SOURCE: "Reputation and Influence," in Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist, The University of North Carolina Press, 1936, pp. 266-83.

[In the following excerpt, McKillop surveys eighteenth-century criticism of Richardson's novels.]

Literary history has confirmed the claims of Fielding and Richardson to be considered the founders of a "new species of writing," and sweeping statements about the influence of both men can be made with some show of justification. But it is uncritical to treat later eighteenth century fiction as merely the lengthened shadows of the two great novelists, to credit all the humor and critical realism to Fielding, all the sentimentalism and feminine touches to Richardson. It is safer to content ourselves with a brief study of reputations, rather than to try to weigh the imponderables that make up what we call literary influence. Although reputation and influence are of course connected, there is a wider gap between them than is always realized; an author may be universally known and admired, and yet his work may not be imitated to much purpose. In the case of Richardson, the highly individual, even abnormal quality of his work contrasts curiously with his wide-spread popular appeal. Despite the persistence of currents which could be called Richardsonian, he remained, perhaps fortunately, the dinosaur of English novelists.

The most striking thing about Richardson's fame is of course its international extent. More attention has been paid to his enormous vogue in France and Germany than to the renown he enjoyed in his own country. The continental Richardsonians were often more extreme and so more picturesque; in Great Britain we think of him as responsible for the countless dull volumes written by the obscure people, mostly women, who plied the novelist's trade between 1750 and the first quarter of the nineteenth century. But in spite of these depressing associations it seems natural to begin with Richardson at home. It has already been suggested that we have little reason to believe that he was admired indiscriminately and invariably by the English public. Pamela did not fully establish his fame among fastidious readers—it took Clarissa to do that—and Grandison did not fully sustain it. After the publication of Grandison, indeed, there were signs that his reputation had suffered a check, and about the year of his death, 1761, his fame in England was somewhat below its high point of a decade before. Booksellers' records of sales of copyrights seem to show that in the sixties Smollett's novels were commercially about as valuable as Richardson's, and that in the next decade the copyrights of the major novels of Richardson, Smollett, and Fielding (with the exception of Amelia) were valued at about £70 a volume for the standard editions in duodecimo.¹ A list called "Books Printed by the Booksellers of London and Westminster in different Sizes and Prices; of which there remains a large Stock on Hand: With the Number of Years an Impression of each is in selling," to be dated about 1774, tells us that the duodecimo editions of Tom Jones and Grandison were four years in selling, Pamela and Smollett's Don Quixote five, and Clarissa six. Perhaps the most surprising implication here is that Grandison was more popular than we might expect, Clarissa somewhat less popular. If we turn the figures of a sale of March, 1792, into pounds per volume, we find Tom Jones ahead with a figure of 28; others are grouped thus: Grandison 16, Pamela 151/2, Joseph Andrews 13, Peregrine Pickle 121/2, Clarissa 111/2.

It seems safe to conclude that, as far as the general public was concerned, Richardson never regained the position he held about 1750, when he had first claim to the attention of almost every reader, frivolous or serious, or at least divided honors only with Fielding. The reaction after Grandison has already been noted. A writer in the Imperial Magazine for 1760 hazards some censure of Richardson's novels, though he adds that this unfavorable opinion is "very different from that which is generally received."² The novelist's death in 1761 called forth tributes from Lady Bradshaigh, Elizabeth Carter, and John Hawkesworth, personal friends, and the feelings of many humble admirers must have been expressed in a letter to the London Chronicle signed "Philotimos," suggesting that some eminent sculptor be employed "in memorial of our justly admired Richardson."³ William Shenstone was interested in the possibility of getting out a memorial edition.⁴ There was no official eulogy in Great Britain, no funeral oration such as Diderot's Éloge in France, but this may have been due to Richardson's modest social station and to the secondary esteem in which prose fiction was held by academic people. Of the four great novelists of the eighteenth century, only Sterne was copiously and publicly mourned.

With the multiplication of novels and circulating libraries, and particularly with the rise of sentimentalism, the moralistic criticism of fiction was sometimes directed even against Richardson. An extreme example is found in the New and General Biographical Dictionary (1762):

His Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, have been universally read; and they shew a wonderful power over the passions, in which his strength chiefly lay. His purpose was to promote virtue and moral perfection: and hence, like many other writers, who have been animated with this noble zeal, he was led to describe human nature, rather as he wished her to be, than as she really is; not as she appears in her present depraved state, but as she would appear reformed and purified: and we may venture to say, that whoever shall form their judgment of the human kind from Mr. Richardson, and affix to it all those effeminate and fantastic ideas of sentiment, delicacy, and refinement, which his descriptions are too apt to suggest, will find themselves little qualified for commerce with the world. The truth is, this ingenious writer, with a view of exalting the nature of man, has adopted Shaftesbury's system of it, as the foundation of his works: while others have adopted that of Hobbes, with a view of degrading it. But have either of them philosophised rightly? is human nature either so good as Shaftesbury, or so bad as Hobbes, hath described it? perhaps not. Perhaps it is more of the mixed kind; hath in it much of good and much of evil, which prevail in different persons according to the temperament and constitution of each: and this being in reality the case, it should seem that they who, like Fielding, have represented it thus, have represented it the most truly, and the most like itself….

