SOURCE: "Horrid Romancing: Richardson's Use of the Fairy Tale," in Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters, Princeton University Press, 1982, pp. 145-95.

Was ever the like heard? … But this, to be sure, is horrid romancing!

Pamela (I, 243-44) [I, 156]

In their study of fairy tales, lona and Peter Opie include among their illustrations one of Joseph Highmore's portraits of Pamela.¹ Pamela is telling a nursery tale to a pensive-looking Miss Godwin, five of the B. cherubs, and the nursery maid, "delightedly pursuing some useful Needlework, for the dear Charmers of my Heart." They wait, "all as hush and as still, as Silence itself," for moral allegories about the two good little boys and the two good little girls who married "and made good Papas and Mammas, and were so many Blessings to the Age in which they lived." There were also tales of three naughty little boys and one naughty little girl who break their mother's heart and come to bad ends. One boy drowns at sea, one turns thief, and one begs for bread, while the "naughty girl, having never loved Work, pined away in Sloth and Filthiness, and at last, broke her Arm, and died of a Fever." (IV, 438-41) [II, 462-64] As usual, evil, more than good, stimulates Richardson's imagination. Pamela also tells the rousing tale of "four pretty ladies [who] lived in one genteel neighbourhood," Coquetilla, Prudiana, Profusiana, and Prudentia, "their several Names denoting their respective Qualities." (IV, 442) [II, 465] Not a giant or a fairy in the lot.

Yet in spite of the prosaic quality of Pamela's tales, the Opies' choice for their frontispiece is still appropriate, for Pamela not only told nursery tales, but acted in them as well, playing in her less matronly days a plucky Cinderella to Mr. B.'s ill-conceived Prince Charming. Richardson's Cinderella won her prince not "once upon a time," but in the here and now, so convincingly that the good citizens of Slough celebrated her fictional wedding in reality.² Readers believed in Pamela's fairy tale: an "anonymous gentleman" objected to Pamela's extraordinarily small waist, predicting a craze of tight lacing, and even Henry Fielding feared that Pamela's matrimonial success would inspire other servant girls to throw themselves at their masters, with dire results.³

In his best novels, Pamela and Clarissa, Richardson managed to combine the elements of romance and reality so effectively that he was able to convince his readers to accept the fantastic as commonplace. And if his readers did believe the "truth" of his fiction, Richardson did nothing to disillusion them. Hiding behind the mask of the editor, supplying prefaces, footnotes, and postscripts to manufacture one more level of reality, he encouraged, even insisted upon, maintaining what he called the "Historical Faith" in fiction. When William Warburton unwittingly called attention to the fictional nature of Richardson's work in his preface to Clarissa, Richardson politely objected, withdrawing the preface from later editions: "Will you, good Sir, allow me to mention, that I could wish that the Air of Genuineness had been kept up, tho' I want not the letters to be thought genuine; only so far kept up, I mean, as that they should not prefatically be owned not to be genuine: and this for fear of weakening their Influence where any of them are aimed to be exemplary; as well as to avoid hurting that kind of Historical Faith which Fiction itself is generally read with, tho' we know it to be Fiction." (Letters, p. 85) Richardson's hedging is painfully apparent here. In spite of his disclaimer, he did want his fiction to be "thought" genuine, depending upon "that kind of Historical Faith" to establish his sphere of exemplary influence.

Richardson always jealously guarded his moral sphere. He wanted, above all, to be taken seriously, to be placed, as he suggested to Lady Echlin, on the proper side of the bookshelf next to the graver moralists, where he could perfect as well as amuse his reader. As we have seen in the previous chapters, Richardson's desire to perfect his reader caused him to invent complex characters of independence and integrity who, in the process of perfecting themselves, create themselves. His perfectionism also led him to create fictional worlds that may appear commonplace but in fact are fantastic—prosaic nightmares. For to perfect his reader, Richardson first had to catch him, and to catch him, he had to lure him in with the promise of a sensationally romantic world, yet a world described realistically enough to pass his moral censor.

Richardson's admirers generally accepted the author's concern for the "Air of Genuineness" as evidence of his realism.⁴ Joseph Spence, for instance, praised Richardson's "plain and natural Account of an Affair that happened in a private Family, just in the manner it did happen. He has aimed solely at following Nature; and giving the Sentiments of the Persons concerned, just as they flowed warm from their Hearts." The "Sentiments" of the "natural" Harlowe family flow warm enough in Clarissa, a plain and natural account of duels (one on the first page), rape, abduction, and imprisonment—the everyday affairs of a "private" (privately mad) family. Nothing could be more natural. Philip Skelton, another of Richardson's contemporaries, also praised the author's attention to nature. Clarissa "comes home to the Heart, and to common Life," unlike those inferior romances filled with "a Croud of mere imaginary Amours, Duels, and such-like Events."⁵ Somehow Skelton managed to overlook the fantastic aspects of the "Amours, Duels, and such-like Events" crowding the pages of Clarissa.

