Samuel Richardson

He was an 18th-century English writer and printer. He wrote Pamela: at the end he was one of the authors of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Biography

1689 à Richardson was born on 19th August in Mackworth, Derbyshire

1719 à after having finished his seven years of apprenticeship under John Wilde and having  become an “Overseer and Corrector of a Printing-Office”, he opened his own printer shop.

1721 à Richardson married Martha Wilde, the daughter of his former employer, and from her he had five sons and a daughter. All his sons and also his wife died early and so he and his daughter moved into another house on Blue Ball Court when they also lived with Elizabeth Leake, the Richardson’s second wife. From her Richardson had five daughters and a son. Only four daughters became adult and their son was born in 1739 and died in 1740.

1733 à Richardson was granted a contract with the House of Commons to print the Journals of the House, improving his business. Then, he wrote The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum to create the perfect apprentice.

1740 à He published his first novel: “Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded”

1748 à He published his second novel: “Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady”. But the three volumes were published later so people began to imagine the end of the story and they asked for a happy ending. Obviously the writer refused this request and also Fielding, who was the strongest antagonist of Richardson, was agreed with him because a happy ending would not do the novel justice.

1753 à He printed his new novel: The History of Sir Charles Grandison. But he discovered that Irish printers were trying to pirate the work, so he relied on multiple London printing firms to help him produce an authentic edition before the pirated version was sold.

1761 à Richardson died and he was buried near his first wife Martha at St. Bride's church. He wanted to leave his works to his family but with the death of his sons and a nephew he had to leave the printer to his second nephew, even if he doubted the younger man's abilities. In fact after the death of Richardson his printer stopped working.

Epistolary novels
The 18th century is the golden age of the epistolary novel throughout Europe. In epistolary novel or novel of letters, the narration takes place in the form of letters, possibly journal entries, and occasionally newspaper reports (epistle is an archaic term for a letter).
The epistolary novel is an interesting literary technique, because it allows a writer to include multiple narrators in his or her story. This means the story can be told and interpreted from numerous viewpoints.
The first true epistolary novel was the 17th century work, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister penned by Aphra Behn but the first great international success in this genre is Lettres persanes,a philosophical novel by the French writer and philosopher Montesquieu. Many critics consider the first truly modern English novel Pamela of Samuel Richardson.

The epistolary novel shows an astonishing variety of moods and contents, for example:

• The Sorrows of Young Werther, (J.W.Goethe), is a psychological novel based on unhappy love;
• Richardson’s Pamela is a sentimental novel with strong social and religious overtones;
• La nouvelle Héloise, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, embodies the Enlightenment philosophy of the return to primitive mature as the correction of the society’s abuses.

The epistolary novel enjoyed its greatest popularity in England and France from the mid-1700s to the end of the century, a time when literacy was on the increase and the public sought literary works with more depictions of ordinary experience and greater psychological realism than were found in the old heroic romances. With its reliance on subjective points of view, the epistolary novel by its very nature offers intimate insight into characters' thoughts and feelings without interference from the author, and advances the plot with dramatic immediacy. Epistolary authors commonly wrote about questions of morality, and many epistolary novels are sentimental in nature.
The acknowledged great British epistolary novelists of the period included Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollet.  Fielding, Richardson’s rival, with his parody points out some of the inherent problems with the epistolary form, including the fact that simple, uneducated characters convey their sentiments through sophisticated literary means.

The epistolary novel presents a great technical variety: it can be distinguished between a single-point-of-view and a composite-point-of-view. In the first the letters are written by only one correspondent, while in the second the letters are exchanged between several correspondents like in the Les liaisons dangereuses.
Very important in epistolary novel is the role of the editor, a fictitious figure who pretends to have found the letters and presents them to the public. The fictitious editor may be found in Pamela, Werther and Ortis. The editor has got two different functions: on the one hand, his impersonal role adds an air of authenticity to the letters while on the other hand he is a neutral voice which increases the complexity of the epistolary exchange.

