[Below, Warner explores Richardson's sometimes counterproductive attempts at asserting authorial control over the readers of Clarissa.]

During her long, formal character-sketch of Clarissa, Anna Howe tells an anecdote about her friend which helps to show how this kind of aesthetic might work:

Once I remember, in a large circle of ladies, every one of which (I among the rest) having censured a generally reported indiscretion in a young lady—Come, my Miss Howe, said [Clarissa] … let me be Miss Fanny Darlington. Then removing out of the circle, and standing up, Here I stand, unworthy of a seat with the rest of the company till I have cleared myself. And now, suppose me to be her, let me hear your charge, and do you hear what the poor culprit can say to it in her own defence. And then answering the conjectural and unproved circumstances, by circumstances as fairly to be supposed favourable, she brought off triumphantly the censured lady; and so much to every one's satisfaction that she was led to her chair, and voted a double rank in the circle—as the reinstated Miss Fanny Darlington, and as Miss Clarissa Harlowe. "Very few persons, she used to say, would be condemned, or even accused, in the circles of ladies, were they present: it is generous, therefore, nay, it is but just, said she, to take the part of the absent, if not flagrantly culpable." [IV,492-93]

How does Clarissa's artifice function? Clarissa creates a game to effect a discrete purpose. She feels Miss Darlington has been treated unjustly, so Clarissa acts according to the general principle of fairness she enunciates after the game—"it is but just to take the part of the absent, if not flagrantly culpable." Now it is the special virtue of Clarissa's little game that it wins the company over to a just treatment of Miss Darlington without apparent force. Once Clarissa has engaged in role playing, everyone eagerly restores Miss Darlington and Clarissa to their rightful place in the group. But it is worth taking note of two details of this anecdote. First, the game involves a certain risk for the artist—Clarissa makes a barter to engage everyone's interest, by assuming the position of the outcast. If she cannot clear Miss Darlington, Clarissa expects to share her fate, ostracizing from the group. Secondly, the whole moral value of Clarissa's artifice comes from her ability to put a bit of untruth (her own "act") at the service of truth (winning justice for Miss Darlington). If the game had gone out of control, if Clarissa had become involved in the fun of being Miss Darlington for its own sake, or if she had failed to win over her friends, the value of the artifice would have vanished.

How does Richardson's practice with Clarissa compare with this account of Clarissa's use of art? Can Richardson win the ultimate control over his readers which this anecdote posits for Clarissa? If anything, Richardson's actual experience with Clarissa argues the opposite—it proves easier to provoke a reader's perverse independence than to win his docile compliance. Also, the position of this anecdote in the text of Clarissa should make us suspicious. Anna's formal characterization of Clarissa was greatly enlarged in the third edition as part of an attempt to silence critics of the heroine. It is designed as a formal panegyric of Clarissa. Richardson used Clarissa's status as an example to postulate general ideals in almost every area of womanly endeavor. It is entirely appropriate that, while he works to assert control over the reception of his own work of art, Richardson gives us a version of art's operation which dramatizes its radical subordination to an artist's moral intention. This picture of Clarissa as an ethical artist is more an expression of Richardson's aspiration for his own art than a faithful record of his practice. To the more uncertain cross-currents of that practice we now turn.

In writing Clarissa, Richardson took a calculated risk. Each move to enhance the immediacy and power of his fiction also threatened to undermine his own authority. Here is a list of several steps Richardson took in shaping Clarissa. Notice how each augments the power of Richardson's work by engaging the interest of the reader, at the same time that it disengages the work from Richardson's direct control:

1. Richardson publishes Clarissa in three installments over the period of one year. This stimulates the reader's curiosity and invites him to develop his own scenarios for the story's ending.

2. Richardson effaces his own presence in the text by adopting the low-profile role of an editor. At the same time he enhances the importance of each letter-writer's momentary presentation of events. In this way the reader gains the illusion of an unmediated experience of the major character and his or her unfolding predicament.

3. Richardson tells a story of romantic love to encourage reader identification and …

4. the story of a daughter's fateful disobedience to her father, in order to trigger debates about the propriety of her conduct.

With these techniques Richardson tosses his work into the neutral space that exists between an author and his readers. Clarissa seems to become the reader's plaything. And yet, Richardson cannot forget that it is he who started this game, that the book is after all "his" toy, and that the game is designed to be controlled by a higher purpose (reforming the reader). With the debates that begin around Clarissa "control" becomes the problem of this text; "control" becomes its question: how is control asserted and relinquished? what are the limits of that control for both the author and the interpreter of the text?

The Umbrage of Editor

Richardson's authorial control over Clarissa is put into question by the novel's central fictional presupposition: the notion that Clarissa and Lovelace are "real people," and that their letters have an independent existence as the written records of their lives. Even when Richardson acknowledges the fictionality of his characters, he never tires of insisting that his account is "taken from nature," or is, as we would say, "true to life." Clarissa, like all realistic fiction, invites the reader to test the extent to which the text corresponds to the "reality" we are assumed to share. This "reality" is the ultimate source of any authority the text may have. In this situation, the visibility of an author can be an embarrassment. His position is most problematic: he even begins to look like an unwelcome interloper.