This is not to Skelton's discredit, however, for Mr. Richardson was loath to allow anyone to focus upon the sensational nature of his fiction. He was, throughout his novels, the severest critic of the romantic inventions he exploited. Listen to Mrs. Pamela on the subject of romance. Apparently forgetting her own melodramatic role-playing, she rebukes romantic Miss Stapylton for filling her commonplace book with the "beautiful Things and good Instructions, to be collected from Novels and Plays, and Romances." There were "very few Novels and Romances that my Lady would permit me to read," Pamela sternly recalls, "and those I did, gave me no great Pleasure; for either they dealt so much in the Marvellous and Improbable, or were so unnaturally inflaming to the Passions, and so full of Love and Intrigue, that hardly any of them but seem'd calculated to fire the Imagination rather than to inform the Judgment."

Romantic heroines tend to be especially faulty:

what principally distinguishes the Character of the Heroine is, when she is taught to consider her Father's House as an inchanted Castle, and her Lover as the Hero who is to dissolve the Charm, and to set at Liberty from one Confinement, in order to put her into another, and, too probably, a worse: To instruct her how to climb Walls, drop from Windows, leap Precipices, and do twenty other extravagant Things, in order to shew the mad Strength of a Passion she ought to be asham'd of: to make Parents and Guardians pass for Tyrants, and the Voice of Reason to be drown'd in that of indiscreet Love, which exalts the other Sex, and debases her own. And what is the Instruction that can be gather'd from such Pieces, for the Conduct of common Life? (IV, 425-26) [II, 453-54]

Pamela could well be outlining the plot for Clarissa, Richardson's moral primer for "the Conduct of common Life."

In her introduction to Richardson's correspondence, Anna Laetitia Barbauld discussed the "natural" aspects of Richardson's writing: "That kind of fictitious writing of which he has set the example, disclaims all assistance for giants or genii. The moated castle is changed to a modern parlour; the princess and her pages to a lady and her domestics…. we are not called on to wonder at improbable events, but to be moved by natural passions." (Correspondence, vol. I, xxi) Mrs. Barbauld at least acknowledged the romantic elements of Richardson's fiction, but it would be more precise to say that "the modern parlour is changed to a moated castle." For Richardson transformed common reality, investing the most ordinary situations with menace and wonder. The Harlowe family's "modern parlour," filled with swelling Arabella, squatting Solmes, ranting James, raging Father, and wraithlike Mama, holds horrors. Richardson was able to abstract the terrors of common life—the envy, jealousy, fear, and lust—make them part of his character's psyche, and then project them back to the reader. James, consumed with a monstrous jealousy, becomes a monster to Clarissa. Since we see and experience what Clarissa does, we also see him as a monster, as terrible as any that ever stalked a fairy tale. By making the horrors and wonders part of his character's psyche, Richardson authenticated his fairy tale, never hesitating to supply a few "real life" horrors of his own: the monstrous Colbrand, Uncle Antony's moated house, and Clarissa's squalid prison. But the most effective horrors remain closest to home: in the cozy parlor conferences that erupt into violence; in those scenes in which Clarissa and Lovelace, sedately sipping tea, suddenly fling each other about the room. Incorporating the elements of fairy tale and romance, Richardson always attended to the menace of the ordinary.

When he laid down the uncompleted volume of the Familiar Letters to begin writing Pamela, Richardson moved from the familiar to the novel. And moral aphorisms were always "familiar." [One can see] his obvious delight in making moral maxims in The Apprentice's Vade Mecum. In his edition of Aesop's Fables, Richardson revised and to some extent moralized L'Estrange's version of the Fables, first published in 1692. Highlighting the "useful," and banishing the "trivial or a loose Conceit," he "presumed to alter, and put a stronger Point to several of the Fables themselves, which we thought capable of more forcible Morals."⁶ The mammoth Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, gleaned from his three novels, reflects his continuing pride in his ability to make a moral with the best of them. We need only look at a few of the maxims Richardson found in Pamela to see the great difference between the simple moral aphorisms and the more complex dramatic action of his novel.

In his "Cautions to young Female Servants," he warns that a "handsome Female Servant should not wish to live in the house of a Single man, since she will be likely by it to suffer in her reputation in the world's eye." Sage enough advice, but unheeded by Richardson's own "handsome Female Servant," Pamela Andrews, who gladly reported to her parents that she was staying on to take care of Mr. B.'s linen after the death of her mistress. Richardson also warns "young women" to avoid the company of a man "capable of rudeness": "A young Woman whose virtue has been once attempted, yet throws herself into the same person's company, or continues where he is, when she can avoid it, ought to charge herself with the consequences, if she receive new indignities." But in his first novel, Richardson examines the actions of his own "young woman," who ostensibly avoids B. after his first attempts, yet manages to stay in his way. "Trick'd up" to make her farewell, Pamela effectively throws herself into B.'s company and rekindles his waning desire for her. Pamela's mixed feelings, expressed through actions both ambiguous and calculating, complicate Richardson's simple maxims. Richardson can firmly state that "the man who is capable of rudeness to a woman, to whom he professes honourable love, ought to be rejected as an husband, by a woman of virtue and spirit, for his sake, as well as for the sake of her own honour."⁷ But at the same time, Richardson created a world of far greater latitude, in which a woman of "virtue and spirit" gratefully and humbly accepts the man "capable of rudeness" as her husband and master.