After all, it is to be feared, that the writings of this ingenious person have not always had the good effects he intended; but on the contrary, instead of improving a natural, have made many an artificial character: have helped to fashion many a pretty gentleman, who all sentimental, delicate, and refined, has affected to despise his fellow-creatures, as a tribe of low, gross, uncivilized animals, and of a species plainly different, when compared with the finished and transcendant superiority of himself.⁵

The quixotic reader whose illusions have been fostered by the novels of Richardson now makes an appearance. In a Smollettian novel, The Peregrinations of Jeremiah Grant (1763), we read of a curious sea-captain who "was well versed in romances, and had conceived a remarkable veneration for all Mr. Richardson's performances; Clarissa Harlowe was his admiration; Pamela pleased him much; but Sir Charles Grandison was, in his opinion, the perfection of human invention. It was the last mentioned character that he had made the model of his conduct."⁶ The author of the Batchelor thus describes a rich widow who is writing a novel:

Yes, I have formed a most delightful one on our courtship and nuptials, in a Series of Letters, in the manner of Clarissa, Grandison, Danby, Eliza, Lady Caroline S——, and others. I have interspersed the whole with a most charming mixture of agreeable adventures, and pleasing distresses: I have drawn you as a Sir Charles, and I am a Harriot Byron: You are the best of men, and I the best of women: a lady Clementina runs mad for you, and I blush and glow in the cedar parlour.⁷

Such comment as this was inspired particularly by Grandison. Criticism of the faultless Sir Charles became one of the commonplaces of talk about novels, and was glibly repeated until it obscured the importance of the book as a pioneer novel of manners.⁸

Nevertheless the currents and eddies from the sixties to the eighties were on the whole in Richardson's favor. Professor Blanchard throughout the early chapters of his Fielding the Novelist (1926) has produced abundant evidence to show that Richardson enjoyed a privileged position in the official criticism of the time, although he has perhaps not given weight enough to the evidence that Richardson and Fielding were alike admired and read in the second half of the century by a public which did not believe that if we cleave to the one we must despise the other. Thus in The Stage-Coach (1753), written by a disciple of Richardson's:

The conversation turned upon the prevailing taste for novels. Mr. Manly said he had never read any thing of that kind, but the works of Cervantes, till lately he had been persuaded to peruse Clarissa, and some of the Covent-Garden justice's performances; and though he formerly had thought such fictions below his notice, he was now not ashamed to aver, there were some, which, if attended to, and not run over meerly to kill time, were capable of yielding profit with amusement, particularly those he had mention'd.⁹

On the other hand, the author of The History of Charlotte Summers (1750), an imitation of Fielding, does not take amiss the melancholy of Richardson, though he exaggerates it:

His Sighs, his Tears, and Groans guided his Pen, and every Accent appears but the Picture of his own sad Heart, that beats with tender Sympathy for the imaginary Distress of his favourite Fair. Thus both these great Men while they were writing for the Entertainment of the Public, were pleasing themselves in their different Tastes; Tom Jones was pleased when he laughed, and Clarissa when she cried.¹⁰

James Ridley's James Lovegrove (1761) praises both Fielding's "inimitable Works" and Richardson's "System of Ethicks."¹¹ The youthful Gibbon describes them as the two great geniuses who in their different ways have carried the art of the novel to its highest possible degree.¹² A writer of 1772 gives them preëminence in "comic romance" and "delineation of character" respectively, and boldly compares them both with Shakespeare.¹³ This is exactly the position taken by James Beattie in his elaborate essay "On Fable and Romance," save that the place next to Shakespeare is reserved for Fielding.¹⁴ It was not Richardson against Fielding, but Richardson and Fielding against all comers. In the long run both novelists actually profited by the multiplication of fiction and by the vogue of the newer forms of sentimentalism which came in with Sterne and Rousseau in the sixties. Tristram Shandy and the Nouvelle Héloïse, far from superseding Clarissa and Tom Jones, quickened interest in them. Critical discussion of fiction, which had been scanty from 1740 to 1760, now became more frequent and more elaborate. The long comparison between Richardson and Rousseau in the Critical Review for September, 1761, was translated by Suard in the Journal étranger, and struck the keynote for much later criticism:

If we take a nearer view of the two admired performances in question [Clarissa and the Nouvelle Héloïse] we shall find Rousseau's infinitely more sentimental, animated, refined, and elegant; Richardson's, more natural, interesting, variegated, and dramatic. The one every where appears the easy, the other, the masterly writer; Rousseau raises your admiration, Richardson solicits your tears; the former is sometimes obscure; the latter too minute.¹⁵

The Monthly, which had been inclined to belittle Richardson, tried in this important case to hold the balance true:

Though Mr. Rousseau falls short in many respects of Mr. Richardson, whose manner he has imitated, yet in others he so far excels him, as to appear himself an inimitable original. There are many persons who do not scruple to say, they admire the character of Eloisa, beyond that of Clarissa; and we will ourselves venture to pronounce, that by whomsoever the romance bearing that title is read with profit or delight, this of Eloisa will be no less so.¹⁶

English criticism seldom gave Rousseau precedence as emphatically as in the following passage from Anecdotes of Polite Literature (1764):

Julie is the capital piece of Rousseau's charming pen, and one of the finest compositions of the kind ever published in any language: it is thought he had Richardson in his eye when he planned it, and, if that is true, he has infinitely surpassed his model: it is difficult for a man of taste to praise our countryman more than he deserves; but surely the tediousness of his plans, his trifling, verbose language, and his dwelling in such a tiresome manner on minute, but uninteresting particulars, greatly lessen the value of his novels.¹⁷

More discriminating is the antithesis in an article of 1766:

Richardson is more pathetic; Rousseau more florid; Richardson's sentiments are more just and natural, Rousseau's more frequent and dazzling. Richardson is tedious, Rousseau is paradoxical; the one raises a strong interest by a succession of pathetic strokes, the other masters all our hearts by a single blow.¹⁸

For many eighteenth century readers, of course, such distinctions were too subtle, and they were ready to bracket together "the soft eloquence of a Rousseau, who so strongly has described the tender passions;—the sweetness of a Rowe's numbers; [and] the heartfelt, refined language, of the great master of the human passions, Richardson."¹⁹