For, to the extent that we accept the "reality" of Clarissa, Lovelace, and their story, the "author" as the creative genius who spins all of the book out of his mind (or borrows it from somewhere else) must discreetly withdraw from view. What we see instead is the dutiful editor—a trustworthy assembler of letters taken to have a prior existence as the "actual" correspondence of "real" persons. To sustain this illusion, it is important that there be no author around to take responsibility for the existence of this artifice—which explains Richardson's uneasiness with the preface Warburton offered him for the second installment of Clarissa.

Richardson was flattered by the attentions of this famous and learned man, but the preface alludes quite openly to Richardson as the gifted author of Pamela and Clarissa. Richardson's articulation of his misgivings about the preface, in a letter to Warburton, describes the subtle balance he wants Clarissa to maintain. It must seem real to the reader at the very same moment that it is understood to be fictional:

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, 85; April 19, 1748]

Richardson understands that the power of his fictional illusion, and the moral program linked to this fiction, are contingent upon the absence of a visible author or narrator. In place of the dominant author, we get a tactful and low-profile editor. Thus Richardson is blocked from extensive intervention in the fiction by the limits of the role of editor he has assumed.

In spite of the limits of this role, playing the editor gives Richardson important power, which he exercises with a good deal of astuteness. A letter to Aaron Hill allows us to step behind the scenes to watch Richardson making editorial decisions that modulate the power relationship between Clarissa and Lovelace. In the first drafts of the novel, Richardson had Clarissa and Lovelace give independent narratives of the big scenes where they encounter each other. While shortening the novel for publication, Richardson decided to abridge some of these duplicate narratives and quickly discovered the importance of how this is done. Thus he writes to Aaron Hill that he started by cutting Lovelace's accounts and putting the most interesting of his comments in the form of footnotes to Clarissa's account. But because these notes broke "in upon the Narration, and his wicked levity turning into a kind of unintended Ridicule half the serious and melancholy Reflections, which she makes on her Situation: So I alter'd them back" (Letters, 71; October 29, 1746).

Richardson, acting as editor, finds an alternative to protect Clarissa's sentiment from the force of Lovelace's raillery. He gives Clarissa the dominant role as narrator and supplements her account with connective summaries of his letters, "preserving only those Places in his, where his Humour, and his Character are shown, and his Designs open'd, [and I] have put many others, into a merely Narrative Form, referring for the Facts to hers, so of some of hers, vice-versa" (Letters, 71; Oct. 29, 1746).

If one follows the editorial interventions over the course of the novel, an interesting pattern emerges. The pendulum swing of power—from Clarissa, to Lovelace, and back to Clarissa—is faithfully reflected in which character delivers the central narrative of events. Thus, at St. Albans at the beginning of her stay at Sinclair's, Clarissa's letters are inviolate, while Lovelace's letters are subjected to summary (II,96-97; 207-09; 212; 213). As the action proceeds, Lovelace gains more and more of the narrative, until his first physical attempt on Clarissa, where his correspondence begins to overshadow Clarissa's in a most decisive fashion (II,379). From there on, until Clarissa's final escape from Sinclair's after the fire scene, Clarissa has only two complete letters totaling six pages, compared to almost five hundred pages of text written by Lovelace.

During this central segment of the novel, the editor will sometimes give segments of Clarissa's letters within Lovelace's letters. Some of her letters are intercepted by Lovelace, others are forged by Lovelace to deceive Anna. Clarissa's correspondence loses its autonomy as she loses control of her body. At one point, extraordinary circumstances are contrived to keep the narrative with Lovelace. Clarissa has escaped from Sinclair's and wanders around Hampstead, lonely and frightened, until she finds her way to Mrs. Moore's. We do not get an account of these events in a letter from Clarissa to Anna, as might be expected. Instead, Lovelace reconstructs her movements through the eyewitness accounts of a servant hired by complete strangers to follow the movements of this mysterious woman (III,28).

What is the logic behind these shifts in the location of the narrative? They are not arbitrary steps taken by Richardson to manipulate our sympathy. Nor do they depend very much on Clarissa's inability to write Anna at certain points in the action—for this is only the case between her rape and her final escape from Lovelace. We get a clue to the answer to this question when Lovelace's authority begins to ebb. In working to subdue Clarissa after the rape, he tries to lure her into an attempted escape from Sinclair's with the assistance of Dorcas. For some reason, Clarissa senses a trick and refuses to fall for the ruse. The editor breaks into Lovelace's narrative with these words:

Mr. Lovelace gives here a very circumstantial relation of all that passed between the lady and Dorcas. But as he could only guess at her motives for refusing to go off … it is thought proper to omit his relation, and to supply it by some memoranda of the lady's. [III,255-56]

Now we can understand the constraints which govern the editor's procedure. The editor shifts to Clarissa's account, and unveils her "book of memoranda," at the very point when Clarissa begins to regain control over the action. This is appropriate, for the editor must select an account that will give the reader the fullest possible understanding of how and why events are unfolding the way they are. In practice, this involves giving the narrative to the character who has the most initiatory power over the action. An author may favor one character over another, as Richardson favors Clarissa over Lovelace, but once he has assumed the role of editor "his" behavior is sharply circumscribed. Thus, on the vital matter of which character will deliver the narrative to the reader, the editor's moves become a function of all the other positions of the text: Clarissa, Lovelace, and the flow of power and awareness from one character to the next.