In his preface to his Collection, Richardson explains that since the narrative "was only meant as a vehicle for the instructive," he would now separate the maxims "expressing elevated thoughts, beautiful sentiments, or instructive lessons" from the "engaging incidents" that might divert the reader's attention from the moral.⁸ But to separate the maxims from the action is to alter the very meaning of the novel by ignoring the complications provided by such "engaging incidents." Although he never lost sight of the moral in Pamela, Richardson's experiments with the epistolary novel indicated his need to make his moral in a wholly different way, replacing aphorisms with characters and transforming the commonplace with the elements of romance, fairy tale, and myth, thereby complicating his simple moral in the process.

In Richardson's novels we find a sense of fantasy made concrete, almost commonplace. Richardson created a literature "having both body and hidden depths," a literature Roland Barthes would describe as "clouded." In an analysis of the difference between the "transparent" literature of the early eighteenth century and the "clouded" literature of the late eighteenth century, Barthes argues that "literary form" in the late eighteenth century "develops a second-order power independent of its economy and euphemistic charm; it fascinates the reader, it strikes him as exotic, it enthralls him, it acquires a weight. Literature is no longer felt as a socially privileged mode of transaction, but as a language having both body and hidden depths, existing both as dream and menace."⁹ Richardson's readers "felt" the dream and menace of his novels. Aaron Hill's servant boy sobbing over Pamela; Aaron Hill himself, confessing that he can never escape Mrs. Jewkes, "who often keeps me awake in the Night"; and even Fielding's Parson Tickletext, complaining that "if I lay the book down it comes after me"—all testify to the emotional power Richardson enjoyed over his readers.¹⁰ Combining romance and reality, Richardson uncovered the dream and the menace implicit in the ordinary.

The terms romance and fairy tale are often used interchangeably in this chapter, for it is almost impossible to separate them in any sensible way. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the romance and the fairy tale were often considered to be one and the same, nursery links to the "world of fine fabling."¹¹ By 1740, the middle-class reading public tended to reject the aristocratic French heroic romance, as well as its English imitations by writers like Roger Boyle and Aphra Behn. Even as early as 1691, a spokesman for The Athenian Mercury mocked "knight-errantry" for its "Loving, Sighing, Whining, Rambling, Starving, Tilting, Fighting, Dying, Reviving, Waking, Staring, Singing, Crying, Praying, Wishing, Composing, Writing, Serenading, Rhyming, Hoping, Fearing, Despairing, Raving."¹² But while it was judged to be "not at all convenient for the Vulgar, because [it] give[s] 'em extravagant Ideas's of practice," and generally "soften[s] the Mind,"¹³ the romance was still preserved in the nursery.

Arthur Johnston traces the gradual descent of the medieval romance to the chapbook, deciding that "few nurseries in the eighteenth century can have been without the chapbook version of the romances, little twenty-four page booklets, badly printed on poor paper with crude illustrations of Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Southampton, Valentine and Orson, Don Bellianis and The Seven Champions of Christendom."¹⁴ "Authentic" medieval romances as well as imitations, such as Tom a Lincolne, the Red Rose Knight, which went into a thirteenth edition in 1704,¹⁵ remained popular throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although severely abridged, romances like The Seven Champions, "suited to the meanest Capacity," were still expected by their high-minded prefacers "to enrich the Fancy, as well as to divert the Learned." Thomas Warton found that the chapbook romances, "however monstrous and unnatural" they might appear "to this age of reason and refinement," were the source "from which young readers especially in the age of fiction and fancy, nourished the SUBLIME."¹⁶

One such young reader was Samuel Johnson, who learned to read from The Seven Champions. And Richardson, as we have already seen, "early noted for having Invention," was frequently asked to make up romances to amuse his schoolmates. "One of them, particularly … was for putting [him] to write a History, as he called it, on the Model of Tommy Potts … of a Servant-Man preferred by a fine young Lady (for his Goodness) to a Lord, who was a Libertine." (Letters, pp. 231-32)¹⁷ Certainly Richardson came in contact with chapbooks in the printing house of John Wilde, where he served as an apprentice. Wilde printed "jest books or old-fashioned popular fiction like The Most Pleasant History of Tom a Lincolne"¹⁸ Always diffident about his lack of learning, Richardson was not one to brag about his familiarity with low chapbook romances; he preferred to reminisce about his early passion for Orlando Furioso.¹⁹ Dictionary Johnson, secure in the public recognition of his erudition, could more carelessly, even gleefully, indulge himself in animated discussions of Jack the Giant Killer, but Samuel Richardson, master printer, would remain silent or, if pressed, deny the claims of romance.

