Reason and Religion in Clarissa

Reason and Religion in Clarissa Samuel Richardson and ‘the Famous Mr. Norris, of Bemerton’

E. Derek Taylor

Reason

and Religion in

Clarissa

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Reason and Religion in Clarissa S amuel Richardson and ‘the Famous Mr. N orris, of Bemerton’

E . D e rek Ta ylo r L ongwood University, USA

© E . D erek Taylor 2009 A ll rights reserved. N o part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. E . D erek Taylor has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, D esigns and Patents A ct, 1988, to be identi.ed as the author of this work. Published by A shgate Publishing L imited A shgate Publishing Company Wey Court E ast S uite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry S treet Farnham Burlington S urrey, G U9 7PT VT 05401-4405 E ngland USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Taylor, D erek Reason and religion in Clarissa: S amuel Richardson and ‘the famous Mr. N orris, of Bemerton’ 1. Richardson, S amuel, 1689–1761. Clarissa 2. N orris, John, 1657–1711 3. Philosophy in literature I. Title 823.6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Taylor, D erek. Reason and religion in Clarissa: S amuel Richardson and ‘the famous Mr. N orris, of Bemerton’ / by E . D erek Taylor. p. cm. Includes index. IS BN 978-0-7546-6531-1 (alk. paper) 1. Richardson, S amuel, 1689–1761. Clarissa. I. Title. PR3664.C43T39 2009 823’.6—dc22 2008029301 IS BN : 978-0-7546-6531-1

Contents A cknowledgments

vi

Introduction: The E nd of Clarissa

1

1 Un-L ocke-ing S amuel Richardson

33

2 Mary A stell, E lizabeth Carter, Clarissa Harlowe, and other “D escendants” of N orris

77

3 O ut-N orrised

111

Bibliography Index

155 167

A cknowledgments My mentor, Melvyn N ew, has been encouraging me and my work on this project for the better part of a decade. He sets an impossibly high bar for professional conduct and for scholarly achievement—I count myself very lucky indeed to have tricked a S terne scholar into spending so much time with Richardson. I am indebted to Brian McCrea for introducing me to Clarissa and to its rich critical history. John D ussinger provided invaluable suggestions for (and corrections to) this manuscript. A ny and all errors are very much my own. Many thanks to Michael L und for his always astute advice and for providing a model for successfully negotiating classroom and research responsibilities. I’ve been blessed with parents who aren’t Harlowes, a wife Clarissa and A nna would have loved. I’m grateful for their enduring support.

Introduction

The E nd of Clarissa

It is perhaps the distinctive characteristic of S amuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa. Or, The history of a young lady (1747–48) that from the outset the author knew how this one would end. This is not to say Richardson composed blindly his first or his final works of historical fiction, Pamela: or, virtue rewarded (1740) and The history of S ir Charles Grandison (1753–54), respectively. Richardson surely understood from the beginning that Pamela A ndrews would wed Mr. B, her master and would-be seducer, and then proceed to reform both him and the members of his socially elite circle through a moral domestication of his and their aristocratic excesses. But the conclusion to Pamela does not constitute an “end” in the sense I am using it here, a fact brought home to Richardson by such spurious continuations of his story as John K elly’s Pamela’s Conduct in High L ife (1741). However much he resented the “Hardship” of not being “permitted to end his own Work, when and how he pleased,” as he complained to James L eake in a letter of A ugust 1741, even in his own Pamela, Part II (1741)—a work composed exclusively, Richardson admitted in this same letter, as a response to having “my Plan ... Ravished out of my Hands”—he elected not to include either Mr. B or Pamela herself in the list of characters whose remaining years, and deaths, are sketched out by an editorial voice in a final “conclusion.” Similarly inconclusive is the “decidedly odd” final volume of Grandison, which, as Jocelyn Harris has characterized it, gives every indication that, even as his novel drew to a close, “Richardson had not made up his mind how to end the work.”



See Tom Keymer and Peter Sabor’s very fine facsimile collection of this and other literary (and visual) responses to Richardson’s novel: The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and adaptations of S amuel R ichardson’s Pamela (L ondon: Pickering and Chatto, 2001). Cf. K eymer and S abor’s Pamela in the Marketplace: L iterary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).  John Carroll, ed., S elected L etters of S amuel R ichardson (O xford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 43.  Jocelyn Harris, “The Reviser O bserved: The L ast Volume of S ir Charles Grandison,” S tudies in Bibliography 29 (1976): 1. Harris finds this volume to be “aesthetically wayward, digressive, and often distorting to characterization.” Major characters, she notes, occupy strangely precarious positions as the novel concludes: “The second heroine, Clementina della Porretta is left drifting and purposeless. ... S ir Charles’s ward, E mily Jervois, remains single and unhappily devoted to her guardian; Harriet, after a near-miscarriage, is not yet delivered of her child.”



R eason and R eligion in Clarissa

Clarissa was quite literally a different story. A s Richardson’s biographers note, it is clear from his correspondence that “he had the outline of the story well in mind before 20 June 1744, when [E dward] Y oung wrote to him defending the character of L ovelace and the proposed tragic ending of the novel against ‘Y our critics.’” O nly one month later (24 July 1744), E aves and K impel explain, A aron Hill commended Richardson on the “good and beautiful design” of which he had just finished reading “the wide and arduous plan,” exclaiming in wonder at the author’s claim to “have finished it already!” “What the last sentence means,” the biographers sensibly suggest, “is open to conjecture, but on the face of it, the letter says that Richardson has finished his novel.” Of course, just what “finished” means is itself a matter of conjecture. In 1744, Richardson’s manuscript was still three years away from appearing in print; the first installment containing volumes one and two was first published (by Richardson’s own press) in December 1747. At the time of Hill’s letter, the well known, often torturous process through which the seven volumes comprising Clarissa would come finally to be printed had only just begun—the revisions upon revisions by an author who, as he admitted in a letter of 1744 to Young, was a “sorry pruner ... apt to add three pages for one I take away!”; the incessant epistolary tug-of-war between a needy and reluctant Richardson and his myriad needy and reluctant advisors. Clearly, then, Clarissa was far from its final form in 1744. But it does seem certain that Richardson had completed at the very least a thorough prospectus of his novel by this date, thus explaining the ability in 1745–46 of readers like E dward Y oung to comment on and make additions to portions of the novel that would eventually be published in the final volumes— Clarissa’s post-rape treatment of L ovelace and her eventual death, for instance. Richardson frequently described his writing technique as formless, if not wholly whimsical. “I intended to be diffuse in my N o-Plan, as I may call it,” he explained of Clarissa to A aron Hill in a letter of 29 O ctober 1746, “in order to take in all that I thought might be of Use from such Characters and S ituations, tho’ I little imagin’d it would carry me to so great a L ength.” Richardson again hesitates to claim a “Plan” for his works in a letter of 2 June 1753 to Johannes S tinstra; he wonders if “a Man may be allowed to say Plan; who never was regular enough to write by one; and who when he ended one L etter, hardly knew what his next would be.” “I am a very irregular writer; can form no plan; nor write after  T.C. D uncan E aves and Ben D . K impel, S amuel R ichardson: A Biography (O xford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 205–6.  Carroll, 61.  S ee Richardson’s letter to Y oung of 3 D ecember 1745, where he thanks Y oung for his “admirable additions”; “S uch noble, such exalted sentiments and expressions, will adorn [Clarissa’s] last hours ... ” (Carroll, 62).  Carroll, 71.  �������������������������� William C. S lattery, ed., The R ichardson-S tinstra Correspondence and S tinstra’s Prefaces to Clarissa (Carbondale and E dwardsville: S outhern Illinois University Press, 1969), 32.

The End of Clarissa



what I have preconceived,” Richardson insisted to L ady Bradshaigh in an undated letter of 1751. The author’s characterization of his compositional method may at first appear difficult to reconcile with the compelling evidence that, as Eaves and Kimpel put it, “From the first mention of [Clarissa] he had had its general plan firmly in mind, and he held to his own conception of the story and especially of the characters.”10 Y et the two points need not be read as contradictory; indeed, it is possible to see them working in unison to explain how it is that Richardson allowed himself to become so overwhelmingly “diffuse” in the presentation of Clarissa’s “story,” how his dealings with these particular “Characters and S ituations” could ever arrive at the roughly one-million words comprising his novel. Richardson, as he created and inhabited his two main characters in “to the moment” fashion, was constantly in the position of knowing that, however diffuse, minute, and particular his recounting of their story, a certain ending within the world of the novel lay ahead for them: both, he knew from the beginning, would die. K eeping this fact of composition in mind helps to explain, I think, how a moralistic prude could create the most brilliantly iconoclastic, unrepentantly Faustian villain of his age; how a rigidly Filmerian father could offer a devastating challenge to Filmer’s patriarchal assumptions in his portrayal of Clarissa’s battle with her family; how a man who thought it unwise for women to remain single could take as his title character a woman whose tragedy is enabled by her inability to achieve the “single life” she so desperately craves and deserves. His certainty of the endpoint to which his plot would arrive, in other words, had a curiously liberating effect on Richardson; having decided from the beginning to kill off his two main characters, the author found himself intellectually unfettered, as it were, and thus able to explore them and their “situations” with a degree of literary sophistication and psychological honesty that continues to surprise readers today and that (as the litany of frustrated exchanges between Richardson and his contemporary readers might suggest) Richardson himself may not fully have recognized. Richardson was making a didactic claim for his novel when he explained to A aron Hill that its very point was death—“[Clarissa] ... is designed to make those think of D eath who endeavour all they can to banish it from their Thoughts” (letter of 12 July 1749).11 He was also, however, giving us a clue to its artistry. O ne might well wonder how it could be that the novel about the plot of which Richardson was most certain would also be the one wherein he is most prolix— Clarissa dwarfs its predecessor, Pamela, by a ratio of roughly three to one. If, as I am suggesting, the author knew where he was going, why did it take him so very long to reach his destination? Peter Brooks’s analysis of narrative dynamics in R eading for the Plot (1984) offers a helpful way of thinking through this problem. Brooks begins with a “simple conviction” about the nature of storytelling, namely that it “has something to do with time-boundedness, and that plot is the internal 

������������������������������������������������������������������ Carroll suggests a date of spring, 1751 for this letter (182n82). ����������������������� E aves and K impel, 213. 11 ������������� Carroll, 126. 10



