Samuel Richardson
Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761), printer and author, was baptized on 19 August 1689 at Mackworth, Derbyshire, the fourth of the nine children of Samuel Richardson (fl. 1667–1727), joiner, and his second wife, Elizabeth Hall (fl. 1682–1736).
Early years and education, 1689–1706
Richardson's forebears had been sturdy yeomen in Byfleet, Surrey, since at least the late sixteenth century, and four William Richardsons held in succession copyhold land on the royal manor of Byfleet. The last William, the author's grandfather, sent his son Samuel to London in 1667 where he became an apprentice to Thomas Turner, a joiner. The reason given by the novelist for this move is that his father's family had grown too numerous to live off the land and had to go into trades. Although Richardson's father had evidently become a successful joiner as well as draughtsman and was by 1678 a freeman of the Joiners' Company and of the City of London, for some unknown reason he chose to move into Derbyshire shortly before the novelist's birth. In a letter to his Dutch translator, Johannes Stinstra, the only autobiographical account that we have, Richardson claimed that his father's known sympathies with the duke of Monmouth and the first earl of Shaftesbury prompted his move from the City at the time of Monmouth's execution in 1685 (Slattery, 23). To the end, however, Richardson was mysteriously silent about the circumstances of his birthplace and childhood years.
Richardson's siblings, not counting children who had died in infancy before he could have known them, included his half-sister, Elizabeth, daughter from his father's marriage to Elizabeth Lane, Mary and Anne, all born in London, and William, Sara, and another brother, name unknown, born in Derbyshire. His two youngest brothers were born in London—Benjamin, baptized in St Botolph's, Aldgate, on 4 October 1699, and Thomas, baptized on 14 January 1703, in the same church. An older brother, William, born in London, was buried in Derbyshire in September 1689. After returning to London, Richardson the elder lived in the area of Tower Hill, in Mouse Alley, a poor and dangerous neighbourhood. In 1703 he moved his family to a house nearby, on Rosemary Lane, which he continued to rent until 1727, the last record of his whereabouts.
Richardson's father had intended him for the church; but
some heavy Losses having disabled him from supporting me as genteelly as he wished in an Education proper for the Function, he left me to choose at the Age of Fifteen or Sixteen, a Business; having been able to give me only common School-Learning. (Slattery, 24)
The question of Richardson's formal education may never be fully answered. We know nothing about the extent of his schooling during his ten years or so in Derbyshire. If the Samuel Richardson listed at the Merchant Taylors' School in 1701–2 is the novelist, he must have had at least enough tutelage to gain admission there. But he himself freely admitted that he knew only his native language.
By his own account, Richardson was a precocious letter writer. Even before he was eleven, he allegedly assumed the guise of an adult knowledgeable in the appropriate biblical texts and sent a letter to reprimand a widow nearly fifty years old, who under the pretence of religious zeal ‘was continually fomenting Quarrels and Disturbances, by Backbiting and Scandal, among all her Acquaintance’ (Slattery, 26). Without the interest in sports usual to boys his age, he gained the sobriquet of Serious and Gravity and preferred instead to become ‘an early Favourite with all the young Women of Taste and Reading in the Neighbourhood’ (Slattery, 26). While a small group of them were doing their needlework and with their mothers in attendance, he was often called upon to read to them and to make observations on the texts. When scarcely over thirteen he won the confidence of three of these young women to the extent of sharing their ‘Love-Secrets, in order to induce me to give them Copies to write after, or correct, for Answers to their Lovers['] Letters’ (Slattery, 27).
Apprenticeship and freedom, 1706–1721
To gratify his appetite for reading, he observed, Richardson chose to become a printer; and on 1 July 1706 he was apprenticed to John Wilde, a parsimonious master who begrudged giving his employees any rest at all but relented after their protests. Fearful of encumbering his master, who dubbed him ‘The Pillar of his House’, and even scrupulous to the extent of paying for his own candles, Richardson devoted his precious free time at night to reading literature and also to ‘a Correspondence with a Gentleman greatly Superior in Degree, and /of ample/ Fortunes, who had he lived, intended high things for me’ (Slattery, 25). The identity of this ‘Master of the Epistolary Style’ remains unknown. Since Wilde's business specialized in almanacs and jest books and such popular fiction as The most Pleasant History of Tom A Lincoln, it seems unlikely that Richardson's time spent working in the shop enhanced his interest in literature.
