Masters and Servants: Political Discourse in Richardson's A Collection of Moral Sentiments
- Masters and Servants:Political Discourse in Richardson's A Collection of Moral Sentiments
John A. Dussinger, Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the author of The Discourse of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1974), In the Pride of the Moment: Encounters in Jane Austen's World (1990), and of articles and reviews on writers ranging from the Third Earl of Shaftesbury to Mary Shelley. The present essay is related to his research for the facsimile edition of Richardson's Collection of Moral Sentiments, vol. 11 of the Clarissa Project.
Footnotes
1. Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale. Supposed to be written by Himself, 2 vols (London, 1766), 1:208.
2. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, Le Barbier de Seville, act 1, scene 2 (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1964), p. 41.
3. See Margaret Anne Doody, "Richardson's Politics," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2 (1990), 113-23. Doody links Richardson ingeniously to the Tories against George II and Walpole, and suggests that Sir Charles Grandison was a model of what Bonnie Prince Charles should have been to be worthy of support. Certainly the international theme of Richardson's last novel does appear to be what might be called a "strategy of containment" to help ameliorate the rift between Protestant and Catholic followers in England in the wake of 1688 and the various subsequent Jacobite uprisings. For this Marxist critical term, see Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 53-54. Doody also emphasizes that Richardson is so cautious about revealing his loyalties mat one can only speculate about what he believed from the circumstantial evidence of his printing career and from possible allegorical meanings in his novels. My interpretation of Richardson's political affinities assumes that they are more Whig than Tory. While interpreting Sir Charles Grandison's international role as a British gentleman, Jocelyn Harris also observes that he is "a firm supporter of me Union and the Hanovers," Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 141. For the fullest account of this author's career, including his political involvement as a printer, see T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
4. See Richardson's A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, with an introduction by James E. Evans (Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1980), hereafter referred to as the Collection. Volume 11 of the Clarissa Project, under the editorship of Florian Stuber, Margaret Anne Doody, and Jim Springer Borck, to be published by AMS Press in 1993, contains a facsimile of this work, to which I have written the Introduction and Ann Jessie Van Sant, the Afterword.
5. For the rendering of servants in the early novel, see Bruce Robbins, The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); and John Richetti, "Representing an Under Class: Servants and Proletarians in Fielding and Smollett," The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 84-98. See also Mary Soliday, "High Life below Stairs: Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Fiction," unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Illinois, 1990).
6. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, Shakespeare Head edition, 4 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1929), 4:331-32. References in parentheses to Pamela II are to vols 3 and 4 of this edition. In the Collection Richardson describes the references to Pamela as follows: "The Numerals, i. ii. iii. iv. denote the Volumes; the first Figures refer to the Octavo Edition; those inclosed thus [ ] to the 3d and subsequent Editions of the Twelves" (Collection, p. 1).
7. Francis Osborn, The Works, 8th edition (London, 1682), p. 18. Cf. Henry Peacham: "Nobility is the Honour of blood in a Race or Linage [sic], conferr'd formerly upon some one or more of that Family, either by the Prince, the Lawes, customes of that Land or Place, whereby either out of knowledge, culture of the mind, or by some glorious Action performed, they have been use full and...
