Samuel Richardson: Life and Works
Samuel Richardson: Life and Works
Samuel Richardson, 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 letterform (“epistolary novel”). His major novels were Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48).
Life:
Richardson was born in 1689 in Mackworth, Derbyshire. His mother Elizabeth was a woman “not ungenteel” and his father was a tradesman from Surrey, described by his son as “of middling note." As a boy, he apprenticed in a printer’s shop, where he earned the nicknames “Gravity” and “Serious.” Indeed, by all accounts, Richardson was, from an early age, the sort of grave, the fastidious fellow he would write about in his novels. Richardson received little formal education and in 1706, at the age of 17, Richardson was forced to begin a seven-year apprenticeship as a printer under John Wilde, employment that Richardson felt would “gratify my thirst for reading.” By 1715 he had become a freeman of the Stationer's Company and citizen of London, and six or seven years after the expiration of his apprenticeship set up his own business as a printer, eventually settling in Salisbury Court.
In 1721 Richardson married Martha Wilde, the daughter of his former employer. His wife died on January 23, 1731, following the deaths of five of their six children. The last child survived its mother by only two years. In 1733 following the death of this child, Richardson remarried. His second wife Elizabeth was also a daughter of a former employer, John Leake. Together they had six children, another two of whom would die in infancy. Four of their daughters reached adulthood and survived their father. Richardson's personal life has always been marked by literary critics as particularly grim; few writers experienced quite as much death and private sorrow as Richardson, and no doubt these experiences influenced the somewhat sombre tone of his later writings.
In 1733 Richardson wrote The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum, urging young men to be diligent and self-denying. 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. 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.
Although Richardson's early writings—including the Vade Mecum—proved only moderately successful, Richardson's business sense was astoundingly acute, and during the 1730s he rapidly shot to the top of the publishing industry. Richardson joined, and soon found himself, headmaster, of the "Stationer's Company," the guild for all Englishmen involved in the book trade. He became known as one of the best printers in all of London, and as his fortune grew, he began to climb the social ladder as well. He purchased a country house and entertained intellectuals and friends that included Samuel Johnson, the actor Colley Cibber, and even the Speaker of the House of Commons, Arthur Onslow.
During these years Richardson began, ever so modestly, to write fiction and essays. At some point in the 1730s, he was commissioned to write a sequence of fictional letters, a form relatively popular among serial publications in its time. This collection has become known as Familiar Letters on Important Occasions. During this time, it is apparent, as Richardson's notebooks state, that he began to envision the possibility of writing a novel in the form of a sequence of letters. Utilizing a true story, he had heard elsewhere as the basis of his plot, Richardson began to write his novel, Pamela, in the winter of 1739, and the novel was published a year later when Richardson was 50 years old.
The plot of Pamela is quite simple. Pamela Andrews is a young maidservant in a wealthy household. The son of the household, Mr B., conceives a passion for her and repeatedly schemes with his servants to have his way with her. She protects her virtue successfully and B., moved in her favour when he reads the journal she has been keeping in secret, proposes to her. The two then live happily ever after.
The popularity of Pamela was mainly due to the effective technique of revealing the story through letters written by the protagonist. Because this was combined with the moralistic nature of the story, which made it acceptable for the century's rapidly growing middle class, the book became a publishing sensation. The epistolary form was an innovation that was a source of great pride for Richardson. Pamela thus helped reinvent a literary genre, and moreover, it did so in a way that aided its readers in the instruction of virtue. Nevertheless, many contemporary readers were shocked by the more graphic scenes and by some questionable behaviours of the characters; it was easy to regard Pamela, for example, as a scheming young woman trying to gain higher social status by making a nobleman marry her. Henry Fielding parodied Pamela twice: once anonymously using the same epistolary form in Shamela, and again with Joseph Andrews, which tells the story of Pamela's brother Joseph and his efforts to protect his virtue.
Richardson also wrote two later epistolary novels, Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Of the three, Clarissa has generally been the most highly regarded by critics; in it, Richardson uses the epistolary form with great effectiveness, creating characters that are psychologically convincing while reflecting on some of the most important moral questions of the eighteenth century. It is widely considered to be one of the greatest novels of the eighteenth century and a milestone in English literary fiction.
Sir Charles Grandison, published in 1753, was Richardson's attempt to create a male model of virtue. Many modern critics have found that he was less successful here, noting that Sir Charles is not a very interesting or sympathetic character and that his confident sense of virtue can be overly sentimental to the modern reader. In addition, the plot is relatively less eventful and the moral lessons less ambiguous than in Clarissa. However, in its own time, Sir Charles Grandison was a massive success in England.
Following the publication of Grandison, Richardson, already quite an old man, retired to his home outside of London and died in 1761.
Pamela:
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 protagonist, a young servant girl, is pursued by her master, Mr B., but maintains her virginity despite his repeated and ingenious efforts, until the would-be seducer, driven to desperation, marries her. This is Pamela’s virtue rewarded. The continuation of the novel in volume 2, a decided let-down, is virtually plotless, highly repetitive, and highlighted only by Mr 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. Labelled as “virtually unreadable” by one modern commentator, even Richardson’s most understanding critic biographers, 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 sermonizing 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.
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 Mr 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 Mr 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.”
Despite 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 memorable Ness: 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:
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 revise the text for publication). Almost a million words in length, the plot of Clarissa is relatively simple.
Other Works:
Novels:
Pamela in her Exalted Condition (1741–1761) – the sequel to Pamela
Letters and Passages Restored to Clarissa (1751)
The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1761)
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)
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
Works Cited:
Bloom, Harold, ed. Samuel Richardson. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Eaves, T. C. Duncan, and Ben D. Kimpel. Samuel Richardson: A Biography. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1971.
Golden, Morris. Richardson’s Characters. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963.
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