On 2 July 1713 Richardson completed his apprenticeship; and on 13 June 1715 he became freeman of the Stationers' Company and citizen of London. Thereafter he continued in Wilde's business as compositor and corrector until his master's death in January 1720. When Richardson married Wilde's daughter, Martha, in the Charterhouse chapel on 23 November 1721 the record mentions his belonging to St Bride's parish, the first trace of his residence in the Fleet Street neighbourhood where he spent the rest of his life. All the children from this marriage, five sons and one daughter, died in infancy, and Martha preceded her last born son in death on 23 January 1731. In 1748 Richardson reflected: ‘I cherish the memory of my lost wife to this hour’ (Correspondence, 4.226). Shortly after the death of his last infant Richardson married another printer's daughter, Elizabeth Leake (d. 1773), on 3 February 1733. Four daughters from this marriage outlived their father: Mary (Polly), Martha (Patty), Anne (Nancy), and Sarah (Sally). Their first born, Elizabeth, died in 1733, and a son, Samuel, died in 1739. Other than occasional tensions, Richardson seems to have enjoyed this marriage to the end.
On 5 March 1722 Richardson was granted the livery of the Stationers' Company. Besides his ties with his brother-in-law, Allington Wilde, who was admitted to the livery at the same time, Richardson was already associated with another printing establishment—that of John Leake and family. After John's death in February 1720, his widow, Elizabeth, carried on the business until her death in April 1721 when her son James acquired her share. But since James had already established a business as bookseller in Bath and moved there, Richardson stepped in to help manage the London shop; and throughout his life he was always on more intimate terms with James Leake than with Allington Wilde.
Early printing business and politics
Already by 1722 when he was admitted to the livery, Richardson's printing business was prospering. Yet without the benefit of records comparable to those available for William Bowyer's press, the information about his printing activities remains patchy and until recently largely based upon the pioneering work of William Sale. But after careful study of the printer's many tell-tale ornaments, Keith Maslen has found that it was apparently Richardson's contracts for printing private bills, orders, and occasional reports for the House of Commons that enabled him to escape the usual dependence on booksellers. Since the bulk of the private bills printed involved such things as estate deeds, wills, and marriage settlements, Richardson gained considerable legal knowledge while representing the affairs of the upper classes, which doubtless provided the groundwork for his later development as a novelist.
Of the first books Richardson printed, Poems on Various Occasions (1721) by the Irish clergyman Jonathan Smedley even includes the printer's name on the title-page. Another early book is the translation of Fénelon's Éducation des filles (1721). As various newspaper advertisements in his name indicate, Richardson, besides printing, also occasionally acted as bookseller, publishing by subscription Memoirs of the Reigns of Francis II and Charles IX of France (1724), translated from the French of Michel de Castelnau, as well as the editions of Roger Acherley's Britannic Constitution (1727) and Joseph Morgan's The History of Algiers (1728–9).
In view of his later government contracts for printing the Journals of the House of Commons, it is noteworthy to find Richardson in his first years as printer being responsible for a number of publications against the ministry of Robert Walpole. During 1721–3, for instance, he printed pamphlets concerning government financial policies before and after the South Sea Bubble by the opposition tory member of parliament Archibald Hutcheson. Much more risky were his associations with principals identified with the Jacobite cause célèbre of 1722—Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester, his amanuensis, the Reverend George Kelly, and the duke of Wharton. On 24 May 1723, soon after Atterbury was forced into exile, Richardson printed an edition of his Maxims, Reflections and Observations; in addition, he printed Kelly's speech before the House of Lords defending himself from his accusers, and later, while Kelly was in the tower, his translation of Castelnau.
Perhaps yet more daring was Richardson's involvement in printing Wharton's opposition paper, the True Briton. This mercurial aristocrat had lost much of his fortune in the South Sea Bubble and had subsequently allied himself with the City, becoming a member of the Waxchandlers' Company and editing this semi-weekly journal wittily satirical of Walpole's government. The seventy-four issues were published from 3 June 1723 to 17 February 1724. Richardson also printed the collected editions of the True Briton (1723–1732) that appeared in two volumes. Although at first posing as an old whig in defending Atterbury and Kelly in the House of Lords, Wharton eventually joined them in supporting the Pretender in France.
