The Columbia History of the British Novel

hypocrisy with great fervor, and yet (as -76- her friends immediately cry out) she herself is married to a reformed rake whom she extols as a godlike benefactor and 'Master.' Her reply, that Mr. B. was a dignified 'Gentleman of Sense' and not a common town rake, suggests both the inadequacies of Pamela and the genesis of Richardson's tragic masterpiece, Clarissa. For although Mr. B. is supposed to be a dashing aristocratic sensualist before his conversion, Richardson actually shows him as a confused adolescent, a Squire Booby (the cruel name given him in Fielding's parody Shamela). And when Richardson next attempted to create an upper-class libertine, this time successfully, he turned out to be an infinitely more dangerous character, indeed one of the most fascinatingly Satanic in literature: Robert Lovelace, the nemesis of Clarissa Harlowe.

Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, published in three cliffhanging installments between December 1747 and December 1748, vastly magnifies the resources of the epistolary novel. In this millionword collection, both the female victim and the male pursuer write their experiences 'to the moment'; each corresponds with strongly drawn confidant(e)s who become major characters in their own right, and with a throng of minor relatives, servants, and accomplices, all distinguished by their own manners of writing. Moreover, the letter itself-the physical object and the unique perspective it embodies-plays an even greater part in the action. Pamela's journal acts as a sexual symbol when she sews it into her underskirts, and as an agent of conversion when Mr. B. finally reads it, awestruck by its pathos and authenticity. But in Clarissa the story hinges at each stage on the various meanings of 'correspondence.' Clarissa dates her own downfall from her secret exchange of letters with Lovelace, when he is banished the house by her apoplectic father after a duel provoked by her equally irascible brother, a former college mate. Lovelace's spy network constantly intercepts and manipulates the letters of others. When Clarissa refuses a clandestine interview by the gate of her father's estate, Lovelace replaces the letter untouched so that she is forced to meet him in person-and she is duly abducted. When her confidante Anna Howe warns Clarissa that the respectable London house where Lovelace lodged her is in fact a brothel, and his friends actually highwaymen and confidence tricksters, the letter never reaches her; Lovelace captures it, edits it (marking each point with marginal index fingers to prod his revenge), and replaces the women's authentic letters with forgeries that serve his own plot. By such manipulations of word and appearance he baffles and torments -77- Clarissa, putting off the issue of marriage in the hope that she, like 'every woman' according to libertine doctrine, will sooner or later give way to her desire and become his whore. This tangle of deceit and «trial» continues up to 'the final Outrage,' when he tricks her back into the brothel, drugs her, and rapes her unconscious body. Rather than subsiding into rueful acceptance as he hoped, Clarissa disintegrates with a violence equal and opposite to his own; the room is filled with torn fragments of letters, scattered across the page in a typographical equivalent to her frenzy. Hereafter, in the novel's most surprising turn and the most controversial for readers in 1748, Lovelace loses all vestige of control over Clarissa's text, her body, her interpretation of the world. The ground shifts to religious tragedy as she, fully convinced of her «ruin» despite her inviolate will, prepares to waste away and die. In the process she gains a verbal and personal authority that had eluded her before. Lovelace continues his hysterical plotting, longing once again to capture female letters, dreaming that 'the Seal would have yielded to the touch of my warm finger… and the folds, as other plications have done, opened of themselves to oblige my curiosity.' But he cannot (or will not) grasp the true situation. When the anorexic heroine feels on the point of death, she sends him one last letter, finally tricking him as he has constantly deceived her: reading of her departure for 'her father's house,' the secular Lovelace assumes that she has finally lifted the ferocious curse her father laid on her after the abduction/elopement; he cannot recognize the biblical allusion and the massive pompe funèbre it ushers in. While the nineteen-year-old Clarissa expires in a halo of saintly rapture, and Mrs. Sinclair the brothelkeeper dies in hideous squalor, the alienated Lovelace slinks off to Europe, only to «expiate» his crime and embrace death in a suicidal duel with Clarissa's mysterious cousin Morden.