Richardson was the first writer to dramatize letter-writing. Richardson uses many devices for making his letters lively and intensely dramatic, as if they were written in the moment. In the 18th century the epistolary novel served a dual purpose: it was the means of expressing philosophical and social issues as well as individuality of feelings. On the one hand, writers such as Montesquieu and Rousseau found in letters the ideal medium for giving their own view of man and society.

In the Enlightenment the epistolary novels were important instruments for the diffusion of the great issues like religious tolerance, freedom, equality and the return to nature. On the other hand, the letters became the means of psychological analysis of characters. The first acclaimed master of this was Richardson and his lesson was soon followed by other European writers.

Samuel Richardson’s works

• Pamela
• Clarissa
• Sir Charles Gradinson
• Letters

PAMELA
In his first novel, “Pamela”, he explored the various complexities of the title character's life, and the letters allow the reader to witness her development and progress over time. This novel was an experiment, but it allowed Richardson to create a complex heroine through a series of her letters.

CLARISSA
When Richardson wrote his second novel “Clarissa, or story of a Young lady” he had more experience in the form and expanded the letter writing to four different correspondents, which created a complex system of characters encouraging each other to grow and develop over time. It was published in 1748 and tells the tragic story of a heroine whose quest for virtue is continually thwarted by her family: Clarissa Harlowe is a beautiful eighteen-year-old woman considered an exemplary woman by everyone around her, but the members of the family are avaricious and eager to improve their standing in the world, and Clarissa becomes the victim of their avidity. The trouble starts when Richard Lovelace, a charming man, comes to pay court to Clarissa’s sister, Arabella, but is attracted by Clarissa instead.

SIR CHARLES GRANDISON
His third epistolary novel was “Sir Charles Gradinson”. It transforms the letter writing from telling of personal insights and explaining feelings into a means for people to communicate their thoughts on the actions of others and for the public to celebrate virtue. The book was published in 1753 and it was a response to Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, which parodied the morals presented in Richardson's previous novels. The novel follows the story of Harriet Byron who is followed by Sir Hargrave Pollexfen. After she rejects Pollexfen, he kidnaps her, and she is only freed when Sir Charles Grandison comes to her rescue. After his appearance, the novel focuses on his history and life, and he becomes its central figure.
The novel incorporates an epistolary format similar to Richardson's previous novels, Clarissa and Pamela. Unlike those novels, Charles Grandison, the leading male character, is a morally good man and without the evil intent that is manifested by the Lovelace or Mr. B (characters of Clarissa and Pamela respectively).

LETTERS
He wrote also the  “Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, on the Most Important Occasions” (1741), in which Richardson addressed a number of fictional situations, including that of attractive servant-girls subject to plots against their virtue. Containing one hundred and seventy-three letters.

Pamela, or virtue rewarded

Richardson’s masterpiece
This novel is Samuel Richardson’s first work of fiction but also his Masterpiece. It was the first example of a best-seller in the history of the English novel. This is an epistolary novel; most of the letters are written by the protagonist, Pamela Andrews, a young servant girl, to her parents. The book was immensely popular not only in England but also in Europe where it was soon translated into all the major languages and turned into a play.  (For example in Italy, Carlo Goldoni wrote two comedies after Richardson’s novel: Pamela nubile and Pamela Maritata)
The publication of Pamela in 1740 in England was a massive cultural event, inspiring praise and condemnation, followed by endless discussion, public debates, letters written to journals and newspapers. The novel’s implicit theme divided the country into Pamelist and anti-Pamelist (like Henry Fielding). Imitations and parodies (like Henry Fielding book’s Shamela) soon come out, so Richardson’s first follow-up was a sequel to the novel, Pamela in her Exalted Condition (1741)

The letters
In Pamela, the letters are almost exclusively written by the heroine, restricting the reader's access to the other characters; we see only Pamela's perception of them, while in Richardson's other novels, the reader is privy to the letters of several characters and can more effectively evaluate the characters' motivations and moral values.
In the novel, Pamela writes two kinds of letters. At the beginning, while she decides how long to stay on at Mr B's after his mother's death, she tells her parents about her various moral dilemmas and asks for their advice. After Mr. B. abducts her and imprisons her in his country house, she continues to write to her parents, but since she does not know if they will ever receive her letters, the writings are also considered a diary. The book can be divided into two parts.

