Parliamentary Printing, Paper Credit, and Corporate Fraud: A New Episode in Richardson's Early Career

Parliamentary Printing, Paper Credit, and Corporate Fraud: A New Episode in Richardson's Early Career Thomas Keymer The creator ofLovelace, the most adroit and beguiling manipulator in eighteenth-century fiction, was in his own life unusually susceptible to deception and fraud. In Samuel Richardson's last years, having made compassionate loans totalling £50 to Eusebius Silvester, a feckless attorney he came to regard as a confidence trickster , he sought to retrieve his full correspondence widi Silvester as a memorial of exploited trust. He wished (as he instructed a proxy to tell Silvester) to have his Collection complete, for aWarning Piece to his Friends and Family to bejoined with one ofjust such another Imposition put upon him by an Attorney too, out of his own Profession, but which indeed he pretended not to abhor for righteous Reasons, as you do in many of your parading Epistles. By which however he could not take Warning, tho' it was Years before he was attacked by you, in so artful and designing a Manner, as now appears on Proof.1 Richardson then meticulously organized and edited his correspondence with Silvester, adding explanatory annotations and 1 John Douglas to Eusebius Silvester, 21 August 1759, Forster MSS 15-1, fol. 58, Victoria and Albert Museum. "His Friends and Family" replaces the deleted word "Posterity." EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 17, Number 2,January 2005 184 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION interpolating connecting text. This correspondence is among the Forster manuscripts in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and has been Üioroughly analysed from biographical and critical points of view.2 Whatever record Richardson kept of die other "Imposition put upon him by an Attorney" has not survived, but new evidence from the archives makes it possible to identify die episode in question , which did indeed take place years before die Silvester affair—a quarter of a century beforehand, at a time when evidence of die future novelist's activities is frustratingly patchy. Reconstruction of die episode casts new light on Richardson's early career as a printer (our emerging understanding ofwhich I trace in the first part ofthis article) while also connecting him intriguingly to one of die major financial scandals ofthe Walpole era. It has long been recognized diat Richardson was thinking of his extensive contracts as a parliamentary printer when summarizing his career in 1753: "I began for my self, married, and pursued Business with an Assiduity that, perhaps, has few Examples; and with the more Alacrity, as I improved a Branch of it, that interfered not widi any other Person; and made me more independent ofBooksellers (dio' 1 did much Business for them,) dian any odier Printer."3 At first, it was assumed that Richardson refers only to official government contracts . A chapter of William Merritt Sale's ground-breaking Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (1950) was devoted to this crucial branch of his business, documenting his activities from 1733 as sole official printer of bills and committee reports for die House of Commons. These commissions led in turn to Richardson's appointment in 1742 as the first, and again exclusive, printer ofTheJournals oftL· House of Commons. The contract involved was enormous: die task included printing not only recent transcriptions but also manuscript records 2 For a biographical account, see T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 465-70; on die formal implications , see Tom Keymer, Richardson's "Clarissa" and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 34-44. 3 The Richardson-Stinstra Correspondence and Stinstra's Prefaces to "Clarissa, " ed. William C. Slattery (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 25-26. Citing this passage, Eaves and Kimpel assume—mistakenly, for reasons set out below—"that branch ofhis business ... did not begin until 1733, and in his early years he was presumably not so independent ofthe booksellers" (Samuel Richardson: A Biography, 19). CORPORATE FRAUD185 ofsessions dating back to 1547 (die number ofwords to be printed was at first estimated, with eye-watering precision, at 26,537,603), so that Richardson was embroiled for the rest of his life in a massive Shandean catch-up operation that was only nearing completion in 1761, die year ofhis deadi, when...