CHAPTER II

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEGINNINGS:  RICHARDSON

There is some significance in the fact that Samuel Richardson, founder of the modern novel, was so squarely a middle-class citizen of London town.  Since the form, he founded was, as we have seen, democratic in its original motive and subsequent development, it was fitting that the first shaper of the form should have sympathies not too exclusively aristocratic:  should have been willing to draw upon the backstairs history of the servants’ hall for his first heroine.

To be sure, Mr. Richardson had the not uncommon failing of the humble-born:  he desired above all, and attempted too much, to depict the manners of the great; he had naive aristocratical leanings which account for his uncertain tread when he would move with ease among the boudoirs of Mayfair.  Nevertheless, in the honest heart of him, as his earliest novel forever proves, he felt for the woes of those social underlings who, as we have long since learned, have their microcosm faithfully reflecting the greater world they serve, and he did his best work in that intimate portrayal of the feminine heart, which is not of a class but typically human; he knew Clarissa Harlowe quite as well as he did Pamela; both were of interest because they were women.  That acute contemporary, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, severely reprimands Richardson for his vulgar lapses in painting polite society and the high life he so imperfectly knew; yet in the very breath that she condemns “Clarissa Harlowe” as “most miserable stuff,” confesses that “she was such an old fool as to weep over” it “like any milkmaid of sixteen over the ballad of the Lady’s Fall”—­the handsomest kind of a compliment under the circumstances.  And with the same charming inconsistency, she declares on the appearance of “Sir Charles Grandison” that she heartily despises Richardson, yet eagerly reads him—­“nay, sobs over his works in the most scandalous manner.”

Richardson was the son of a carpenter and himself a respected printer, who by cannily marrying the daughter of the man to whom he was apprenticed, and by diligence in his vocation, rose to prosperity, so that by 1754 he became Master of The Stationers’ Company and King’s Printer, doing besides an excellent printing business.

As a boy he had relieved the dumb anguish of serving maids by the penning of their love letters; he seemed to have a knack at this vicarious manner of love-making and when in the full maturity of fifty years, certain London publishers requested him to write for them a narrative which might stand as a model letter writer from which country readers should know the right tone, his early practice stood him in good stead.  Using the epistolary form into which he was to throw all his fiction, he produced “Pamela,” the first novel of analysis, in contrast with the tale of adventure, of the English tongue.  It is worth