R eason and R eligion in Clarissa

logic of the discourse of mortality.”12 In his Freud-inspired view, human beings write and read narratives in order to satisfy, if in small measure, their inexorable twin drives toward the continuation of life (eros) and toward stasis, death, the end through which the random sequences and digressions of human experience achieve the non-random coherence of a plot (thanatos). (A ny reader who halfway through a long novel has peeked at the final page knows something of that which Brooks speaks... .) Brooks, it should be noted, is not advocating a traditional psychoanalytic approach to literature wherein the critic-as-analyst deciphers the unconscious complexity of particular authors, readers, or characters. Rather, his application of Freud’s ideas (derived largely from Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920]) provides a way of thinking more generally and fundamentally about “the functioning of the text,” as he puts it;13 his is a formal, structural analysis of the generative tension that narratives embody and through which they are themselves formed. The crowned ourubus ornamenting Clarissa’s coffin—an “emblem of eternity,” Belford explains14—is meant to symbolize the necessarily consuming telos of a life that has achieved its final meaning, but it speaks as well to the way the story of that life unfolds. A s Frederick W. Hilles aptly suggested decades ago, the “serpent with the tail in its mouth” offers a compelling model for understanding the shape of the novel: “in my end is my beginning.”15 For Brooks, this symbol might well speak for the functioning of any story. It is “the contradictory desire of narrative” to accelerate, he writes, “toward the end which would be both its destruction and its meaning” and “to resist simultaneously that end through repetition, digression, and elaboration.”16 In any narrative, in other words, the end occupies a “determinative position,”17 qualifying and coloring every mundane description, every seeming tangent as part of a unified, causally linked, “written” plot. A nd yet storytelling (as S hahrazad would surely attest) is also an act of postponement—“tick-tock,” Frank K ermode told us, “is not much of a plot.”18 Each page defers the arrival of the final one, each chapter moves both toward and away from the conclusion. “The most effective or, at the least, the most challenging texts,” Brooks suggests, “may be those that are most delayed, 12 �������������� Peter Brooks, R eading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (N ew Y ork: A lfred A . K nopf, 1984), 22. 13 ������������ Ibid., 112. 14 ������������������� S amuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young L ady, ed. A ngus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 1305. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 15 ���������������������������������� Frederick W. Hilles, “The Plan of Clarissa,” in S amuel R ichardson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Carroll (E nglewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 82. 16 ����������� Brooks, 58. 17 ���������� Ibid., 92. 18 ��������������� Frank K ermode, The S ense of an Ending: S tudies in the Theory of Fiction (N ew Y ork: O xford University Press, 1967), 45.

The End of Clarissa



most highly bound, most painful.”19 It is difficult to imagine a novel more fitting of this description than Richardson’s Clarissa, the catastrophic end to which may very well explain its length. The “no-plan” Richardson claims for Clarissa is not, then, an early adumbration of automatic writing, nor did the author mean to imply as much. But neither is it correct to suggest that he is simply misrepresenting his method of composition. Rather, Richardson is attempting to capture in a deliberately paradoxical phrase the dramatic irony he sensed in the relationship between the “to the moment” existences of characters whose consciousnesses he had worked assiduously to adopt and himself as a creator keenly aware of his distinction from them—and, in Clarissa, of when the “moments” would stop accumulating. “It is not fair to say—I, identically I, am any-where, while I keep within the character,” Richardson famously explained to L ady Bradshaigh in a letter of 14 February 1754, the weight of the pronouncement resting firmly on the qualifying clause—“identically I”—which works to reinstate the “I” that the author sensed could never really disappear.20 It is this “I” that surfaces in the author’s admission to Hester Mulso in a letter of 3 S eptember 1751: “I laid indeed a heavy hand on the good Clarissa.”21 A lthough it would surely horrify him to have the comparison made, Richardson’s largely instinctive response to this irony has much in common with that most self-conscious explorer (and exploder) of the limitations of novelistic realism, L aurence S terne, who early on in The L ife and Opinions of Tristram S handy, Gentleman (1759–67) has his title character explain his story-telling strategy in terms Brooks would, and Richardson should, find compelling: “In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,--and at the same time.”22 “N othing odd will do long,” S amuel Johnson claimed in reference to Tristram S handy. “Were a man to read Clarissa for the story,” he quipped of Richardson’s novel, “he would be so fretted that he would hang himself.” E ach pronouncement, demonstrably false as stated, proves strangely useful when applied to the other novel. D espite its contemporary and current popularity, Clarissa has yet to inspire a wave of like-minded Christian tragedies. Instead, like S hakespeare’s L ear before it, it occupies the position of being probably the uniquely painful work of E nglish fiction composed in its century. But readers always have and still do read Clarissa for the story; for all their immersion in a popular culture that values immediate gratification over patience, special effects over substance, viewing over reading, my undergraduates nevertheless find the novel to be compelling—much, I should add, to their surprise. Tristram, on the other hand, is now universally recognized as the major E nglish forbear to modern and postmodern experiments in narrative— 19

������������� Brooks, 102. ������������� Carroll, 286. 21 ������������ Ibid., 190. 22 ����������������� L aurence S terne, The L ife and Opinions of Tristram S handy, Gentleman, in vols 1–3 of The Florida Edition of the Works of L aurence S terne, ed. Melvyn N ew and Joan N ew (G ainesville: University of Florida, 1978), 1: 81. 20

R eason and R eligion in Clarissa



from Joyce, to Calvino, to Rushdie—despite the fact that (one might even say because) it contains so little by way of “story.” Richardson, to be sure, had no patience with “this Y orick”—“execrable I cannot but call them,” he wrote of the first two volumes of Tristram S handy to Bishop Hildesley in 1761.23 It is likewise difficult to imagine Sterne finding much of interest in Richardson’s generally satire-allergic fiction. And yet Clarissa and Tristram S handy belong together, for each work, in its own way, reveals an author keenly aware of the time-bound implications, the stakes, of storytelling. O f particular interest in this regard is volume VII of S terne’s satiric novel, where Tristram would appear to outdo himself in narrative misdirection. S ix volumes in, readers ought to have become accustomed to the decidedly non-linear manner in which Tristram relates his “life and opinions.” (To take one shining example—Uncle Toby’s exclamation in volume I, Book XXI, “I think ...,” is suspended mid-sentence, finally reaching completion in volume II, Book 6 after some 10 chapters of intervening, and in Tristram’s mind crucial, historical context: “I think, replied my uncle Toby,--taking, as I told you, his pipe from his mouth, and striking the ashes out of it as he began his sentence;----I think, replied he, --it would not be amiss, brother, if we rung the bell.”)24 A nd yet, to this point, even the most far-flung tangents in Tristram’s autobiography have filaments, however tenuous, connecting them back to the main storyline and setting; S lawkenbergius’s Tale, probably the quintessential S ternean experiment in extended digression (and double entendre), functions as a type of preface to volume IV, not only in its placement (it falls between the title page and first page of the first chapter) but in its explanatory function: Tristram’s father finds the nosarian lessons contained in the tale “running perpetually” in his “fancy,” readers are informed in the first paragraph following the conclusion to the tale.25 Volume VII , however, does not follow this model, providing instead a lengthy break from the main characters and setting of the previous volumes. A s he has done frequently in past volumes, Tristram here leaps forward to the present moment of writing; but this time, rather than returning to the circumstances, people, and “opinions” surrounding his birth, he stays put, describing instead his experiences during a deliberately circumambulatory, and hastily devised, tour through France. Tristram’s (and S terne’s) sudden narrative shift comprises, as A rthur Cash puts it, “the most surprising turn of the novel.”26 The spur for traveling, as Tristram relates it in chapter 1 of volume VII, comes from the onset of a “vile cough” and a requisite visit from a most unwelcome guest: “D eath himself knocked at my door.” After finishing quite deliberately his obscure but bawdy joke to his friend E ugenius—“there is nothing in this world I abominate worse,” S terne self-consciously has Tristram complain, “than to be 23

�������������� Carroll, 341. �������� S terne, Tristram, 1: 70, 114. 25 �������������� Ibid., 1: 325. 26 ���������������� A rthur H. Cash, L aurence S terne, The L ater Years (L ondon and N ew Y ork: Methuen, 1986), 196. 24

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interrupted in a story”—Tristram on his “two spider legs” flies from his personified, and increasingly exasperated, end. “I will lead him a dance he little thinks of,” Tristram announces, “for I will gallop ... without looking once behind me to the banks of the G aronne; and if I hear him clattering at my heels—I’ll scamper away to Vesuvius—from thence to Joppa, and from Joppa to the world’s end, where, if he follows me, I pray G od he may break his neck---.”27 “I have followed many a man thro’ France,” D eath will eventually admit, “but never at this mettlesome rate.”28 Tristram is not S terne, of course; as Cash notes, “not a single episode of the novel can be shown to have happened to S terne.” A nd yet it is surely noteworthy that what is killing Tristram, consumption, had become a particularly acute problem for S terne as he began planning volume VII during his convalescence in France; “This adult Tristram is strikingly like his author,” Cash also tells us.29 S terne’s own travels in France in the early years of the 1760s “had been costly,” Ian Campell Ross explains; having “left home ... in search of health,” S terne in 1764 “needed to return to E ngland to regain it.”30 Volume VII thus serves as an exercise in avoidance not only for Tristram, then, but for S terne as well. Tom K eymer notes frequent “ominous” suggestions in the work that “the text has no natural conclusion of its own, will be coterminous with Tristram’s life, and will always depend for its prolongation on his prospects of health.”31 S urely, “the S terne who was writing Tristram S handy in 1765, ill and alone,” as Melvyn N ew puts it, was cognizant of the relationship between his own “prospects of health” and his ability to keep writing.32 William Holtz has sagely suggested that volume VII “might be said to stand in something of the same relationship to the body of Tristram S handy as does �������� S terne, Tristram, 1: 575–7. ��������������� Ibid., 1: 645. 29 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Cash, 197. The seriousness of S terne’s illness is evident from his correspondence (L etters of L aurence S terne, ed. L ewis Perry Curtis [O xford: Clarendon Press, 1935; reprint, 1965]). A letter of 28 D ecember 1761, “left with Mrs Montague, In Case I should die abroad,” serves as an unofficial will for his wife and daughter; Curtis notes of the original that “Teardrops are supposed to have stained the MS ” (146–8). A few days later (1 January 1762), S terne wrote to To L ady D _____ [D acre?], “Indeed I am very ill, having broke a vessel in my lungs ... . I believe I shall try if the south of France will not be of service to me ... ” (150). S terne was able to assure his wife from Paris on 17 March 1762 that his health was improving: “I have got a colour into my face now, though I came with no more than there is in a dishclout” (155). It was around this time that he began thinking about volumes VII and VIII of Tristram. “I am very hard at Work,” he wrote to Thomas Becket on 16 May 1762, “and when I am got down to my house at Toulouse in the S outh of France you will soon see abt What” (169). 30 ������������������� Ian Campbell Ross, L aurence S terne: A L ife (N ew Y ork: O xford University Press, 2001), 304. 31 ������������ Tom K eymer, S terne, The Moderns, and The Novel (O xford and N ew Y ork: O xford University Press, 2002), 138. 32 ������������ Melvyn N ew, ‘Tristram S handy’: A Book for Free S pirits (N ew Y ork: Twayne, 1994), 110. 27