But with the advance of sentimentalism many were found to share Johnson's opinion that while Rousseau was a dangerous fellow, Richardson was an exponent of sound morality. Here, for once, Thomas Gray agreed with Johnson.²⁰ A clergyman might be expected to rebuke ladies who "prefer a novel drawn with the luxuriant pencil of Rousseau, to the chastest and most charming touches of a Richardson."²¹ In comparison with Sterne, Mackenzie, and the author of The Sorrows of Werter, guardians of the public morals looked on Richardson as a representative of sturdy old-fashioned virtue. From Philadelphia to Berlin he had a certain patriarchal right to be acclaimed the master of didactic fiction. The advice of Madame de Beaumont, that daughters should read Clarissa as an initiation in virtue, might have come from the novelist's own circle, or from admirers in Germany or America.²² The opinion of the German poet Zachariä, that the ideal maiden would read almost no novels but Richardson's, might have been echoed in many places and languages:

In the hands of the educators his work was often cut down to petty dimensions. Madame de Cambon's Kleene Grandison (1782) was taken into English by Mary Wollstonescraft as Young Grandison (1790) and adapted by Berquin in his Petit Grandisson. The Paths of Virtue Delineated (1756), a condensation of the three novels, was translated into German as Die Wege der Tugend (1765). By 1769 Francis Newbery had brought out shilling versions of Pamela, Clarissa, and Grandison, designed to afford moral reading for the young, although no doubt they made more than a narrowly didactic appeal to the readers of chapbooks. Such abridgments were particularly popular in America during the last years of the eighteenth century, and were frequently reprinted by the booksellers of Philadelphia, Wilmington, Norristown, New York, Boston, Worcester, and Hartford.

Those who read Clarissa and Grandison as conduct-books often indulged, of course, in the dangerous delights of sentiment,²⁴ but the official doctrine from Madame de Genlis to Hannah More was that Richardson's virtuous characters represented "the triumph of religion and reason over the passions."²⁵ An irresponsible person like Treyssac de Vergy might write a story of extravagant and fatal love, and, in the character of editor, say of himself, "Of the PASSIONS he has written with the pen of an OVID, of the FEELINGS that of RICHARDSON."²⁶ But he was a French adventurer writing in English; the moral spokesmen of the British public were ready to repudiate any such alliance of the passions and the feelings (or "sentiments"). In the earlier version of her "Sensibility," Hannah More points out that hostility to sentimentalism is not hostility to Richardson. Speaking of true feeling, she says:

'Tis not to melt in tender Otway's fires;
'Tis not to faint, when injur'd Shore expires;
'Tis not because the ready eye o'erflows
At Clementina's, or Clarissa's woes.

Forgive, O richardson! nor think I mean,
With cold contempt, to blast thy peerless scene:
If some faint love of virtue glow in me,
Pure spirit! I first caught that flame from thee.²⁷

It is significant that in the revised version of this poem the tribute to Richardson is dropped, and in its place we read of the feminine devotee

Who thinks feign'd sorrows all her tears deserve,
And weeps o'er Werter while her children starve.²⁸

Even the sentimentalists wanted to maintain discipline, and seldom let themselves go as far as Alexander Thomson did in his vision of Richardson, Rousseau, and Goethe in the "Vale of Pity":

Full in the midst a sable coffin stood
On which reclin'd the Priest of Virtue lay;
Of all that e'er essay'd the melting mood,
Who rul'd the heart with most despotic sway,

'Twas he, who told so well the touching tale
Of proud bologna'S melancholy maid,
And taught the world clarissa'S fate to wail,
By tyrant force and hellish fraud betray'd.

Two pensive pupils at his feet were laid,
Who drew sweet pictures of domestic life;
Whose art in Virtue's tend'rest robe array'd
The forms of wolmar'S and of albert'S wife.

The friend of julia, from her soul refin'd,
Obtain'd a balm to soothe his am'rous woe;
While here no rest could werter'S spirit find,
But rush'd indignant to the shades below.²⁹

Usually there was an uneasy feeling that readers could not afford such indulgences, but the defence was sometimes set up that idealized characters were best for the conscience as well as for the imagination. The didactic value of sheer fiction was emphasized. Thus the youthful Canning and the sedate Maria Edgeworth considered Sir Charles Grandison to be a better example for youth than a man of flesh and blood.³⁰ Martin Sherlock's extreme eulogy exalted Richardson for setting forth perfect characters.³¹ Richardson's future biographer, Anna Laetitia Aikin, praised the delicate idealization of Clarissa, but suggested that she was too prudent and rational to inspire full sympathy.³² When critical opinion began to turn against Richardson the expressed objection often was, not that his moral system was low, but that it was fastidious and impractical, not that he described hypocrites and self-deceivers, but impossible paragons of virtue. The feelings of many readers may be given in the words of Burns's letter to Dr. John Moore, February 28, 1791:

Original strokes, that strongly depict the human heart is your & Fielding's province beyond any other Novellist, I have ever perused.—Richardson indeed might perhaps be excepted; but unhappily, his Dramatis personae are beings of some other world; & however they may captivate the unexperienced, romantic fancy of a boy or a girl, they will ever, in proportion as we have made human nature our study, disgust our riper minds.³³

The objection was made again and again that Clarissa and Sir Charles were impossibly idealized. On this ground Cumberland censured Richardson, and on this ground Anna Seward and Percival Stockdale replied to Cumberland.³⁴ Jane West, herself a writer of anti-sentimental didactic fiction, recognized the growth of this feeling against Richardson:

It has lately been denied, that Richardson painted manners as they really were; his moral excellence will, however, preserve him a place in the esteem of every well-principled reader; and his pathetic and descriptive powers will enchain attention, while his piety must transfuse some devout sentiments into the most cold and worldly bosom. You will observe, that I confine this commendation to his Clarissa and Grandison. Fielding and Smollett preferred the exhibition of the grotesque and depraved part of our species: such almost intuitive knowledge of the human heart as the former possessed, combined with the morality and pathos of Richardson, would have formed the desideratum in this class of literature.³⁵

But deference to Richardson was becoming perfunctory, as we see in a novel by the Misses Purbeck, Neville Castle (1802), where a character gives her reasons for preferring Fanny Burney and Sophia Lee to Richardson and Fielding:

