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Full Description
This biography of Richardson, emphasizes three areas of his work. Firstly it examines literary contextualization, reassessing the relationship between Richardson and early 18th-century popular fiction. This is further developed in light of new evidence which discredits Richardson's professed lack of acquaintance with French and English amatory fiction. Secondarily it looks at political contextualization. Biographical evidence is used to highlight Richardson's youthful political dissidence and the clash between his residually oppositional sympathies and establishment printing thereafter, following through into a reading of the novels. Both "Pamela" and "Clarissa" trace conflicts arising when legitimate authority turns tyrannical, and are riddled with a politicized vocabulary of liberty, treason, rebellion, and usurpation. "Clarissa" was written during a major armed insurrection (the Forty-five), and cries out for a historicized analysis that would see it as deeply coloured (though less ostentatiously than Tom Jones) by this wider public experience. Thirdly it looks at form and ideology.
It reads the competing narrative voices of the novels as articulating unresolved conflicts within Richardson himself: between Jacobite legitimism and Whiggish contractarianism, for example, or between traditional piety and libertine freethinking.
Contents
Part One Before the Novels: Origins and apprenticeship, 1689-1721 - Richardson's birth in Derbyshire shortly after the Revolution of 1688-9, Two features of his family origins which he later makes central to his sense of self - the family's decline (as a consequence, as in Pamela, of virtuous principle) from a prior state of yeomanly prosperity, his father's involvement in the conspiratorial Whig politics of the early 1680s and flight from London following the failure of the Monmouth rebellion, His return to London in the 1690s, apprenticeship (1706-13) to a printer whose daughter he marries (1721), Apprenticeship will be discussed in light ofhis later work, The Apprentice's Vade Mecum (1733); Dissident printing, 1721-1733 - Sets up in business for himself, probably in informal partnership with the Bath bookseller James Leake (whose sister he marries, 1733), andrapidly becomes known as printer for Tory ultras, notably during the Atterbury treason trials, Brushes with authority over The True Briton (1723) - written mainly by the Duke of Wharton (reportedly a model for Clarissa's Lovelace), but perhaps partly by Richardson himself - and Mist's Weekly Journal (1728), There may be more in PRO State Papers for this period, which are now fairly thoroughly indexed; Parliamentary printing, 1733-39 - Severs his most extreme antiministerial affiliations, though they survive more mildly in some of his writings of the 1730s, e.g. his pamphlet supporting the opposition Playhouse Bill (A Seasonable Examination, 1735) and the Jacobite innuendoes of Aesop's Fables (1739), Makes official parliamentary contracts the mainstay of his business, but extensive printing of journals, poems, plays and novels integrates him closely into key literary circles of the day, especially that of Aaron Hill; Towards Pamela, 1739-40 - Analysis of Richardson's prolific writing in the late 1730s (Aesop's Fables, editions of The Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe and Defoe's Tour, Familiar Letters, important short items e.g. his preface to Penelope Aubin's Collection of Novels) as heralding the novel, This will be the place to explore the relationship between Pamela and earlier fiction, with particular reference to Richardson's printing of Haywood and others. Part Two The Novels and After: Pamela and the Pamela vogue, 1740-42 - A reading of Pamela, emphasizing political overtones of the novel's conflict, and drawing out the extent to which its plot, though far from allegorical, uneasily shadows Richardson's own history of resistance to, and accommodation with, Whiggish authority, Then an analysis of the ensuing controversy as a market phenomenon, emphasizing evidence of Richardson's guiding hand. (Part contents).
