SAMUEL RICHARDSON AS NOVELIST

  ASSIGNMENT :  SAMUEL RICHARDSON AS NOVELIST 

Paper No :102

   Literature of the Neoclassical Age

Topic: write a note on Samuel Richardson AS Novelist. 

Name : Sangita Kantariya 

Roll No : 20

Enrollment No :4069206420210015

Semester: 01

Year : 2021-22

Submitted by : S.B. Gardi 

Department of English, MKBU 

SAMUEL RICHARDSON AS NOVELIST 

 

SAMUEL RICHARDSON was an English writer and printer best known for three epistolary novels: Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: or the  History of young Lady  (1748) and The History of sir Charles Grandison (1753). He printed almost 500 works in his life, including journals and magazines. He wrote his first novel at the age of 51 and immediately joined the admired writers of his day. 

SAMUEL RICHARDSON EARLY  LIFE 

Richardson probably  born in 1689in England. According to Richardson his mother was also a good woman. In describing his father's occupation, Richardson stated that "he was a good draughtsman and understood architecture." Richardson was educated at Christ's Hospital grammar school.  The  Richardson received very little education, but he had a natural talent for writing letters. After his writing ability was known, he began to help others in the community write letters.  The elder Richardson originally wanted his son to become a clergyman, but he was not able to afford the education that the younger Richardson would require, so he let his son pick his own profession. He selected the profession of printing because he hoped to "gratify a thirst for reading, which , in after years, he disclaimed." At the age of 17, in 1706, Richardson was bound in seven-year apprenticeship under John wilde as a printer.

By 1715 he had become a freeman of the statiner's company and citizen of London, and six or seven years after the expiration of his apprenticeship set up his own business as a printer, eventually settling in Salisbury Court.

In 1721 Richardson marriage Martha wilde, the daughter of his former employer. His wife died on 1731. Richardson remarried.  Richardson‘s  personal life has always been marked by literary critics as particularly grim; few writers  experienced quite as much death and private sorrow as Richardson, and no doubt these experiences influenced the somewhat somber tone of his later writings. 

In 1733, Richardson was granted a contract with the House of commons,  with help from Onslow, to print the journals of the House. 

FIRST NOVEL 

During his time printing the Daily journal, he was also printer to the "society for the Encouragement of learning." Richardson made the transition from master printer to novelist on 6 November 1740 with the publication of  Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. He expanded the dramatic possibilities of the novel by his invention and use of the letter from. 

In 1733 Richardson wrote The Apprentice's Vade Mecum, urging young men to be diligent and self  denyind.  Written in response to the "epidemic Evils of the present Age," The text is best known for its condemnation of popular forms of entertainment including theaters, taverns, and gambling. The manual targets the apprentice as the focal point for the moral improvement of society, not because he is most susceptible to vice,  but because, Richardson suggests, he is more responsive to moral improvement than his social betters.

During these years Richardson began, ever so modestly, to write fiction and essays. At some point in the 1730s he was commissioned to write a sequence of fictional letters, a form relatively  popular among serial  publications in its time. This collection has become known as familiar letters on important occasions.  During  this time it is apparent, as Richardson‘s  notebooks state, that he began to envision the possibility of writing a novel in the form of a sequence of letters.  Utilizing a true story he had heard elsewhere as the basis of his plot, Richardson  began to write his novel Pamela in the winter of 1739, and the novel was published a year later, when Richardson was 50 years old.

EPISTOLARY NOVELS 

An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents.  The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspapers clippings and other  documents are sometimes used. The word epistolary is derived from Latin from the Greek word, meaning a letter.  Epistolary fiction may be monologic in which the story is told exclusively through journal entries or letters of the main characters,thus representing their point of view.  Epistolary writing may also be dialogic or polylogic  consisting of a series of letters or other correspondence between two or more characters, in which multiple points of view are represented through an array of documents. 