28

R eason and R eligion in Clarissa



the Journal to Eliza to the S entimental Journey,”33 a comparison that captures aptly its simultaneously central and peripheral nature. In leading himself away from D eath, Tristram necessarily leads us away from his autobiographical “L ife,” for it is to this depressing conclusion that every page unavoidably tends, if not arrives. “If time would only stand still,” Keymer notes, “Tristram might finish his book.”34 But time will not stand still of its own accord, of course; Tristram is thus as invested in not finishing as in finishing. The same might be said for Sterne, whose decision it was, after all, to pull back, or rather forward, at this particular point in his novel. Volume VII “is generally regarded as an excrescence upon the main body,” Holtz notes, “an attempt by S terne to patch together enough material to make another installment of his book.”35 S terne’s (or is it Tristram’s?) epigram to it, however, argues precisely to the contrary: “Non enim excursus hic ejus, sed opus ipsum est [This is not a digression but the work itself].”36 The volume least helpful in progressing the novel’s plot, S terne would seem to contend, is its central episode—and precisely for this reason, he might have added. Tristram himself will recognize as much in the climactic final chapter to volume VII . Having decided in chapter XXX to tour L yons during the four hours between breakfast and his departure, Tristram experiences instead “VE XA TION upon VE XA TION .”37 A fter losing three hours to a series of interruptions both selfimposed and accidental, Tristram finally reaches each of his chosen sites of interest only to be disappointed. The “great clock of L ippius of Basil,” he discovers, “was all out of joints, and had not gone for some years”;38 nor, despite his best efforts, can he manage to drop a tear upon the Tomb of the L overs—“When I came,” he explains, “there was no tomb to drop it upon.”39 Such deflations are, of course, part of S terne’s general satire in volume VII directed at the explosive popularity of travel writing—Tobias S mollett, or “S melfungus” as S terne would enduringly label him, published his own Travels through France and Italy in 1766—and they offer a telling precedent for S terne’s sustained re-visioning of continental travel in A S entimental Journey (1768).40 They function as well, however, to clear the ground for Tristram’s momentary triumph in the final pages of the volume. ��������������� William Holtz, Image and Immortality: A S tudy of Tristram S handy (Providence: Brown University Press, 1970), 130. 34 �������� K eymer, S terne, 137. 35 ����������� Holtz, 130. 36 �������� S terne, Tristram, 1: 573. 37 �������������� Ibid., 1: 625. 38 ������������������� Ibid., 1: 625, 642. 39 �������������� Ibid., 1: 643. 40 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Cf. S terne’s letter of 11 N ovember 1764 to Robert Foley: “I will contrive to send you these 2 new Vols of Tristram, as soon as ever I get them from the press—Y ou will read as odd a Tour thro’ france, as ever was projected or executed by traveler or travel Writer, since the world began— --������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ tis a laughing good temperd S atyr against Traveling (as puppies travel) ... ” (231). 33

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It is with good reason that S terne has Tristram encounter the broken clock during his futile tour of Lyons, for Tristram will find satisfaction not by checking off lists and counting hours, but by abandoning himself so utterly to his experience of the present moment that objective time itself comes unhinged.41 Fittingly, he accomplishes this feat not in cities filed with the antiquities catalogued and popularized in hosts of previous travelogues, but in the more obscure plains in the south of France where the operations of time can, at least for a little while, be dismissed out of hand. “I had made not convention with my man with the gun as to time,” Tristram explains. Thus, “by stopping and talking to every soul I met who was not in a full trot—joining all parties before me—waiting for every soul behind—hailing all those who were coming through cross roads—arresting all kinds of beggars, pilgrims, fiddlers, fryars—not passing by a woman in a mulberrytree without commending her legs, and tempting her into conversation with a pinch of snuff ... I turned my plain into a city.” If only for a little while, Tristram finds that which he has been seeking since the beginning of volume VII , a digression that simultaneously fills and extends time, a pause in life that nevertheless is life; this “barren track,” Tristram assures us, “’tis the most fruitful and busy period of my life.” Here he meets not the black cloaked figure eager to announce the arrival of his final moment, but rather the epiphanic “nut brown maid,” whose moral innocence and sexual openness create a momentary space for the timeless experience of heaven on earth. “We had been seven years acquainted,” Tristram truthfully insists of his new, passing friend.42 41 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Cf. A .A . Mendilow: “What interests S terne much more than chronological dating however is the discrepancy between duration in terms of chronological and psychological time ... . The true duration therefore is subjective, measured by values, not by the clock; it consequently varies in length with each individual, having regard to the circumstances and frame of mind in which he happens to be. The external, objective, unvarying duration as measured by the pendulum has little place in the novel, except as presenting a contrast to psychological duration ... ” (Time and the Novel [L ondon: Peter N evill, 1952; reprint, N ew Y ork: Humanities Press, 1965], 171). 42 �������� S terne, Tristram, 1: 648, 651, 650. N ew similarly reads “The last adventure of volume VII ” as “the one Tristram has all along been seeking,” but emphasizes the lack of consummation suggested by Tristram’s decision to “dance off”: “A s Tristram dances away, we glimpse the importance of separating S terne from his unreliable narrator; the S terne who was writing Tristram S handy in 1765, ill and alone, and more and more convinced that the body was as much an instrument of G od’s grace as the mind and the heart, would not, I believe, have danced away” (Free S pirits, 110). O ne wonders, however, just how much time (objectively speaking) passes in the em dash separating the moment when the “nut brown maid ... dance[s] up insidious” and Tristram’s announcement, “Then ’tis time to dance off” (S terne, Tristram, 1:651). In S terne’s A S entimental Journey Through France and Italy (ed. Melvyn N ew and W.G . D ay [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006]), after all, two unaccountable hours pass between the moment Y orick and the .lle de chambre fall on top of one another in his hotel room and the moment he raises her “up by the hand,” a fact we learn not from Y orick’s recounting of the event itself, but from the seemingly outraged master of the hotel two chapters later (132, 135).

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10

A .A . Mendilow contends that in Tristram “there are no fixed time-points to which episodes bear reference, no beginning from which everything proceeds sequentially and to which events are relative in time.”43 But there is, in fact, a “fixed time-point,” albeit one Tristram can never know experientially or record for his readers; it is dressed in black and chasing him relentlessly across E urope, and it inflects not only the events of volume VII but the work of fiction as a whole. Tristram’s rapturous espousal of indirection as a path to timelessness at the conclusion of volume VII represents, if paradoxically, S terne’s most direct response in Tristram S handy to the weight of the unavoidable ending that pursued him as surely as it did his novel’s narrator. The effects of this same burden, I am suggesting, are equally evident in Richardson’s Clarissa—its very bulk a tangible sign of the author’s interest in delaying the conclusion he had in mind even before he began writing. Y et he could extend his novel only so far. Unlike S terne, whose narrative flexibility and satiric vision allowed Tristram a literalized retreat from death and a momentary escape from time, Richardson saw nothing for it but to force himself and his readers to confront the implications of shaking hands, finally, with Tristram’s black cloaked nemesis. As Richardson put it in a letter of 26 O ctober 1748 to “Belfour” [L ady Bradshaigh], “If [death] is become so terrible to human N ature it is Time to familiarize it to us.”44 Richardson made frequent claims of theological import for his second novel. In this same letter to L ady Bradshaigh, for instance, the author explained that “Religion never was at so low an E bb as at present: A nd if my Work must be supposed of the N ovel kind, I was willing to try if a Religious N ovel would do good.”45 Critics have become understandably wary of Richardson’s frustrating tendency in his comments on his novels to simplify his own complexity beyond recognition; Richardson at times proves a hapless Richardson scholar. It is important to note, however, that in this case the author is not only making an interpretive claim about his novel, but describing the impetus that first urged him on. As with most chicken and egg questions, it is probably not worth wondering whether Richardson’s initial desire to write a religious novel unlocked the possibility of Clarissa’s direct engagement with death, or whether his early awareness of his main characters’ fates urged him into theological territory. What matters more, I think, is recognizing that for Richardson, each possibility supposes the other. Indeed, the author invariably treated these compositional impulses as two sides of one coin. “D eath must, at last, have been [Clarissa’s] L ot,” he wrote to A aron Hill, “had she been ever so prosperous”; forcing “a triumphant D eath” into the 43

��������������� Mendilow, 182. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Carroll, 95. Consider the S ternean misdirection L ovelace uses on Hickman as the heroine’s condition declines. Having convinced A nna’s earnest suitor that Clarissa’s new lover “is a misshapen, meager varlet; more like a skeleton than a man,” one whom “none of us care to be intimate with . . –except this lady,” L ovelace proceeds to shout at last his identity “full in [Hickman’s] ear”: “His name in short is DEATH!—DEATH, sir ...” (1097). 45 ������������� Carroll, 92. 44

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world of his novel rather than leaving it beyond its confines, the author explained with evident satisfaction, “I thought as noble a View, as it was new.” What secures the triumph, the nobility, and the novelty in this case is not merely that the heroine dies, but that her death, “founded on the Xn system,” carries comedic potential— “another S ort of Happiness,” as Richardson put it (letter of 10 May 1748).46 Where in Grandison Richardson himself did not know until the end what the end would be, from the beginning of Clarissa, Richardson insisted to L ady Bradshaigh (then masking herself as “Belfour”), readers ought to be able to see in L ovelace “the early L ibertine ... calling out for Punishment,” in Clarissa, “the early S aint ... [calling] for a heavenly Crown” (letter of 26 O ctober 1748).47 Here, as elsewhere, it is impossible to separate out the religious and the narrative implications of the author’s insistence on interpretive certainty. Richardson surely means to say that a religiously inclined reader will be able to decipher each character’s telos long before reaching volume seven. A t the same time, his suggestion that L ovelace’s and Clarissa’s respective fates ought somehow to be clear from the beginning cues us to the centrality of their fates in Richardson’s original conception of their characters and of the novel that tells their story. “I had begun with [Clarissa],” Richardson explained to Hester Mulso in a letter of 3 S eptember 1751, “with a view to the future saint in her character.”48 (O nly six weeks later, it is worth noting, Richardson would write far differently of the two main female characters in the unfinished Grandison.49) A s he saw it, Clarissa’s death is both theologically and artistically necessary: A Writer who follows N ature and pretends to keep the Christian S ystem in his E ye, cannot make a Heaven in this World for his Favourites; or represent this L ife otherwise than as a S tate of Probation. Clarissa I once more aver could not be rewarded in this World. To have given her her Reward here, as in a happy Marriage, would have been as if a Poet had placed his Catastrophe in the Third A ct of his Play, when the A udience were obliged to expect two more. (letter of 15 D ecember 1748 to L ady Bradshaigh)50

