3 - Samuel Richardson (1689–1761): The epistolary novel

Summary

Samuel Richardson had a simple story to tell about the invention of the epistolary novel, a genre that embodies its narrative in fictional letters. By the age of fifty he had established himself in business as one of the leading master printers in London, and was also known in the trade for his ability to write good copy; he had composed numerous prefaces, dedications and ‘other little Things of the Pamphlet-kind’, he later told his Dutch translator, only some of which can now be traced. It was doubtless with this reputation in mind that Richardson had been urged for years by two influential publishers to produce a letter-writing manual for which they sensed a market opening, aimed at a predominantly rural readership and offering template letters for practical implementation in everyday life. Richardson was slow to accept the commission, but on starting work in 1739 he became absorbed by the imaginative and moral potential of the project, and began developing scenarios that involved fictionalised ethical dilemmas as well as epistolary solutions. One such scenario grew under his hands, about a maidservant importuned by her predatory master, and within a mere two months that winter he drafted a full-length novel from scratch while the manual limped slowly behind: ‘And hence sprung Pamela’, he briskly recalled (Selected Letters, 232). Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded was published to immediate acclaim in November 1740, almost a year to the day after composition began; Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, On the Most Important Occasions, appeared early the next year, and then – as its miraculous offspring became an international craze – disappeared again.