Richardson, Samuel

(baptized Aug. 19, 1689, Mackworth, near Derby, Derbyshire, Eng.

died July 4, 1761, Parson's Green, near London) English novelist.

After moving with his family to London at age 10, Richardson was apprenticed to a printer before setting up in business for himself in 1721. He soon became quite prosperous. In the 1730s he began to edit and write pamphlets, and he eventually hit on the idea of writing a book using a series of letters on the same subject. His major novels were the epistolary novel Pamela (1740), about a servant who avoids seduction and is rewarded by marriage; and his huge masterpiece, Clarissa, 7 vol. (1747–48), a tragedy with multiple narrators that develops a profoundly suggestive interplay of opposed voices. The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), which blends moral discussion and a comic ending, influenced later writers, especially Jane Austen.

* * *

▪ English novelist

baptized Aug. 19, 1689, Mackworth, near Derby, Derbyshire, Eng.

died July 4, 1761, Parson's Green, near London

 English novelist who expanded the dramatic possibilities of the novel by his invention and use of the letter form (“ epistolary novel”). His major novels were Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48).

      Richardson was 50 years old when he wrote Pamela, but of his first 50 years little is known. His ancestors were of yeoman stock. His father, also Samuel, and his mother's father, Stephen Hall, became London tradesmen, and his father, after the death of his first wife, married Stephen's daughter, Elizabeth, in 1682. A temporary move of the Richardsons to Derbyshire accounts for the fact that the novelist was born in Mackworth. They returned to London when Richardson was 10. He had at best what he called “only Common School-Learning.” The perceived inadequacy of his education was later to preoccupy him and some of his critics.

      Richardson was bound apprentice to a London printer, John Wilde. Sometime after completing his apprenticeship he became associated with the Leakes, a printing family whose presses he eventually took over when he set up in business for himself in 1721 and married Martha Wilde, the daughter of his master. Elizabeth Leake, the sister of a prosperous bookseller of Bath, became his second wife in 1733, two years after Martha's death. His domestic life was marked by tragedy. All six of the children from his first marriage died in infancy or childhood. By his second wife he had four daughters who survived him, but two other children died in infancy. These and other bereavements contributed to the nervous ailments of his later life.

      In his professional life Richardson was hardworking and successful. With the growth in prominence of his press went his steady increase in prestige as a member, an officer, and later master, of the Stationers' Company (the guild for those in the book trade). During the 1730s his press became known as one of the three best in London, and with prosperity he moved to a more spacious London house and leased the first of three country houses in which he entertained a circle of friends that included Dr. Johnson, the painter William Hogarth, the actors Colley Cibber and David Garrick, Edward Young, and Arthur Onslow, speaker of the House of Commons, whose influence in 1733 helped to secure for Richardson lucrative contracts for government printing that later included the journals of the House.

      In this same decade he began writing in a modest way. At some point, he was commissioned to write a collection of letters that might serve as models for “country readers,” a volume that has become known as Familiar Letters on Important Occasions. Occasionally he hit upon continuing the same subject from one letter to another, and, after a letter from “a father to a daughter in service, on hearing of her master's attempting her virtue,” he supplied the daughter's answer. This was the germ of his novel Pamela. With a method supplied by the letter writer and a plot by a story that he remembered of an actual serving maid who preserved her virtue and was rewarded by marriage, he began writing the work in November 1739 and published it as Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, a year later.

      Most of the story is told by the heroine herself. On the death of Pamela's mistress, her son, Mr. B, begins a series of stratagems designed to end in Pamela's seduction. These failing, he abducts her and renews his siege in earnest. Pamela preserves her virtue, and halfway through the novel Mr. B offers marriage. In the second half Richardson shows Pamela winning over those who had disapproved of the misalliance. Though the novel was immensely popular, Richardson was criticized by those who thought his heroine a calculating minx or his own morality dubious. Actually his heroine is a vividly imagined blend of the artful and the artless. She is a sadly perplexed girl of 15, with a divided mind, who faces a real dilemma because she wants to preserve her virtue without losing the man with whom she has fallen in love. Since Richardson wrote the novel from Pamela's point of view, it is less clear that Mr. B's problem arises from his having fallen in love with a servant, who, traditionally, would have been merely a target for seduction. In a clever twist, he is converted by her letters, which he has been intercepting and reading. The author resolved the conflicts of both characters too facilely, perhaps, because he was firmly committed to the plot of the true story he had remembered. When the instantaneous popularity of Pamela led to a spurious continuation of her story, he wrote his own sequel, Pamela in her Exalted Condition (1742), a two-volume work that did little to enhance his reputation.