Prominent example of novel in the epistolary style include :

Pamela : or, Virtue Rewarded by samule Richardson (1740)

Clarissa by samule Richardson (1748)

Evelina by Fanny Burney (1778)

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1823)

Lady Susan by Jane Austen (1871)

PAMELA: OR VIRTUE REWARDED 

Pamela : or Virtue Rewarded, an endless series of latter's telling of the trials, tribulations, and the Final happy marriage of a too sweet young maiden, published in four volume extending over the years 1740-1741. 

While preparing this Volume, a small sequence of letters from a young Lady asking her father's counsel when endangered by her master's advances, entranced him . His enthrallment resulted in a shift in his work. The result was the tone Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded.  The book has been subject to Much inquiry.  One such question critics ask is if the main character, Pamela Andrew's is truly Virtuous or a convincing hypocrite.   By understanding the character of Pamela, one must conclude Pamela is a truly Virtuous young Lady. 

 

Comparison characteristics of "Evelina " and "Pamela"

Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded  referred to in "learning to be female" as "conduct-of-life " literature.  The story letters tell the tale of Pamela Andrew's a servant in the household of Lady Booby. The novel consist of a funny cat-and- mouse tale of Mr. B'S unrequited love  for Pamela, and Pamela cleverly escaping his grasp  in order to save her Virtue. 

It was not only the upper -class that took issue with Pamela, but some of RICHARDSON'S  contemporaries did as well. Most notably, Henry Fielding wrote the novella AN APOLOGY FOR THE LIFE OF MRS. SHAMELA ANDREW'S, often simply called SHAMELA as a direct attack and satire of Richardson popular novel.

Evelina ; or, The History of a Young Girls  Entrance into the world was written by Frances Burney and was published in 1778. Also written in epistolary form, this novel centers around Evelina Annville, a young woman being brought up by Reverend villas after the death of her mother and her father rejection. Unlike Samuel Richardson, Burney did not face as much criticism for Evelina. Both of these stories, although unlike  in plot, have many similarities.  Even before delving into the text itself, there are many similarities in Pamela and Evelina. Pamela and Evelina were well- received and widely read. In addition to these surfaces issues, there are also some apparent  thematic similarities. 

Pamela ; or, Virtue Rewarded and Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World are both eighteenth century novels, written in similar styles and containing similar themes, though there are some differences in the characterization of Pamela and Evelina, as well as many differences in plot. 

CLARISSA; OR , THE HISTORY OF A YOUNG LADY 

CLARISSA, in full clarissa ; or, The History of a Young Lady, epistolary novel by samule Richardson, published in 1747 - 48. Among the longest English novels ever written, the book has secured a place in literary history for its tremendous psychological insight.  Written in the then fashionable epistolary form, it's main body consists of the letters of clarissa Harlowe and her seduce,Lovelace.

Clarissa, a young woman who expects to marry well, is gravely disappointed by her parents choice of  suitor. The extremely wealthy, though ugly, solves is not clarissa idea of a good match. Instead she is drawn to a man who is as dashing and fashionable as he is lacking in moral character. He casts himself as Clarissa rescuer from her off to the apparent safety and anonymity of london. 

The novel's seeming narrative simplicity is not its strengths; it is the sometimes devastating psychological insight that Richardson achieves that is its real Forte. 

RICHARDSON CONTRIBUTION TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH 

Some critics have considered Samuel Richardson the farther of the novel. George saintsbury declared Pamela the first novel in history, asking rhetorically, "where are we to find a probable human being, worked out to the same degree, before?" Richardson did not invent the form of long fiction, but he did innovate the combination of psychological realism and amplitude of concrete detail that is the special province of the genre of the novel. 

In other words, Pamela  inaugurated a whole tradition in the English novel whereby readers know  the characters directly through the circumstances of their comparatively unfiltered lives, rather than learning of the second hand through an omniscient narrator.  

The novel's use of "narrative skill" to "re -create the pseudo -realism of the daydream, to give an air of authenticity to a triumph against all obstacles and contrary  to expectation,"  amounts simply to a more insidious version of the Cinderella fantasy, an application of literary realism that  teaches the infusion of marital aspirations with fairy -tale patterns of social elevation. Whether or not one chooses to accept watts moral judgment of this tendency of  the English novel, it is a tendency that undoubtedly bears the impress of Richardson and of Pamela. 

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