For the record, Richardson, along with many other novelists, firmly rejected the "romance" and all it represented. But when Richardson rejected the romance in his various prefaces and letters, he was not necessarily rejecting heroic or even chapbook romance at all, but more likely disassociating himself from the novella, that shortened, more lurid form perfected by Eliza Haywood and Mary Manley. Dieter Schulz suggests that Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding reacted against the romanticized novella, a "shorter and debased variant of the heroic romance," rather than the romance itself.²⁰ The novella, as John Richetti points out, appealed to a middle-class audience unprepared to "cope with the sheer bulk and complication of the heroic romance, but too 'sophisticated' to be satisfied with chapbooks." Mrs. Manley recognizes in the preface to her Secret History of Queen Zarah that "these little Pieces which have banish'd Romances are much more agreeable to the Brisk and Impetuous Humour of the English, who have naturally no Taste for long-winded Performances." The English may have lost their taste for psychological complexity and convoluted idealism, but they had retained their taste for sexual fantasy. Mrs. Manley's secret histories and Mrs. Haywood's novellas exploit the sexual antagonism of the romance, appealing to the communal "myth" of the "destruction of female innocence by a representative of an aristocratic world of male corruption."

This myth, the plight of the helpless, virtuous female pitted against the malign, masculine, aristocratic world, is, Richetti reminds us, a "well-known eighteenth-century preoccupation, from its prominence in the drama to the prose fiction which begins with Richardson and expands all over Europe."²¹ This sexual conflict pervades the sentimental drama, where many of the themes and conventions of the heroic romance surfaced. The physical distresses that plagued beleaguered virtue—the archetypal shipwrecks, captures by pirates, and occasional bouts of slavery—all became stock features of the drama as well as the romance. This strange mixture of romance, novella, and drama complicates an analysis of Richardson's work. When Clarissa compares herself to a ship foundering, ready to split on the rocks or strike on the sands, when she wildly begs to be sold into slavery rather than marry Solmes, she could be echoing dramatic, heroic, or popularly romantic conventions—all at the same time.

An attempt to unravel strands of the romance from strands of the fairy tale is further complicated by a critical search for the "true" romance, the medieval romance. The medieval romance can also be traced back to that "phenomenon that the anthropologists call 'the cultural lag,'"—the chapbook. Henry Knight Miller dismisses French heroic romances, not to mention their debased novella followers, for deviating from the true chivalric path of romance as preserved in the chapbook.²² We are back once again in the nursery, where tales of giants, along with the adventures of Guy of Warwick, nourish a taste for the sublime.

It is equally difficult to trace fairy tale conventions in any definite way. We know they were about, but since so many tales were transmitted orally it proves almost impossible to pin them down. Once the tales were printed, we can at least suggest that they were being read. Johnson is one of the fairy tales' more vigorous champions, insisting that babies need not moral tales but giants and castles to "stretch and stimulate their little minds."²³Jack the Giant Killer, first printed in England in 1711, was a favorite tale. Confessing to Mrs. Thrale that in an idle moment he had been reading of Jack's exploits, Johnson teased her with the notion that "so noble a narrative" could call up in him the soul of enterprise.²⁴

Many other tales besides Jack's had been published in the early eighteenth century, and certainly even more were extant orally. Perrault's Histories ou contes du temps passé, translated into English in 1729, introduced Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Blue Beard, and Puss in Boots. Jack in the Beanstalk first appeared in 1734, while Tom Thumb, glorified in many chapbooks and celebrated in Fielding's farce, had been in print since 1621. In their study of the fairy tale, the Opies trace an early version of Cinderella, "Rashin Coatie," back to the Complaynt of Scotland, first published in 1540.²⁵ Through tales both printed and oral, preserved in the nursery and published abroad, the stories of giants and damsels, shipwrecks and heroic slaves, mingled in the popular imagination.

Although we cannot be certain exactly how various fairy tales and romances extant in the eighteenth century actually began, we can be fairly certain how they ended: happily ever after. The romance, patterned and providential, "is a way of ordering the world under God in secular times."²⁶ Presenting an "ideal type" of romance, Henry Knight Miller argues that although the genre does not deny "that the 'actual world' is full of mutability and fluctation and chaotic particulars … it normally seeks to transcend this merely present and mutable physical scene, to find values in a 'real' order that is unchanging and eternal."²⁷ The transcendence can be spiritual or magical, depending upon the degree of enchantment in the tale, but always a higher order is restored. "The romance structure, like that of comedy, wherein larger world and smaller world are harmonized at the last, is almost inevitably that of the completed figure." While literature that refuses resolution generates a certain pleasing anxiety, "the characteristic pleasure of romance and of comedy comes, rather, from their natural completion of the figure, and their inevitable suggestion that a new figure is thereby generated."²⁸ We shall see the way Richardson closed his own circles in Pamela and Clarissa. Fearful of losing her accustomed place upon the death of her mistress, subject to the whims of her master, Pamela, imprisoned, exiled from her own parents, wins B. and returns to her true home as mistress of Mr. B.'s domain, enlarging a circle of moral regeneration through her gently didactic letters. Driven off by her harsh relations, Clarissa leaves her father's house, wanders in exile from St. Albans to London to Hampstead and back again, where once again in the wilderness of London she becomes initiated into the ways of the fallen world. After her rape, through her will, she makes her painful return at last to her true father in heaven, closing the figure as she closes another circle in the serpent motif of her coffin. However, her completed figure, unlike Pamela's, excludes her persecutors. As she ascends to her true home, she leaves her family and Lovelace hanging, suspended in guilt and grief that are impossible to resolve.