Our discussion of the author-as-editor has emphasized the limits Richardson accepts through the way he constructs his fiction. But when the novel becomes engulfed in controversy, Richardson steps forward as the staunch defender of the moral program of his art: in Clarissa, he has given the world an example of virtue. In this polemical moment, the role of editor is viewed as a temporary sleight of hand—a convenient fiction to enable the author to steal into the hearts of the unsuspecting readers. So, in the postscript to Clarissa, greatly lengthened for the third edition (1751), Richardson adds this passage to explain his own intentions and methods:

It will be seen by this time that the author had a great end in view. He has lived to see scepticism and infidelity openly avowed … and a taste even to wantonness for outdoor pleasure and luxury, to the general exclusion of domestic as well as public virtue, industriously promoted among all ranks and degrees of people…. He imagined, that, in an age given up to diversion and entertainment, he could steal in as may be said, and investigate the great doctrines of Christianity under the fashionable guise of an amusement. [IV,553]

By introducing the higher purpose of the artwork, Richardson can claim that the role of the editor is just a means to an end, not a way in which he "lets go" of the work, but a cunning method of disguising the ultimate control of an author who exercises his authority indirectly and at a distance. Thus Richardson explains to Aaron Hill that he can write an "assuming and very impudent preface" to Pamela, making great claims for his art, because he has "the umbrage of the editor's character to screen myself behind" (Letters, 42; 1741).

Does the role of editor disengage the text from authorial control, or merely give an inviting illusion of reader and character freedom from author manipulation? While we must defer our response to this question, we should note that Richardson's description of his art, as a means to steal into the reader's heart, coincides with a much more aggressive use of the role of editor in the second and third editions of Clarissa. For now the editor is no longer the benign and docile figure who invites the reader to judge and compare the rival claims of the protagonists. Instead he enters the text with an army of footnotes and textual addenda designed to expose Lovelace's plots and tip the scales of justice in favor of his heroine, Clarissa. Perhaps the role of editor always concealed the dual possibilities of dispassionate judge and manipulative prosecutor. By the third edition, Richardson has exploited both of these contradictory possibilities.

The Character: The Author's Impersonator (and/or) His Trope

If the role of editor offers a most uncertain vehicle for Richardson's control of the fiction, perhaps his characters—the children of his imagination who loom so large in the spectacle that is Clarissa—perhaps these characters will allow Richardson to direct the fiction toward its "proper" destination. Richardson has two ways of talking about his characters. Sometimes they are the people he loses himself in becoming; sometimes they are the rhetorical tropes he stands outside to manipulate. In the first case, Richardson emphasizes a movement beyond himself, toward something distinctly different from his self. Thus, to a Frenchman he describes his balanced treatment of the Catholics and Protestants in Sir Charles Grandison, and attributes this to an act of impersonation he undertakes during the process of writing: "in short, this Part is one of those that I value myself most upon, having been as zealous a Catholic when I was to personate the Lady, and her Catholic Friends, as a Protestant, when I was the Gentleman" (Letters, 238; July 5, 1753).¹

In another letter, Richardson offers a careful description of what happens when he writes or speaks for a character. Lady Bradshaigh has reproached him for having Charlotte Grandison tease Aunt Nell, or allowing Aunt Nell to wear the pink and yellow ribbons that make her worthy of ridicule:

Was it I that dressed Aunt Nell? Fie upon me: I ought never to be forgiven—Only I know I did it not so much for Ridicule Sake as to give occasion to correct the Ridiculer…. But how can it be said I and not Charlotte dressed Aunt Nell?—here I sit down to form characters. One I intend to be all goodness. All goodness he is…. Another Lady G——ish; All Lady G——ish is she. I am all the while absorbed in the character. It is not fair to say—I, identically I, am anywhere, while I keep within the character. And if I have done so, why say you, madam, that I dressed Aunt Nell? [Letters, 286; Feb. 14, 1754]²

In this playful response to Lady Bradshaigh, Richardson reminds one of Lovelace, by offering an elegant alibi to separate himself from all the particular consequences of his artifices. But in doing this, Richardson also gives us a valuable analysis of his own practice. Richardson begins as removed from his fiction and in control of its unfolding. He writes the scene not to ridicule, but "to give occasion to correct the Ridiculer." He sits down "to form characters," and in every instance they mirror that intention. But during the process of writing, something new happens. Richardson as a separate entity disappears: "I am all the while absorbed in the character." It is in reference to this moment that Richardson offers his most radical formulation: "It is not fair to say—I, identically I—am anywhere, while I keep within the character."

