Samuel Richardson

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Data:	12.03.2007
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Richardson and the epistolary vogue
The son of a joiner, Samuel Richardson was born in 1689 in Derbyshire (although his family moved to London while he was still a child). His father hoped Samuel would become a priest but the family lacked the means to educate him, so he became a printer's apprentice instead.
Richardson did very well in the trade. He eventually bought his own business which became a highly respected press, printing (amongst other things) several daily newspapers and the Journals of the House of Commons. On the personal front, Richardson had married his employer's daughter, Martha Wilde, and they had six children. Alas, she and all their children died, and he married again. He had six children with Elizabeth Leake, and although two of them also died of childhood illness, four survived.
In 1739 people from the book trade (apparently two friends of his called Rivington and Osborne) asked him to write a manual to advise people on the correct etiquette of letter writing. As he prepared the volume and thought about all the things to be considered in interpersonal communications and relationships, he began to somehow see a story emerge. While working on this volume he had the idea of using the epistolary technique to tell a story he had heard about the real case of a serving maid whose virtue had been unsuccessfully attacked by an unscrupulous man. In the form of letters and excerpts from a diary, Richardson wrote and published the first volumes of his first novel, “Pamela”, in 1740, with concluding parts appearing in 1741.
Richardson published an even more popular second novel, “Clarissa”, in seven parts from 1747 to 1748. A third novel, “Sir Charles Grandison”, appeared in seven volumes from 1753 to 1754.
Samuel Richardson passed away on the 4th of July, 1761.

The moralising aim
All novels of Richardson reflect the characteristics of the Journal “The Spectator”: common sense, good manners and modesty. In fact there is a deep moralising tendency within Richardson’s novels, which reproduce the Puritan middle-class scheme of reward for virtue and punishment for sins.
He avoided episodic plots by basing his novels on a single action, a courtship.

Characterisation
In Richardson’s work there is psychological analysis. In fact the reader is suited to share the states of mind and the vicissitudes of the events. There is also a sense of individual development within the story: characters are far from being static and the reader is almost a witness to their gradual development. Richardson’s heroines have much in common with each other: youth and charm, considerable self-will and knowledge, together with Christian piety.

The epistolary novel
An epistolary novel is a book written using a literary technique in which a novel is composed as a series of letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. The word “epistolary” comes from the word “epistles”, meaning letters.
One of past arguments for an epistolary novel was that it was thought to add greater realism and verisimilitude to the story, chiefly because the epistolary novel mimics the workings of non-fictional real life. It is able to demonstrate differing points of view without recourse to the omniscient narrator, whom some novelists believed to be an unrealistic representation.
The epistolary novel was a form most popular in the 18th century in the works of such authors as Samuel Richardson, whose early novel Pamela (1740), was considered the first epistolary novel. In France, Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) used the epistolary form to great dramatic effect, because the sequence of events was not always related directly or explicitly.

Narrative technique
It is quite difficult to find a story-telling device able to give a more perfect impression of actuality than the epistolary form chosen by Richardson. This form, which uses the first person narrative techinique through personal letters and journals, provides different individual points of view on the same event, which is fully explored; moreover it has much in common with the dramatic technique, since the characters introduce one another, using letters instead of speech, and the action is made up by a series of scenes with no general summaries. Another aspect of this literary form is its immediacy: the reader is implicitily invited to believe that the letters are as they read them as they were in the very act of composition.