Richardson and the Philosophes by James Fowler (review)

The premise of this book is an intriguing one, namely, that Samuel Richardson exercised an important influence on Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot. In exploring this claim, Mr. Fowler makes a useful contribution to the study of how writers on either side of the Channel helped shape the work of their counterparts, a subject of increasing study. Readers, though, will be disappointed if they expect the similarities between the English novelist and the philosophes to be extensive. Mr. Fowler is candid about this fact and rather than focusing on the specifically literary features of the writings he considers, he examines them primarily as "vehicles" for beliefs and ideas, and the core of Richardson's beliefs is Christian, in contrast to the deism and atheism of the philosophes. What remains of the parallels can at times feel slight.

Mr. Fowler examines four works by Voltaire: the three-act comedy Nanine (1749); Paméla, a "semi-fictionalized collection of originally authentic letters," unpublished at Voltaire's death; and two philosophical contes, L'Ingénu (1767) and Les Lettres d'Amabed (1769). One of the parallels that Mr. Fowler traces between Richardson and Voltaire is a belief in meritocracy—however, this must be understood in a very general sense. On the one hand, Richardson's Pamela portrays a young woman who is allowed to marry above her station as a reward for maintaining her virtue in the face of temptation and duress. The merit concerned is moral. On the other hand, Voltaire insists that talent should decide one's standing in society. It has nothing to do with moral virtue. So in the case of Nanine, "the play argues in its way that, as opposed to chaste virgins, certain men (valiant soldiers and men of genius) need to be promoted, and that this needs to happen regardless of birth" (Mr. Fowler's emphasis). The same moral pertains to Paméla, a curious composition that consists of a selection of letters from Voltaire to his niece, which the author intended as a standalone composition. It deals with Voltaire's relationship with his patron, King Frederick of Prussia. The work takes its title from the conceit that the King's condescension in supporting Voltaire was akin to a mésalliance—à la Mr. B. and Pamela. Yet the work comes no closer to echoing the actual theme of the English Pamela than that titular nod of acknowledgment.

The Richardsonian connections in L'Ingénu and Les Lettres d'Amabed are similarly remote. Both works, like Clarissa, deal with lost chastity—indeed, with rape, sometimes merely threatened, but in the case of Les Lettres, realized. As Mr. Fowler points out, in most of his works Voltaire ridicules the notion that chastity is a virtue, but in these two stories the treatment is somewhat more ambiguous. L'Ingénu concerns a woman who sacrifices her chastity to a corrupt official to secure the freedom of an unjustly imprisoned soldier. The story closes with the moral "misfortune is good for something"—hardly a fitting epigraph for Clarissa. Les Lettres d'Amabed comes somewhat closer to that novel's moral, in that it involves a priest who rapes his Indian wards, an act that sets off a cascade of decisions resulting in the violation of still more taboos. Yet the focus of Voltaire's story is a critique of the clergy—by no means a focus that Richardson would have supported. Mr. Fowler is forthright about this divergence between Richardson and his cross-Channel colleagues, and he conjectures that "perhaps Voltaire is moving towards the position that the virtue of a Pamela or a Clarissa is not to be despised, but should be transplanted from a Christian to a deistic soil." This need for transplantation reflects the persistent difference between the writers. Thus, if Voltaire, for a time, grew ambivalent about the relative value of chastity, his most significant disagreements with Richardson remained and continued to render them writers with very different philosophies.

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