Ostensibly, Richardson the moralist, reconciled to earthly woe, had little truck with happy endings. "'Happy, happy.' That is such a word with you chits," he taunted Miss Mulso. (Letters, p. 312) When Lady Brad shaigh demanded her happy ending for Clarissa, Richardson severely reminded her that life must be endured, not necessarily enjoyed. Richardson seemed to associate a desire for happiness with the undeveloped aspirations of the young ladies he both advised and chided. "I am not," he told Miss Mulso, "a woman, child. I do not think the world made for me." (Letters, p. 321) Yet despite his scorn for happy endings,²⁹ in his first novel, Richardson celebrated the Cinderella story, significantly assuming the character of a fifteen-year-old chit to make his point. The fairy tale formula freed Richardson from the demands of reality, allowing him to create a world of absolute moral values where virtue is not only desirable but rewarded, and not in heaven but in the here and now….

Why do we believe in Richardson's violent fairy tales? How does he authenticate his nightmares and convince us that we are reading "plain and natural" accounts of real life? He gives us a clue in the "hints" of prefaces for Clarissa: "Attentive Readers have found, and will find, that the Probability of all Stories told, or of Narrations given, depends upon small Circumstances; as may be observed, that in all Tryals for Life and Property, the // Merits of the Cause are more determinable by such, than by the greater Facts; which usually are so laid, and taken care of, as to seem to authenticate themselves." To the objection that "the History is too minute," Richardson answers that "its Minuteness [is] one of its Excellencies."⁵⁰ In his postscript to the fourth edition of Clarissa, Richardson defends the epistolary method as a way to document reality. "The minute particulars of events, the sentiments and conversation of the parties, are, upon this plan, exhibited with all the warmth and spirit, that the passion supposed to be predominant at the very time, could produce, and with all the distinguishing characteristics which memory can supply in a History of recent transactions." (VIII, 326) [IV, 562] The components of the Richardsonian formula are all here: minute particularities, sentiments, and passions. "The probability of all Stories told, or of Narrations given, depends upon small Circumstances." These in turn render probable improbable passions and sentiments.

No one follows Richardson's attention to "minute particulars" more closely than Lovelace, who boasts to Belford that "I love always to go as near the truth as I can." (III, 52) [II, 13] As Morris Golden has pointed out,⁵¹ to achieve a convincing union of truth and fiction, Lovelace pays strict attention to "small Circumstances." It is no coincidence that Lovelace, impresario and artist, sounds much like Richardson, impresario and artist, in his admiration for the minutiae: "I never forget the Minutiae in my contrivances. In all matters that admit of doubt, the minutiae closely attended to, and provided for, are of more service than a thousand oaths, vows, and protestations made to supply the neglect of them, especially when jealousy has made its way into the working mind. (III, 201-202) [II, 115] In Richardson's world, the "working mind" creates its own reality. Clarissa is susceptible to Lovelace's use of the minutiae because her working mind is in the process of creating her personal reality. Reality lies within—within the mind, within the writing closet where Clarissa retires to make sense of her experience.

As he tutors his gang of rakes in the proper way to behave in front of the divine Clarissa, Lovelace warns them that "deep, like golden ore, frequently lies my meaning, and richly worth digging for." Attend to the minutest circumstance, he advises, parodying the desired end of his own use of minutiae—seduction and fatherhood. "The hint of least moment, as you may imagine it, is often pregnant with events of the greatest" (III, 353) [II, 218] Be implicit, he tells his rakes. And Richardson advises his reader to do the same. "The hint of least moment, as you may imagine it," may completely alter our sense of what we are reading. The Tomlinson fraud is perhaps Lovelace's greatest triumph of minutiae. He passes off one of his own itinerant servants as the respectable neighbor of Uncle John Harlowe. Along with Clarissa, the reader accepts the reality of Tomlinson's identity without reservation.⁵²

Lovelace's strategic attention to detail can be seen in Tomlinson's explanation of his recent friendship with Uncle John: "But through an acquaintance of no longer standing, and that commencing on the bowling-green [Uncle John is a great Bowler, Belford]." (IV, 313) [II, 449] "Uncle John is a great Bowler." This authentic circumstance lends credibility to the fiction of Tomlinson. Lovelace's (and Richardson's) talent for making the incredible credible can also be clearly seen at Hampstead. The suspicious Miss Rawlinson, wary of Lovelace's good intentions, protests that his affair with Clarissa "bore the face of Novelty, Mystery, and Surprise." True, admits Lovelace, "Ours was a very particular case: That were I to acquaint them with it, some part of it would hardly appear credible." Since they all "seem" to be "persons of discretion," he agrees to give them "a brief account of the whole; and this in so plain and sincere a manner, that it should clear up to their satisfaction every-thing that had passed, or might hereafter pass between us." (V, 101) [III, 50] In just such a "plain and sincere … manner," Richardson authenticated his fictional world of "Novelty, Mystery, and Surprise," careful to make the incredible credible to the severest critic. Like Lovelace, he created fantastic contrivances, building up his fantasy with solid facts, pieces of commonplace reality.

