Reason and Religion in “Clarissa”: Samuel Richardson and “The Famous Mr. Norris, of Bemerton” (review)

When Ian Watt traced “the rise of the novel” in 1957, he not only inaugurated studies in the cultural climate that produced the novel as the eighteenth-century genre par excellence; he also affirmed, enduringly, that Locke’s epistemology furnished the psychological framework through which eighteenth-century novelists wrote and their readers read. Locke’s empirical theory of the corporeally sensitive mind, which feels its way through the world and which forms our experience of morals, religion, education, law, and civil society, led British moral philosophy into the Enlightenment. Under Watt’s influence, Locke’s empiricism also clarified the triumphant emergence of the self-reflective protagonist, fascinated student of his own thoughts, object of our sympathy, and product of social experience, which the novel records for our moral education. But we tend to forget, according to this rigorous and erudite study, that Locke’s epistemology of the senses also obscured (at best) or demolished (at worst) the theological certainty that had long enabled morality and understanding. Now that knowledge is felt through the senses and not inspired through the divine, morality becomes rational (not religious), the world material (not spiritual), “sensibility” a matter of both. Historians of the novel at mid-century would do well to observe that Locke’s cultural infusion was, in fact, firmly resisted and certainly incomplete.

Richardson was arguably the most avowedly Christian of the century’s great novelists, and possibly its most didactic. His epistolary novels immersed readers in oceans of thoughts and feelings produced, first hand, by expansively reflective protagonists. Mr. Taylor’s energetic book surveys the intellectual, moral, and spiritual controversies that challenged Locke’s epistemology among philosophers, novelists, and readers—a challenge that was sustained well into the 1740s, and engaged Richardson, his correspondents, and even several characters of his great tragedy, Clarissa (1747–1748). Richardson had even raised the possibility that Clarissa’s own childhood nurse and “more natural mother” Mrs. Judith Norton was the daughter and student of “the famous” John Norris (1657–1711), rector of Bemerton (near Salisbury), renowned commentator on Locke, English celebrant of Malbranche, and correspondent of Mary Astell; his name and his notions surface at key points in the novel. This book makes a compelling case: only by appreciating the theological import of Locke’s new epistemology, as it touched the production and reception of Clarissa, can we animate the moral complexity of Richardson’s enduring masterpiece.

In an Introduction and three chapters, with copious footnotes that display impressive attention to detail and argument across historical debates in theology, moral theory, political philosophy, and epistemology—to say nothing of exhaustive attention to some forty years of Richardson studies—this monograph engages with fine details at the expense of wider cultural context. Mr. Taylor’s considerable scholarship on Astell and Norris, and his interest in Sterne, provide extensive discussion at the expense of comparative insights drawing on other figures of the period (and other novelists surely). I confess there were moments when I thought this book would have made a much more powerful article.

It is difficult to envision how Mr. Taylor could sustain such depth, and at such length, however, without this tight focus. The book opens with the honest claim that few scholars of this period attend to the theological concerns of commentators such as Norris, to the conservative moral discourse that informed Astell’s positions on women’s education, or to the real tensions lived (that is, suffered) by Richardson’s correspondent Margaret Collier, who sought emotional refuge by reading Clarissa while enduring a life of poverty and dependence. “However, today’s footnotes,” Mr. Taylor wisely remarks, “were very often yesterday’s primary texts,” and engagement with this neglected history illuminates the quality of the “sensory” qua spiritual contra material experience of Richardson’s characters, along with this novel’s “full commitment to an Astellian form of feminism.” For such understanding, on our part, requires...