Both during and after this outpouring of fictional letters, Richardson himself engaged in an immense correspondence with literati, friends, and anonymous admirers, debating the ethics and the outcome of Clarissa. In a sense, this circle of (mostly female) writers and readers helped to generate the text itself, since Richardson made numerous changes in response to their criticisms. Over time the master printer built an extraordinary apparatus around his novel, to counteract what he took to be careless or perverse misinterpretations and to highlight those aspects that his friends found most improving. Clarissa was revised, expanded with original letters ('restored' from manuscript and -78- marked with special symbols), set in large print for the weak-eyed, fortified with footnotes explaining the wickedness of Lovelace, and supplemented with hundreds of pages describing the characters, summarizing all 537 letters (with the moral of each in italics), indexing those morals alphabetically, extracting the Maxims and Sentiments, and gathering the biblical passages that inspired the heroine's final days. Modern critics rejoice in Richardson's overanxious attempts to control the interpretation of his own book, since they suggest a split between the official morality preached by Clarissa and the «real» meaning of the text-a psychoanalytic truth about repressed sexuality, perhaps, or a political truth about patriarchy and class hierarchy, or a deconstructive truth about the inherent instability of all textual meaning. Certainly some of Richardson's later efforts suggest a panic or cover-up, particularly those highly visible footnotes and plot summaries that drive home character features that should have been conveyed wholly in the letters themselves. Having showed, he feels he must also tell. Many of his additions, however, did belong in the original manuscript and were suppressed from the first edition too timidly, following readers' criticism that he later overrode; one particularly demented fantasy (in which Lovelace plans to rape Anna Howe and her mother on a boating trip) was struck out on the advice of a young correspondent, but returned triumphantly in the third edition (volume 4, letter 42). And Richardson held fast to the grim essentials of the plot-the rape and Clarissa's death-in the face of almost universal protest.

The consultatory mode of authorship contributed most to Richardson's third novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1754) — his most popular with contemporary readers including Jane Austen, though few critics now recognize its substance. Richardson appealed widely for materials to incorporate into this pendant to Clarissa, the story of a good and beautiful man. Many scenes are set in Italy, where he had never been, and among the aristocracy, where he had never belonged (though, as he was proud to point out, he had never been to a masquerade or a brothel either, and still painted them convincingly from report). The knighterrant hero, who rescues the brilliant and beautiful Harriet Byron from a vile seducer on Hounslow Heath, turns out to have lived abroad and become involved with Lady Clementina della Porretta, a baroque saint driven insane by the conflict between her love for the Anglican Sir Charles and her fervent Catholicism. He is thus inhibited from acting upon his growing love for Harriet, and this impasse, seen largely -79- through Harriet's own vivid eyes, forms the central core of the narrative. Why is he mysteriously unhappy? Will he marry the magnificent Clementina once he has helped bring her back to health? If not, can Harriet accept a man who frankly loves two women? Around this core grows a mass of subsidiary narratives, ranging in tone from slapstick comedy (as Sir Charles's boisterous sister torments her new husband), through feminist satire (as Harriet rejects alternative lovers), to operatic melodrama, when Clementina runs mad or when Olivia, another Italian noblewoman, pulls a knife on the hero. (Richardson amused himself by dividing the Dramatis Personae into 'Men,' 'Women,' and 'Italians.') Now that he has left behind the claustrophobic unity of Clarissa, he feels free to explore all the 'natural passions' that spring up within the Grandison circle-that loose group of orphaned siblings and protégés that replaces the conventional family: Charlotte Grandison's love for her brother, so strong that it makes all other men seem worthless; the fervent embraces of Harriet and Sir Charles's fifteen-year-old ward Emily; the more-than-brotherly love between Sir Charles and Clementina's crippled brother Jeronymo. The narrative mode is equally varied. Richardson experiments with scenes written as drama within letters written to the moment, flashbacks from older letters, direct narrative by an elderly clergyman, even the «minutes» taken by a concealed stenographer. But the letter always remains open and transparent, designed to be read by the whole group,in marked contrast to the deadly secrecy that shrouds almost all communication in Clarissa.

If Pamela is comedy and Clarissa tragedy, then Grandison is clearly romance, with its paragon lovers and its meandering episodic plot (Richardson did not know from one volume to the next what he would do with the story, whereas in writing Clarissa the terrible conclusion had always been in his view). But it is a thoroughly up-to-date romance, set not in some supernatural realm but in a polite and constitutional society. Wherever possible, tears are shed instead of blood-and in prodigious quantities; even the ex-villain Sir Hargrave manages a small flood, and the good characters seem to have tear ducts as infinite as their nobility. The breadth of Grandison allowed Richardson to tackle what he had attempted in Pamela II, an encyclopedic range of problems germane to the life of a new