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Pamela and
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Clarissa, was the son of a Derbyshire joiner. He was born in 1689, and died in 1761. Apprenticed to a London printer, he rose by steady industry and prudence to be the manager of a large business, printer of the Journals of the House of Commons, Master of the Stationers' Company, and part-printer to the king. In 1741, at the age of fifty-two, publishers urging the thriving citizen to write them a book of moral letters, Richardson produced
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Pamela, a novel which ran through five editions the first year, and became the rage of the town. Ladies carried the precious volumes to Ranelagh, and held them up in smiling triumph to each other. Pope praised the novel as more useful than twenty volumes of sermons, and Dr. Sherlock gravely recommended it from the pulpit. In 1749 Richardson wrote
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Clarissa Harlowe, his most perfect work, and in 1753 his somewhat tedious
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Sir Charles Grandison (7 vols.). In
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Pamela he drew a servant, whom her master attempts to seduce and eventually marries, but in
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Clarissa the heroine, after harrowing misfortunes, dies unrewarded. Richardson had always a moral end in view. He hated vice and honoured virtue, but he is too often prolix and wearisome. He wished to write novels that should wean the young from the foolish romances of his day. In
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Pamela he rewarded struggling virtue; in
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Clarissa he painted the cruel selfishness of vice; in
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Sir Charles he tried to represent the perfect Christian gentleman. Coleridge said that to read Fielding after Richardson was like emerging from a sick room, heated by stoves into an open lawn on a breezy May morning. Richardson, indeed, wrote more for women than men. Fielding was coarser, but more manly; he had humour, but no moral purpose at all. The natural result was that Fielding and his set looked on Richardson as a grave, dull, respectable old prig; Richardson on Fielding as a low rake, who wrote like a man who had been an ostler born in a stable, or a runner in a sponging-house.
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The virtues of Fielding's heroes, the vain old printer used to say to his feminine clique,
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Pamela.
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Sir, he used to thunder out,
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He called Fielding a
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Sir, there is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all 'Tom Jones.' Some one present here mildly suggested that Richardson was very tedious.
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Why, sir, replied Johnson,