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SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Samuel Richardson [E1] [E2] [I1] [F1] [F2] [ES1] [ES2] was born in Derbyshire in 1689 of a humble family. He received little education and at the age of seventeen he was sent to London and apprenticed to a printer. Having married his employer’s daughter, some years later he was able to set up his own printing house, which became one of the largest and lucrative in London. Until the age of fifty he led an industrious life, typical of an ambitious middle-class tradesman.
When he was fifty, he discovered his ability as a novelist by accident, as he was asked to write a volume of model letters to be imitated by semi-literate country people on various occasions in their correspondence. Some of them were specifically intended for maid girls providing instructions on how they could avoid the potential dangers of their male masters and resist them. While preparing the letters, he realized that some of them could easily be arranged into a complete novel and developed the story of a young maid who is harassed by her master. Therefore he decided to give up the work he had been commissioned to do and he quickly wrote a four-volume novel, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740-41), the first of the three novels he produced. Its was a great success, like the two novels which followed, Clarissa (1747-48) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54).
After that, Richardson wrote no more novels and died in 1761 in London.
At a formal level, Richardson was one of the most innovative and influential writers of his time, developing a new genre with the EPISTOLARY NOVEL that provided new ways of revealing the human character and of dealing with the conflicts between the new, rich (honest) English merchant class and the (corrupt) aristocracy.
Richardson adopted the form of letters that various characters write to each other to describe what is happening to them and to record their feelings and thoughts about their personal experiences moment by moment in all his three novels:
- PAMELA, OR VIRTUE REWARDED (1740-41) in four volumes. It is a collection of letters written by a servant girl, Pamela Andrews, to her parents. These letters show how Pamela has to defend herself from the advances of her mistress’s son, who, after many unsuccessful attempts to seduce her, falls in love with her and marries her. The novel is aimed at teaching that virtue has its reward, as in the end Pamela, who has resisted her master, becomes rich and obtains the social position that, according to the puritan middle-class ideals of the age, was the highest achievement in life. In 1742 a second part was added to the novel, showing Pamela as a happy and virtuous wife.
- CLARISSA HARLOWE (1748-48) in seven volumes, making it the longest novel in the English language. Clarissa Harlowe is a beautiful and virtuous middle-class girl who is torn between her duties as a daughter and the love for an unscrupulous aristocrat.. Her virtue will be finally defeated. Actually she runs away from her family to put herself under the protection of the man she loves, thus rebelling against her parents and breaking a precise code of behaviour. The heroine is punished for this rebellion; she is drugged and raped and dies of shame and grief repenting her rebellion and looking forward to a reward after death.
- SIR CHARLES GRANDISON (1753-1754) in seven volumes.
It is centred around a man who, after many vicissitudes, is able to marry the woman he is in love with. He embodies all the qualities and virtues of an enlightened and generous gentleman, but this counterpart of Pamela and Clarissa is so perfect that he seems unreal and unattractive.
To conclude Richardson’s epistolary technique was extremely important, since it had the same function as the dramatic soliloquy (in which a character reveals his thoughts aloud without addressing a listener) and anticipated the stream-of-consciousness technique in modern novels (device used to record a character’s continuous flow of ideas and feelings in his mind).
Moreover Richardson’ s novels shared a moralizing purpose, as they tried to amuse in order to instruct.
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