Richardson and His Circle
SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689–1761), the first literary superstar, sent all Europe into convulsions of enthusiasm, suspense, boredom, grief, revulsion, and adoration. By 1800 his massive novels had been translated into at least eight languages. But critical opinion, then as now, was divided. 'I heartily despise him and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his works in a most scandalous manner,' Lady Mary Wortley Montagu confessed. Coleridge found Richardson's mind 'vile,' his novels «day-dreamy» and claustrophobic-an overheated sickroom compared to the breezy, open landscape of Henry Fielding's. Fielding himself jeered at the social-climbing pretensions of Richardson's first novel in a devastating parody, but dissolved into admiring tears over Clarissa. For Samuel Johnson, Fielding merely describes the face of a clock, whereas Richardson explores and explains its inner workings: 'There is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's, than in all Tom Jones.' This vision of Richardson as a great moralist and psychologist was shared, surprisingly, by some of the most radical figures of European literature. Though Voltaire hoped he would never be 'condemned to reread Clarissa,' Diderot vowed that, if poverty forced him to sell his books, he would keep only the Bible, Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and Richardson. Laclos, author of Les liaisons dangereuses, declared Clarissa 'le chef-d'oeuvre des romans,' a novel of 'utmost genius.' The Marquis de Sade agreed.
Diderot's enthusiasm for 'the divine Richardson' helps us to grasp just how revolutionary he seemed to his contemporaries. Diderot sens-73- es that the novel has been changed so irrevocably that the frivolous term roman no longer applies, though no new name has been found. What earlier moralists did with maxims, Richardson does with far more powerful materials-'actions' and 'images.' We regard his characters as real acquaintances, cry out to them, debate with them. Readers do not remain passive, but interact with the text, and the text in turn transforms its readers, mysteriously strengthening their impulse to do good and shun evil. Oddly enough, the novels of a starchy Puritanical Englishman become a «touchstone» for the Enlightenment philosophe, confirming his love of «Virtue» and his vision of a material universe troubled and energized by the clash of contradictions. What Diderot especially values is Richardson's ability to articulate the secrets of the unconscious, to 'bring the torch into the depths of the cavern,' to capture the 'dissonant tone' of a speaker concealing the truth, to express the struggles and divisions within families and even within a single individual. Especially compelling are his portraits of a wise and intelligent heroine whose every action is wrong (Clarissa) and a male protagonist (Lovelace) who combines every possible extreme of good and evil.
These qualities did not develop early in Richardson, whose conventional petit-bourgeois life has encouraged the view that he must have created his masterpieces by accident. Coleridge speaks for many readers when he admires the novels but recoils from 'so very vile a mind, so oozy, so hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent!' It is true that Richardson's work is heavily didactic, and includes such jewels as The Young Man's Pocket Companion (1734), which dictates strict rules to the apprentice and forbids him to attend any public entertainment except Lillo's London Merchant. It is true that Richardson's own life (until he began writing fiction at the age of fifty) seems unpromisingly 'middle class'-the son of a joiner, apprenticed to the (semi)respectable trade of printing, married his master's daughter, rose to be a prosperous publisher and printer to the Crown. Worse still, he grew uncommonly fat and conducted himself like Uriah Heep, 'a sly sinner, creeping along the very edges of the walks… afraid of being seen' (the portrait is Richardson's own, so we should suspect irony). Nevertheless, two episodes in the early life of the Good Apprentice suggest a strong narrative drive and an imagination inspired by secrets. First, he was excited and filled with 'strong desire' by the myth of the ring that makes its wearer invisible: 'I was a very sheepish boy, and thought I should make a very happy use of it on a multitude of occasions.' The invisibility con-74- ferred by fiction-all his novels pretend to be real letters, written in the grip of events and only later discovered by their 'editor'-would allow him to indulge this 'strong desire to be master' and to enjoy the «happy» results of shedding inhibitions and scruples. And second, he recalls that as a bashful thirteen-year-old (with a reputation for storytelling) he was employed to write love letters by 'the young Women of Taste and Reading,' who 'revealed to me their Love Secrets': 'I have been directed to chide, and even repulse… at the very time that the Heart of the Chider or Repulser was open before me, overflowing with Esteem and Affection, and the fair Repulser dreading to be taken at her Word.' In thus acting as a «Secretary» (in several senses), Richardson learned important lessons in the erotics of intimacy, the contradiction between words and feelings, and the power of writing for others.
