Feasting and Fasting: Nourishment in the Novels of Samuel Richardson

Feasting and Fasting: Nourishment in the Novels of Samuel Richardson Peter Sabor In A Natural Passion—one of a handful of books that revitalized Richardson studies in the early 1970s—Margaret Anne Doody devotes several pages to the uses of nourishment in Pamela (1740). Contending that "both hero and heroine are fond of eating," she discusses the novel's many food-related scenes, which, she believes, "reinforce the lovers' physical and instinctual relationship." Doody adds that "there is nothing approaching this emphasis on food in the two later novels, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, where relationships are more sophisticated."1 Although fasting in Clarissa has been the subject of a recent work by Donnalee Frega,2 very little has been added to Doody's remarks, published over twenty-five years ago, on nourishment in Pamela or Sir Charles Grandison. My purpose here is first to reconsider the depiction of eating and drinking in Pamela in the light ofRichardson's own dietetic concerns in the 1730s and early 1740s—before and shortly after the publication of Pamela— and then to re-examine the relationship between the treatment of 1 Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 50, 52. Other seminal works on Richardson published in the early 1970s are TC. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel's still standard biography, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); and Mark Kinkead-Weekes's Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist (London: Routledge, 1973). 2 Donnalee Frega, SpeakinginHunger: Gender, Discourse, and Consumption in "Clarissa" (Columbia : University of South Carolina Press, 1998). See also Frega, "Speaking in Hunger: Conditional Consumption as Discourse in Clarissa," Studies in the Literary Imagination 28 (1995), 87-103. The references to nourishment in the first edition of Clarissa have been exhaustively indexed, under headings such as "food," "drink," "meals," and "collation," in Susan Price Karpuk, SamuelRichardson's "Clarissa": An Index (New York: AMS Press, 2000). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Number 2,January 2002 142EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION food in Pamela and that in Richardson's two later, more ambitious, and more complex novels. In January 1736, Edward Cave, proprietor of the Gentleman's Magazine, wrote a set ofhudibrastic verses to Richardson, urging him to attend a printer's feast. Mocking Richardson's considerable bulk, Cave assures him: I'll place two seats, whene'er you come, This for your arms—and that your bum. Cave envisages the gathering illuminated by Richardson's glowing features: Oh! could it gain your rosy face, How the full orb the board would grace, When flush'd with wine, and plump with praise! Diminish'd stars shall hide their head, Twinkle a while, then drop to bed, While you shine forth serenely bright, Restore the day in midst of night.3 Richardson's detailed self-description in a later letter to Lady Bradshaigh ,4 as well as surviving paintings byJoseph Highmore, Francis Hayman, and Mason Chamberlin,5 confirms the accuracy of Cave's portrait: he was short, plump, thick-necked, and ruddy-cheeked. Richardson's "rosy face," however, would not be present at the dinner . Pleading a prior engagement, he had declined the invitation in a verse epistle which, like Cave's, was printed in the Gentleman's Magazine. Almost five years before the publication of Pamela and twelve before the first instalment of Clarissa, the verse exchange creates a scene in which the consumption of food entails a struggle for control: one persuades, the other attempts to resist. In this case the printers will dine without Richardson, "who, pre-ingaged, can't know / The pleasures that wou'd from your meeting flow." 3 Gentleman's Magazinen (1736) , 51 . The verses were reprinted byJohn Nichols in Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer (London, 1782), pp. 89-90, 160; and in Literary Anecdotes oftheEighteenth Century (London, 1812-15), 2:74—79. 4 See Richardson to Lady Bradshaigh, late November (?) 1749, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed.John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 135-36. 5 Highmore's portraits of Richardson are at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Hall of the Company of Stationers; Hayman's portrait is in a private...