Samuel Richardson (review)

REVIEWS 69 The last two chapters, though they stop short of special pleading, do perhaps overstate a case, though they do so with aplomb. Nonconformist domesticity and plainness, its realistic celebration of common human affection, are defended against the polite literature of the court with its urge to power and manipulation. But by this time the old Puritan plainness had become in the eyes of their opponents far from plain, a special dialect. Samuel Parker's attack on dissenting style was really an attack on ideas, on the doctrine of grace expressed in a language that was confessional rather than explicatory. Keeble concludes with reflections on some of the major themes of Nonconformist mythography: the exodus, wayfaring and pilgrimage, adventure, and the wilderness of this world. This is a distinguished and important book, and the attempt to connect the individualism and realism of the Nonconformist ethos with specific literary techniques is brave if not always consistent. Keeble convinces us that this was a vital movement, not a moribund one, but he does not seem to face the question whether separation from the national core was ultimately impoverishing: perhaps it was, to that core too, as well as to the dissenters. Roger Sharrock King's College, London Jocelyn Harris. Samuel Richardson. British and Irish Authors. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1987. xii + 179pp. US$39.50 cloth; US$11.95 paper. Samuel Richardson's distinction as a novelist now is, properly, so axiomatic that Cambridge naturally included him in its Introductory Critical Studies of British and Irish authors. The choice of Jocelyn Harris for such a work was a happy one. She approaches her subject with respect but without hagiography, and with tactful use of modem critical approaches but without being used by them. We see, for example, Richardson's concern with Pamela's concerns—the British young woman's right to control her own property, here her virginal body, against the absolutist infringements of her master Squire B. In Clarissa Richardson deals with a related but vastly more complex political and sexual matter—the Lockean Clarissa resisting the Filmerian Lovelace. Alternatively, Clarissa is like Eve, the ravaged but noble Lucretia, and the queenly Elizabeth. Lovelace is like Don Juan, Faust, Milton's Satan, and an un-British absolute monarch. The growth from Pamela to Clarissa is a growth in epistolary sophistication and in Richardson's need to answer his critics, to make plain that it is neither a joke nor a matter indifferent for a man to victimize a socially inferior woman. He also must make plain that in one respect his critics were correct: marriage to a presumably reformed rake is not the reward for sexual virtue. Clarissa, however, compounded his problems, for misreaders grew 70 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION with the size of Richardson's audience, some of whom read key portions of his great work in manuscript. Richardson thus needed to conduct ongoing dialogues with the Lady Bradsheighs of the world, those who thought Clarissa too fussy, Lovelace all too attractive, and the benevolent Hickman all too tepid. What better way to correct such errors than by writing anotíier novel, in which Sir Charles Grandison evokes an Edenic world whose brave aristocratic man is a virgin, and whose beautiful female virgin remains so until marriage? What better way to discuss true modern Christian heroism than to show it in action through the varied moral choices available to the men, women, and Italians of that novel's dramatic personae? Jocelyn Harris is especially good at showing the continuity among these novels, their strengths and weaknesses, and their role as artifacts in constant change. I suspect that we never will have a "definitive " edition of Clarissa; Richardson himself never decided what his final version would be, for he never adequately controlled his unruly readers' responses, and never stopped trying to find ways to anticipate or correct their errors. Harris negotiates these straits well, and though she offers much plot synopsis for the novice, she also offers substance for the advanced student. She is good, for instance, concerning one chief reason for Clarissa's death, her awareness that she has seen Lovelace as heart of darkness, as vice itself (pp. 92...