“Obliged” is a telling word here, for it speaks not only to what Richardson thought he owed his readers through his story but also to what he believed his readers owed it (and him). Whether or not readers in fact expect Clarissa’s death, in other words, 46

����������� Ibid., 87. ���������� Ibid., 94. 48 ����������� Ibid., 190. 49 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ “Clementina’s Fate is not yet come to my K nowledge. I have been hinder’d from enquiring after her; in other words, from pursuing her story. But I think she rises upon me. A nd as I know not what to offer next; being too irregular a scribbler to be able to write by a plan, I seem to be at a loss, to know what to do with her, or to fetch up Harriet again, and make her the principal Female character” (letter to William D uncombe of 22 O ctober 1751; ibid., 194–5). 50 ������������ Ibid., 108. 47

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12

they ought to expect it—they are obliged to do so. They quite literally deserved it, in both senses of the word, as consumers of realistic fiction and as Christians. To maintain, as I will in this study, that Richardson wrote a religious novel is not to claim that the author was himself a remarkably religious person, though this supposition has gained currency among a number of Richardson scholars of late. N or will I attempt to locate the author within any particular religious tradition, in part because the wisdom of doing so has grown steadily more dubious. Were I forced to hazard a guess, I might suggest that Richardson, like many of his contemporaries and like many of us today, vacillated between a number of theological camps, depending on the issue. Instead of asking the question, “to what theological system did Richardson subscribe,” then, we might more profitably ask, “to what theological system did Richardson turn as he contemplated and wrote his religious novel?” In other words, it matters less what Richardson believed then on what system of belief he relied in shaping his fictional world. It is a distinction between rhetoric and biography, albeit not a firm one, and not one wherein biography may be altogether forgotten. In many respects, Richardson would appear to have tended toward a decidedly modern, which is to say latent, religious attitude that, rather than informing in a ubiquitous manner his every experience, instead surfaced occasionally, and then primarily when he came to consider “the distinguished Thing,” as Henry James is said to have described the moment of his own death. There are, of course, atheists in foxholes—Richardson’s contemporary D avid Hume (1711–76), whose graceful and stoic acceptance of death so unnerved James Boswell and so angered D r. Johnson, was one. Richardson was not. It is striking, in fact, to note how frequently, when he thought of Clarissa’s end, Richardson was moved to consider his own. In a playful and charming letter of thanks to his wife—“D o you know, that the beatified CLARISSA was often very uneasy at the Time her Story cost the Man whom you favour with your Love; and that chiefly on your Account?”—the author closes on a strangely somber note: “A nd may our last S cenes be closed as happily as Her last Scene is represented to have done!” (letter of 1 December 1748). He repeats this refrain in a letter to L ady Bradshaigh written two weeks later: “O that my own last Hour, and the last Hour of those I love may be such as that I have drawn for my amiable G irl.”51 Such comments suggest that Richardson’s affinity for his second novel—it was, he made clear in a letter of 2 June 1753 to Johannes S tinstra, his “Favourite”52—was quite personal in nature. Could someone who had “made it [his] own Case,” L ady Bradshaigh rhetorically asked of the man who had allowed her beloved Clarissa to die, “think with Pleasure, of parting with what they love, supposing their E nd ever so glorious?” But Richardson had indeed consulted his “own Case” in working through the implications of his main characters’ ends; the enumeration of personal tragedies he produced in his reply to L ady Bradshaigh suggests that her criticism, rather than putting the author 51

���������������� Ibid., 102, 111. �������������� S lattery, 31.

52

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on the defensive, amounted to throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch.53 Put differently, one might say that Richardson was constantly thinking about endings as he composed Clarissa—both those he could predict and control and, more disconcertingly, those he could not. The author’s reaction to one such unpredictable ending offers a telling view of how his mind worked on such occasions. O n 31 June 1750, Richardson sent a letter to his bookseller and friend A ndrew Millar the timing of which, in light of its contents, could hardly have proven more unfortunate. A s A dam Budd explains it, the bulk of the letter is practical in intent, having to do with Richardson and Millar’s work on a new edition of E dward Y oung’s Night Thoughts (first published 1742–45).54 A s he closed, however, Richardson hazarded a bit of ostensibly harmless, if somewhat callous, advice regarding Millar’s five-year-old son A ndrew, Jr., in whom the author had noticed a disquieting tendency towards effeminacy: I am most concerned for him ... Poor little Man! He must in every thing as his Mamma and his Aunt please. No Will of his own! ... I would wish him a Boy rather than a Girl! – The dear Infant is but young. But I wish him for that very reason, more robust than I see him likely to be.55

The day before Richardson’s letter arrived, Budd explains, “A ndrew Jr. had died, of an unidentified illness.” Andrew Millar and his wife Jane, “now in their midforties,” were left childless. Richardson, whose fictional works so often rely upon the miscues and vagaries inherent to the epistolary exchange, was left, one imagines, wishing the earth would swallow him whole. The author’s letter of apology was composed one week later (8 A ugust). In it, Richardson first begs forgiveness for having written, if unwittingly, “in such a manner” as he had in his last (“not I hope woundingly,” he writes, unconvincingly and probably unconvinced). He himself had been “deeply and often thus exercised,” he explains to Millar, “and so know how to pity others.” D espite this oblique reference to his own personal tragedies—Richardson had lost his first 53 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Richardson writes, “Thus have I lost six Sons (all my Sons!) and two Daughters with every one of which, to A nswer your Question, I parted with great Regret” (letter of 15 D ecember 1748; Carroll, 110). He then moves to his extended family: “N o less than E leven concerning D eaths attacked me in two Y ears” (110). E ven Richardson’s dramatic preface to his list—“Ah; Madam!—And do you thus call upon me?—Forgive an interrupting Sigh; and allow me a short Silence”—would seem to indicate how fully confident he is in his credibility on this score. L ady Bradshaigh’s comment, which Richardson repeats, may be found in her letter of 1748 reprinted in The L ife and Correspondence of S amuel R ichardson, ed. A nna L ætitia Barbauld, 6 vols (L ondon, 1804), 4: 209. 54 A dam Budd, “Mourn N ot a Change: The Moralizing Consolations of S amuel Richardson,” Times L iterary S upplement (8 A pril 2005): 214. A ll further references to Richardson’s letter come from Budd’s note. 55 ��������������� Quoted in Budd.

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wife and each of their five children during the 1730s and the first of his children with his second wife in 1740—the author’s letter quickly turns to “a surprisingly bibliographical method of consolation,” as Budd puts it. Richardson writes, The Future, the great Hope, even (thro’ G od’s Mercy) to an undoubted Certainty, still remains, in his eternal Happiness. Time alone can alleviate this great Affliction. And I will only transcribe a pretty piece of Mr Norris’s, which he intitles, The Resignation (Y ou are Christians) and inclose 8 pages of the Familiar Letters; which, when Reflection takes place, will not, perhaps, be quite impertinent.

The second reference, to a selection from Richardson’s own Familiar L etters (1741), makes the practical (if bleak) argument that the early death of a hopeful child is less painful, relatively speaking, than, as Richardson puts it in his letter to Millar, “had the dear Child been taken from you at Man’s E state.” Things could have been worse in a hypothetical future, Richardson is arguing to his friend and to himself. But the main argument hinges on religious considerations of the sort elaborated by “Mr. N orris.” This reference, and Richardson’s curiously presumptuous parenthetical qualification of it—“(You are Christians)”—ought to come as no surprise to readers of Richardson’s religious novel. There too, as Richardson spun Clarissa’s and L ovelace’s lives to their full extent, “Mr. N orris” and his works surface with a regularity suggestive of his authority, in Richardson’s mind, in matters that ought to concern Christians. That most students, and many scholars, of the long eighteenth century are unfamiliar with John N orris (1657–1711), rector of Bemerton from 1692 until his death, is probably attributable, at least in part, to an accident of birth. N orris was a rigorous thinker and a prolific author, whose books of poetry, theology, and philosophy went into multiple editions well into the middle of the eighteenth century. Unfortunately for him, however, N orris was also one of those historical figures of otherwise substantial intellect born to reside just inside the far-cast shadows of mental giants. N orris’s reputation as a poet pales beside that of an earlier rector of Bemerton, G eorge Herbert (1593–1633), just as his ChristianPlatonist philosophy withered in John L ocke’s rising, secular-empirical sun (1632–1704). A ny scholar who doubts the demise of N orris’s fame need only visit his church at Bemerton, then-as-now a suburb of S alisbury. D utiful (or hobby-horsical) scholar that I am, I took time out of a research trip to L ondon in order to make just this pilgrimage. To my chagrin, if not quite to my surprise, informational pamphlets, suggestions for donations, framed sketches on the wall, all bore Herbert’s name, image, story, and snippets of his poetry. N orris, on the other hand, was marked only by a stanza from his poem “The A spiration,” hanging in needlepointed thread beneath his burial tablet. The literature explaining the history of the church similarly focuses almost exclusively on Herbert; N orris receives one brief paragraph, wherein he is bemusedly dismissed as a religious “enthusiast” who, like the master Herbert, dabbled in poetry, and who, armed with hopelessly

