Richardson's Paradoxical Success

Extract

Richardson, writer and printer of the eighteenth century, the center of a circle of admiring ladies, began his career (as is well known) in an inconspicuous manner by preparing love-letters for enamoured young women. Finding himself successful in this delicate mission, he responded to a demand for a volume called Familiar Letters, models for all occasions. But, being innoculated by the moral virus of the eighteenth century, he sensed the shallowness of these epistles and decided that they should contain moral as well as literary examples. His first book, Pamela, was a group of letters instructing a maidservant in manners and morals. But neither Richardson nor the women who were his constant critics were satisfied until he had prepared a volume of letters instructing a “lady.” This lady, called Clarissa, was created as an “examplar to her sex.” These two books were so popular, and the demand for an example of conduct for the perfect gentleman was so great that Richardson next wrote Charles Grandison. Since fiction without a moral purpose was disapproved by the eighteenth century, Richardson makes it clear that one should not look “upon the story as the sole end but as a vehicle to the instruction.” It is obvious that Richardson's first aim was to instruct in manners and morals; his secondary aim, begun as a writer of Familiar Letters, was to make model letters for all who needed instruction. There is no evidence that he abandoned this latter purpose; he simply subordinated it to a loftier one.