Publisher's Synopsis
Main blurb (for internal use only - CHECK BEFORE USING IN PRINTED PUBLICITY):
In writing a biography of Richardson, three new emphases are now needed, for which the format and identity of the BCB series make it the perfect medium:
A) Literary contextualization. A start is made in the most recent books by Warner (Licensing Entertainment, 1998) and Richetti (The English Novel in History, 1999) on reassessing the relationship between Richardson and early eighteenth-century popular fiction. This needs to be developed further in light of new evidence (see below) which discredits Richardson's professed lack of acquaintance with French and English amatory fiction. B) Political contextualization. The biographical evidence I propose to highlight about Richardson's youthful political dissidence and the clash between his residually oppositional sympathies and establishment printing thereafter (see below) needs to be followed through into a reading of the novels. Both Pamela and Clarissa trace conflicts arising when legitimate authority turns tyrannical, and are riddled with a politicized vocabulary of liberty, treason, rebellion, and usurpation. Clarissa was written during a major armed insurrection (the Forty-five), and cries out for a historicized analysis that would see it as deeply coloured (though less ostentatiously than Tom Jones) by this wider public experience. C) Form and ideology. In Richardson's Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (1992) I wrote about Richardson's use of multiple competing perspectives as a way of problematizing the reading experience and devolving responsibility for interpretation and judgment. The context of a BCB volume will enable me to take this argument in another direction, reading the competing narrative voices of the novels as articulating unresolved conflicts within Richardson himself: between Jacobite legitimism and Whiggish contractarianism, for example, or between traditional piety and libertine freethinking. Contradictions in Richardson's identity Eaves and Kimpel's Richardson is, as the dustjacket blurb rather unenticingly puts it, 'of considerable historical interest as a typical, if unusually sincere, product of the middle-class ethics of his day'. A conventional, humdrum man of his age -- pious, moral, conformist --, he produced novels explicable only in terms of some absolute split between Richardson's unconscious imagination and his stodgily bourgeois life and ideas. Driven by this downbeat view of their subject, they doggedly set about proving it true, consistently underplaying (and sometimes failing to investigate at all) a wealth of evidence that complicates the picture. D) Political extremism in early career. The balance of Eaves and Kimpel's biography is very much dictated by the survival of letters, which Richardson did not systematically preserve until reaching his fifties. They give only cursory attention to his thirties - a crucial period, one might have thought, in any life. Denounced to the government in 1723 as a disaffected extremist, he was the main printer on behalf of the defendants in the treason trials following the abortive Jacobite plot of 1722, and came close to arrest for seditious libel on at least two later occasions (over his printing of The True Briton in 1723 and Mist's Weekly Journal in 1728), when he seems to have escaped imprisonment only because others, for whom he stood bail, carried the can. Though Eaves and Kimpel document this, they also play it down, refusing to recognise the young Richardson as the risk-taking activist he was, and preferring to assume that he failed to understand what he was putting through his press, or that he was innocently helping out an overburdened fellow printer.
E) Hard-nosed literary entrepreneur. Another example of the suppression by Eaves and Kimpel of complicating aspects of Richardson's activities comes in their handling of the Pamela vogue. Committed as they are to a view of religious didacticism as his exclusive obsession, they refuse to see the extent to which he was also, in engineering and stirring the controversy, a brilliantly modern (and arguably rather cynical) impresario of the literary marketplace. The didacticism, though no doubt an important aspect of Richardson's thinking, was also a way of explaining and treating Pamela that he was capable of stepping outside. There is now strong evidence, which Eaves and Kimpel discount, to suggest that he had bribed the clergyman who famously recommended Pamela from his London pulpit, and his guiding hand is everywhere to be seen in the promotional campaign. There is even evidence to support contemporary rumours that the anonymous Pamela Censured, a strident denunciation of the novel as a work of disguised pornography, was actually 'a Bookseller's Contrivance for recommending ye Purchase of Pamela', with Richardson himself behind it.
F) Experiments with authorship. Committed as they are to traditional notions of authorial genius as solitary and independent, Eaves and Kimpel underplay the strikingly collaborative ways in which the fiction was produced within and by a community of contributing readers. Sir Charles Grandison was almost written by committee. I suspect that the reason for their resistance to the evidence of how much the novels changed during their pre-publication circulation in manuscript form lies with the centrality to these processes of women like Sarah Chapone, Jane Collier, Sarah Fielding and Hester Mulso, obscure in 1971 but now much more highly regarded. The time is ripe for a reassessment of their importance to Richardson, and of his to them. Here, in his radically devolved method of composition among (as he put it) a 'female senate', is another highly unconventional aspect of Richardson's life as a writer, and one best illuminated in a format allowing critical analysis
of the text to be juxtaposed with biographical evidence about its composition. My intention would be to present the Richardson of the 1740s and 1750s as engaged in peculiar unstable experiments with scribal publication, and as the sponsor of an innovative literary circle that is important not only in shaping the novels but also in its own right.
New evidence of Richardson's printing career and early writing. A new biography of Richardson will have one great advantage over the old. For their knowledge of his output as printer, Eaves and Kimpel had to rely on W. M. Sale's Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (1950), which identifies, largely on the evidence of printers' ornaments, some 570 works. Yet it is now reliably estimated, by analogy with the well-documented business of William Bowyer, that this figure is unlikely to represent more than 20% of his output. Sale, moreover, was looking in the obvious places, so that the items he lists tend to be those that reinforce the old assumptions, rather than others which, in many cases, point in unforeseen directions. Eaves and Kimpel did not know, for example, that having moved out of opposition in the 1730s Richardson became the major official printer of parliamentary bills. Now that we do know this, it is hardly a tenable assumption that he lived his life and wrote his novels as though cocooned from the political turbulence of his day. Again, Eaves and Kimpel take at face value Richardson's lofty professions of ignorance about popular amatory fiction, and the acceptance by subsequent scholars of their judgment has closed the door on an important line of research. Yet it is now emerging that he printed such material quite extensively, including, a few years before Pamela, a collection of scandal novels by Eliza Haywood. It will be a great opportunity to write in the immediate wake of Keith Maslen's major forthcoming expansion of Sale's checklist, which really will require the standard picture of Richardson's literary and other connections to be rethought from scratch. Another important opportunity will come with the first serious attempt to follow up, at the level of specific attribution, the evidence that in the 1730s Richardson was quite a prolific occasional writer of pamphlets, prefaces and periodical essays.
