To the end of his days Richardson continued to sit under the editorial shade -- Sir Charles Grandison was “published” by the “editor of Pamela and Clarissa” -- enjoying the sunshine of his authorship. His introduction to Pamela and the care he took with it suggest more succinctly than anything else Richardson’s flirtation with his adorers, which is not at all unlike that of his so modest heroine.
Sheridan W. Baker, Jr.
University of Michigan
[1.] William M. Sale, Samuel Richardson, a Bibliographical Record (New Haven, 1936), p. 13.
[2.] The fourth carries “the Second Edition” before the new introductory letters; the fifth changes to “the Present Edition.”
[3.] A translation of Abbé Noel Antoine Pluche: The History of the Heavens, 2 vols. (1740). (William M. Sale, Samuel Richardson: Master Printer [Cornell, 1950], p. 193.)
[4.] William M. Sale, Samuel Richardson, a Bibliographical Record, p. 15; William M. and Alan D. McKillop, Samuel Richardson (Chapel Hill, 1936), p. 42.
[5.] McKillop, pp. 301-2. Richardson had printed the Miscellany between 1733 and 1736.
[6.] Richardson mentions other letters but does not print them. Hill’s reference to “The Gentleman’s Advice” on page xxii is to a letter from Benjamin Slocock, who commended Pamela from his pulpit in St. Saviour’s, and thus helped provoke Henry Fielding. (Sale, ibid., p. 17.)
[7.] McKillop, p. 49.