Richardson-as-author is lost "within" his character, because the act of writing has displaced Richardson from the position of a firm public persona to that of a character who writes a letter. In this situation, Richardson cannot be held responsible for what a character does—for, to the extent that the character "is," the author as a separate controlling agent simply "is not." Richardson presumes that this process will also enfold the reader and prevent a reader's reproach of the author. To Mrs. Watts, Richardson wrote, "I am apt to be absorbed in my characters when I write for them, and the reader that is not, as he or she reads, must be too often alarmed, I doubt, especially by the things put into the mouths of the freer characters."³ In spite of these warnings, Richardson cannot prevent critics of the tragic ending from insisting on his responsibility as the "author" of the novel. Richardson responds, in a letter to Lady Bradshaigh, by sharing responsibility with his characters: "if the Author rather than the Characters in his story must be considered, I only hope to be weighed in an equal Balance" (Letters, 316; October 10, 1754).

Richardson's effort to conceal the author's presence in the fiction is not simply a function of strategy. It also responds to his most personal needs. When Harriet Mulso asks about his health, Richardson responds: "I write, I do anything I am able to do, on purpose to carry myself out of myself: and am not quite so happy when tired of my peregrinations, I am obliged to return home. Put me not therefore in mind of myself (Corr., III,190-91; Sept. 10, 1751). Writing does more than take Richardson away from his chronic illness. It helps to overcome the shyness and "bashfulness" Richardson customarily felt when he appeared in public. This shyness came in part from his modest origins and in part from his scanty formal education.⁴ We get a vivid glimpse of Richardson's feelings of inferiority, and the concomitant uses of his art, in a letter sent to Lady Bradshaigh. An admirer of Richardson's novels has visited the author, but then failed to write a follow-up note:

He has not written to me since he left London. I suppose I answered not, on a personal Acquaintance, the too high ideas he had of me from what I had published. I am always jealous of suffering in the Opinion of my Readers, when we come into personal Conversation—And why?—Because the simplicity of my Character (I hope I may say so) and the Frankness of my Communicativeness, lay me open all at once, and must convince the new Acquaintance that they had thought too highly of me, by their Reading. I design not either Affectation or Reserve; and if I appear to have Shyness, it is owing more to my native Awkwardness, than to Design. Let me own to you, that I never paid my personal Duty to your Ladyship, but I came away half dissatisfied with myself, from Diffidence I have mentioned; and glad at my Heart was I, when the next Visit from your Ladyship, or Command to attend you, gave me Hope, that your Goodness had not permitted me to sink in your Favour. In writing, I own, I was always an impudent Man. But need I tell your Ladyship that? [Letters, 318-19; August 13, 1755]

Here is a Richardson who is both self-conscious and ineffectual, making a confession that is difficult to read over two centuries after it was written. Little wonder friends reported that Richardson was quiet in public and only eager or confident in discussing his own books. Little wonder, too, that he should choose to win laurels and importance by effacing a public persona felt to be inadequate. Instead, Richardson displaces himself into characters that give free rein to an "impudence," assertiveness, and fantasy-life otherwise inaccessible to this awkward old printer.⁵

But, if Richardson is absent from the work of art because he has been "absorbed" into the characters, how can he hope to control the work so that it serves a useful moral purpose? Richardson's answer comes in the debates which follow publication of the novel. For Richardson, Clarissa is not just one character among many, she is an exemplar of virtue who excels all those around her. For this reason, any thoughtful and judicious reader should grant her priority over her adversaries. At least one prominent reader, Samuel Johnson, felt that it was Richardson's distinctive virtue as an artist to give us a picture of vice in Lovelace that would stimulate some admiration but ultimately draw a negative judgment. Johnson compares Richardson's treatment of Lovelace to Rowe's treatment of his rake, Lothario, in The Fair Penitent:

Lothario, with gaiety which cannot be hated, and bravery which cannot be despised, retains too much of the spectator's Kindness. It was in the power of Richardson alone, to teach us at once esteem and detestation; to make virtuous resentment overpower all the benevolence which wit, and elegance, and courage, naturally excite; and to lose at last the hero in the villain.⁶

In Rambler Number 4, Johnson rejects the notion of mixed character advanced by Fielding and makes the idea of the moral exemplar, as used by Richardson, the keystone of his fictional program.⁷ Richardson's practice in designing his novel—effacing himself and putting an exemplary character before the reader—will only lead to a predictable reader response if the reader feels the aspiration toward virtue shared by Richardson and Clarissa, and described so vividly by Johnson:

In narratives, where historical veracity has no place, I cannot discover why there should not be exhibited the most perfect idea of virtue; of virtue not angelical, nor above probability, for what we cannot credit we shall never imitate, but the highest and purest that humanity can reach, which, exercised in such trials as the various revolutions of things shall bring upon it, may, by conquering some calamities, and enduring others, teach us what we may hope, and what we can perform.⁸

When we descend from the high ground of prescriptive aesthetics to the more mundane terrain of actual reader response, we shall find that many do not share Johnson's judgment of Lovelace, Richardson's evaluation of Clarissa, or either author's concern with virtue. To describe Clarissa as an elaborate trope—an exemplar for the reader—subdues the novel to the original intentions of the author who manipulates that trope.

