The artistic success of Clarissa undoubtedly reflects in part the lesson Richardson learned from such moral attacks as Pamela Censured and Shamela. While "warm scenes" remain in his second novel—as indeed they must in any realistic portrayal of male-female relations—Richardson continually tempers these scenes with clear indications of Lovelace's vicious nature and careful forebodings of Clarissa's tragic fate. Moreover, unlike Pamela, whose reward is marriage to her would-be rapist, Clarissa escapes from her seducer, achieving a morally unambiguous reward, her heroic death.
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NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1] Aaron Hill to Samuel Richardson, 17 December 1740, printed in "Introduction to this Second Edition," Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1971), p. 9; Knightley Chetwood to Ralph Courteville, 27 January 1741, cited in Pamela, ed. Eaves and Kimpel, p. vi; Gentleman's Magazine, 11 (1741), 56.
[2] For dates of publication, see T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 127, 129; concerning Fielding's composition of Shamela, see Charles B. Woods, "Fielding and the Authorship of Shamela," PQ, 25 (1946), 248-72.
[3] B. W., "Introduction," Pamela's Conduct in High Life (London: Ward and Chandler, 1741), I, xii-xiii; Alan Dugald McKillop, Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1936), p. 78; The Richardson-Stinstra Correspondence and Stinstra's Prefaces to Clarissa, ed. William C. Slattery (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1969), pp. xxiii-xxiv.
[4] Collier, A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (London: S. Keble, R. Sare, and H. Hindmarsh, 1698), chap. I; A Vindication of the Stage, with the Usefulness and Advantages of Dramatick Representations (London: Joseph Wild, 1698), p. 6; Pamela's Conduct, I, xiii.