Richardson, it is true, has some passages that are above all praise; he is the only writer who in the disguise of a novel, has powerfully enforced the great truths of Christianity; and no one I think can read the character of Grandison, the conduct of Clementina, and particularly the death of Clarissa, without receiving essential benefit. I am also willing to pay a just applause to the talents of Fielding, but Miss Burney has in a great degree, at least in point of morals, all the merit of the former, without those trifling defects which now render his works too little read and attended to; and all the humour of the latter without his coarseness and indelicacy.³⁶

Over against the somewhat stereotyped comments on Richardson's idealization and Christian principles developed the objections to his moral and social code raised by those who read his books in the light of the manners of a later generation. Writers on education sometimes qualified their praise by pointing out that the fascinating Lovelace might teach the wrong lessons to ingenuous readers.³⁷ Going farther than this, Catherine Macaulay Graham was shocked to discover that the dubious chastity of Pamela, the incorrect and perverse behavior of Clarissa, and the pompous virtue of Sir Charles made the books unfit for the perusal of the young,³⁸ and Laetitia Matilda Hawkins found that Clarissa's piety was not enough to make up for "the brothel and the beastliness."³⁹ Charles Dibdin, granting Richardson's "astonishing genius," thought he had done great harm by setting up exaggerated and unsound characters for the imitation of minor scribblers.⁴⁰ Such prejudices made it impossible for many readers to take advantage of certain more subtle critical ideas which were in the air. William Godwin's vigorous and acute reëxamination of the whole question of didactic fiction gets closer to reality; he distinguishes between the overt moral of a work and its tendency, "the actual effect it is calculated to produce upon the reader," which "cannot be completely ascertained but by the experiment." As for Richardson, neither Lovelace nor Grandison "is eminently calculated to produce imitation, but it would not perhaps be adventurous to affirm that more readers have wished to resemble Lovelace, than have wished to resemble Grandison." This, however, does not settle the question, and Godwin's conclusion is that "the power of books in generating virtue, is probably much greater than in generating vice."⁴¹

Commentators could give Richardson his due only when they got free of the interminable debate about good and bad examples in fiction. An enthusiastic novelist of 1785 tries to have it both ways by admitting and defending Richardson's idealization and at the same time dwelling on his power in psychology and manners:

"Fielding takes the world as he finds it; exhibits with infinite humour ludicrous scenes, low dialogues, ridiculous and infamous characters, and is content to amuse and divert; for, upon my honour, I have not penetration enough to discover his moral intention. Richardson takes a higher aim; attempts to amend the heart as well as amuse the fancy, and exhibits human nature as it ought to be; sets before his readers as perfect copies, as he thinks consistent with humanity, and endeavours to awaken a virtuous emulation; he presents likewise a variety of characters in a more common style, most of them good, all of them varied, and throughout exceedingly well supported.—His conversation pieces are inimitable; spirited, witty and sensible; and every distinction of character nicely preserved—"

"Good God! Lady Charlton," interrupted Charlotte, "who would have thought such an old-fashioned author had been your favourite! Why, one runs the hazard of having one's taste called in question by ever mentioning his Clarissa, or Sir Charles Grandison." "That person must be void of both taste and sentiment, who can read either with dislike, my dear,"

"Well, I don't know—I have not read them since I was quite a girl—I remember I liked them exceedingly at the time; but I have heard Sir Charles so ridiculed for his virtue, and Clarissa for her prudery, that I have not looked into them since—but I am determined now to give them another reading."⁴²

Later Charlotte Smith fairly described the strength and the limitations of Richardson's art as compared with the new Gothic spirit:

It is easier, I believe, to write an Arabian tale, with necromancers and genii, than to collect, as Richardson does, a set of characters acting and speaking so exactly as such people so circumstanced would act and speak in real life, that we almost doubt whether the scenes and the actors are merely imaginary. It is true, that the minuteness of description, to which this powerful deception is in a great degree owing, renders some of the letters excessively tedious; but the pleasure that Richardson's writings still afford, though the manners are so changed, and taste has undergone so many revolutions, proves that his knowledge of the human heart, and his adherence to nature, have charms that make us overlook the fid-fad sort of caquet which sometimes fatigues us.⁴³

Hazlitt disregarded and Coleridge opposed the official educational pronouncements on Richardson, and in their reaction from the sterile formulas of moralistic critics of fiction they developed a view of the subject that can still help to bring the novels to life in the twentieth century. But for all their discrimination and subtlety they could not save Richardson. Active indignation died down as the official defence of the novelist was abandoned, and people were content to label him quaint, archaic, and dull.

To revert to an earlier period, the situation is somewhat different when we turn from the sermons of Dr. James Fordyce⁴⁴ or the verdicts of Dr. Johnson to the fiction actually written in the generation after 1750. A minor novelist could not write pure Richardson. Much of Pamela was low, much of Grandison tedious, and to undertake such a protracted tragedy as Clarissa was to attempt the bow of Ulysses. Richardson had pushed to the farthest possible point the subjects he had made his own. Plots dealing with ill-starred love-affairs, mésalliances, and abductions were scaled down and wrought into facile combinations of sentiment, humor, and melodrama. The minor novelists and their patrons wanted quick and easy effects. Professor James R. Foster has helped to clear up this obscure chapter in English fiction by showing that the so-called Richardsonian novel yields more and more to French influence after 1760, and in the attempt to find a short cut to pity and terror swings from domesticity and manners to sensibility and intrigue.⁴⁵ Miss J. M. S. Tompkins, however, while she underestimates the specific indebtedness to French fiction, rightly dwells on the persistence through the third quarter of the century of the patterns established by the four major novelists.⁴⁶ From 1750 to 1760 direct imitations of Fielding and Smollett are numerous, epistolary novels very few; in the next decade the letter-form becomes quite common, but it expresses a more trivial view of life than Richardson's. Although Mrs. Frances Sheridan in her Sidney Biddulph tries to resume the problems and methods of the Richardsonian novel, she succeeds only in heaping incoherent and irrational disasters on her devoted heroine. The experience of the author of The Benevolent Man: Or, The History of Mr. Belville (1775) is significant: he sets out to write a "serious and moral" work with a tragic ending to be justified by the Postscript to Clarissa, but at the beginning of his second volume he regretfully announces: "Thus am I obliged to alter my plan, and to make Belville and Eloisa happy at last; nor can a conformity to nature, and the example of the author of Clarissa support me, against my friends' more weighty arguments."⁴⁷ Richard Griffith in his Triumvirate (1764) satirically proposes a supremely distressing work in nine volumes, uniting Clarissa and Biddulph.⁴⁸ More typical is Charlotte Lennox's Harriot Stuart (1751), which uses the skeleton of the Clarissa plot, but goes on to romantic adventure in the American wilderness; or The History of Wilhelmina Susannah Dormer (1759), which shows that when the psychology has been subtracted from a Richardsonian plot, only sensationalism remains, or The Auction (1760), in which two libertines successively lay traps for the heroine.