Richardson's first anonymous publications
Despite John Nichols's belief, on John Duncombe's testimony, that Richardson was the author of the sixth issue of the True Briton (21 June 1723), modern biographers have discounted the attribution on stylistic grounds. What seems to have been ignored, however, is that this particular issue is mainly in the form of a letter signed by A. B., a pseudonym that Richardson used elsewhere, and that other letters with this signature appear in subsequent issues (numbers 9, 22, 23, and 24), all evidently written by the same person, according to the editor.
Besides printing the True Briton in 1723–4, Richardson was also responsible for the Daily Journal from its inception in 1720 to its demise in 1737. Here, too, we find numerous letters signed A. B. that appear to be his contributions, in some instances primarily advertisements puffing books that he was printing at the time. Moreover, in the Daily Gazetteer (9 January 1740) a letter with this same signature offers a proposal to rid the streets of prostitutes and to find the means of preserving the lives of the offspring of these women, a social problem that concerned Richardson to the end of his life. Perhaps the most telling instance of this signature appears in The Apprentice's Vade Mecum (1734), where Richardson produces a sample of an indenture, giving the hypothetical apprentice the initials N. N. and the citizen-printer, A. B. (p. 2). In view of Richardson's penchant for assuming the woman's voice, five other issues of the True Briton (numbers 28, 34, 45, 47, and 71) may well be his work.
Well before the general public knew him to be an author, Richardson's fellow printers admired his talents as a writer during his years in the newspaper business. In the January 1736 issue of the Gentleman's Magazine, Edward Cave, the editor, remarked that Richardson has ‘often agreeably entertain'd with Elegant Disquisitions in Prose’. Among these anonymous works were doubtless the pamphlets The Apprentice's Vade Mecum and the Seasonable Examination, both of which concerned the well-being of the City working men and the evil influence from the theatre and other cultural diversions enjoyed by the upper classes in the West End. Originally written in the form of a personal letter to his nephew Thomas Verren Richardson (Imperial Review, 2, 1804, 609–16), who was to have begun as his apprentice in the printing trade, the Vade mecum, though only a modest success in the author's own lifetime, eventually became a standard reprint by the Stationers' Company down to the twentieth century. What is of particular interest in interpreting the provenance of the religious motifs in his novels is the third part that Richardson added while producing this cautionary manual. The main heads of this section inveigh against the ‘Depravity of the present Age’, attacking the allegedly rampant deism, scepticism, and libertinism of his society that threatened ruin to the young man starting out on his career.
Printing and editing in the 1730s
During the 1730s Richardson expanded his business by printing bills and reports for the government. Nichols attributed to Arthur Onslow, speaker of the house, the lucrative contract in 1742 to print the Journals of the House of Commons, probably a reward for Richardson's long and tactful dealings with members of parliament. In addition to printing the Daily Journal he undertook the Daily Gazetteer, a newspaper that first appeared on 28 June 1735 and was designed to combine into one organ the three main pro-government papers—the Daily Courant, the London Journal, and the Free Briton. Although the Daily Gazetteer was begun by James Pitt (Francis Osborne) and William Arnall (Francis Walsingham), it was Ralph Courteville (R. Freeman) who soon became, according to James Ralph, its ‘sole Director’. Originally intended as a platform to answer the devastating attacks by opposition writers, especially those in The Craftsman, thanks to Richardson's influence the Daily Gazetteer became increasingly less partisan and eventually included literary criticism, poems, moral essays, ship news, and other non-political matter. Some time in 1746 Richardson gave up his partnership with this paper, which lasted another two years before becoming the London Gazetteer.
Besides newspapers, Richardson also printed two periodicals—William Webster's Weekly Miscellany and Aaron Hill's The Prompter. He printed Webster's periodical from its inception on 16 December 1732 until 1736, during which time he generously absorbed the editor's mounting debts in this venture. Since the recurrent theme of the Weekly Miscellany laments the decline of religion and morality in the present age, a familiar stance in Richardson's correspondence and especially emphasized in Clarissa, it is not unlikely that he also contributed to this journal. In the issue for 11 October 1740, years after Richardson was no longer its printer, the Weekly Miscellany produced a letter, possibly by Webster himself, praising the manuscript of Pamela and urging the author to publish it, a letter included along with Hill's as advertisement for this novel. Associated already with Hill as the printer of his Plain Dealer, shortly after the demise of the True Briton, Richardson, in collaboration with William Popple, took on his friend's new paper, the twice-weekly Prompter, which began on 12 November 1734 and ended on 2 July 1736.