The plot
Part 1
It tells the story of a beautiful 15-year old maidservant named Pamela Andrews who works as Lady B's maidservant in Bedfordshire for many years. When the noblewomen dies, Pamela is much grieved: she loved Lady B. because she had given her an education far beyond her means, and Pamela is also worried about her future. Mr.B, Lady B’s son offers to let her remain in the household, and Pamela accepts with gratitude. Mr. B is infatuated with her, first by her looks and then her innocence and intelligence, but his high rank hinders him from proposing marriage.
He abducts her, locks her up in one of his estates, and attempts to seduce and rape her. She rejects him continually, but starts to realize that she is falling in love with him. He intercepts her letters to her parents; reading them, he becomes even more enamored by her innocence, intelligence, and continuous escape attempts. Her virtue is eventually rewarded when he sincerely proposes an equitable marriage to her.

Part 2
In the novel's second part, Pamela accepts to marry Mr.B, she and her family was poor and it could be a solution for their poverty but when Mr.B liberated her and she is coming home, she realizes she loves him. So when Mr.B is ill she accepts to come back. Pamela and Mr. B talk of their future as husband and wife and she agrees with everything he says. She explains why she doubted him. This is the end of her trials: she is more submissive to him and owes him everything now as a wife. Mr. Williams is released. Pamela. Pamela's father comes to take her away but he is reassured when he sees Pamela happy. So they attempt to build a successful relationship with him and to settle into upper-class society.
This part shows Pamela and Mr.B’s married life with troubles, treason and quarrels . All admire Pamela and she is shown like a model wife and the gentry who once despised Pamela now praise her, but Mr.B too is in the end converted to a sober well-regulated life.

The Pamela character
In this novel, Pamela reveals in her journal and letters the intimate details of her everyday life in language that is simple, straightforward, and conversational. This approach makes the novel easy to read and understand. Moreover, it creates a closeness with the reader, as if he or she were the recipient of the letters or the reader of the journal.
Pamela, of course, is a lower-class female servant.
She is a devoted daughter to her impoverished parents to whom she writes a prodigious number of letters and whom she credits with the moral formation that prompts her to defend her purity at all costs. A pretty servant girl was easy prey for a wealthy master who took a fancy to her. In the face of the squire's attempts to seduce her, Pamela never once gives in to him. She turns down his offers of sums of money, servants at her beck and call, and other favors in order to preserve her virtue. Although she discovers after a time that she loves him, she refuses to bed with him outside of marriage.

The triumph of the middle class
One of the great social facts of Richardson’s day was the intermingling of the aspirant middle class with the gentry and aristocracy. The eighteenth century was a golden age of social climbing and thereby of satire, but Richardson was the first novelist to turn his serious regard on class difference and class tension. Pamela is a servant girl who has managed to climb the ladder of classes. There was a point in Pamela, in fact, to put forward the values of a middle class that prided itself on its rectitude and morality as opposed to freer life-style of the nobles. “O Sir! my Soul is of equal Importance with the Soul of a Princess; though my Quality is inferior to that of the meanest Slave.”
(Pamela, 158)
This exclamation, which Pamela makes in the course of a letter to Mr. Williams, expresses that the moral life of the individual possesses an absolute value that transcends social distinctions. The novel celebrates not just the marriage between Pamela and Mr B but also the union of England's two classes: the nobles and the bourgeois.

The first psychological novel
The novel was praised for its psychological veracity and its moral influence on the readers. In fact Pamela was the first psychological novel in English. A psychological novel is a work  fiction which places more than the usual amount of emphasis  on the motives and on the circumstances. The psychological novel is not content to state what happens but goes on to explain the motivation of this action. The psychological novel can be called a novel of the "inner man".
In composing Pamela, Richardson wanted to explore human psychology in ways that no other writer had before. His narrative method, in which Pamela records her thoughts as they occur to her and soon after the events that have inspired them, he called “writing to the moment”. This study of character's feelings was achieved by Richardson through a clever and innovative use of epistolary technique. The letters are in fact full of incidents, and the dialogues are mostly in direct speech. This corresponds to Richardson's idea of letter-writing which was that the characters write down their thoughts and feeling after the incident has occurred. Richardson's epistolary novels combine the urgency and direct speech of drama with an accurate and detailed description of people, places and objects.