But there was also the imperfect development of what we may call the light Richardsonian novel, which at its best avoided extravagance and sensational plotting, and worked with considerable skill and humor on the border line between psychology and manners. The models for this kind of work were the letters of Anna Howe, and the small talk of Harriet Byron and Charlotte Grandison. An early attempt to compose lively letters "in Imitation of an admirable Writer of the present Age" is found in the second part of John Kidgell's The Card (1755). Sukey Paget finds the Night Thoughts, Paradise Lost, and Clarissa dreary reading, and enters merrily into the fashionable life of Tunbridge Wells; nevertheless she remarks to her correspondent: "You and I write like Clarissa Harlowe, and Miss Howe, only not totally in the same Strain—but in this, I believe, we all four agree, that next to the Conversation of a Friend is her Correspondence."⁴⁹ In the long run it was Grandison rather than Clarissa that showed the possibility of a prolonged study of everyday manners and character. An entry in Thomas Green's Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature makes an important distinction:

L., very acutely and perhaps justly, ascribed the superior popularity of this work [Grandison] over the Clarissa (which he regarded as much the more masterly performance), to its enforcing rather the lesser manners, which form the charm and safeguard of civilized life, than the higher morals, engrafted on the fiercer passions.⁵⁰

One of the great achievements of eighteenth century fiction was the creation of a world in which the serious and the humorous are naturally connected. Even Richardson, though he is not counted among the English humorists, can carry his characters from grave to gay with great technical skill. One mark of his less successful followers is the clumsiness with which they alternate the "lesser manners" and the "fiercer passions." Thus the heroine of Sophia Lee's Life of a Lover is abducted, imitates the pen-knife scene in Clarissa, and then tries to laugh it off:

Hardly can I forbear smiling now at the recollection of the scene. Imagine me, my dear, with my hair loose over my shoulders; my bonnet half off; one hand wrapt in a bloody handkerchief, and the other pointing my 'new-fashioned dagger,' as he sneeringly called it; while, to appearance, not a creature meant to attack me.—Can you conceive any thing more grotesque?⁵¹

At times the minor novelists tried to treat life lightly and critically, but they were betrayed again and again by cheap sentiment, theatrical plots, and the simpering gentility of the underbred. When Fanny Burney brought true wit and intelligence to the task, she scored a great triumph. Her independence of current fiction has probably been exaggerated; Evelina is the most brilliant example of a kind of novel which had been trying to get itself realized for twenty years. Immediately after the publication of Grandison, relatively light imitations of Richardson began to be written. It has recently been shown that in 1757 Miss Anna Meades submitted to the novelist a story in letters which he revised with some care and which was published in 1771 under the editorship of Thomas Hull as The History of Sir William Harrington, described as "revised and corrected by the late Mr. Richardson."⁵² This performance is prophetic in its close yet superficial imitation of Richardson's themes and persons: the imitation Lovelace is married off to the girl he had tried to seduce; the rakes of Clarissa and the sprightly correspondents of Grandison reappear, and are compared again and again to their originals. A novelist of 1758, who already had The Stage-Coach and Lucy Wellers to her credit and who got Richardson himself to subscribe to her new book, put the situation thus:

She hoped to produce something like a CLARISSA, or a GRANDISON: but nothing came of it but TheBROTHERS. She need not however enter into so disadvantageous a comparison. She did not aim at making a perfect Character in either sex, an hero or heroine which had been already touched, and finished 'beyond hope of imitation'; but to pursue the same honest intention of promoting the interest of good-manners and amiable dispositions by a story of common, though not vulgar, life.⁵³

In 1760 the author of Louisa; Or, Virtue in Distress says in her Preface:

I have observed that most of our modern novels abound with a Lady G: the great Mr. Richardson form'd a compleat plan, which all his followers have run into: can any one be blamed for following so excellent a pattern? I myself am not blameless in this respect, since I have introduced a lively character.⁵⁴

It was in vain that Frances Brooke later professed to reject the Richardsonian plot when she wrote in The Excursion (1777):

He cautioned her, not against the giants of modern novel, who carry off young ladies by force in postchaises and six with the blinds up, and confine free-born English women in their country houses, under the guardianship of monsters in the shape of fat housekeepers, from which durance they are happily released by the compassion of Robert the butler: but against worthless acquaintance, unmerited calumny, and ruinous expence.⁵⁵

or that Miss Belville, the heroine of The Husband's Resentment (1776), wrote to her friend:

Have you not wondered what was become of me all this while? Run away with, at least! Faintings, sleepy Potions, Threats, Promises, Confinement; such pretty Adventures would my Fanny's romantic Imagination invent for her Selena. Ah! no such Matter, my Dear; there are but few such enterprising Knight-Errants now-a-days; few spirited Lovelaces; our modern Libertines are quite in a different Stile, so that your Belville has very little chance of imitating your favourite Clarissa.⁵⁶