In addition to these printing activities Richardson was engaged in a number of editing projects. Some time in 1737 he helped the French Huguenot physician James Mauclerc to produce The Christian's Magazine. As in Webster's periodical, Mauclerc's stress on the orthodox Christian contempt of the world and preparation for death suited Richardson's own predilections when writing Clarissa. In the same year Richardson revised the fourth edition of Daniel Defoe's Complete English Tradesman, which includes a puff of Hill's Plain Dealer and of the Apprentice's Vade Mecum. Similarly, in 1738 Richardson revised and printed the second edition of Defoe's Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain. At the end of 1739 Richardson produced an expurgated and abbreviated version of Aesop's Fables, based on Sir Roger L'Estrange's popular edition, originally published in 1692, which had already gone through an eighth edition in 1738.
Richardson still occasionally assumed the role of bookseller (i.e. publisher) as well as printer. In 1736 he was busy planning the Universal History, a multi-volume project that occupied him for the next twenty years. In the same year he became connected with the Society for the Encouragement of Learning, which was formed to publish scholarly books that booksellers were not willing to risk on the market. For this society Richardson published, partly at his own expense, the first volume of The Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe in March 1740. Although widely advertised and handsomely printed, the Negotiations was a commercial failure, perhaps largely because of its high price, £1 7s. Nevertheless, the History of the Works of the Learned (May 1740) praised highly the editor's skill in organizing the diverse material in this book. During the 1740s Richardson had a brief acquaintance with the Society of Booksellers, a group interested in publishing learned works with unusually good terms for the authors concerned. For this society, as part owner as well as printer, Richardson produced Robert James's Medicinal Dictionary (1743–5).
Pamela
During the autumn of 1739, Richardson turned to preparing a letter manual that was commissioned by the booksellers John Osborne senior, and Charles Rivington. In his letter to Hill (1 February 1741), Richardson recounts how he had long been urged by these business associates to ‘give them a little book (which, they said, they were often asked after) of familiar letters on the useful concerns in common life’ (Correspondence, 1.lxxiii). Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, on the most Important Occasions was published on 23 January 1741. While planning this manual, however, some time in November 1739, Richardson abruptly began writing the first draft of Pamela, completing it within about two months. Letters 138 and 139 from the manual, which represent the cautionary advice of a servant-girl's father after her master's ‘vile attempt’, and her dutiful reply about returning home, clearly anticipate the Pamela story. Rather than simply dream up the circumstances to generate the appropriate letter, Richardson seems to have benefited greatly from his long years of printing newspapers by grounding his fiction in reported experiences of the everyday world. Thus letter 62, ‘A young Woman in Town to her Sister in the Country, recounting her narrow Escape from a Snare laid for her on her first Arrival, by a wicked Procuress’, obviously a germ for the plot of Clarissa's abduction, may be a commonplace tale of the day, but Richardson enhances its uniqueness by an emphatic note: ‘N. B. This shocking Story is taken from the Mouth of the young Woman herself, who so narrowly escaped the Snare of the vile Procuress; and is Fact in every Circumstance’ (Letters, 84).
When Pamela appeared on 6 November 1740, only Richardson's wife and a few friends knew that he was the author. But gradually during the following year the secret was out; and the numerous letters witnessing this literary phenomenon, mostly of praise, may have prompted Richardson at this time to begin faithfully keeping his correspondence on record. Knightley Chetwood declared unabashedly that ‘if all the Books in England were to be burnt, this Book, next the Bible, ought to be preserved’ (V&A, Forster MSS, 27 Jan 1741, FM XVI, 1, fol. 43). But less sanguine responses faulted the ‘warm scenes’ as unfit for proper ladies. Yet, despite his own dissatisfaction with its ‘lowness’ and his continual revising of this novel until his death, Richardson made few changes to the erotic encounters. Despite previous assumptions that it was this novel's sexual explicitness which earned its place in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum by the Roman Catholic church, it seems more likely that the strongly protestant views of the heroine's economic ‘salvation’ were what gave most offence to the church authorities.
Pamela was an instant commercial success, going through five editions during its first year. As an indication of its popularity, numerous imitations of Pamela appeared almost immediately. The first, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, published in April 1740, was written by Henry Fielding. With a focus on Pamela's own duplicitous narrative, following closely Mr. B.'s complaint about this ‘artful Gypsey’ (Richardson, Pamela, 40), it is a brilliant parody of the content and style of Richardson's novel. Unlike her predecessor, however, Shamela openly reveals her designs on her master: ‘I thought once of making a little Fortune by my Person. I now intend to make a great one by my Vartue’ (H. Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. D. Brookes-Davies and T. Keymer, 1999, 329–30).