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mystical weapons, quixotically challenged L ocke to a philosophical duel, the outcome of which was never in doubt. E ven on his home turf, it occurred to me during the walk back to S alisbury (easily accomplished on a clear day, thanks to Wren’s massive steeple), N orris is little more than a footnote. Today’s footnotes, however, were very often yesterday’s primary texts. Certainly, during the years in which Richardson wrote his second novel, N orris had yet to fall completely out of favor. N orris’s name and citations of his writing appear explicitly in each installment of Clarissa. In the first installment (volumes one and two, published in D ecember 1747), A nna Howe quotes “the words of N orris” in explaining her relationship to the besieged heroine (131). In the next installment (volumes three and four, published in A pril 1748), A nna attempts to secrete a note for 50 guineas to Clarissa in her copy of “Norris’s Miscellanies”; this leads to a series of letters in which Clarissa returns A nna’s “N orris” and A nna worries that she might have need of “my N orris” (512, 513, 514, 529). L ater in the same installment, L ovelace gains access to several of A nna’s letters to Clarissa and becomes particularly irritated by A nna’s promise that her “Norris” is “forthcoming on demand”—“The devil take me,” L ovelace vows, “if I am out-Norrised!”— a refrain he repeats on two further occasions (634; cf. 639, 691). In the final installment (volumes five, six, and seven, published in December 1748), Belford quotes a stanza from “a poetical divine who was an excellent Christian”; in an editorial footnote unlike any other in Clarissa, Richardson provides the name of the “excellent divine” to whom Belford refers—“The Rev. Mr N orris of Bemerton” (1229). Richardson’s interest in N orris is likewise evident from his correspondence. In a 1747 letter to E lizabeth Carter of D eal (1717–1806), Richardson refers to the “famous Mr. N orris, of Bemerton,” to whom he mistakenly came to believe Carter was related.56 These direct references to N orris in Richardson’s writings have done little to counteract N orris’s lack of reputation among scholars of his works. E aves and K impel, whose exhaustive account of Richardson’s life and works is surely one of the triumphs of literary biography, offer a telling case in point. N owhere do the biographers mention Norris as an intellectual precursor to or influence on Richardson; they ignore N orris not, however, because they considered him and found his influence wanting, but because they failed to recognize his name at all— N orris appears in the text and the index of the Biography as “Mr. N orris,” just as Richardson had named him in his letter to Millar.57 E ven for excellent scholars like E aves and K impel, in other words, it is easy for expectation to determine recognition. Of course, one might with some justification wonder just how “famous” Norris could really have been, if scholars as thorough as E aves and K impel failed to 56 ������������������������������������ Richardson’s letter is reprinted in Memoirs of the L ife of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, ed. Rev. Montagu Pennington, 2 vols (1825; reprint, N ew Y ork: A MS , 1974), 1: 101–2. 57 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� E aves and K impel, 159. S ee my “S amuel Richardson and ‘Mr. N orris’: Richardson’s L etter to Millar, 8 A ugust 1750,” Notes and Queries 242 [N .S . 44] (June 1997): 204–5.

16

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recognize him. N orris’s publishing record, however, tends to support Richardson’s characterization of him as “famous.” N orris’s A Collection of Miscellanies (1687), the text with which Richardson seems most familiar, went into its ninth edition in 1730. A ccording to Richard A cworth, this assemblage of metaphysically charged theosophical poetry and essays was “the most popular of all N orris’s works with the cultivated public in general.”58 O ther of N orris’s works also had multiple editions. The Theory and R egulation of L ove (1688), to which N orris appended a series of letters between himself and Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–87), went into a seventh edition in 1723, and R eason and R eligion (1689) was likewise in its seventh edition by 1724. Four volumes of Practical Discourses upon S everal Divine S ubjects (1690, 1691, 1693, 1698), the first volume of which is also known as Christian Blessedness: or, Discourses Upon the Beatitudes, reached a fifteenth collected edition in 1728. N orris’s correspondence with Mary A stell (1666–1731), entitled L etters Concerning the L ove of God (1695), had a third edition in 1730. A n A ccount of R eason and Faith, in relation to the Mysteries of Christianity (1697), a reply to John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696), went into its thirteenth edition in 1740. Reflections upon the Conduct of Human Life: with Reference to the S tudy of L earning and Knowledge (1690) and Norris’s final publication, A Treatise concerning Christian Prudence (1710), both went into multiple editions in their original format, and both lived on, due to John Wesley’s high regard for them, in Wesley’s abridged formats until the turn of the next century. A s the example of Wesley (1703–91), the founder of Methodism, might suggest, Richardson was hardly alone among influential eighteenth-century thinkers in his familiarity with and interest in N orris. This seems especially true of people in (roughly speaking) Richardson’s generation. Wesley defended N orris’s poem “The Meditation”—a stanza of which Belford and Belton discuss in Clarissa (1229–30)—as “scarce inferior either in sense or language to most compositions of the present age” in a letter of 9 S eptember 1756 “To the Monthly Reviewers.”59 When one of John O glethorpe’s servants in G eorgia requested of Wesley that he read “some treatise” he “judged proper with her,” he began with N orris’s Christian Prudence.60 N orris’s Conduct of Human L ife, however, would appear to have been Wesley’s favorite; he claimed in a 1756 letter to S amuel Furley that “every paragraph of [it] must stand unshaken (with or without the Bible) till we are no longer mortal.”61 (S uch hyperbolic praise may explain why this particular text was 58 ����������������� Richard A cworth, The Philosophy of John Norris of Bemerton (1657–1712) (N ew Y ork: G eorg O lms Verlag Hildesheim, 1979), 55. 59 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The reviewers had panned Wesley’s edited collection of poetry for being indicative of Methodist enthusiasm. S ee John Wesley, The L etters of the R ev. John Wesley, A .M., ed. John Telford, 8 vols (L ondon: E pworth Press, 1931), 3: 197. 60 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The servant, who had fallen ill, apparently did not find Norris very engaging; Wesley notes with evident frustration on 2 D ecember 1735 that “we never came to the end of it, for in a few days she recovered from her sickness and her seriousness together” (The Journal of John Wesley, ed. N ehemiah Curnock, 8 vols [L ondon: Charles H. K elly, 1909–16], 6: 125). 61 �������� Wesley, L etters, 3: 173.

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still being reprinted as volume 30 of Wesley’s Christian L ibrary in 1819.) John Byrom (1692–1763), a poet and mystical Christian with whom Richardson was acquainted and for whom Richardson printed, notes in his diary a day in 1735 spent discussing N orris’s thought at a L ondon coffee-house.62 Byrom’s close friend and spiritual mentor William L aw (1686–1761), another of Richardson’s acquaintances for whom Richardson printed,63 received thankfully one of N orris’s books as a gift from Thomas L angcake in the 1750s; two works by N orris (Miscellanies and L etters Concerning the L ove of God) can still be found in L aw’s collection of books.64 S arah Chapone (1699–1764), one of Richardson’s favorite and most loquacious correspondents, refers glowingly to the “divine N orris” in her letters to the author.65 Catherine Talbot, another enthusiastic admirer and correspondent, promised to save her borrowed copy of N orris’s A Practical Treatise Concerning Humility (1707) for 62 ����������������������������������� Byrom writes of pieces he found in Miscellanies: “talked much of Mr. N orris, said that G od spoke to all his creatures within themselves-- ... that the ideas of all things were in G od, and that we existed in him from all eternity; ... we read N orris, some parts, his letter about his niece’s death, his contemplation of man’s end, his 139th Psalm.” S ee Byrom’s Private Journal and L iterary R emains, ed. Richard Parkinson, 2 vols (Manchester: Chetham S ociety, 1854–57), 1: 287; quoted in John Hoyles, The Edges of A ugustanism: The A esthetics of S pirituality in Thomas Ken, John Byrom and William L aw (The Hague: Martinus N ijhoff, 1972), 82. 63 �������������������������������������������������������������������������� For an overdetermined reading of the relationship between Byrom, L aw, and Richardson, see Rosemary Bechler, “‘Trial by what is contrary’: S amuel Richardson and Christian D ialectic,” S amuel R ichardson: Passion and Prudence, ed. Valerie G rosvenor Myer (Totowa: Barnes and N oble, 1986), 93–113. 64 ���������������������������������������������������������������������� A . K eith Walker notes L aw’s grateful reception of a book by N orris in William L aw: His L ife and Thought (L ondon: S .P.C.K ., 1973), 220. L aw’s books, which remained on the shelves of the K ing’s Cliffe L ibrary until the mid-1990s (L aw founded the library in 1755), are now housed at the Northampton Records Office. 65 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ In her letter of 15 D ecember 1750, Chapone praises Richardson by paraphrasing one of N orris’s common refrains: “When the L aws of Precedency shall be adjusted & set right for ever, by the unerring Judge, it may be question’d whether there will be found a more dignified Spirit than the author of Clarissa. The Divine Norris seems to think that those who love most in this L ife, will be rewarded by K nowing most in the O ther. Pamela, & Clarissa, breathe the very S pirit of L ove, but that the Beloved author, should be capable to taste feel and D escribe Human-N ature, in its full S trength & Purity, & yet at the same time able to trace it thro’ all the meanders of D issimulation, & to follow it into the darkest recesses & ugliness of vice, has always been [a] matter of my greatest wonder.” S he strikes the same note two years later in her letter of 4 June 1752: “in the very foremost Rank of this select-exalted Band of Brothers in ingenuity, stands my Honour’d Mr. Richardson, E minently distinguished by that L ove-compelling G oodness, which I am from my soul persuaded shall eminently distinguish him to all Eternity! The Divine Norris says, ‘That those who L ove most in this L ife, shall be rewarded by K nowing most in the next.’ What Beatific illuminations—what floods of Light will then fully replenish all the boundless Capacities of your soul! And the rapture of Knowing, shall still add to the Extacies [sic] of L oving, ‘for G od is L ove.’” S ee the Forster Collection of Manuscripts in the Victoria and A lbert Museum (48E 5-48E 10), XII , 2, f. 9 and f. 75.