The novelists could not live up to such sentiments; they professed a judiciousness which they did not really exercise. Incongruous and sensational tragedy sometimes emerges from a mild series of letters, or the heroine may be subjected to the ordeal of Clarissa or Clementina, but saved from a tragic fate. The plots of Clarissa and Grandison, less often of Pamela, are slavishly reproduced and combined. All stories of seduction and abduction inevitably remind us of Richardson after the middle of the century;⁵⁷ and many an obscure scribbler might have exclaimed with the author of High Life (Dublin, 1768): "Oh! for the pen of a Richardson, to paint the charming scene!"⁵⁸ Examples are of course innumerable, but early American fiction affords a particularly striking and simple case: when Hannah Webster Foster put into the form of a novel the actual story of the unfortunate Elizabeth Whitman, she distorted the facts so as to conform to the Clarissa pattern, and The Coquette, or The History of Eliza Wharton (Boston, 1797) tells an American story in Richardsonian terms. In an early letter, Mrs. Richman warns Eliza about Major Sanford: "I do not think you seducible; nor was Richardson's Clarissa, till she made herself the victim, by her own indiscretion. Pardon me, Eliza, this is a second Lovelace."⁵⁹

In many novels besides those just mentioned the characters are not only based upon but often compared to the great prototypes in Richardson; thus Bouvery, the Lovelace of Pamela Howard (1773), is in the habit of making such allusions:

My old Flame, Lady Kitty Sunderland, made me, as a penance for railing at her favourite study, Novels, take a solemn Vow … to read no less than Clarissa, which itself is a Lady's Library; and the Patience of Job, and his Wife's Patience to boot, appear'd, at starting, hardly sufficient to carry me to the end of it. I kept my Vow, however, and also one that I had privately made in regard to my Fair Tormentor. Sweet Kitty, to what purpose didst thou study Clarissa! … The eight Volumes through which I travell'd did agreeably entertain me, taught me some Morality, and, I think, improved me in the Art of writing Letters familiarly, and perhaps has loosened my tongue, for, since that time, I am become as prating a Fellow as any Lovelace of them all.⁶⁰"

Later he meets the Grandison family in Bologna, and prefers Lady G—, the former Charlotte Grandison, to Harriet Byron herself:

I never indeed was an Admirer of her Character—So insufferably prudent, weeping, trembling, blushing, fainting, timid even to affectation—I love Sensibility, I adore Modesty in the Sex; but Excess in any thing degenerates into a Fault…. Sir Charles and she are, however, exceedingly well match'd; they have both a Formality in their manner which one seldom meets with in People of their Rank, and who have seen so much of the world.⁶¹

In other novels, a heroine abducted from a masquerade reads Grandison and fears her captor may prove to be a Sir Hargrave, or a fair rustic reads Pamela and imagines that her suitor resembles Mr.—.⁶² When another damsel has scruples about marrying against her father's wishes, the example of her favorite Clarissa is urged upon her.⁶³ Still others, exposed to the advances of men of superior rank, are urged not to imitate the prudery of Pamela.⁶⁴ A noble youth may be compared to Sir Charles, or a girl in love with her friend's husband sees her story paralleled in the silent devotion of Emily Jervois to the faultless hero.⁶⁵ Silly novel-reading women cite precedents set by the famous heroines.⁶⁶ All correspondents in epistolary novels more or less frankly admit their dependence on Richardson, even though they may try to qualify it:

For the present, I will continue my letters journal-wise, as Miss Byron calls it; but I cannot for my life be circumstantial, and carry you up and down stairs, to the parlour, the drawing-room, the harpsicord, the card-table, &c.&c.&c.⁶⁷

Imitators of Lovelace write endless letters in swaggering and facetious vein. The hero of Samuel Jackson Pratt's Pupil of Pleasure sets about putting the doctrine of Lord Chesterfield's Letters into practice, and cries in his extravagant enthusiasm: "Richardson's a child, Grandison is a monster, Lovelace a bungler." Or a Lovelace may express reluctant admiration of a Grandison: "Thou art not yet a Sir Charles Grandison,—but you despise the character; ah! Jack, we too often condemn, what we have not virtue to imitate,—but how I moralize!"⁶⁹ In Hugh Kelly's Memoirs of a Magdalen (1767) the hero-seducer writes to a friend:

I have just this moment received your letter, and my sister Haversham's. By these I find you are endeavouring to imitate, as far as you are capable of imitating anything worthy, the character of Belford in Richardson's Clarissa Harlow. Nay, to render this imitation the more striking, you treat me as if I were just such another contemptible blockhead as Lovelace, who did not imagine there was a modest woman existing.⁷⁰

After these English examples we may interpolate one from France, an extreme case of literary Dopplegangerei; the heroine of La nouvelle Clarice (1767), by Madame Le Prince de Beaumont, corresponds with a Lady Hariote, who reads Richardson's story and is amazed to find there prototypes of herself and her friend!

The plight of the novel of manners in the last quarter of the eighteenth century may be described by saying that most writers were incapable of consistently holding a middle course between pseudo-genteel insipidity and melodrama, or between mechanical sprightliness and heavy didacticism. Fanny Burney had shown the way out, though she made no important advance after Cecilia; the critics of fiction were more or less clearly aware that what was needed was an anti-sentimental novel animated by a keener intelligence and a subtler wit than could be found in the ponderous comments of Hannah More and the stories of Jane West. The immediate background of Jane Austen's work is this effort, quickened by a new critical view of fiction in the eighties and nineties, to conserve and refine Richardsonian ethics and psychology. It is significant that when Jane Austen's nephew wished to illustrate her minute acquaintance with Richardson, he made special mention of Grandison:

Her knowledge of Richardson's works was such as no one is likely again to acquire, now that the multitude and the merits of our light literature have called off the attention of readers from that great master. Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison, all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour, was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had been living friends.⁷¹

To the same effect her brother Henry had written in the Biographical Notice of 1817:

Richardson's power of creating, and preserving the consistency of his characters, as particularly exemplified in 'Sir Charles Grandison,' gratified the natural discrimination of her mind, whilst her taste secured her from the errors of his prolix style and tedious narrative.⁷²

The loftier and more pretentious parts of Grandison could not command her full sympathy. "Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked," she wrote to Fanny Knight.⁷³ But her casual references to the book, light and satirical though they are, confirm the statements of her first biographers. In the early sketch called "Jack and Alice," a certain Lady Williams "like the great Sir Charles Grandison scorned to deny herself when at Home,"⁷⁴ and other passages seem to echo mockingly Richardson's repeated warnings about the dangers of a first love, and the inquisitions into the state of Harriet's heart. Among the precious minutiae of the correspondence are passing references to the feather in Harriet Byron's head-dress, to the same heroine's embarrassment in gratitude, and to a very minor character in the story, James Selby.⁷⁵ In preferring the relatively light study of manners in Grandison to the half-articulate spiritual democracy of Pamela or the emotional intensity of Clarissa, Jane Austen connected herself with the intellectual and judicious side of the Richardson tradition. Her development of an antisentimental feminine novel is a triumph of individual genius, but the conditions that made such a development possible include Richardson's analytical novel of personality, even though her fastidious intelligence and good taste made it impossible for her to accept Richardson unreservedly. As for Clarissa—"Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery." Her only explicit comments on Richardson's great tragedy are to be found in the valuable fragment called "Sandition," where she describes the egregious Sir Edward Derham, a very small romanticist who admires the character of Lovelace:

His fancy had been early caught by all the impassioned, & most exceptionable parts of Richardsons [novels]; & such Authors as have since appeared to tread in Richardson's steps, so far as Man's determined pursuit of Woman in defiance of every opposition of feeling & convenience is concerned, had since occupied the greater part of his literary hours, & formed his Character.⁷⁶

In default of further comment we may use the words of a contemporary, Lady Louisa Stuart, one of the most intelligent of novel-readers, who wrote to her sister in 1802, after reading Grandison aloud:

Richardson is as much out of fashion amongst the young people now as Mademoiselle de Scudéry, and everything in it seems to strike them as antediluvian. However, though we sometimes get into fits of laughing at the coaches and six, and low bows, and handing ladies about the room, yet I perceive a difference between it and the common novels one now meets with, like that between roast beef and whipt syllabub, and a thousand traits worth very great attention.⁷⁷

Surely Jane Austen would have subscribed to every word of this.

Notes

¹ Inventories and sales records in the archives of the house of Rivington; "Booksellers' Sales in the Eighteenth Century," Notes and Queries, 7 S. IX (1890), 301-02. On August 6, 1761, some of Richardson's literary properties were sold at the Queen's Arms Tavern, St. Paul's Churchyard (Addit. MS 38,730, ff. 146b, 147), but I have not succeeded in finding a complete record of this sale.

² I, 686-87.

³ XIII (February 8-10, 1763), 143.

⁴ Hans Hecht, Thomas Percy und William Shenstone (Strassburg, 1909), p. 81: Shenstone to Percy, May 16, 1762: Quellen und Forschungen, CIII.

⁵ X, 142-43.

⁶ P. 181.

⁷ No. 4, April 12, 1766, repr. Dublin, 1769, I, 11. This series of papers, mostly by Robert Jephson under the pseudonym of "Jeoffry Wagstaffe," appeared originally in the Dublin Mercury.

⁸Memoirs of Sir Thomas Hughson and Mr. Joseph Williams (1757), II, 241; The Brothers (1758), I, 87; Michael Wodhull, "To Romance," in Poems (1772), p. 50; Westminster Magazine, IV (1776), 521; London Magazine, LI (1782), 211-13; Samuel Jackson Pratt, Miscellanies (1785), III, 122; [T. Christie], Miscellanies: Literary, Philosophical and Moral (1788), 163-66; Robert Bage, Barham Downs (1784), Ballantyne's Novelist's Library, IX, 306; The Female Mentor (1793), I, 115; "Harriet Marlow" [William Beckford], Modern Novel Writing, or The Elegant Enthusiast (1796), I, 185; Historical, Biographical, Literary and Scientific Magazine, I (1799), 55-59.

⁹ I, 71. By Miss Smythies of Colchester….

¹⁰ I, 221.

¹¹ I, 171.

¹²Mémoires littéraires de la Grande Bretagne, I (1767), 76.

¹³ "A Catalogue of the Most Celebrated Writers of the Present Age," in Letters Concerning the Present State of England (1772), pp. 357-58, 393-94.

¹⁴Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783), pp. 567-70.

¹⁵ XII, 203-11; reprinted in London Chronicle, X (October 20-22, 1761), 386-88; Court Miscellany, II (1766), 241-44.

¹⁶ XXV (1761), 260. This review is by William Kenrick Nangle, The Monthly Review, First Series 1749-1789: Indexes of Contributors and Articles [Oxford, 1934], p. 189).

¹⁷ II, ii, 78-79.

¹⁸ "A Critical Examination of the Respective Merits of Voltaire, Rousseau, Richardson, Smollett, and Fielding," Universal Museum, N. S. II (August, 1766), 391-93; reprinted in Royal Magazine, XV (September, 1766), 146-49; London Chronicle, XX (September 6-9, 1766), 247.

¹⁹The Wedding Ring: Or, History of Miss Sidney (1779), III, 103.

²⁰ Norton Nicholls, "Reminiscences of Gray," in Correspondence, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley (1935), III, 1298.

²¹Lady's Magazine, XI (1780), 375.

²²Lettres du Marquis de Roselle (Amsterdam, 1764), II, 54-56. See also Madame de Genlis, Théâtre à l'usage des jeunes personnes (Paris, 1783), IV, 85-86; [Judith Sargent Murray], The Gleaner (Boston, 1798), II, 64-67, cited by H. R. Brown, "Richardson and Sterne in the Massachusetts Magazine," New England Quarter ly, V (1932), 66.

