Sir Charles Grandison and the "Language of Nature"

Sir Charles Grandison and the "Language Of Nature"George E. Haggerty At one point early in her involvement with the Grandison family circle, Harriet Byron asks a series of rhetorical questions which expose the central obsessions of Richardson's final novel: And why is the Grecian Homer, to this day, so much admired, as he is in all these nations, and in every other nation where he has been read, and will be, to the world's end, but because he writes to nature? And is not the language of nature one language throughout the world, tho' there are different modes of speech to express it by?1 Harriet gives vent to this seemingly self-evident expostulation as a way of matching her own circumscribed experience against the worldly wisdom of Sir Charles. (She is writing from London to her cousin Lucy, with whom she is in constant correspondence and who reads her letters to a close-knit family circle.) Harriet's point is that a lively sensibility will make even radically limited experience harrowing and eventful. Indeed, as critics have noted, it is the nature of this novel to find more richness, variety, and depth in the largely female world of private experience and epistolary correspondence than in the public world of heroic action and restraint.2 1 Samuel Richardson, The History ofSir Charles Grandison (1753-54), ed. Jocelyn Harris, 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), I1 185. References are to this edition. 2 See Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 2, Number 2, January 1990 128 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION The real world of the novel is a world which expends its energy in the inscription of feelings in language, searching for what Harriet elusively calls the "language of nature." Margaret Anne Doody argues that the private circle of which Sir Charles is an intimate member is a comic version of those imprisoning households in Clarissa.3 In the English group, parents have in one way or another been disposed of, and a circle of young adults live together as brothers and sisters in what seems at times like an orgy of mutual admiration. Yet this circle is also a hornet's nest of private intrigue. With no parents to regulate behaviour, freedom is nearly absolute—Harriet's relatives are extraordinarily careless about her wellbeing —and the characters have only their own moral sense and their mutual example to guide them in a world fraught with danger from both without and within. The challenge for these characters is to balance private strength with public necessity and to establish a context in which they can be themselves. They meet this challenge in and through language. Harriet herself and Charlotte Grandison are the most fascinating members of this circle because they are the most fully developed and the most actively engaged in discovering who they are. Harriet at one stage calls Charlotte "a very Miss Howe" (I, 229); this not only reminds us of some of the less excruciating concerns of the earlier novel but also suggests a reworking of constant themes.4 Charlotte is a "new" Anna Howe, though, only in the sense that she is a richer, more fully characterized, and a more boldly experimental statement of what has been called «r-feminism.5 Harriet , however, is by no means a second Clarissa. Excitement rather than (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 277-81; and John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 208-10. Other recent studies which have dealt interestingly with Sir Charles Grandison are: Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); Carol Houlihan Flynn, Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); James Allen Stevenson, "? Geometry of His Own': Richardson and the Marriage Ending," SEL, 26 (1986), 469-83. 3 Doody, A Natural Passion, pp. 278-79. 4 Sitter emphasizes this connection; see Literary Loneliness, pp. 202-4; see also Mary V. Yates, "The Christian Rake in Sir Charles Grandison," SEL, 24 (1984), 545-61. 5 Stevenson sees a "feminist unity...