The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, Volume 2: Correspondence with George Cheyne and Thomas Edwards ed. by David E. Shuttleton and John A. Dussinger (review)

It is unsurprising that the patriarch of the epistolary novel would have a surviving correspondence substantial enough to match his published work volume for volume, to the tune of a dozen volumes each. However, it is important to note that the key word for The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson is "correspondence," and the organizational principles and titling structure of these volumes emphasize the ways in which Richardson is best understood through the coteries in which he constantly participated. Tom Keymer and Peter Sabor note in their General Editors' Preface that a one-sided project of collecting Richardson's letters would run to perhaps one-third the number of volumes. This volume, the second in the series, illustrates the value of this more ambitious and comprehensive project.

That project will ultimately include eight volumes organized by correspondents, two by subject (that is, correspondence around Pamela and Clarissa, and correspondence around Sir Charles Grandison), a volume designated for "additional letters" along with the Appendices and Index for the entire edition. This is, as Keymer and Sabor argue, based in Richardson's own organizational structure, and is a feature worth (to the extent possible) re-creating, in addition to following the model from the Yale editions of Boswell, Walpole, Johnson, and others. While those seeking to read the entire Richardsonian correspondence chronologically will find themselves moving between many volumes, this seems an unlikely usage for such a wide and varied correspondence. Happily, navigation aids abound, including Richardson's own Index, as well as useful and intriguing provenance information about the Richardson copybook of Cheyne's letters (a trail that has not yet been wholly unearthed).

This volume in particular shows the strengths of focusing on a few "key correspondents" at a time. Together, George Cheyne and Thomas Edwards have been selected for this volume not only because of their medical content (Cheyne as physician, Edwards as fellow-sufferer), but because Richardson's letters within the correspondence reveal his thoughts on literary production that are early and candid. There are further parallels that the editors do not so explicitly emphasize, but that are worth mentioning. While the correspondences do not overlap (Cheyne's runs 1733–1743, Edwards's 1748–1756), they both were terminated only by death. Because both correspondents predeceased Richardson, their letters were preserved by Richardson, though both collections appear with strict injunctions that neither should ever see print. Indeed, the final Appendix to this volume is the seven "Names of Those Readers To Be Permitted To Read the Richardson-Edwards Correspondence." The care (and indeed selectivity) with which Richardson preserved his own letters to these two men, and further embargoed their publication, suggests that reading them as "unguarded" can only be pushed so far, or by comparison with the far more public and circulated correspondences Richardson carried on with others.

The difference between "letters" and "correspondence" shows strongly in this volume, especially in the Cheyne collection, which includes only three drafts of Richardson's letters to eighty-three of Cheyne's. Without Cheyne's contributions, the three letters of Richardson could easily be moved to the volume on Pamela and Clarissa (and indeed, I wonder if they will be duplicated in Volume 9). That said, situating those three letters within the larger exchanges with Cheyne reveals much about Richardson as both printer and patient. Scholars of print history will find much to examine in Cheyne's directives over the publication of his work, and more medically minded readers will be grateful for the footnotes that translate Cheyne's "receipts" that appear periodically throughout. Mr. Shuttleton's Introduction provides context that will be useful both for those who come to this volume for Cheyne specifically, as well as those who have little familiarity with Cheyne's work. This correspondence is...