Criticism and parody/Pamela and Shamela
Pamela was immediately and extremely popular with the reading public. Richardson initially also enjoyed critical acclaim and was considered one of the most important English novelists. His contemporaries focused almost exclusively on his moral teachings, and most praised the author for his judgment and honesty. Richardson's stated purpose in his works was moral instruction and thus when his sincerity was eventually questioned, and his work attacked by Fielding in parodies including Shamela, Richardson defended himself with explanations and revisions, particularly in the third edition of Pamela. The heroine of Pamela is a paragon of virtue, a servant girl who resists the sexual advances of her master, and Richardson's purpose with the novel was to “cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes.” Fielding's heroine Shamela, on the other hand, is an artful minx who uses her “Virtue” to rise in the world. By poking fun at every aspect of Richardson's method and message, Fielding exposes the hypocrisy of contemporary mores. The work is more than a simple parody of Richardson, however, as Fielding lampoons political figures, the clergy, and contemporary writers. So the differences between the two women are obvious. Pamela was created as a pinnacle of virtue and steadfastness. She withstands both temptation and difficult circumstances. 
Conversely, Shamela presents only a mirage of virtue. and if she is doing the wrong thing, at least she is doing something.

Samuel Richardson’s revision
The popularity of Richardson’s novel led to much public debate about the novel’s message and style. Richardson responded to some of the criticisms by revising the novel for each new edition; he even created a “reading group” of women to advise him.
Also, after the criticism, he published a sequel to the novel “Pamela in her Exalted Condition (1741)” with a revision of the original romance. Some of the most significant changes that he made were his alterations to Pamela’s vocabulary. In the first edition her diction is that of a lower-class maid, but in later editions Richardson made her more linguistically middle-class by removing the lower-class idioms from her speech. In this way, he made her marriage to Mr. B less scandalous as she appeared to be more his equal in education.
A curiosity about the novel concerns that Samuel Richardson claims that the story was based on a true incident related to him by a friend about 25 years before, but did not identify the principals.

Pamela and the women’s condition
The term feminism indicates the movement, which occurred around 1960,when women tried to get equal rights with men.
The rededication of rights started long time before. In fact already in the XVII century, women tried to prove to be equal to men.
So the dinners and meetings in the halls  of middle high bourgeoisie, were no longer occasions only for fun but also to think about, moral, truths and habits of life of woman and men.
Ladies wrote and discussed about the love between woman and man, this love had to be purely spiritual, about the significance of marriage and some of them believed that it was unnecessary.
So a multitude of books and writings, which speak about the feminist ideas spread in all Europe. The myth of the witches spread to stop the expansion of these ideas, which were considered too dangerous for the society. So all women who were considered dangerous were burned at the stake.
At the beginning of XVIII century, the  woman tried to marry for adapting to the society.
Only with the spread of Enlightenment ideas the feminism found new vigour.
As in the XVII century the salons were meeting places for man ladies and philosophers; but contrary to the previous century they don't discuss about society but about Science and Philosophy. So "women philosophers" was born. But soon the woman philosophers' importance were overcome by the philosophers' importance that come to this meeting (Voltaire, Rousseau e Diderot); the woman, who managed their importance, were few. One of theme was De Gouges, a French dramatist who lived during the French Revolution. She fought for the woman's rights. she is the best example of feminist woman of XVIII. She wrote in 1791, the declaration of the rights of women and the city.
At the end of the XVIII most novels were intended for a female audience, that at the beginning of the XIV century enters the world of work.
Books, like Samuel Richardson's Pamela who told of the beautiful Pamela, were born. In particular in this novel presents a model of female life, where women triumph over oppression of the male, the leader. a woman who can marry the man she loves with an act of rebellion but in the end reconciled with the morality of the time.
Even if in the XVII-XVIII centuries women got great conquests feminism's victory came only in XX century. The woman returned to the fore, especially in the role of worker, emerged as a social figure free from the male power.