"The Job I Have Perhaps Rashly Undertaken": Publishing the Complete Correspondence of Samuel Richardson

If the eighteenth century was the great age of English letter writing, the twentieth century was the great age of editing correspondence. The letters of almost all of the major Enlightenment authors have now appeared in scholarly editions, many in multivolume sets, and many published by Oxford University Press, Yale University Press, or, in the case of Horace Walpole, the two in conjunction.¹ Some of these editions, such as the Oxford Frances Burney (now at sixteen volumes) and the Yale Thomas Percy (now at nine), are still in progress.² Others, such as the five-volume Oxford Pope and the ten-volume Chicago Burke, have become dated and are receiving supplementary addenda and corrigenda.³ For some especially privileged authors, new editions have replaced or are replacing earlier publications: Swift, Johnson, Boswell, and Austen are among those whose correspondence has appeared in two separate collected editions.⁴

Although few eighteenth-century novelists were major letter writers, their correspondence has not been neglected. Standard editions of the letters of Defoe, Smollett, and Sterne have long been available, and Sterne's correspondence has been reedited for the Florida edition.⁵ Henry Fielding's letters, of which remarkably few survive, have been published together with those of his sister Sarah.⁶ The collected letters of other women novelists before Austen, such as Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Hays, have also been printed in modern scholarly editions.⁷

Yet we have no collected modern edition of Samuel Richardson's correspondence. As well as creating the numerous fictional letters that make up the nineteen volumes of his three epistolary novels—Pamela (in two parts, 1740-41), Clarissa (1747-48), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54)—Richardson was also a prolific letter writer with a large circle of correspondents that included many of the key figures, male and female, in the literary and social world of his time. The parallels between his own epistolary practices and those of his fiction are striking. The intricate systems of composing and delivering letters in the novels, in which an epistle can be written by more than one author and dispatched to multiple recipients, are mirrored in his private correspondence. The letters he exchanged constitute an extraordinary analysis of his novels, a sustained debate on the art of fiction between a practitioner and his readers. In addition, because Richardson was one of the major London printers of the period, his correspondence is also a vital resource for the history of book publishing.

The only attempt, however, to assemble Richardson's correspondence was made by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, in a six-volume edition of 1804.⁸ This edition of over 2,000 pages, a heroic enterprise in its time, has found a recent champion in her biographer, William McCarthy. As McCarthy notes, Barbauld's edition has been unjustly disparaged.⁹ Although she abridged many of the letters that she included and made stylistic changes throughout, often for the worse, she was, by the standards of her time, quite a scrupulous editor. In general, she avoided the then-common practice of conflating separate letters; she had to work with manuscripts already tampered with by Richardson, his correspondents, and others; and she had a mere three months in which to select and transcribe the material for her edition. Its limitations, however, are obvious. With some 440 letters to and from Richardson, it contains little more than a quarter of the total known today: close to 600 by Richardson and 1,100 by his correspondents. It was, as she herself noted both on the title page and in her preface, a selected edition, with no pretence to completeness. And, as was normally the case for nineteenth-century editions of correspondence, it had no editorial commentary. Barbauld was well aware of the magnitude of her task, writing to a correspondent, in a phrase I have borrowed for my title, about the "job I have perhaps rashly undertaken."¹⁰ One feature of her edition has caused difficulties that she could not have foreseen. Volumes 5 and 6 of her edition contain, as...