Samuel Richardson

1689-1761. English writer. Among his works there are three which are considered his master pieces, all of them written in the epistolary form: Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and the History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). He also made contributions in magazines and journals and worked as publisher and printer. Although he is well known for his literature, he also spent some time painting, which was his other, less known passion.

Early life and beginnings

Richardson was born in Derbyshire, in a family of middle-class tradesmen. He got his first opportunity to develop his abilities when he travelled to London to be apprentice of John Wilde, a great painter and draughtsman of that time. A family of painters called the Leakes took great sympathy for them, and their presses would be his future in the printing industry. In his professional life Richardson was committed to his work and this gave him great success, since his works were said to be written with pure passion and dedication. As his printing press grew in prestige he became an intellectual respected by many others, like 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.

His main works

Pamela

In 1740 he published Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, a story about a young woman who has to face the reality of the patriarchal world and overcome its many obstacles. 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 an imagined blend of the artful in some instances and the artless in some others. She is a 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. The point of discussion would be to consider first what is the notion of virtue at that time and what it really implied was quite complex, although social class was a good reason to be virtuous.

Clarissa

In 1744 Richardson wrote the novel Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady. He presents the heroine, Clarissa Harlowe, when she is discovering the concealed motives of her family, who would force her into a loveless marriage to improve their fortunes. Clarissa falls in love with Lovelace, a nephew of a quite rich Lord, who would grant both her happiness and that of her family. As the novel comes to its close, she is removed from the world of both the Harlowes and the Lovelaces, and becomes a destitute child of heaven, although it could be read in several ways. In providing confidants for his central characters and in refusing to find a place in the social structure into which to fit his heroine, Richardson made his greatest advances over Pamela. He was determined, as his postscript indicates, to write a novel that was also a tragedy and indeed was found more tragic than his previous heroine.

Sir Charles Grandison

In his third novel called The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), Richardson provides a hero who is a model of benevolence. He faces little that a good heart cannot remedy and is led to a dilemma that he has to solve: 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 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. 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.

Legacy

Richardson was a committed reviser of his own work, and the various editions of his novels differ greatly. Much of his revision was undertaken in a quite self-censoring response to criticism; the earliest versions of his novels are generally the more insightful and daring according to several critics. Richardson’s Pamela is often credited with being the first English novel (others name Defoe's Robinson Crusoe or Aphra Behn's Oronooko). 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 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. He is widely considered a true forerunner of the psychological novel in Europe.

Sources

An article by Jonathan Villar