We can find many examples of the way Richardson authenticated fantasy in Pamela as well as in Clarissa. Colbrand becomes a creature of nightmare proportions in Pamela's letters: "He is a Giant of a Man, for Stature; taller, by a good deal, than Harry Mawlidge, in your Neighbourhood, and large-bon'd, and scraggy; and has a Hand!—I never saw such an one in my Life. He has great staring Eyes, like the Bull's that fright'd me so." (I, 225) [I, 145] Here Richardson authenticates Pamela's nightmare of the "great staring Eyes, like the Bull's that fright'd me so" with homely detail: "taller, by a good deal, than Harry Mawlidge," in the neighborhood. Colbrand's hideous masculinity threatens Pamela sexually: like the bull, he represents the animalistic forces of sexuality, nature out of control.

In his attempt to present Mr. B. as a redeemable rake, Richardson introduced threatening foils like Colbrand and Mrs. Jewkes. While Mr. B. plots the seduction, his underlings actually act out his desires: B. gets the girl while Colbrand and Jewkes get the blame. Pamela can eventually love Mr. B., in spite of his repeated outrages, because her fears are deflected towards Colbrand, who is the scapegoat, like the bull, for his master's lust. Pamela even connects the two men in her mind: "When I went to bed I could think of nothing but [Colbrand's] hideous Person, and my Master's more hideous Actions; and judg'd them too well pair'd, and when I dropp'd asleep, I dream'd they were both coming to my Bed-side, with the worst Designs." (I, 226) [I, 145]

Richardson goes even further, suggesting that Colbrand will soon be the author of "more hideous actions" to accommodate his master. Mrs. Jewkes has told Pamela that "she has Reason to think [Mr. B.] has found a way to satisfy my Scruples: It is, by marrying me to this dreadful Colbrand, and buying me of him on the Wedding-day, for a Sum of Money! Was ever the like heard?—She says it will be my Duty to obey my Husband; and that Mr. Williams will be forced as a Punishment, to marry us; and that, when my Master has paid for me, and I am surrender'd up, the Swiss is to go home again, with the Money, to his former Wife and Children; for, she says it is the Custom of these People to have a Wife in every Nation." "Was ever the like heard?" "But this," Pamela adds, "to be sure, is horrid romancing!" (I, 243-44) [I, 156] Horrid romancing to be sure. Pamela's qualifications understate the highly unlikely nature of B.'s marriage plot. The reader of eighteenth-century fiction is accustomed to an occasional Fleet marriage, but Mr. Williams, "forced as a Punishment," to perform the marriage of an unwilling Pamela, strains the most generous reader's belief. But we still believe in the romantic possibility of the sham marriage because Pamela invests the plot with realistic detail. She evaluates its legal possibility, takes it seriously, and convinces the reader to do the same: "Yet, abominable as it is, it may possibly serve to introduce some Plot now hatching! … But can a Husband sell his Wife, against her own Consent?—And will such a Bargain stand good in Law?" (I, 244) [I, 156]⁵³ The moment Pamela entertains the legal possibility of such a marriage, the reader believes in the legal (and actual) dilemma. Pamela's fears, fed by her most "horrid romancing," become reality.

Richardson's careful attention to the minutiae convinces us that his fairy tales, filled with violence and passion, are plain and natural accounts of real life. As Hazlitt pointed out, Richardson's novels have "the romantic air of a pure fiction, with the literal minuteness of a common diary. The author had the strongest matter-of-fact imagination that ever existed, and wrote the oddest mixture of poetry and prose."⁵⁴ It is in the union of the nightmare and the diary, romance and reality, that Richardson demonstrates his genius.

It only remains for us to wonder about Richardson's reasons for using fairy tale elements in his novels. Richardson always cared deeply about the truth of his fiction. He wanted to be believed, and to be heeded. Let us reexamine his letter to Warburton, in which he insisted upon retaining the "Air of Genuiness." He feared that if his "letters" were "owned not to be genuine," their influence would be weakened. From the beginning of his literary career, Richardson jealously guarded his influence. He wanted to direct his reader's behavior, tell him how to become a proper apprentice, how to dun a debtor politely, how to propose marriage, how to reject such a proposal—in short, how to live and, finally, how to die. Richardson was always fascinated with the process of becoming, with social transformations. The flexible nature of the "young girl," as yet undeveloped, about to "become" a wife, mother, saint, strongly attracted him, as we can see in his selection of both heroines, friends, and correspondents. Fairy tales suited Richardson's interest in transformations, in Eliade's "sacred history" of "creation," allowing him to focus on the "natural" development of his characters.

In Pamela, Richardson sought a dramatic form to convey his moral: virtue will be rewarded. Significantly, he chose the fairy-tale formula, for Pamela's progress could only be found in fantasy, not in "real" life. But, as always, Richardson wanted to be believed. His realism, his attention to the minutiae, authenticated his fairy tale. The fairy tale was necessary in order to make the moral work, and the realism was necessary in order to make the fairy tale believable.