²³Die vier Stufen des Weiblichen Alters (Rostock, 1757), p. 14.

²⁴ John Bennett, Letters to a Young Lady (Philadelphia, 1793), II, 57-58; Crabbe, Tales of the Hall (1819), Book XI, "The Maid's Story."

²⁵ Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808), II, 210-11.

²⁶The Lovers: Or the Memoirs of Lady Sarah—and the Countess P— (1769), p. xiv.

²⁷Sacred Dramas (Philadelphia, 1787), p. 186.

²⁸Sacred Dramas (18th ed.; 1815), p. 281.

²⁹The Paradise of Taste (1796), pp. 64-65. In his Essay on Novels (Edinburgh, 1793) Thomson had declared that the three novelists were more "moving" than Homer, Virgil, or Milton.

³⁰Microcosm No. 26, May 14, 1787; Maria Edgeworth, Ormond (1817), Chs. VII, VIII.

³¹Letters on Several Subjects (1781), I, 21, 141-48. See also his Letters d'un voyageur anglais (1779), trans. John Duncombe (1780), quoted by Nichols, Lit. Anec, IV, 585-87.

³² J. and A. L. Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (2nd ed.; 1775), pp. 205-07.

³³The Letters of Robert Burns, ed. J. DeLancey Ferguson (Oxford, 1931), II, 58-59.

³⁴ [Anna Seward], "Variety," repr. in Gentleman's Magazine, LVIII (1788), 818, 1005-06, 1168-71; Percival Stockdale, Lectures on the Truly Eminent English Poets (1807), I, 181-89; Memoirs (1809), I, 93-98.

³⁵Letters to a Young Lady (4th ed.; 1811), II, 453-54.

³⁶ II, 275-76.

³⁷ Joseph Priestley, Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1777), p. 129; James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783), p. 569; Erasmus Darwin, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (Derby, 1797), p. 36; [Hannah Webster Foster], The Boarding School (Boston, 1798), pp. 160-61.

³⁸Letters on Education (1790), pp. 145-47.

³⁹Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts, and Opinions (1824), I, 195-99.

⁴⁰Observations on a Tour, etc. [1803], I, 142.

⁴¹The Enquirer (Philadelphia, 1797), pp. 108-09.

⁴²The Recontre: Or, Transition of a Moment (Dublin, 1785), pp. 136-37.

⁴³The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800), I, 25-26.

⁴⁴Sermons to Young Women (4th ed.; 1767), I, 147-48.

⁴⁵ "The Abbé Prevost and the English Novel," Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc., XLII (1927), 443-64; "The Minor English Novelists, 1750-1800," Harvard University Summaries of Theses … 1926 (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), pp. 172-75.

⁴⁶The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (1932), Ch. II.

⁴⁷ II, 4.

⁴⁸ I, 104-05.

⁴⁹ II, 54, 68.

⁵⁰ Ipswich, 1810, p. 77.

⁵¹ 1804, II, 193-94. Written before 1780.

⁵² William M. Sale, Jr., "Samuel Richardson and 'Sir William Harrington'," Times Literary Supplement, August 29, 1935.

⁵³The Brothers, I, iv-v. Mr. Frank Gees Black has identified the author as a Miss Smythies of Colchester (Times Literary Supplement, September 26, 1935).

⁵⁴ P. x.

⁵⁵ I, 22.

⁵⁶ I, 37-38. Charlotte Smith takes exactly the same view of Lovelace and his plots (Desmond [1792], II, 214-15).

⁵⁷ For an excellent brief discussion of the persistence of Richardsonian types and characters, see J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (1932), pp. 34-37.

⁵⁸ P. 290.

⁵⁹ 2nd ed., Charlestown, 1802, p. 53. For the mingling of fact and fiction in this story, see Mrs. W. H. Dall, The Romance of the Association (Cambridge, Mass., 1875), especially pp. 65-71; Bolton, The Elizabeth Whitman Mystery (Peabody, Mass., 1912).

⁶⁰ I, 90-91.

⁶¹ II, 112.

⁶²The Masquerade (1769), I, 50-51; Feelings of the Heart (1772), I, 37.

⁶³The Relapse (1780), I, 24-25.

⁶⁴The Triumph of Fortitude (1789), I, 129; Sophia Lee, The Life of a Lover (1804), I, 51.

⁶⁵The Unfortunate Union (1778), I, 4; Eliza Parsons, Woman As She Should Be (1793), I, 141-42; The School for Wives (1763), 35-36.

⁶⁶ Dr. William Dodd, The Sisters, Novelist's Magazine, V (1781), 103, first published 1754; Jane West, The Infidel Father (1802), III, 334.

⁶⁷ Elizabeth Griffith, The History of Lady Barton (1771), I, 23.

⁶⁸ 2nd CD., 1777, I, 2, first published 1776. This passage is imitated in Excessive Sensibility (1787), I, 234.

⁶⁹Disinterested Love: Or, The History of Sir Charles Royston and Emily Lesley (Dublin, 1776), I, 48.

⁷⁰Novelist's Magazine, VII (1782), 33.

⁷¹ J. E. Austen-Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1926), p. 89.

⁷²Novels, ed. Chapman (2nd CD.; Oxford, 1926), V, 7.

⁷³Letters, ed. Chapman (Oxford, 1932), pp. 486-87: March 23, 1817.

⁷⁴Volume the First (Oxford, 1933), p. 26. Cf. Grandison, Shakespeare Head Edition, IV, 18.

⁷⁵Letters, pp. 322, 344, 140; Abby L. Tallmadge in Times Literary Supplement, January 19, 1933.

⁷⁶Fragment of a Novel (Oxford, 1925), pp. 108-09.

⁷⁷Gleanings from an Old Portfolio, ed. Mrs. Godfrey Clark (Edinburgh, 1898), III, 95.