Richardson, SAMUEL, novelist, was born in 1689 in Derbyshire. Like Matthew Prior, he was the son of a joiner; but unlike him, he made no effort to obscure his origin. 'My father,' he said, 'was a very honest man, descended from a family of middling note. My mother was also a good woman, of a family not ungentle.' His career is a curious exemplification of the truth of that Horatian precept which Thackeray chose for the motto of Esmond. It preserved to the end the characteristics of its outsetting. The man who was afterwards the moralist of Salisbury Court was as a boy the 'Gravity' and 'Serious' of his school-fellows; the novelist who penned the interminable epistles of Clarissa and Harriet Byron was as a youth the favoured and indefatigable amanuensis of half the girls in the neighbourhood, acquiring in this artless office something of that strange knowledge of the minuter mechanism of the feminine mind which is so conspicuous a feature of his genius. He says of himself that he had only 'common school-learning;' but he appears to have been at Christ's Hospital. In 1706, at the age of sixteen, he was bound by his own wish to John Wilde of Stationers' Hall, a printer, with whom he served the usual period. Allington Wilde, whose daughter he married, was also a printer, but was quite a distinct person from his master. From 1713 to 1719 he worked as a journeyman printer. In the latter year he opened an establishment of his own in the centre, and later in the north-west corner (No. 11) of Salisbury Square, then Salisbury Court. His printing-office and warehouses were in Blue Ball Court, on the east side of the Square. In a sober, methodical way he continued to prosper, perfecting his faculty for letter-writing in various ways, and serving the humbler needs of literature by diligent compilation of prefaces, indexes, advertisements, and the like. He printed more than one newspaper, and by the favour of Mr Speaker Onslow obtained the printing of the journals of the House of Commons, twenty-six volumes of which passed through his establishment. Then, in 1740, came the opportunity which transformed him into a literary celebrity. To use his own words, 'he accidentally slid into the writing of Pamela.' He was over fifty when two bookselling friends invited him to prepare a volume of familiar letters 'in a common style, on such subjects as might be of use to those country readers who were unable to indite for themselves.' He caught at the idea, superadding another. 'Will it be any harm,' he said, 'in a piece you want to be written so low, if we should instruct them how they should think and act in common cases?' 'Hence sprung Pamela,' published in November 1740. Its title was as leisurely as its method: 'Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded. In a series of familiar letters from a beautiful young damsel to her parents. Published in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the mind of the youth of both sexes. A narrative which has its foundation in truth; and at the same time that it agreeably entertains by a variety of curious and affecting incidents, is entirely divested of all those images which, in too many pieces calculated for amusement only, tend to inflame the minds they should instruct.' The moral note is explicit enough on the good printer's title-page; but for all that Pamela is by no means ad usum Delphini. Its vogue, in a coarser and robuster age than ours, was nevertheless extraordinary. Not to have read of Richardson's exemplary heroine was 'as great a sign of want of curiosity, as not to have seen the French and Italian dancers.' Divines extolled her from their pulpits; Pope declared she would do more good than their discourses; fine ladies triumphantly exhibited her popular chronicles at places of amusement; and in remote country villages, when at last she was happily married, her rustic admirers set the bells a-ringing. In February followed a second edition; a third succeeded in March, and a fourth in May. Grub Street, fastening promptly upon this unexampled popularity, hastily put together for sequel a Pamela in High Life, which had the unfortunate effect of seducing Richardson into two supplementary volumes, now deservedly forgotten; and then Henry Fielding fluttered the Salisbury Court dovecote by producing what Richardson and his coterie regarded as the 'lewd and ungenerous engraftment' of Joseph Andrews. Happily, however, both for Richardson and posterity, he speedily discarded burlesque for the immortal character of Parson Abraham Adams.
Eight years elapsed before Richardson published another novel. But during this time, consoling himself for the coarse sallies of the irreverent by the 'soft adulation' of a little circle, chiefly of the gentler sex, who gathered round him in his suburban home at Hammersmith, he continued, either in his snug writing-closet or his summer-house, to work placidly at his masterpiece—Clarissa; or the Adventures of a Young Lady, known generally as Clarissa Harlowe. Virtue, in this performance, was not 'rewarded,' but ruined. The heroine is nevertheless drawn with a tenacity of insight to which Pamela could scarcely pretend; and the chief male character, that of Lovelace, though more of an abstraction, is scarcely inferior. Johnson declared the book to be the first in the world for its knowledge of the human heart; and even Fielding did not refuse his tribute: 'Such simplicity, such manners, such deep penetration into nature, such power to raise and alarm the passions, few writers, either ancient or modern, have been possessed of' (Jacobite Journal, No. 5). Lesser voices swelled the chorus with greater energy, and it was repeated across the Channel with Gallic enthusiasm. The high-priest of sentiment, Diderot, did not scruple to name its author with Homer and Euripides; and as if to prove that this was no momentary Anglomania, in our own day the poet Alfred de Musset proclaimed it to be 'le premier roman du monde.' But from France also came its compactest condemnation. 'La nature,' said D'Alembert, 'est bonne à imiter, mais non pas jusqu'à l'ennui.'
Having drawn the ideal woman in Clarissa, Richardson proceeded, some five years later, to portray, in Sir Charles Grandison, the perfect man—'the man of true honour.' This is a work of much greater ability than Pamela, but still far below Clarissa. It has, moreover, no central story strong enough to reconcile the reader to the prolix impeccability of its superfine hero, whom M. Taine, with an unwonted burst of critical levity, suggests should be stuffed and canonised for his wearisome good qualities. Besides a solitary essay in Johnson's
Rambler (No. 97), and the voluminous but not very interesting correspondence published (with an excellent memoir) by Mrs Barbauld in 1804, Richardson left no other literary remains of any importance. In later life a nervous habit grew upon him, which terminated in 1761 by a fit of apoplexy, of which he died. He has left his own portrait in his letters to Lady Bradshaigh (Corr. ii. 206, and iv. 290); but it might almost have been deduced from his letters. He was a sentimental, purring, methodical, well-meaning little man, domesticated and affectionate, whose fitting environment was feminine society of the sympathetic sort; and he has repaid the gentle caresses with which his worshippers tempered the wind of adverse criticism to his sensitive soul by depicting their sex in return with a patience, a discrimination, a sustained analysis of secret spring and motive which it has been given to no other male author, living or dead, to achieve. It is the most unequivocal testimony to his native genius that his impracticable method of telling his story by correspondence, and his intolerable circumstantiality and diffuseness (he thinks nothing of an epistle of fifteen pages, and Clarissa takes nineteen for her will) have served only to emphasise and intensify the reality of his creations.
See the reprint of the novels, with Mr Leslie Stephen's preface (1883), Mrs Barbauld's Life of Richardson (1804) and Miss Linklater's (1900); also the essays of Mrs Oliphant (Blackwood, March 1869), of Mr Buxton Forman (Fortnightly, xii.), of Mr H. D. Traill (Contemporary, xlv.), and of Mrs Andrew Lang (National Review, xiv.).