"Into Whosoever Hands Our Letters Might Fall": Samuel Richardson's Correspondence and "the Public Eye"

In this article I examine seventeen letters exchanged between Samuel Richardson and the woman he called his "best Adviser," Lady Bradshaigh, from 19 November 1757 to 21 July 1758, in which they discuss a proposal the author had received from the Leipzig-based bookseller Philipp Erasmus Reich to publish "a Vol:e or two of select Letters" (Richardson to Bradshaigh, 19 November 1757).¹ As this correspondence demonstrates, Richardson was attracted by the proposal to translate his manuscript letters to print, but was also tentative. He was mercilessly parodied for the use of personal letters to preface Pamela in its first and second editions (1740 and 1741), an experience that may have left him wary about committing further familiar letters to print.² Although Richardson and Bradshaigh made revisions to their letters, Richardson eventually rejected the proposal and they remained unpublished in his lifetime.

Richardson used his personal correspondence to fashion himself as an author and promote his fiction through a network of readers and commentators. He was evidently aware of the significance of his correspondence: after the publication of Pamela in 1740, he began to collect his letters and by 1753 had arranged them into "Volumes of Epistolary Correspondencies" (Richardson to Johannes Stinstra, 2 June 1753).³ Richardson variously described these manuscripts as items for familial amusement to "divert my Children, & teach them to honour their Fathers Friends, in their Closets" (Richardson to Thomas Edwards, 27 January 1755), as potential reading material "for young Women, who wish to be tho:t prudent & good," and as "a Critique on Clarissa & Grandison" (Richardson to Bradshaigh, 2 January 1758).⁴ Richardson described the value of these epistolary materials for their potential publishers as "letters that have been written to me by several ingenious Correspondents . . . worthy of the public Eye" (Richardson to Bradshaigh, 2 January 1758).⁵

Richardson's correspondence network is mainly literary in scope. It includes the physician and writer George Cheyne; the author Aaron Hill, and his family; poets and authors Thomas Edwards and Edward Young; the Irish clergyman and writer Patrick Delany, and his wife and artist Mary Delany. A set of young female correspondents includes the writers Hester Mulso (later Chapone), Sarah Fielding, and Jane Collier, as well as Susanna Highmore, daughter of the painter Joseph Highmore. Other notable female correspondents include the author Sarah Chapone, memoirist Laetitia Pilkington, Lady Barbara Montagu, and a woman whom Richardson was to call both daughter and friend, Sarah Wescomb (later Scudamore). Richardson's lengthy correspondence with Lady Bradshaigh, who resided in Haigh Hall near Wigan with her husband, Sir Roger Bradshaigh, establishes her claim to fame as "letter writer" in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. And it was owing to Bradshaigh's influence "more than to any one Person besides" that Richardson was encouraged to write and complete what was to be his last novel, Sir Charles Grandison (Richardson to Bradshaigh, 13 August 1755).⁶ Bradshaigh's sister, Lady Echlin, also became a revered correspondent of Richardson. However, voluminous correspondence does not always imply an equal degree of significance: some of Richardson's most revealing epistolary exchanges are relatively brief. Notable in this latter category are a collection of forty-five letters with an attorney named Eusebius Silvester, with whom Richardson quarreled, and an exchange of twenty-one letters with the Dutch translator of Clarissa, Johannes Stinstra.⁷

The Richardson--Bradshaigh correspondence composed during this period raises various considerations, but this article focuses on its content relating to editing processes as well as on examples of the editorial practice of both writers. This enables me to analyze the difficulties Richardson and Bradshaigh encountered in editing correspondence for posterity. As a novelist, Richardson explored the afterlives of letters as much as their momentary creation, doing so with particular emphasis in Clarissa. Clarissa preserves her letters carefully and writes letters for posthumous use; that the novel contains the history of its own publication is made explicit by its draft title, "The Lady's Legacy."⁸ Jocelyn Harris has read Richardson's published and unpublished addenda to Clarissa metatextually alongside...