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her friend (and Richardson’s acquaintance) E lizabeth Carter, explaining, “I think it will strike and please you, as much as it did me” (letter of 30 D ecember 1760).66 E ven Richardson’s friend and literary apologist S amuel Johnson (1709-84), while engaged in a light-hearted discussion with the young Frances Burney, could become quite serious when talk turned to N orris.67 The lesson of such anecdotal evidence is not, I hasten to add, that N orris’s popularity did not diminish after his death in 1711 (it clearly did, as the petering out of new editions of his books around 1730 suggests); rather, it is that for readers who lived through N orris’s popular apogee in the early decades of the eighteenth century, his name, works, and ideas continued to carry significance well into the middle of the century. Richardson had good reason, in other words, to refer in 1747 to “the famous Mr. N orris, of Bemerton,” and one suspects that for a generation or two of readers, at least, the characterization would have seemed perfectly apt. That “the famous Mr. N orris, of Bemerton” has lost his “fame” for us today is perhaps excusable—Burney, after all, seems unfamiliar with him in the 1760s, although S terne, who quotes N orris in works spanning his clerical and literary career, was not68—but our unfamiliarity does not release us from trying to recuperate Richardson’s intentions in scattering his name throughout Clarissa. I am not, in fact, the first to propose Norris as an important intellectual source for Richardson’s novel. In The L anguage of the Heart, 1600–1750, Robert E rickson begins his discussion of Clarissa by looking at N orris’s writings on the heart in Theory and R egulation of L ove; he notes that N orris “was a writer much esteemed by S amuel Richardson in his own private meditations” and that he is “alluded to in ... significant ways in Clarissa.”69 L ois Bueler likewise suggests in Clarissa’s Plots that N orris, who “had a distinguished career as a homileticist and a philosopher,” ������������������ E lizabeth Carter, A S eries of L etters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Mrs. Catherine Talbot [... .], 2 vols (1809; reprint, N ew Y ork: A MS , 1975), 2: 358. 67 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Burney recalls the following dialogue with Johnson: “‘Y ou shall give me,’ cried he ‘a discourse upon the passions: come begin! Tell us the necessity of regulating them, watching over and curbing them! Did you ever read Norris’s Theory of L ove?’ ‘N o, S ir,’ said I, laughing, yet staring a little. D r. J.—Well, it is worth your reading. He will make you see that inordinate love is the root of all evil: inordinate love of wealth brings on avarice; of wine, brings on intemperance; of power, brings on cruelty; and so on. He deduces from inordinate love all human frailty.” S ee Diary and L etters of Madame D’A rblay, A uthor of Evelina, Cecilia, &c. E dited by her N iece. 7 vols (L ondon: Henry Colburn, Publisher, 1842), 1: 117. I am grateful to Brian McCrea for alerting me to this passage. 68 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� A s N ew has noted, S terne refers to or quotes N orris in several of his sermons, in both Tristram S handy and A S entimental Journey, and in the aborted “Rabelaisian Fragment” penned just before Tristram. (For example, S terne labels N orris “a very able divine in our church” and “an able enquirer” in his sermons.) N ew argues that S terne’s sentimentalism owes much to N orris, and he suggests that the L ockean context often assumed for S terne’s fiction thus needs qualification. See Melvyn New, “The Odd Couple: Laurence Sterne and John N orris of Bemerton,” Philological Quarterly 75 (1996): 361–85. 69 ����������������� Robert E rickson, The L anguage of the Heart, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 185. His discussion of N orris covers pages 185–7. 66

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is “important to the intellectual background of Clarissa.”70 S he focuses on N orris’s last published work, Christian Prudence, as illustrative of the “Prudence Plot” at work in the novel: “John N orris helps us see why the practice of prudence is so strenuous—because it is not just a matter of rightly conceived goals but of the right response to specific circumstances.”71 Victor L ams takes particular interest in N orris’s poetry, in particular his poem “The A spiration,” in Clarissa’s Narrators.72 E ach of these important forays, however, is limited in scope; E rickson spends three pages discussing one passage from a one work by N orris, Bueler thirty pages on a single aspect of another title, L ams four pages almost entirely on a single poem. This study seeks to demonstrate that Richardson’s interest in N orris warrants closer and more sustained attention. Before turning to specific discussions of Clarissa, however, it will be useful to examine just what would have made Norris “famous” to Richardson in the first place. For the purposes of this study, the following synopsis of N orris’s thought and reputation should suffice. Readers interested in exploring Norris further should consult Richard A cworth’s full-length examination and the shorter analyses of Charles McCracken, Patrick G rant, and Ruth Perry—along with N orris’s own works, of course. 73 O n the one hand, the “famous Mr. N orris” was, to use Belford’s words, a “poetical divine.” N orris’s poetic efforts were limited almost exclusively to those included in his Miscellanies, and it is clear that Richardson knew these poems well. N orris also garnered renown as an “excellent divine” (Belford’s words again). A s rector of Bemerton, N orris proved a strong defender of the A nglican establishment against the interests of dissenters, and he apparently had aspirations for acquiring a higher position in the church than he did.74 He wrote many works of popular theology, as the fifteen editions of Practical Discourses might suggest. 70 ������������� L ois Bueler, Clarissa’s Plots (N ewark: University of D elaware Press, 1994), 125. Bueler’s mistaken connection of N orris with the A thenian Mercury causes her to overstate his casuistical leanings. S ee below, n. 110. 71 ������������ Ibid., 131. 72 ��������������������� Victor L ams, Clarissa’s Narrators (N ew Y ork: Peter L ang, 2001), pp. 109–12. 73 ������������� S ee A cworth, Norris of Bemerton; Charles J. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy (O xford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 156–79; Patrick G rant, Images and Ideas in L iterature of the English R enaissance (A mherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 154–209; and Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary A stell: A n Early English Feminist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 75–82. 74 ��������������������������������������� G eorge Willmott, citing John N ichols’s L iterary A necdotes, 9 vols (L ondon: N ichols, S on, and Bentley, 1812–16), 1: 639, notes that in response to Thomas Colburne’s enthusiasm at seeing the “great cathedral” of S alisbury while taking a walk, N orris glibly replied, “it is all the prospect I have with respect to that cathedral” (Pictures of Christian L ife [L ondon, 1824], 129). Bishop G ilbert Burnet was put off, according to John Passmore, by N orris’s mystical tendencies and by his “attack on toleration in The Charge of S chism Continued (1691)” (s.v. N orris, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul E dwards [N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1967]). O ne “zealous admirer” of N orris claimed that Burnet “permitted [N orris] to starve within the sound of his cathedral bells” (Willmott 129).

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N o reader of N orris’s poetry or theology, however, could have missed his interest in matters of philosophy. From the outset, with the publication of Miscellanies in 1687, N orris was fully engaged in the philosophical questions of his day, and all of his works, even the ostensibly “practical” Practical Discourses, contain moments of purely philosophical speculation.75 Indeed, a short philosophical essay written in 1690 established one of the primary trajectories of N orris’s fame in the eighteenth century: only a few months after John L ocke published his “new way of ideas” in A n Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), N orris published his Cursory Reflections Upon a Book Call’d, ‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ and took his place in history as the first published demur to L ocke’s philosophical system.76 To dismiss N orris as a “preacher,” in other words, is historically inaccurate, just as it would be to consider N orris solely as a philosopher.77 G eorge Ballard, writing in 1752, strikes the appropriate balance in his appraisal of N orris: “his divinity and philosophy is well known to differ very much,” Ballard notes, from that of L ocke.78 The seeds of what eventually would become N orris’s comprehensive philosophical disagreement with L ocke can be found in this opening response to L ocke’s Essay. Norris offers two basic criticisms. In the first place, he believes that L ocke errs in proposing the physical senses as necessary elements in all human knowledge. Following D escartes, ideas, for N orris, “must be Immaterial S ubstances,”79 but L ocke would seem to suggest otherwise. If, as L ocke contends, ������� In the DL B volume of English Philosophers, Melvyn N ew uses N orris’s “D iscourse concerning the Measure of D ivine L ove” (in vol. 3 of the Practical Discourses) to summarize the entirety of N orris’s philosophy. Frans K orsten also points to N orris’s intermingling of philosophy and theology, noting that of Norris’s seventy-five English poems, “one-third could be called religious poems, the rest consisting of moral essays and philosophical meditations, though the boundary between the religious poems and the rest is not always very sharp” (“The Restoration Poetry of John N orris,” S acred and Profane: S ecular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British L iterature [A msterdam: VU University Press, 1996], 324). 76 ��������� N orris’s Cursory Reflections forms a forty-four page appendix to the first volume of Practical Discourses, also known as Christian Blessedness. A s noted earlier, this text was in its fifteenth edition in 1728. All references are to the modern edition appended to Mary A stell and John Norris: L etters Concerning the L ove of G od, ed. E . D erek Taylor and Melvyn N ew (A ldershot and Burlington: A shgate, 2005), 184–220. 77 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Patricia S pringborg calls N orris a “preacher” in her essay “A stell, Masham, and L ocke: Religion and Politics” (Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L . S mith [Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998], 110), though she seeks to “remedy” her underestimation “of the importance of N orris as a philosopher and critic of L ocke” in her recent book, Mary A stell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 268n11. 78 �������������������� S ee G eorge Ballard, Memoirs of S everal L adies of Great Britain Who have been Celebrated for Their Writings of S kill in the L earned L anguages, A rts and S ciences, ed. Ruth Perry (1752; D etroit: Wayne S tate University Press, 1985), 332. 79 �������� N orris, Cursory Reflections, 192. 75

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“our Ideas are derived from sensible O bjects,” then we must accept, N orris insists, that ideas are themselves “Material Beings”—for matter can affect, create, or correspond only with other matter.80 This conclusion brings with it, from N orris’s perspective, an assortment of illogical baggage. Is G od a material being? If, as L ocke would surely agree, He is not, how then can our idea of Him come from sensible objects (i.e., how can something material communicate the idea of something immaterial)?81 D oes the word “although” derive, as L ocke insists all words must, from the senses? If not, how is it that L ocke has a “clear Conception of what is meant by that Word”?82 (L ocke could and did respond to these and other of N orris’s ostensibly rhetorical questions, but for present purposes what matters is that N orris believed his criticisms were unanswerable.)83 In N orris’s view, only a pitiful few ideas can be linked to materiality, and then only by way of representation, not of essence. A ll ideas are essentially immaterial, and “most [ideas], are also immaterial as to their Representation, that is, they represent after an immaterial manner, as the Ideas of Truth, Vertue, and the like.”84 This point leads to N orris’s second criticism of L ocke’s Essay, namely that L ocke’s materialist account of human knowledge offers no ground for philosophical certainty—or, put another way, for truth. If, as Locke suggests, we confine our philosophical inquiries to the reports of the senses, we will indeed agree with L ocke that “Truth seems ... to signify nothing but the joyning or S eparating of Signs, as the things signified do Agree or Disagree one with another.”85 Ideas, in this case, are nothing more than subjective mental constructs derived from human beings’ inherently variable sensible impressions and their reflections upon them. 80

������������ Ibid., 193. ���������������������������������������������������� In fact, as N orris notes (ibid., 193), L ocke in the Essay is inconsistent on this point, suggesting at times that we come to our idea of G od just as we do any other idea, at other times otherwise. For instance, L ocke writes that “the simple Ideas” from which we construct our ideas of immateriality and of body “are no other than what we have received from Sensation or Reflection; and so is it of all our other Ideas of S ubstances, even of G od himself” (A n Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. N idditch [O xford: Clarendon Press, 1975; reprint, 1988], 2.23.32.314). E lsewhere, however, he suggests that “the K nowledge of the E xistence of all Things without us (except only of a G od whose existence every Man may certainly know and demonstrate to himself from his own existence) be had only by our S enses” (4.17.2.668). 82 �������� N orris, Cursory Reflections, 195. 83 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� S ee L ocke’s posthumously published “Remarks Upon S ome of Mr. N orris’s Books, Wherein He A sserts P. Malebranche’s O pinion of our S eeing A ll Things in G od,” in Works of John L ocke, 9 vols (1794; reprint, L ondon: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1997), 9: 247–59. L ocke composed his “Remarks” on N orris in 1693, but elected not to publish them; they first appeared, Charlotte Johnston explains, “in 1720 in Desmaizeaux’s Collection of S everal Pieces ... .” S ee Johnston’s “L ocke’s Examination of Malebranche and John N orris,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (1958): 551. 84 �������� N orris, Cursory Reflections, 193. 85 ����������������������������������� Ibid., 196. N orris is quoting from Essay (4.5.2.574). 81