In the same month appeared Pamela Censured, which by contrast is a serious attack on the morality of the tale, urging the author to delete the objectionable, sexually explicit encounters and puns. On 28 May 1741 the first volume of John Kelly's Pamela's Conduct in High Life was published, and the second volume appeared in the following September. In June two more books appeared—Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela, or, Feign'd Innocence Detected and James Parry's True Anti-Pamela. Published in November 1741, Charles Povey's The Virgin in Eden repeats some of the negative criticism of Pamela Censured and recounts a virgin's pilgrimage from Sodom to Canaan after the manner of John Bunyan. On 22 February 1742 Fielding's Joseph Andrews was published with yet more parodic allusions to Pamela, especially in the early parts where Joseph writes to his sister, Pamela, of his employer Lady Booby's attempts on his virtue.
Stage versions of Pamela were also produced—the anonymous Pamela, or, Virtue Triumphant and Henry Giffard's Pamela: a Comedy, both published in November 1741. Voltaire adapted the story in Nanine, ou, Le préjugé vaincu (1749), and a year later Carlo Goldoni produced Pamela nubile, which by having the heroine eventually discovered to be the daughter of a Count Auspingh made the story more palatable to aristocratic audiences. Consequently, a French translation of this play by François de Neufchâteau was condemned after the Revolution and was required to be converted to its original Richardsonian version about a virtuous peasant girl.
Richardson followed all these developments with a mixture of disdain and appreciation. He never forgave Fielding for writing Shamela, and he was especially worried about attempts to exploit the success of his novel with counterfeit sequels. Dropping his pose as merely the editor, in an advertisement to the fourth edition of Pamela, Richardson refers to himself as ‘the Author’ while protesting against the spurious continuations. Upon the advice of such friends as Ralph Courteville, by April Richardson decided to proceed with his own sequel. After being widely advertised, Richardson's addition of two more volumes appeared on 7 December 1741, with the first instance of including his name along with the booksellers Rivington and Osborne. Without the appealing rusticity or suspense of the original, Pamela II nevertheless sold well enough to warrant a second duodecimo edition the following year. The third and fourth volumes were also printed together with the first two in a deluxe octavo edition.
Besides its many editions, translations, and stage adaptations, the Pamela vogue involved popular media such as waxworks, Francis Hayman's murals at Vauxhall Gardens, and illustrated fans for women. By coincidence, although Richardson had commissioned William Hogarth to design two frontispieces to Pamela but abruptly discarded them, unknown to him at the time Joseph Highmore was independently preparing twelve ambitious oil paintings illustrating scenes from the novel. After finally meeting Highmore, Richardson became good friends with the painter and his wife and daughter, both named Susanna, for the remainder of his life. Before that event, however, Richardson had paid Highmore's friend the French expatriate engraver Hubert Gravelot and his partner, Francis Hayman, to produce twenty-nine plates for the sixth edition of Pamela, published on 10 May 1742. Since Richardson had personally consulted these artists about the designs, it is these plates rather than Highmore's paintings, notwithstanding their high quality, which represent the author's graphic intentions. Later, again on his own initiative, Highmore illustrated the Harlowe family of Richardson's second novel and painted a full-length portrait of Clarissa that has since been lost. He also painted Clementina della Porretta for Richardson's last novel, Sir Charles Grandison. In 1747 Highmore made pendant portraits of the novelist and his second wife, which had been acquired by the Stationers' Company in 1811. The portrait of Elizabeth, however, was destroyed in the Second World War by an enemy bomb.
Despite the pleasant distraction caused by the public success of Pamela and of his next very long novels, throughout the last decades of his life Richardson was hardly negligent toward his printing business. Against the tendency of literary scholars to downplay this aspect of his career, Maslen has shown, for instance, that as early as 1741, Richardson was printing the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and continued to print them until his death in 1761. As Richardson remarked to Stinstra in 1753, ‘My Business, Sir, has ever been my chief Concern. My Writing-time has been at such times of Leisure as have not interfered with that’ (Slattery, 26). Richardson was apparently so efficient in running his large printing business, which included about 1500 private bills for both the Commons and the Lords, as well as the Journals of the House of Commons, volumes 1–28, that he was able to find the time to write some of the longest works of fiction in English and even correspond with his many readers in the process!