In Clarissa, Richardson left the optimistic world of Pamela, moving beyond his moral altogether. Clarissa expresses Richardson's dreams of social and spiritual integration, but even more strongly it reveals his fears of the menace of the ordinary, the threat of the separated self, the inevitable clash of cultures implicit in the battle between Clarissa and Lovelace. While Pamela celebrates the morals of the always rising middle class, Clarissa examines these morals more closely, and finds them wanting. Clarissa achieves spiritual elevation at the expense of the society that condemned her. After he introduced fairy-tale elements into his novel, Richardson reversed his reader's expectations, leaving us with a bleak world of triumphant giants, false Prince Charmings, and raped princesses. The happy ending we long for takes place not on earth but in heaven.

We must feel the strain of such a solution. Melvyn New suggests that Richardson's providential scheme, at odds with his method of characterization and the radical individualism it entails, reflects "that moment in Western thought when the antithetical ideas of man as God's creature and man as the radical product of his own autonomous will came together in uneasy and temporary alliance." Richardson is able to project both views simultaneously. "Clarissa can respond to the world as God's creation and yet open to us her whole subconscious mind, in which God himself is merely one more creation."⁵⁵ This synthesis was, at its best, a tenuous one, a strange mixture Richardson was to reject altogether in his final novel, where the moral consumes the individual. Clarissa's happy ending leads into death.

In his essay on the fairy tale, J.R.R. Tolkien suggests that the element of "escape" can be found in all fairy tales—escape from the fallen world, from our sense of separation, and from harsh reality. The "oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape," is "the Escape from Death."⁵⁶ In Clarissa, Richardson forced the harshest reality upon his reader: Clarissa disowned, Clarissa raped, Clarissa imprisoned, Clarissa dead. There are no happy endings here, only a sense of shame and waste. Yet he also offered an escape from the nightmare, "the Great Escape" from death through the myth of eternal life. Clarissa, untouched, sublime, escapes the sordid reality of the Harlowes and Solmeses of the world. The shame and waste remain for mere mortals, but for Clarissa, at least, annihilation offers the final escape into joy.

Richardson needed to write fairy tales to convince his readers and himself of the truth of his moral—for his moral alone, sadly inoperable in a reality his artistic imagination forced him to confront, was never enough.

Notes

¹ Iona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (London, 1974), frontispiece.

² A. D. McKillop, Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill, 1936), p. 45. "The oft-repeated story of the good people of Slough, who gathered at the village smithy to hear Pamela read aloud, and at last went off in a group to ring the church-bells in honor of her marriage … is significant because it shows how Pamela took hold of what we may call the folk-imagination."

³ A letter by that "anonymous gentleman," Aaron Hill, published in the introduction to the second edition of Pamela (1741), complains that "Females are too apt to be struck with Images of Beauty; and that Passage where the Gentleman is said to span the Waist of Pamela with his Hand, is enough to ruin a Nation of Women by Tight-lacing." Richardson objected to this "too tight-laced Objection…. What, in the Name of Unshapliness! cou'd he find, to complain of, in a beautiful Girl of Sixteen, who was born out of Germany, and had not, yet, reach'd ungraspable Roundness," he wonders, neatly side-stepping Hill's point. Pamela, eds. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, (Boston, 1971), pp. 13, 16.

In An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), Parson Oliver, Fielding's moral spokesman, objects to the instruction he finds in Pamela: "To look out for their masters as sharp as they can." The consequences: "If the Master is not a fool, they will be debauched by him; and if he is a fool, they will marry him." Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Boston, 1961), p. 307.

⁴ When I talk about "reality" and the ways of rendering reality, I shall be using Ian Watt's definition of "formal realism": "the narrative embodiment of a premise that Defoe and Richardson accepted very literally, but which is implicit in the novel form in general: the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms." Ian Watt, Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), p. 32.

⁵ Samuel Richardson, Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces and Postscripts, ed. R. F. Brissenden for the Augustan Reprint Society, no. 103 (Los Angeles, 1964), p. 8.

⁶ T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford, 1971), pp. 76-77.

⁷ Samuel Richardson, A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison (London, 1755), pp. 8, 4.

⁸ Richardson, Moral Maxims, pp. vii, ix.

⁹ Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (London, 1967), p. 9.

¹⁰ Hill's letter about his precocious servant boy, as well as his fear of Mrs. Jewkes, was included in the introduction to the second edition of Pamela (1741), eds. Eaves and Kimpel, pp. 18-19. Watt, Rise of the Novel, cites Hill's fears in his discussion of the "deep and unqualified identification" between Richardson's readers and characters, (pp. 200-203) In Shamela (p. 305), Fielding is actually transcribing the raptures of Aaron Hill, which Richardson included in his introduction to the second edition of Pamela: "If I lay the Book down, it comes after me.—When it has dwelt all Day long upon the Ear, It takes Possession, all Night, of the Fancy.—It has Witchcraft in every Page of it: but it is the Witchcraft of Passion and Meaning." Pamela, eds. Eaves and Kimpel, p. 10.

