Clarissa

by Samuel Richardson

In preparing the Preface and Postscript Richardson was faced with a genuine problem. He realised that his achievement in Clarissa was of sufficient magnitude and novelty to demand some theoretical defence and explanation. But he realised also that he was himself inadequate to the task. 'The very great Advantage of an Academical Education, I have wanted,'[4] he confessed to Mr. D. Graham of King's College. He lacked that familiarity with literature and with the conventions of literary criticism which would have made it easy for him to produce the analysis of his novel which he felt was needed. No wonder he told Graham that 'of all the Species of Writing, I love not Preface-Writing;'[5] and it is not surprising that, both before and after the publication of Clarissa, he should have besieged his friends with requests for their opinions of the novel.

In making these requests he was not simply seeking flattery. What he needed were sympathetic critics who could clothe in acceptable language statements which he would recognise as expressing the truth about his masterpiece. Hints of Prefaces, especially if read in the context of the numerous replies Richardson received, reveals very plainly the extent to which he was aware of what he wanted from his correspondents. Most, unfortunately, were sadly incapable of producing a critical account of the novel. In this company Skelton and Spence were brilliant exceptions; and Richardson's adoption of their statements, apparently to the exclusion of all others, indicates the soundness of his own critical intuitions. Equally interesting is his treatment of Warburton's Preface. Although he did not reprint this in the third and fourth editions, one paragraph from it is preserved in Hints of Prefaces.[6] Significantly, it is the only paragraph in Warburton's essay which has something to say about the distinctive qualities of Clarissa.

In formulating all these critical statements Richardson is concerned less with developing a theory of fiction for its own sake than with justifying his action in writing a novel. His main defence, of course, is that Clarissa is morally valuable. The reader who expects it to be a 'mere Novel or Romance'[7] will be disappointed; and, as 'in all Works of This, and of the Dramatic Kind, STORY, or AMUSEMENT, should be considered as little more than the Vehicle to the more necessary INSTRUCTION'[8]—a dictum that Fielding was to quote with approval.[9]

The argument, though valid, is excessively laboured. In the Postscript, especially, Richardson is so preoccupied with demonstrating that Clarissa is a Christian tragedy that he neglects to develop in any detail the other claims he makes for it. Yet Hints of Prefaces shows that he had given considerable thought to what might be called the purely fictive qualities of his novel, and that at one stage he intended to present a much fuller account of them than he finally did. It is also clear that he realized that his didactic purposes could be achieved only if the novel succeeded first at the level of imaginative realism.

From the beginning Richardson claimed to be a realist: Pamela, it is announced on the title page, is a 'Narrative which has its Foundation in TRUTH and NATURE;' and the main purpose of the Postscript to Clarissa is to demonstrate that the story and the manner in which it is told are consonant both with the high artistic standards set by the Greek dramatists and with the facts of everyday life. The decision not to conclude the story with the reformation of Lovelace and his marriage to the heroine is defended on the grounds that 'the Author ... always thought, that sudden Conversions ... had neither Art, nor Nature, nor even Probability, in them;'[10] and in the passage in Hints of Prefaces[11] of which this is a condensation, he attempts to make out a case for the second part of Pamela as a realistic study of married life. Clarissa is stated to be superior to pagan tragedies because it dispenses with the old ideas of poetic justice and takes into account the continuance of life after death. (Richardson has his cake while eating it, however, for he points out that 'the notion of Poetical Justice founded on the modern rules'[12] is strictly observed in Clarissa).

The claim that Clarissa presents a generally truthful rendering of life is given its clearest expression by Skelton and Spence. Both emphasize that it is different from conventional romances and novels: 'it is another kind of Work, or rather a new Species of Novel,'[13] we have 'a Work of a new kind among us'.[14] Clarissa is concerned with 'the Workings of private and domestic Passions', says Skelton, and '[not] those of Kings, Heroes, Heroines ... it comes home to the Heart, and to common Life, in every Line.'[15] The author, says Spence, has not followed the example of the writers of romances, but 'has attempted to give a plain and natural Account of an Affair that happened in a private Family, just in the manner that it did happen.'[16]

Richardson's decision not to include these two essays in the Postscript was perhaps influenced by the fact that he was able to use a similar testimonial which had the added virtue of being patently unsolicited. This is the 'Critique on the History of CLARISSA, written in French, and published at Amsterdam',[17] an English translation of which had been printed in the Gentleman's Magazine of June and August, 1749. Published anonymously, but written by Albrecht von Haller,[18] this review must have been particularly attractive also to Richardson because of the singular praise it accords his Epistolary method'. It had already been asserted by de Freval, in the first of the introductory letters to Pamela, that with this way of writing 'the several Passions of the Mind must ... be more affectingly described, and Nature may be traced in her undisguised Inclinations with much more Propriety and Exactness, than can possibly be found in a Detail of Actions long past;'[19] and von Haller carries the charge even further by claiming not only that it allows the author a greater degree of psychological veracity but also that the convention itself is inherently more realistic than ordinary narrative: 'Romances in general ... are wholly improbable; because they suppose the History to be written after the series of events is closed by the catastrophe: A circumstance which implies a strength of memory beyond all example and probability in the persons concerned.'[20]

Richardson also believed that the epistolary method was superior to the narrative because it was essentially dramatic. Aaron Hill, in one of the introductory letters to Pamela, had maintained that 'one of the best-judg'd Peculiars of the Plan' was that the moral instruction was conveyed 'as in a kind of Dramatical Representation';[21] while in the Postscript to Clarissa Richardson describes it as a 'History (or rather Dramatic Narrative)'.[22] The parallels which he draws between Clarissa and Greek tragedy are directed mainly to illuminating the tragic rather than the specifically dramatic qualities of the novel. But it is clear that he regarded his work as being closer in every way to the drama than to the epic.

The basic distinction between drama and epic (or any other form of narrative) had been drawn by Aristotle:

The poet, imitating the same object ... may do it either in narration—and that, again, either by personating other characters, as Homer does, or in his own person throughout ... —or he may imitate by representing all his characters as real, and employed in the action itself.[23]