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To N orris, however, L ocke is guilty of an unphilosophical substitution in his argument. We must, N orris contends, differentiate between “Truth of the Mind or of the S ubject” and the “Truth of the Thing or of the Object, which consists not in the minds joyning or separating either S igns or Ideas, but in the E ssential Habitudes that are between the Ideas themselves.”86 N orris was at heart a Platonist, and, as any good Platonist would, he believes that L ocke’s attempt to discard “E ssential Habitudes” as unnecessary “Artifices of the Understanding” is utterly disabling of all truth claims, i.e., that L ocke has unwittingly fallen into the skeptical paradox.87 True philosophy, N orris maintains, consists precisely in trying to discover those “fixt and immutable” truths the eternal veracity of which exists independent of human consideration or, for that matter, human existence. Despite the significant distance Norris puts between himself and Locke in this early critique of the Essay, his Cursory Reflections are largely congenial, not rancorous, and he ends by magnanimously claiming that, despite the “few Erratas” to which he has responded, L ocke’s Essay is “a very extraordinary Performance,” one he “would not part with ... for half a Vatican.”88 This high note of civility and graciousness was not long lasting, partly for personal reasons, but largely because L ocke’s philosophical positions and N orris’s were incompatible.89 L ocke found untenable N orris’s Platonic valorization of immaterial ideas and his strict Cartesian dualism; both positions, from L ocke’s perspective, were beyond proving. “Men of Mr. N orris’s way,” L ocke complained in a letter of 21 March 1704 to A nthony Collins, “seem ... to decree, rather than to argue. They ... suppose ... what they should prove.”90 A s time passed and L ocke’s popularity increased, N orris became more and more convinced that L ocke’s insistence on tracing all knowledge to sensory input was not only philosophically wrong, but also theologically and morally dangerous. While in Cursory Reflections, his first critique of Locke, N orris claimed L ocke’s Essay deserved “the most publick Honour and Respect,” in a revised edition of R eason and R eligion (1689; 1693), N orris added an attack on L ocke’s theory that “the Mind needs no other thing but it self for the Perception of O bjects,” calling it “full of Impiety as well as A bsurdity.” By 1704, the Essay had gone from being, in N orris’s mind, worthy of “Respect” to being “consistent 86

������������ Ibid., 196. ���������������������������������������� Ibid., 195, 196. N orris is quoting from Essay (3.5.9.434). 88 ���������������� Ibid., 197, 198. 89 �������������������������������������������������������������������������� S ee Johnston’s fascinating account of L ocke and N orris’s odd relationship (“L ocke’s E xamination”). L ocke only took up his pen against N orris, it would appear, after he mistakenly came to the conclusion that N orris had broken the seal of a letter from D amaris Masham to him that N orris had agreed to deliver. N orris’s Cursory Reflections, as Johnston points out, cannot logically be the source of L ocke’s animosity—for L ocke, at Masham’s behest, intervened with the E arl of Pembroke on N orris’s behalf in 1692, thus securing for N orris the gift of the rectory at Bemerton some two years after his critique of L ocke’s Essay. 90 ������� L ocke, Works, 9: 284. 87

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with A theism.”91 D espite N orris’s early efforts at reconcilement, the disagreement between him and L ocke, as John Hoyles puts it, was fundamental; “each is sceptical of the other’s home ground.”92 If Locke’s home ground was the human being’s sensory and reflective experience of the physical world, N orris’s home ground was the human being’s experience of G od. We might take N orris’s Reflections Upon the Conduct of Human Life (1690) as representative of his theocentric philosophical premises. Unlike an unnamed “A uthor” who claims we know all “from our S enses,” N orris argues that the senses lead only to “Contingent Truth,” those truths that are by definition “Temporary and Mutable”; to arrive at “Necessary Truth”—the only truth “Perfective of the Understanding”—one has to seek an object beyond the physical senses. For N orris, that object is G od, “that Ground and Pillar of all Necessary Truth.”93 N orris’s claim, it should be noted, is not rhetorical, but philosophical; on it rested, to his mind, the edifice of human knowledge. As Plato, Augustine, and Descartes had done, N orris instanced the “perfect” ideas of geometry, metaphysics, morality, and logic. Human beings, he believed, can conceive clearly and distinctly the ideas of a perfect triangle, of infinity, of Virtue, of Justice. These ideas, he maintained, are inexplicable unless they exist somewhere, but that somewhere must be other than the corporeal world, where perfect triangles, infinite numbers of things, and unadulterated Virtue cannot be found. Thus, in Plato’s formulation of an eternal world of Ideal Forms, in Augustine’s insistence on conflating the Ideal World with God, and in Descartes’s contention that our experience of finitude is predicated on our innate awareness of God’s infinitude, Norris found what seemed to him different manifestations of the same basic distinction between the contingent and the true, the mutable and the ideal, the finite and the infinite. When Norris wrote, “to know Truth therefore is to know G od: and Divinity is a larger S tudy than we are aware of,”94 in other words, he was still wearing his philosopher’s cap—though one can discern the outline of his theologian’s cap resting firmly underneath. N orris, it is important to note, was not an immaterialist—although his acquaintance and philosophical admirer, A rthur Collier, the father of Richardson’s friends, correspondents, and house guests Jane and Margaret, did arrive at this

�������� N orris, Cursory Reflections, 197; R eason and R eligion, 193; A n Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World, 2 vols (1701, 1704), 2: 153. Quotations from R eason and R eligion come from the edition included in Treatises upon S everal S ubjects (1698; reprint, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1978). The final two passages from N orris are quoted in G rant, 184, 189. 92 ������������� John Hoyles, The Waning of the R enaissance 1640–1740: S tudies in the Thought and Poetry of Henry More, John Norris, and Isaac Watts (The Hague: Martinus N ijhoff, 1971), 107. 93 ���������������� Quotations from Conduct of Human L ife come from a revised edition that N orris included, with other of his works, in Treatises upon S everal S ubjects, 216, 174, 176, 175. 94 �������� N orris, R eason and R eligion, 127. 91

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conclusion in simultaneity with G eorge Berkeley.95 Norris denied the efficacy, and hence the importance, of matter, not its existence. In this respect, N orris closely followed another theologian and philosopher, N icolas Malebranche (1638–1715), whose works he seems first to have read in 1688. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Malebranche in the development of N orris’s thought. N orris is often considered the last of the Cambridge Platonists (his correspondence with Henry More, as noted above, can be found in N orris’s Theory and R egulation of L ove), but this characterization is misleading. A side from being an O xford man, N orris had serious disagreements with several foundational tenets of the Cambridge Platonists, especially their ultimate disavowal of D escartes.96 In Malebranche, a French priest whose philosophy, like N orris’s own, emerged as a complex union of Platonism, Cartesianism, and A ugustinianism, N orris found a mentor of precisely his own stripe and color, and with the publications of Theory and R egulation of L ove in 1688 and R eason and R eligion in 1689, he became Malebranche’s major E nglish proponent. In work after work, “the incomparable Monsieur Malebranche,” that “G allileo of the Intellectual world,”97 is afforded both praise and explication. A lthough, as A cworth notes, N orris had arrived at his essential philosophical positions with the publication of A Collection of Miscellanies in 1687,98 it is with good reason that he has come to be known as “the E nglish Malebranche.”99 Malebranche wrote several significant and influential works of theology and philosophy, and his interests included everything from optics, to calculus, to the 95 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� A rthur Collier, an admiring supporter of N orris (A cworth, 305–9), developed his philosophical immaterialism in Clavis Universalis: or, a new inquiry after truth, being a demonstration of the non-existence, or impossibility, of an external world (1713; reprint, N ew Y ork and L ondon: G arland Publishing, 1978), wherein he faults “the G reat and E xcellent Mr. Norris” only for not following, as Collier saw it, the implications of his own philosophy (Collier, 124). S ee E aves and K impel, 202–4, for Richardson’s relationship with the Collier sisters, one of whom (almost certainly Jane) lived “as family” with Richardson in 1750. Jane was the author of The A rt of Tormenting (1754), which Richardson’s press printed, and co-author, with S arah Fielding, of The Cry (1754). 96 �������������������������������������������������������������������������� Cudworth, for instance, turned away from Cartesian dualism because of its materialist and, in his mind, atheistic implications, urging instead a version of the scholastic Intellectus A gens (“Plastick N ature,” as he calls it in his True Intellectual S ystem [1678]) which connected spirit and matter. For an excellent summary of Cudworth’s arguments on this point, see John W. Y olton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (O xford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 5–13. In his S piritual Counsel: or, The Father’s A dvice to his Children (1694; included in Treatises upon S everal S ubjects), N orris labels the “imputation of A theism” to D escartes “a silly Charge, and such as nothing but ... Ignorance of him can excuse” (500). 97 �������� N orris, R eason and R eligion, 110; Ideal World, 1: 4. 98 �������������������������������������������������� A cworth, 6. Bueler is incorrect in characterizing Miscellanies as “traditional Christian virtue theory” as opposed to philosophy (126); it is decidedly both. 99 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. N orris. McCracken notes that N orris’s contemporary adversary John Sargeant was the first to use this label (179).