¹¹ In his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), Richard Hurd described the "revolution" in taste in the eighteenth century's "anti-romantic" bridling of fancy and the imagination. "What we have gotten by this revolution, you will say, is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of fine fabling." W. P. Ker cites Hurd in his essay on "Romance," Pastoral and Romance: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Eleanor Terry Lincoln (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969), pp. 235-36. He goes on to suggest that the world of fables and romance was preserved in the nursery.

¹² Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1964), p. 35.

¹³ From The Athenian Mercury, 17 December 1692, as cited in Novel and Romance, 1700-1800: A Documentary Record, ed. Ioan Williams (London, 1970), p. 29.

¹⁴ Johnston, Enchanted Ground, pp. 27-28.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 30.

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 32-33.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 37. Richardson refers to the ballad entitled "The Lovers Quarrel: of Cupid's Triumph. Being The Pleasant History of fair Rosamond of Scotland. Being Daughter to the Lord Arundel, whose Love was obtained by the Valour of Tommy Pots: who conquered the Lord Phenix, and wounded him, and after obtained her to be his Wife. Being very delightful to Read. London, Printed by A. P. for F. Coles, T. Vere, and J. Wright" [?1675] as cited in Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford, 1968), p. 69.

¹⁸ Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, pp. 11-12.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 581.

²⁰ Dieter Schulz, "'Novel,' 'Romance,' and Popular Fiction in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century," Studies in Philology, vol. 7 (1973), pp. 80-83.

²¹ John Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700-1739 (Oxford, 1969), pp. 175-76, 126-27, 125. See Ira Konigsberg's study of Richardson's own connections to the drama in Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel (Lexington, Ky., 1968).

²² Henry Knight Miller, "Augustan Prose Fiction and the Romance Tradition," Studies in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 3, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (Toronto, 1976), p. 249.

²³ Johnston, Enchanted Ground, p. 40.

²⁴ Opies, Classic Fairy Tales, p. 50.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 117.

²⁶ See Melvyn New's discussion of the providential aspects of romance under secular stress. The eighteenth-century novel unites two conflicting visions of life at the moment of an uneasy transition, partially reconciling romance and realism, providence and secularization. "The Grease of God': The Form of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction," Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, vol. 91, no. 2 (March 1976), pp. 235-43.

²⁷ Miller, "Romance Tradition," p. 254.

²⁸ Henry Knight Miller, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and the Romance Tradition (Victoria, B.C., 1976), pp. 40-41. Miller also discusses the importance to the romance tradition of the "monomyth," that controlling pattern of "Departure (or Exile), Initiation, and Return—or in one of its more significant variants, Fall, Suffering, and Salvation." (p. 23)

²⁹ The Opies, Classic Fairy Tales, p. 11, do not consider the happy ending inevitable in the fairy tale. "Most events in fairy tales are remarkable for their unpleasantness…. in some … there is no happy ending, not even the hero or heroine escaping with their life." I suspect, however, that the common reader's tendency to "overlook" the unhappy ending reveals a desire for reconciliation stronger than the "reality" of the tale….

…⁵⁰ Richardson, Hints of Prefaces, p. 5.

⁵¹ [Morris] Golden, [Richardson's] Characters, [Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1963,] p. 27.

⁵² Tomlinson's real identity comes as no surprise to Richardson's ideally "attentive" reader, who consults the "Names of the Principal Persons," in which Tomlinson is listed as "the assumed name of a vile pander to the debaucheries of Mr. Lovelace." Richardson expects his reader to be ever vigilant, trusting no one, not even the author.

⁵³ Ivan Block reports that "marriage by purchase continued in England up to the nineteenth century." It was especially frequent at the end of the eighteenth century, when he finds Archenholtz reporting that "never was the sale of women so frequent … as now. Scenes of this kind, once so rare, have become common. The sale of women among the common people is more frequent than ever." Often, "the husband led his wife with a rope round her neck, on a market day, to the place where cattle were sold, bound her to a post and sold her to the highest bidder in the presence of the necessary witnesses." Her price was seldom more than a few shillings. The "ordinary place in London where these sales of women were held was Smithfield Market, where … the cattle market was held." Ivan Block, History of English Sexual Morals, trans. William H. Forstern (London, 1936), pp. 54-58. Derek Jarrett cites the example of John Lees, a steel burner in Sheffield, who sold his wife in 1796 to Samuel Hall, a fellmonger, for sixpence. "Mrs. Lees was handed over to her new owner with a halter round her neck; but since the clerk of the market took fourpence for toll it is hardly likely that the purpose of this offensive pantomime was monetary gain. This was in fact the labourer's equivalent of divorce by Act of Parliament," Derek Jarrett, England in the Age of Hogarth (St. Albans, Herts., 1976), p. 120.

⁵⁴ William Hazlitt, "On the English Novelists," Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London, 1819), p. 233.

⁵⁵ New, "The Grease of God,'" p. 241.

⁵⁶ J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London, 1974), p. 59.