The Novels Richardson's first full-length fiction clearly grows out of his «Secretarial» experience as a boy; Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) takes its cue from a volume of form letters he composed to help the semiliterate write and behave. In one of these Familiar Letters (eventually published in 1741), the father of a servant-girl 'on hearing of her Master's attempting her Virtue' orders his daughter home immediately, because to stay is to encourage him ('God grant that you have not already yielded to his base desires!'); in the next letter the daughter announces she has already left, intact. The story ends in a mere ten lines. But Richardson's mind obviously dwelt on what might happen if the girl did remain virtuous but did not in fact leave. The result is a lively and spontaneous novel told mostly in her own letters, supplemented by third-person narrative and by the journal she keeps after her abduction. Richardson starts with stock comedy characters (the pert but genteel fille de chambre, the lecherous squire) but invests them with an unprecedented moral seriousness, claiming for the lower- class heroine an ethical status hitherto granted in fiction only to the nobility; indeed, her strange name «Pamela» comes directly from the princess in Sir Philip Sidney's aristocratic romance Arcadia (1584). Pamela brings to life in minute-byminute descriptions her hesitations and terrors, her rationalizations for not leaving when she could, her struggles with her own heart as well as with Mr. B.'s arrogant if clumsy sexual harassment, her claustrophobia and suicidal impulses under house arrest, her attempts to conceive these -75- 'trials' as a God-given spiritual crisis, the dawning of a new respect in Mr. B.'s eyes, his conversion from Don Juan to Prince Charming, his struggles with the social ignominy of marrying a servant-girl, her adjustments to the role of social leader, their wedding, her difficult negotiations with snobbish relatives, and finally her triumphant handling of the discovery that her husband has an illegitimate daughter. The response was a tidal wave of lachrymose praise ('If all the Books in England were to be burnt, this Book, next the Bible, ought to be preserved'), followed by an undertow of mockery from those who found its subject trivial and its emotions overblown. Pamela became a modern industrial product, generating new editions with testimonials, murals in Vauxhall Gardens, critiques, parodies, translations, plays (one by Voltaire and two by Goldoni), engravings, six operas, a Heroic Poem, a pictorial fan, two waxworks, and several sequels tracing 'Pamela in High Life,' including one by Richardson himself (1741).
In Pamela Richardson had developed a new kind of domestic fiction from the structure of courtship-comedy, and in the follow-up (sometimes known as Pamela II) he attempts another kind of comedy, in which already familiar characters encounter the problems of married life in the fashionable world: the vices of the Town, the principles of education, the pros and cons of breast-feeding, the jealousy of the husband when the first baby arrives, the jealousy (and class insecurity) of the wife when Mr. B. takes up with an Italianate Countess. Many readers find the new improved Pamela-the genteel oracle of social propriety and slavish gratitude to a complacent husband-a poor substitute for the vivid unpolished «sauce-box» of the opening letters. Richardson's ear remains sharp in scenes involving conflict or absurdity, but the long passages of discussion in what he imagines to be the upper-class world manage to sound both mincing and turgid. Nevertheless, the postmarital parts of Pamela (the second half of the original volume 2, and the sequel added as volumes 3 and 4) deal seriously with a broad range of social issues, centered on the corruption and reform of the aristocracy and the tension between sexuality and social stability. Toward the end of part 2, for example, Pamela's circle discusses whether 'a Reform'd Rake makes the best Husband,' that is, whether the double standard should be tolerated, whether male sexual predation should be regarded as mere 'sowing wild oats' or seasoning while women were held to strict standards of chastity and ferociously punished if they strayed. Pamela denounces this