But this also does a good deal of violence to the illusion that the novel is designed to sustain. If instead we are dutiful readers, and embrace the terms of this illusion, the characters of Clarissa take on a life of their own within our reading. When Richardson "meets" these characters, and he does so in the correspondence which follows the publication of Clarissa, they will look somewhat strange to their author. They may stand opposite Richardson in the very way wayward teenagers stand opposite a parent. He knows he participated, in the most direct possible way, in their passage into this world, but he is not quite sure how they came to be what they are, and he has moments of uneasiness when he contemplates the discrepancy between his original intentions and the very independent existence they have come to assume. He still calls them "my" children, but he does so under protest.

The Uses of Love: To Interest (and/or) to Instruct

When Richardson tells his readers that he has presented Clarissa under "the guise of an entertainment" in order "to investigate the great doctrines of Christianity," he is invoking the oldest and most pervasive dictum of Western aesthetics: the notion that art should both entertain and instruct.⁹ Richardson's way of describing his own practice in this postscript to Clarissa serves as a heavy-handed reminder to wayward readers that instruction is more valuable and important than entertainment. This reminder is only necessary because many readers have gotten too "caught up" in the entertainment, and seem to want nothing more from this novel than the happy culmination of a story of love.

But the reader should not be blamed for this. For it is Richardson who has scattered the sweet and heady elixir of love through his fiction. He invents an immaculate and incorruptible heroine and then allows her to be raped. He presents Lovelace as a master of the art of seduction—a hero who engages the mystique of an irresistible male physical presence that can arouse the passions of every woman but Clarissa. To acknowledge the sexuality of this novel, one does not need to marshal all the sexual symbols together, the way Dorothy Van Ghent does; nor must one agree with D. H. Lawrence that "Boccaccio at his hottest seems to me less pornographical than Pamela or Clarissa Harlowe."¹⁰ Just look at the descriptions Clarissa and Anna offer of Lovelace's physical charms, and the effect on women of his winning arrogance and cool command (IV,18-26).

And when one has read how Lovelace disarms the ladies at the ball, ladies who all know of his cruel treatment of Clarissa, then turn to the very different description of the "rake" we find in Jane Austen's unfinished novel Sanditon. The narrator explains:

Sir Edward's great object in life was to be seductive…. He regarded it as his duty—He felt that he was formed to be a dangerous man—quite in the line of the Lovelaces.—The very name of Sir Edward he thought, carried some degree of fascination with it … but it was Clara alone on whom he had serious designs; it was Clara whom he meant to seduce. He had … been long trying with cautious assiduity to make an impression on her heart, and to undermine her principles.—Clara saw through him, and had not the least intention of being seduced.

The simple finality of Clara's understanding and resistance brings the whole intricate sequence of seduction to an abrupt close. To have a story involving seduction, Clara would have to have some belief in Sir Edward's power. The clear style and good sense of the Austen narrator will not admit of mysteries about male potency. Here Austen does to Lovelace what Lovelace has done to others so often and so well. The rake's mastery is subjected to merciless formalization, so all Lovelace's enterprise and energy become stylized gestures—the delusions of the fatuous Sir Edward. One is not surprised to discover that a very mundane lack of funds delivers the final blow to Sir Edward's ambitions: if a forced abduction becomes necessary "he knew his business … he must naturally wish to strike out something new, to exceed those who had gone before him … but the expense alas! of measures in that masterly style was ill suited to his purse."" Austen's heroines are seldom in danger of seduction. When Anne Eliot and Fanny Price encounter suitors like Mr. Eliot and Henry Crawford, their "danger" arises from the possibility that they will be drawn into a dreary marriage with confirmed egotists.

The very idea of the rake cannot long survive the kind of laughter Austen develops at Sir Edward's expense. Reading Sanditon on the "rake" places the enabling fictions of Clarissa in sharp relief. For a novel to revolve around an act of seduction, we must have the shared acceptance, by all the major characters, of a group of related fictions: the virgin's purity, the man's potency, and the woman's constant danger. The characters of Clarissa accept these notions with dire earnestness, and every reader is invited to entertain these fictions as the conditions of the possibility for his imaginative participation in the life of this novel. But if the reader drinks the rich potion of love and seduction, will he be ready to return with the author at story's end to a spartan diet of moral instruction?

Some of Richardson's most avid readers had grave doubts. In the fall of 1755, Lady Echlin, the serious elder sister of Lady Bradshaigh, had read all three of Richardson's novels, and felt his collection of moral maxims to be "the pith and marrow of nineteen volumes." She calls herself an "old fashioned matron … better pleased with musty morals than a pretty love-story." For his next story she hopes Richardson will, as she writes, "disappoint your amorous readers, by not making the passion of love their entertainment." She adds:

Allow me to say, the finest lessons you have written, and the best instruction you can give, blended with love intrigues, will never answer your good intention. I wish to see an exemplary widow drop from your pen. [Corr., V,54; Sept. 2, 1755]

Richardson's response is significant. He says, in effect, "I have no choice"—"I am afraid, Instruction without Entertainment … would have but few Readers." And then he offers a celebrated formulation:

Instruction, Madam, is the Pill; Amusement is the Gilding. Writings that do not touch the Passions of the Light and Airy, will hardly ever reach the heart. [Letters, 322; Sept. 22, 1755]

Another letter, this one to his doctor and friend, George Cheyne, helps us to understand Richardson's metaphor for his art. Dr. Cheyne worries that there is too much "fondling" and kissing between Pamela and Mr. B. after their engagement. Richardson explains his purposes:

I am endeavouring to write a story, which shall catch young and airy Minds, and when Passions run high in them, to shew how they may be directed to Laudable Meanings and Purposes, in order to decry such Novels and Romances, as have a Tendency to inflame and corrupt: And if I were to be too spiritual, I doubt I should catch none but Grandmothers, for the Granddaughters would put my girl indeed in better company, such as that of the grave Writers, and there they would leave her; but would still pursue those stories, that pleased their Imaginations without informing their Judgments….

There is a Time of Life, in which the passions will predominate; and Ladies, any more than Men, will not be kept in Ignorance; and if we can properly mingle Instruction with Entertainment, so as to make the latter seemingly the view, while the former is really the End, I imagine it will be doing a great deal. [Letters, 46-47; August 13, 1741]

Richardson proceeds through a long analysis to demonstrate how every expression of physical affection between Pamela and Mr. B. is subtly paired with "some laudable Behavior or Conduct; Benevolence on his Side, which obliges her, or Gratitude on her's."

In these letters, Richardson makes extraordinary claims for his art by organizing an alliance with the very romances he scorns. He does not just acquiesce in the use of a story of love; through a calculated deception, he wraps instruction in love. The patient is drawn by the sweet gilding on the surface of the pill, but he is renewed by the bitter medicine within. In a similar way, young readers come to Richardson's novels to satisfy their sexual curiosity, only to be carried away on a swerve toward virtue. Has Richardson found a way to submit the reader's passions to the author's control? This is the megalomaniac dream of Richardson's art—he wishes to make his book the drug which induces a permanently altered state of consciousness. Young people with "light and airy minds" will be drawn to Richardson's story, hoping for the excitement of novels and romances rife with love; but unbeknownst to them, their hearts will be changed as their passions are linked to the purposes, meanings, and moral examples Richardson proposes for their reformation.

This kind of authorial control is implied in eighteenth-century descriptions of Richardson as the "master of the heart" and the "Shakespeare of the heart." Johnson's concise tribute, in introducing Richardson to the readers of Rambler Number 97, says it best: Richardson is the author "who has enlarged the Knowledge of Human Nature, and Taught the Passions to move at the Command of Virtue."¹² Some of Richardson's readers accepted these extravagant claims of authorial control quite literally. A clergyman named Phillip Skelton wrote Richardson that Clarissa was not a "novel," but "a system of religious and moral Precepts and Examples, planned on an entertaining Story, which stands or goes forward, as the excellent Design of the Author requires."¹³

But there were always critics ready to be skeptical about the actual tendency of Richardson's art. In a pamphlet entitled "Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela," published in 1754 by someone calling himself "A Lover of Virtue," Richardson is accused of stimulating the passions by making "Love eternal Love … the subject [and] burden of all your writings."¹⁴ After an allegorical reading of the story of the Fall—with Adam, reason, Eve, "outward sense," and the serpent, "lust or pleasure"—this critic declares that Richardson's volumes

contain nothing else but a minute and circumstantial detail of the most shocking vices and villainous contrivances, transacted in the most infamous characters, and all to satisfy the brutal and sensual appetite. Thus you act the part of the serpent, and not only throw out to men the tempting suggestions of lust and pleasure, but likewise instruct the weak head and the corrupt heart in the methods how to proceed to their gratification. That is, you tempt them to swallow the forbidden fruit of the tree which they were commanded not to eat. [p. 43]

The author of this pamphlet offers a vivid picture of the likely fate of one of the readers of Clarissa:

Accordingly our amorous youth sallies forth, fully bent to enjoy Clarissa in imagination; but before he has got halfway to mother Sinclair's, he meets a pretty girl in the streets, who invites him to a glass of wine, and the next tavern stands open for their reception. This is the natural catastrophe of a serious persual of the fire-adventure, [p. 47]

There is no record of Richardson's response to this pamphlet. But in the spring of 1749 he wrote his own pamphlet defending the "fire scene" against charges of indecency. He cannot believe the scene can be inflaming; in writing it

the passion I found strongest in me, whenever I suppose myself a Reader only, and the Story real, was Anger, or Indignation: I had too great an Aversion to the intended Violator of the honour of a CLARISSA, to suffer anything but alternate Admiration and Pity of her, and Resentment against him, to take place in my Mind, on the Occasion.¹⁵

Here we find Richardson imagining himself the reader of his own book, and then describing a response to the fire scene which he hopes will be normative. In this way, Richardson acknowledges an embarrassing fact. The reader had never relinquished his sloppy independence and impudent right to bring his own will and interest to bear on every text he reads. By entering into a dialogue with his readers, Richardson is no longer the artist with pharmacological control over the heart. He has reentered a political and transactional relationship with the reader.

