The First Modern Novel – 2

The first great English novelist, Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), was born and bred in Derbyshire.

Continuing The First Modern Novel,
our selection from Edmund Gosse. The selection is presented in three easy 5 minute installments.

Previously in The First Modern Novel.

Time: 1740
Place: England

The first great English novelist, Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), was born and bred in Derbyshire. He records of himself that when still a little boy he had two peculiarities: he loved the society of women best and he delighted in letter-writing. Indeed, before he was eleven, he wrote a long epistle to a widow of fifty, rebuking her for unbecoming conduct. The girls of the neighborhood soon discovered his insight into the human heart and his skill in correspondence and they employed the boy to write their love-letters for them. In 1706 Richardson was apprenticed to a London printer, served a diligent apprenticeship and worked as a compositor until he rose, late in life, to be master of the Stationers’ Company. He was fifty years of age before he showed symptoms of any higher ambition than that of printing correctly acts of Parliament and new editions of law-books. In 1739 the publishers, Rivington and Osborne, urged him to compose for them a volume of Familiar Letters, afterward actually produced as an aid to illiterate persons in their correspondence. Richardson set about this work, gave it a moral flavor and at last began to write what would serve as a caution to young serving-women who were exposed to temptation. At this point he recollected a story he had heard long before, of a beautiful and virtuous maid-servant who succeeded in marrying her master; and then, laying the original design aside, Richardson, working rapidly, wrote in three months his famous story of Pamela.

All Richardson’s novels are written in what Mrs. Barbauld has ingeniously described as “the most natural and the least probable way of telling a story,” namely, in consecutive letters. The famous heroine of his first book is a young girl, Pamela Andrews, who describes in letters to her father and mother what goes on in the house of a lady with whom she had lived as maid and who is just dead when the story opens. The son of Pamela’s late mistress, a Mr. B. — it was Fielding who wickedly enlarged the name to Booby — becomes enamored of her charms and takes every mean advantage of her defenseless position; but, fortunately, Pamela is not more virtuous than astute and after various agonies, which culminate in her thinking of drowning herself in a pond, she brings her admirer to terms and is discovered to us at last as the rapturous though still humble Mrs. B. There are all sorts of faults to be found with this crude book. The hero is a rascal, who comes to a good end, not because he has deserved to do so but because his clever wife has angled for him with her beauty and has landed him at last, like an exhausted salmon.

So long as Pamela is merely innocent and frightened, she is charming but her character ceases to be sympathetic as she grows conscious of the value of her charms and even the lax morality of the day was shocked at the craft of her latest maneuvers. But all the world went mad with pleasure over the book. What we now regard as tedious and prolix was looked upon as so much linked sweetness long drawn out. The fat printer had invented a new thing and inaugurated a fresh order of genius. For the first time the public was invited, by a master of the movements of the heart, to be present at the dissection of that fascinating organ and the operator could not be leisurely enough, could not be minute enough, for his breathless and enraptured audience.

In France, for some ten years past there had been writers — Crébillon, Marivaux, Prévost — who had essayed this delicate analysis of emotion but these men were the first to admit the superiority of their rough English rival. In Marianne, where the heroine tells her own story, which somewhat resembles that of Pamela, the French novelist produced a very refined study of emotion, which will probably be one day more largely read than it now is and which should be looked through by every student of the English novel. This book is prolix and languid in form and undoubtedly bears a curious resemblance to Richardson’s novel. The English printer, however, could not read French,[29] and there is sufficient evidence to show that he was independent of any influences save those which he took from real life. None the less, of course, Marivaux, who has a name for affectation which his writings scarcely deserve, has an interest for us as a harbinger of the modern novel. Pamela was published in two volumes in 1740. The author was sufficiently ill-advised to add two more in 1741. In this latter instalment Mrs. B. was represented as a dignified matron, stately and sweet under a burden of marital infidelity. But this continuation is hardly worthy to be counted among the works of Richardson.

[29 It is, however, now certain that there existed an English version of Marianne. ]

The novelist showed great wisdom in not attempting to repeat too quickly the success of his first work. He allowed the romances of Henry and Sarah Fielding, the latter as grateful to him as the former were repugnant, to produce their effect upon the public and it was to an audience more able to criticize fiction that Richardson addressed his next budget from the mail-bag. Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, appeared, in instalments but in seven volumes in all, in 1748, with critical prefaces prefixed to the first and fourth volumes. In this book the novelist put his original crude essay completely into the shade and added one to the masterpieces of the world. Released from the accident which induced him in the pages of Pamela to make his heroine a servant-girl, in Clarissa, Richardson depicted a lady, yet not of so lofty a rank as to be beyond the range of his own observation.

Continued.

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