Clarissa
To judge by letters exchanged with Edward Young and Hill, already by summer 1744 Richardson had conceived the overall plot of his second novel, and defended the character of Lovelace and the heroine's death. Not surprisingly, the ‘prolixity’ of this novel worried Richardson from the first, and he asked Hill for help in making abridgements, sending him portions of the manuscript at intervals. The surviving correspondence gives detailed accounts of the progress in the various stages of the revisions Richardson quietly made while pondering his readers' responses. But Hill's well-intentioned effort to rewrite the opening of Clarissa for the sake of reducing its length received a chilly reply and may have caused a nine-month lapse in their correspondence.
When the first two volumes appeared in November 1747 the novel was already complete in the author's mind. But Richardson was determined to test the water before submitting further volumes, and it was not until 28 April 1748 that the third and fourth volumes of Clarissa were published, which ended with the melodramatic plotting of the heroine's escape to Hampstead and in danger of being found out by her would-be seducer. By summer 1748 Richardson had revised the last three volumes of Clarissa enough to his satisfaction to advertise them in September, and on 6 December 1748 they were finally published.
Some two months before these final volumes appeared, Richardson gained a close friend and correspondent—Lady Bradshaigh. At about the age of forty and well connected during the time of their first encounter, Dorothy, née Bellingham, had married Roger Bradshaigh of Haigh, close to Wigan, in Lancashire, who had succeeded his father to the baronetcy in 1747. After disguising her identity in her first letters, she finally met Richardson on 6 March 1750. A few months earlier Richardson had described his appearance to enable her to recognize him:
Short; rather plump than emaciated, notwithstanding his complaints: about five foot five inches: fair wig; lightish cloth coat, all black besides ... looking directly foreright, as passers-by would imagine, but observing all that stirs on either hand of him without moving his short neck; hardly ever turning back: of a light-brown complexion; teeth not yet failing him; smoothish faced, and ruddy cheeked: at sometimes looking to be about sixty-five, at other times much younger. (Correspondence, 4.290–91)
Like other readers Lady Bradshaigh protested against the imminent death of Clarissa and tried to persuade Richardson to reform Lovelace in the end. In addition to their lively correspondence, of considerable interest are their manuscript annotations to her copy of the first edition of Clarissa (Princeton University) and to her copy of the first edition of Grandison, of which only volume 7 survives (Hunt. L.).
Lady Bradshaigh's sister, Lady Echlin (née Elizabeth Bellingham), also proved to be an important friend and correspondent from 1753 until Richardson's death, though apparently they never met. Married to Sir Robert Echlin, with a seat near Dublin, Lady Echlin volunteered to help Richardson during the piracy of Grandison. In contrast to her rather lively sister in England, Lady Echlin was by her own account anything but a lady of fashion, preferring solitude and religious meditation to playing cards. Besides her letters objecting to the violence in Clarissa, she wrote an alternative version of the novel, shunning the rape of the heroine, who still dies but from the ill treatment by her family, and emphasizing Lovelace's conversion. Obviously impressed by her moral seriousness, Richardson responded in detail to her rewriting of the Clarissa story. After her husband's death, Lady Echlin eventually decided to move to England but declined Richardson's invitation to stay at Parson's Green until she could settle in a house of her own. To judge by his playful letters, Richardson seems to have enjoyed the rivalry between Lady Bradshaigh and Lady Echlin in gaining his attentions.
As in the composition of his first novel, Richardson kept revising Clarissa. Even the various introductory materials went through drastic changes, and his omission of William Warburton's preface to the third and fourth volumes of the first edition resulted in a breach of their friendship for years afterwards. To the London printer, anxious to be recognized as an original genius, Warburton's main error was probably in daring to hint that earlier French novelists may have been an influence.
Among the many responses to Clarissa, including letters written before and after the publication of the first volumes, Albrecht von Haller's review in a French periodical in Amsterdam and reprinted in the Gentleman's Magazine (19, June and August 1749, 245–6, 345–8) made trenchant comments on its strengths and weaknesses, the latter mainly about the coarseness of Lovelace and his associates at the brothel, Sinclair's death scene, Clarissa's delirium, and the nearly heroic death of the villain. At the end of the instalment in the August issue, Richardson appended detailed replies to the article.
As if confident that his audience would not only tolerate but also welcome a yet longer version after his initial worries over its length, for the third and fourth editions of Clarissa in 1751, Richardson restored much material previously withheld and also created further additions. To compensate the purchasers of his first and second editions, R