When we examine many of Richardson's artistic decisions in this light, a very different image of the artist emerges. Now Richardson seems like a clever sideshow director, who never takes his eyes off his audience, and never stops seeking just the right "mix" of entertainment and instruction to arrive at the response he desires. When the Abbé Prévost cut much of the moral instruction out of his French translation of Clarissa, Richardson complained that the translation departed from "the very motive with me, of the story's being written at all" (Letters, 224; February 24, 1753 to Lady But when the didactic strain of the final installment—with Clarissa's slow death and Belford's interminable narratives—threatened to submerge the pathos and excitement of the protagonist's death, Richardson himself omitted large quantities of this material: Clarissa's reflections upon "transitory life," most of her formal meditations, Belford's meditations on death, and his "very serious answer" to Lovelace's letter implicating Belford in the plot to rape Clarissa (IV,458).¹⁶

Richardson always felt that Clarissa should be an instructive example to his readers. So when some of them are too critical of her and seem to have missed the point, he adds a paragraph to the preface in the third edition explaining her exemplary status. On the other side of this issue, the critic of the Gentleman's Magazine essay wants a flawless heroine, so Clarissa is criticized by him for disobedience to her father, disrespect to Solmes, and running off with Lovelace.¹⁷ Now, part of the interest of Clarissa's position in the first installment arises from the way she is entangled in a situation where there is simply no morally sanctified position, so casuistical debate becomes inevitable. But this invites the kind of heated reader debates which insure interest. Richardson playfully explains this to Lady Bradshaigh, in a letter about Sir Charles Grandison:

The whole story abounds with Situations and Circumstances debatable. It is not an unartful Management to interest the Readers so much in the Story, as to make them differ in Opinion as to the Capital Articles, and by leading one to espouse one, another, another Opinion, make them all, if not Authors, Carpers. [Letters, 296; February 25, 1754]

When the debates about Clarissa begin in earnest, Richardson soon gives up playing with his readers in this spirit. Like a cranky old schoolteacher, he loses interest in motivating his readers and tries to subject them to a solemn interpretive discipline.

The attempt to balance entertainment and instruction in Clarissa carries certain risks. For when Richardson blends love into his moral design, he risks losing ethics in eros. This repeats a pattern we have found elsewhere. To the extent that Richardson adopts the role of editor, he can't be the deity presiding over Clarissa; to the extent that he "speaks" in the voices of the characters, he effaces his own presence. Clarissa invites divergent interpretive response because it is a stratified text carrying these contradictory tendencies within itself. Sometimes its author acts like Clarissa—asserting identities, fixing boundaries, defining the "true" nature and meaning of the book; but sometimes Richardson reminds us of Lovelace: concealing himself behind a multitude of contradictory roles, he alienates the text from himself so as to initiate a game that will involve every reader.

Notes

¹ The OED shows that the word personate carries all the several meanings of the modern term impersonate: (1) assume a mask, act a part; (2) deceive by pretending to be a person you are not; (3) to cheat someone in this way.

² The OED shows that the appropriate meaning for identically is "the very same."

³ This is quoted from MSS of the correspondence of April 9, 1755, in Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 590.

⁴ Richardson often describes himself as "bashful" in public encounters. The accounts of others confirm this characterization. See ibid., p. 520.

⁵ Richardson's very first letter to Lady Bradshaigh is quite explicit about the gratification he feels when his artwork functions as an effective surrogate in stimulating intercourse with others. Richardson urges her not to be ashamed of the fervor of her opinions: "Indeed I admire it; and have reason to plume my self 'upon the interest you have in my story" (Letters, 89; October 26, 1748; Richardson's emphasis).

⁶ From Johnson's Rowe, in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81).

⁷ A consideration of the moral programs advanced for the new prose fiction of the 1740s and 1750s might place these texts together: Richardson's practice in Pamela and Clarissa; Fielding's rejection of "models of perfection" and his preference for the efficacy of moving readers with "mixed characters," as explained in the first chapter of Book 10 of Tom Jones; Johnson's Rambler No. 4; and Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, where the use of a moral exemplar is carried to an untenable extreme, and defended in "A Concluding Note by the Editor" in language which echoes Johnson's position (just as Johnson had earlier implicitly praised Richardson's practice). In this convergence of texts, Rambler No. 4 is the best systematic defense of Richardson's moral program for fiction. The briefest summary will show why this is so: Johnson opens with a comparison of the new fiction with romance that is strongly favorable to fiction "drawn from real life." Examples in this fiction have greater power over their readers—and this offers danger and opportunity for the author. The author must choose and describe his characters so the reader feels an appropriate attraction to virtue and disgust for vice. In advising an author how to guide his reader toward virtue, Johnson makes several related points: (1) Just because something exists in nature does not mean it should be drawn. (2) He explicitly rejects the notion of the "mixed character," for this tends to confound virtue and vice. (3) He insists that man may consult reason so as to choose between "gratitude" and "resentment," even if they "arise from the same constitution of the passions." (4) Art should offer an ideal of virtue to draw the reader toward virtue and away from vice—and the priority of virtue must be constantly maintained. A consideration of Johnson's central ideas and a close analysis of his language show that he is making a case for the vigilant assertion of virtue over vice in every phase of a novel's production. It is the difficulty of Richardson's doing just that in his actual writing of Clarissa that concerns me at this juncture.

