The preface which William Warburton was invited by Richardson to supply for Volumes III and IV of Clarissa when they first appeared in 1748 has never, I think, been reprinted in full.  Richardson dropped it from the second edition (1749) of Clarissa, probably because he relished neither its implication that he was following French precedents nor its suggestion that his work was one “of mere Amusement.”  In the “Advertisement” in the first volume of the second edition he insisted that Clarissa was “not to be considered as a mere Amusement, as a light Novel, or transitory Romance; but as a History of LIFE and MANNERS ... intended to inculcate the HIGHEST and most IMPORTANT Doctrines."[11] Warburton, offended in turn perhaps, thriftily salvaged more than half of the preface (paragraphs 2 to 6) to use as a footnote in his edition of Alexander Pope,[12] but he there made a striking change:  not Richardson but Marivaux and Fielding were praised as the authors who, with the extra enrichment of comic art, had brought the novel of “real LIFE AND MANNERS ... to its perfection.”

The important principle of prose fiction which Richardson and Warburton recognized—­that there is power in a detailed picture of the private life of the middle class—­had been suggested earlier.  Mrs. Manley could not voice it, at least not in Queen Zarah, where the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Godolphln, and Queen Anne were to be leading characters.  But her sometime-friend Richard Steele could.  Having laughed in The Tender Husband (1705) at a girl whose judgment of life was seriously—­or, rather, comically—­warped by her reading of heroic romances, Steele made a positive plea in Tatler No. 172 for histories of “such adventures as befall persons not exalted above the common level.”  Books of this sort, still rare in 1710, would be of great value to “the ordinary race of men.”  The anonymous preface to The Adventures of Theagenes and Chariclia seven years later attributed to Heliodorus’s romance the value of suggesting rules “for conducting our Affairs in common Actions of Life.”  In 1751 when the new realism was a fait accompli, the author of An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding declared roundly (p. 19) that in the new fiction the characters should be “taken from common Life.”  A good argument in favor of books about “private persons” was offered in the preface to the English translation of the Abbe Prevost’s novel, The Life And Entertaining Adventures of Mr. Cleveland, Natural Son of Oliver Cromwell (1741):  “The history of kingdoms and empires, raises our admiration, by the solemnity ... of the images, and furnishes one of the noblest entertainments.  But at the same time that it is so well suited to delight the imagination, it yet is not so apt to touch and affect as the history of private men; the reason of which seems to be, that