpieces of characterization: Aunt Nell, Grandison’s
maiden aunt; and Lord G., Charlotte Grandison’s husband, a gentle and quiet
man, in love with his temperamental wife, often hurt and bewildered by her
sharp tongue and brusque actions.
Horace
Walpole is said to have written off Sir Charles Grandison as a “romance as it
would be spiritualized by a Methodist preacher”; and Lord Chesterfield also
dismissed it, adding that whenever Richardson “goes, ultra crepidem, into high
life, he grossly escapes the modes.” On the other hand, Jane Austen
specifically “singled . . . [it] out for special praise,” and Richardson’s
major biographers believe that in Sir Charles Grandison, his “surface realism
and his analysis of social situations are at their height.”
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