“Piety and Popishness”: Tolerance and the Epistolary Reaction to Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison

Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), in its every aspect, attempts to solve the problems of religious difference in the post-Jacobite world. Recent readings argue that despite the apparent openness of Sir Charles’s marriage proposal to his Catholic love interest, Clementina, the novel presents Catholicism as a threat to both the protagonist and his nation, reducing Sir Charles Grandison to a highly politicized tolerationist platform. For Richardson’s contemporary opponents, a “True Englishman” is an Anglican of conservative social values, an icon they believed Richardson countered by offering the religiously liberal Sir Charles as an alternative model of English character. Through my analysis of the anonymous epistolary responses to the novel, the social and political milieu that informed them, and the novel itself, I challenge the critical assumption that Sir Charles Grandison puts forward a recognizable tolerationist agenda, instead arguing that it works against politically authorized intolerance by unyoking religion from public policy altogether.