⁸Rambler No. 4, in Samuel Johnson: Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler, ed. W. J. Bate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 14-15.

⁹ See Horace, Ars Poetica.

¹⁰ See Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), pp. 60-83. Lawrence is quoted in Philip Stevick's edition of Clarissa (San Francisco: Rinehart Press, 1971), p. xxvii.

¹¹ Jane Austen, Sanditon, ed. Margaret Drabble (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 191-92. All quotations are from these pages.

¹² As quoted by Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, p. 333.

¹³Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript, intro. R. F. Brissenden, The Augustan Reprint Society pub. no. 103 (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1964), pp. 8-9.

¹⁴ The following quotations from this rare pamphlet by an unknown author are taken from the copy in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

¹⁵ This is quoted from the above pamphlet by Eaves and Kimpel in Samuel Richardson, p. 290.

¹⁶ See Eaves and Kimpel, "The Composition of Clarissa and Its Revision before Publication," PMLA 83 (1968): 427. Richardson wrote Lady Bradshaigh that he cut many of Clarissa's meditations for the first edition.

¹⁷Gentleman's Magazine (June and August 1749), pp. 245-46, 345-49.

Critical Bibliography

Richardson criticism has been haunted by one, often fruitlessly argued, issue more than any other. It may be stated this way: to what extent are Richardson's conscious intentions and aesthetic principles adequate to the work of art he produced? The "loyal" critics, like Eaves and Kimpel, do a scrupulous reading of the correspondence, deduce an aesthetic program from Richardson's statements, and then read the works in terms of that program. Two recent books work in this manner: Donald Ball, Samuel Richardson's Theory of Fiction (The Hague: Mouton, 1971); and Elizabeth Brophy, The Triumph of Craft (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974). The first half of Brophy's study describes Richardson's aesthetic "precepts" (the moral purpose, engaging the reader, epistolary form), and the second half describes Richardson's "practice." And this dual focus is said to demonstrate that Richardson has full conscious control over the direction of his artworks….

At the opposite side of this critical issue are the "subversive" critics—like Morris Golden, Leslie Fiedler, Ian Watt, and Dorothy Van Ghent—who are interested in Richardson precisely to the extent that he fails to comprehend the real (and purportedly "repressed") meaning of his works. These critics show little interest in doing a careful reading of Richardson's letters (though Golden is an exception). They assume that although Richardson voiced perfectly conventional aesthetic platitudes, his own practice carries on a powerful articulation of cultural myths and psychological drives which he was unwilling and unable to apprehend.

If the "subversive" critics find the position of the "loyal" critics naïve or uninteresting, the "loyal" critics develop a finely modulated contempt for the license of the "subversive" critics, and a smug confidence that their prosaic way of discussing the novels is the only really valid one. After their summary of Van Ghent and Fiedler, Eaves and Kimpel parade their own humility in this way:

Readers who find abstract statements about social relationships or illustrations of the doctrines of psychoanalysis of primary interest may read Clarissa in the light of one of these myths or, if they are clever enough, make up their own. We will discuss the novel, as Richardson's simple contemporaries (including Diderot and Johnson) read it, in terms of the realistic surface, of its characters and of the emotions they feel and inspire and the attitudes they embody and convey. [Samuel Richardson: A Biography, p. 241; my emphasis]

Is there tenable ground between the daring flights of the subversive critics and the dour fidelity of the loyal critics? Mark Kinkead-Weekes avoids the fallacy of the "excluded middle" on this issue, by focusing on Richardson's activity in writing:

In projecting himself into his characters and allowing them to lead him, Richardson achieved real exploration, self-extension, self-transcendence. He threw differing facets of himself into dynamic conflict, by means of which he reached beyond his ordinary limits…. This process, moreover … can never be subject to full authorial control. [Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist, p. 454]

This perspective allows us to deal with something that only the most "loyal" Richardson critic can avoid feeling: there are times when Richardson brings such a severe and impoverished moral perspective to bear on his own texts that he becomes the worst enemy of his own art. As Kinkead-Weekes suggests, "At the end of Clarissa, indeed, Richardson seems to realize that his deepest moral convictions run clean counter to the drama that gives his fiction its most vivid life" (p. 453).

The positions of the loyal and subversive critics are beset by the same fallacy—the idea that Richardson's awareness of his fiction is always at the same level, that what he says (whether it be right or wrong) must hold for the moments before, during, and after the work of art is produced. My notion of Richardson's aesthetic—as a calculated game with the reader—emerges from watching Richardson produce his art, placing each of his aesthetic statements and authorial decisions within the context provided by the gradual publication of Clarissa, and observing the responses this work provokes. This allows us to see Richardson as a plurality of authors: sometimes agile, flexible, insightful (i.e. sporting), and at other times rigid, dour, and authoritarian (i.e. a spoilsport).