      By 1744 Richardson seems to have completed a first draft of his second novel, Clarissa: or, The History of a Young Lady, but he spent three years trying to bring it within the compass of the seven volumes in which it was published. He first presents the heroine, Clarissa Harlowe, when she is discovering the barely masked motives of her family, who would force her into a loveless marriage to improve their fortunes. Outside the orbit of the Harlowes stands Lovelace, nephew of Lord M and a romantic who held the code of the Harlowes in contempt. In her desperate straits, Clarissa appraises too highly the qualities that set Lovelace beyond the world of her family, and, when he offers protection, she runs off with him. She is physically attracted by if not actually in love with Lovelace and is responsive to the wider horizons of his world, but she is to discover that he wants her only on his own terms. In Lovelace's letters to his friend Belford, Richardson shows that what is driving him to conquest and finally to rape is really her superiority. In the correspondence of Clarissa and her friend Anna Howe, Richardson shows the distance that separates her from her confidant, who thinks her quixotic in not accepting a marriage; but marriage as a way out would have been a sacrifice to that same consciousness of human dignity that had led her to defy her family. As the novel comes to its long-drawn-out close, she is removed from the world of both the Harlowes and the Lovelaces, and dies, a child of heaven. In providing confidants for his central characters and in refusing to find a place in the social structure into which to fit his sorely beset heroine, Richardson made his greatest advances over Pamela. He was determined, as his postscript indicates, to write a novel that was also a tragedy.

      Richardson's third novel was his bow to requests for the hero as a good man, a counter-attraction to the errant hero of Henry Fielding (Fielding, Henry)'s Tom Jones (1749). Fielding had been among those who thought Pamela a scheming minx, as he had shown in his parody An Apology for the life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741). In spite of Fielding's critical praise of Clarissa and the friendship that later developed between Richardson and Fielding's sister, Sarah, Richardson never forgave the author of what he stigmatized as “that vile Pamphlet Shamela.” In The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), he provides a hero who is a model of benevolence. He faces little that a good heart cannot remedy and extricates himself from the nearest thing to a dilemma that he has to encounter: a “divided love” between an English woman, Harriet Byron, and an Italian, Signora Clementina. He is saved for Harriet by the last-minute refusal of the Roman Catholic Clementina to marry a firmly committed English churchman. The uneasy minds of Clementina and Harriet are explored with some penetration, but Sir Charles faces nothing in his society or within himself that requires much of a struggle. Furthermore, his dilemma is not so central to the novel as were those of Pamela and Clarissa. He is surrounded with a large cast of characters who have their parts to play in social comedy that anticipates the novel of manners of the late 18th century.

      Richardson was an indefatigable reviser of his own work, and the various editions of his novels differ greatly. Much of his revision was undertaken in anxious, self-censoring response to criticism; the earliest versions of his novels are generally the freshest and most daring.

      Richardson's Pamela is often credited with being the first English novel. Although the validity of this claim depends on the definition of the term novel, it is not disputed that Richardson was innovative in his concentration on a single action, in this case a courtship. By telling the story in the form of letters, he provided if not the “stream” at least the flow of consciousness of his characters, and he pioneered in showing how his characters' sense of class differences and their awareness of the conflict between sexual instincts and the moral code created dilemmas that could not always be resolved. These characteristics reappear regularly in the subsequent history of the novel. Above all, Richardson was the writer who made the novel a respectable genre.

      Richardson had disciples when he died. Some of them show the influence of Clarissa, which seems to have been most responsible for the cult of Richardson that arose on the European continent. It was Grandison, however, that set the tone of most of Richardson's English followers and for Jane Austen, who was said to have remembered “every circumstance” in this novel, everything “that was ever said or done.” By the end of the 18th century, Richardson's reputation was on the wane both in England and abroad. It was reborn in the late 20th century, however, and Clarissa is now widely admired as one of the great psychological novels of European literature.

William Merritt Sale, Jr. Ed.

Additional Reading

Alan Dugald McKillop, Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (1936, reissued 1960), is a reliable and thorough account of Richardson's life as a novelist, with a good bibliography of contemporary and later criticism and foreign translations. T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (1971), is the most comprehensive biography; it contains an excellent census of his correspondence. William M. Sale, Jr., Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (1950), is an account of Richardson's professional career with a list of books from his press. Brian W. Downs, Richardson (1928, reprinted 1969), provides a good critical discussion of the novels, as do Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth-century Puritan Character (1972); Mark Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist (1973); Jocelyn Harris, Samuel Richardson (1987); and Elizabeth Bergen Brophy, Samuel Richardson (1987). The range of modern critical essays is excellently represented in John Carroll (comp. and ed.), Samuel Richardson (1969); and Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (eds.), Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays (1989). Richard Gordon Hannaford, Samuel Richardson: An Annotated Bibliography of Critical Studies (1980), is the first to try to cover the whole field. An outstanding study of the making of Clarissa is Thomas Keymer, Richardson's Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (1992).

* * *