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mechanism of G race. He was best known in his own day, however, as he is today, for two distinct but mutually supportive theories, “vision of all things in G od” and “occasionalism,” as developed primarily in his most popular work, The S earch after Truth [De la recherche de la vérité] (1674).100 A s represented by Malebranche, “vision of all things in G od” explains how human beings access ideas, which, as A ugustine had argued, exist as part of the D ivine essence. Because G od “must have within Himself the ideas of all the beings He has created,” it followed for Malebranche that when the human being “sees,” for example, another human being, what he or she actually “sees” is the idea of that other human being as revealed to his or her mind by G od. This process is possible, according to Malebranche, only because “G od is in close union with our minds, such that He might be said to be the place of minds as space is, in a sense, the place of bodies.”101 The second theory works to some degree in conjunction with the first. By “occasionalism,” Malebranche means that G od, far from being just the primum mobile, is the solum mobile. O ccasionalism, as is often noted in philosophy courses and in passing scholarly references, allowed Malebranche to bridge the Cartesian gap between the soul and its body; I “feel” pain from a paper cut not because the soul and the body “naturally” communicate (an impossibility, following Descartes), but because, on the “occasion” of the paper slicing the fibers of my skin, G od causes me to feel a burning sensation in my soul. O r, to conjoin the two theories, at the “occasion” of the receptors in my eyes receiving a certain impulse of light waves corresponding to the outlines of a human being, G od reveals to my soul the appropriate “vision” of a person. But occasionalism did more for Malebranche than solve a Cartesian conundrum. More broadly and importantly, it allowed him to explain all apparently “natural” powers (a billiard ball’s ability to communicate movement to another billiard ball, the sun’s gravitational pull on the earth, my mind’s capacity to cause my fingers to type this sentence) as effects of G od’s direct will, and thus to interweave G od throughout the nascent N ewtonian universe. Bizarre as his theories may seem to us today (and absurd as they seemed to L ocke and his associates),102 Malebranche was an esteemed intellectual in his ������������������������������������������ Two E nglish translations of Malebranche’s S earch appeared during the final decade of the seventeenth century, one by Thomas Taylor (1694), the other by Richard S ault (1695). 101 ����������������� S ee Malebranche, The S earch A fter Truth, trans. Thomas M. L ennon and Paul J. O lscamp, and Elucidations of the S earch after Truth, trans. Thomas M. L ennon (Columbus: O hio S tate University Press, 1980), 230. 102 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� William Molyneux, in a letter of 18 A pril 1693 to L ocke, argues that “as there are enthusiasms in divinity, so there are in philosophy; and as one proceeds from not consulting or misapprehending the book of G od; so the other from not reading and considering the book of nature. I look upon Malebranche’s notions, or rather Plato’s, in this particular, as perfectly unintelligible ... . Plato’s fancy has no foundation in nature, but is merely the product of his own brain.” S imilarly, in a letter of 16 March 1697 to L ocke, Molyneux refers to N orris as “an obscure enthusiastic man” ( “S ome Familiar L etters Between Mr. L ocke, and S everal of His Friends,” in Works, 8: 316, 404). In 1695, L ocke pondered adding a chapter to his Essay that would lay open “the vanity, and inconsistency, and unintelligibleness of that 100

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own day, and not only in France: in a telling exaggeration, A ddison claimed in 1700 that Malebranche had “more admirers” in E ngland than in his own nation.103 A nd in 1759, in the famous passage in Tristram S handy where Tristram invokes L ocke on the causes of “obscurity and confusion, in the mind of man,” he claims that he can explain the argument so well that D olly the maid will understand it “as well as Malbranch,”104 perhaps a deliberate S handean coupling of philosophers whose views were largely antithetical, but also an indication that S terne’s interest in philosophical matters went beyond L ocke. It is difficult not to speak of Norris and Malebranche in a single breath—insofar as E ngland is concerned, at least—for N orris’s role in popularizing the French Father heavily influenced his reputation among English readers of the eighteenth century. Norris tended to be less scientific, or at least less rigidly theoretical, in his deployments of Malebranchean concepts than was Malebranche himself. For N orris, the precise mechanisms of “vision in G od” and “occasionalism” mattered less than the fact that together, the two theories provided a philosophical understanding of a truth N orris already accepted on scriptural authority—human beings exist “in” G od, “by” his power, and “through” his ever-creating Word. In the conclusion to his first detailed explanation of Malebranche, in fact, Norris intermingles the French thinker’s two major theories without even a perfunctory attempt to distinguish one from the other; he ends, furthermore, on a Biblical, rather than a theoretical, note: From all which, [Malebranche] concludes, that God is the Intelligible World, or the Place of S pirits, as the Material World is the place of Bodies. That these S pirits received their Modifications, or S ensations, from his Power, and find their Idea’s in his Wisdom ... ; and that in G od we have our L ife, or Motion, and our Being. A ccording to that of S t. Paul, He is not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being [A cts 17: 28].105

way of explaining humane understanding,” suggesting that at this time he perceived in Malebranche and N orris a threat to his own system (The Correspondence of John L ocke, ed. E .S . de Beer, 8 vols [O xford: Clarendon Press, 1976)], 5: 287; quoted in McCracken, 120). He decided against doing so, however, and by the time of his death in 1704, L ocke had come to believe that Malebranche’s “opinion” was “like to die of itself” (letter of 25 O ctober 1704 to Peter K ing; quoted in McCracken, 121). 103 L etters of Joseph A ddison, ed. Walter G raham (O xford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 25; quoted in McCracken, 2. Cf. William Warburton’s comment on Malebranche in a letter of 3 March 1759 to a friend: “all you say of Malebranche is strictly true, he is an admirable writer. There is something very different in the fortune of Malebranche and L ocke. When Malebranche first appeared, it was with a general applause and admiration; when Locke first published his Essay he had hardly a single approver. Now Locke is universal, and Malebranche sunk into obscurity” (L etters from a L ate Eminent Prelate to one of his Friends [K idderminster: G eorge G ower, 1808], 208). 104 �������� S terne, Tristram, 1: 98, 99. 105 �������� N orris, R eason and R eligion, 119.

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G rant notes that N orris’s problem with L ocke’s epistemology boiled down to its intransigent secularism; by insisting “that our images and our ideas are derived from sense impressions caused by bodies,” L ocke implicitly had transplanted, N orris recognized, “the ground of man’s spirit from G od to the natural world.”106 By popularizing Malebranche’s philosophical arguments to the contrary, N orris hoped to reverse the terms of L ocke’s transplantation.107 It was, of course, possible to be an interested reader of both Malebranche and N orris, as were, for instance, Byrom, L aw, and Wesley. But even these thinkers, as we shall see in Chapter 3, tended toward N orris’s generalized version of Malebranche’s theosophy, rather than toward Malebranche’s specific theories. A nd for every L aw or Wesley, I suspect, there were probably many Henry N eedlers. N eedler (1690–1718), a minor poet and essayist, seems not to have read Malebranche directly, but, from his reading of N orris, he could nonetheless take a recognizably Malebranchean position on G od’s direct implication in all aspects of His creation in his poem “A Vernal Hymn, in Praise of the Creator”: A t Thy Command, the S tarry Host, the S un, A nd Moon, unerringly their Courses run; Ceaseless they move, Obsequious to fulfill The Task assign’d by Thy A lmighty Will. Thy Vital Pow’r, diffus’d from Pole to Pole, Inspires and animates this ample Whole. If Thou wert A bsent, the Material Mass Wou’d without Motion lie in boundless S pace. The sun, arrested in his S piral Way, N o longer wou’d dispense alternate D ay; A breathless Calm wou’d hush the stormy Wind, And a new Frost the flowing Rivers bind Whate’er, thro’ false Philosophy, is thought To be by Chance or Parent-Nature wrought, From Thee alone proceeds... .108 106

������������ G rant, 189. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Malebranche also frequently cites Biblical precedents for his philosophical claims, particularly in his Elucidations of The S earch A fter Truth, which was appended to S earch beginning with the third edition (1677–78); see, for instance, his “R eply” to the “S eventh Proof” in E lucidation 15, where “S acred S cripture” is shown to be in full accordance with his views on causality (672–85). 108 ���� S ee The Works of Mr. Henry Needler (1728), ed. Marcia A llentuck, A ugustan R eprint S ociety Publications 90 (L os A ngeles: William A ndrews Clark Memorial L ibrary, 1961), 66. A llentuck notes that “unlike Thomas D ’Urfey, who used N orris’s writings for an amusing satire, N eedler acknowledges his great debt to N orris, whose Theory and R egulation of L ove he doubtless knew, and to whose Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World he devotes a long and important letter of N ovember 1711. N eedler’s writings resound with Norris’s doctrine of moral gravitation, and he subordinates his scientific speculations to more metaphysical ones as N orris enjoins” (iii). 107

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N eedler’s is not the G od of Voltaire’s dervish, an aloof Creator who sent the world on its course as a king sends a ship across the sea, uninvolved in managing its affairs, untroubled about the mice on board. Rather, N eedler’s is the ever-present, all-infusive G od of Malebranche, even though he came to Him indirectly through sources like N orris. Many E nglish readers, among them S terne and Richardson, seem to have had similar inclinations.109 A nd many women. Though his circle of female correspondents pales numerically beside that of Richardson (whose would not?), N orris’s epistolary relationships with important female intellectuals of his day are remarkable nonetheless. N orris was not, as D oris Mary S tenton believes, the same man as the N orris who assisted gratis in the publication of the A thenian Mercury (an error that continues to circulate in studies of Norris and in studies of Norris’s influence on Richardson),110 but he was, as she notes, in touch with “the learned ladies of the age.”111 N orris corresponded, for instance, with Mary, L ady Chudleigh (1656–1710), whom he also met, and to whom we owe our only physical description of him.112 Chudleigh wrote her own versions of his neoplatonic poetry, echoed his philosophical essays in her own, and appealed directly to his continental mentor Malebranche in the preface to her popular poem The L adies Defence (1701) to justify female intellectual potential.113 N orris’s own faith in women’s capacity for learning is 109 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� It was also possible to gain a working knowledge of Malebranche from publications like The S pectator, a favorite of Richardson. McCracken notes that in no. 37 (12 A pril 1711), A ddison “portrayed Malebranche’s S earch as one of the three modern philosophical works that an E nglish person who aspired to appear learned would keep on the shelf” (15n68). He also notes that the 18 June 1711 issue of The S pectator offers a comparison of L ocke and Malebranche. 110 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The mistaken association of John N orris with the “D r. N orris” who worked on the A thenian Mercury, according to A cworth, “originated with John Bowyer N ichols in his 1817 edition of The L ife and Errors of John Dunton.” A ccording to A cworth, “N ichols wrongly identified John Norris, to whom Dunton always referred as ‘Mr. Norris,’ with the ‘Dr. Norris’, a physician (probably to be identified with Dr. Edward Norris, fifth son of Thomas N orris of S peke, L ancs., and younger brother to S r. William N orris the envoy to India), who was indeed, along with D unton, S amuel Wesley, and Richard S ault, a regular contributor to the A thenian G azette” (356–7n30). This error is repeated, unfortunately, in the old DNB, and it is thus understandable that Bueler would refer to John N orris as “John Norris the Athenian, who figures in Clarissa” (18; the error, it should be noted, has been corrected in the new DNB entry on N orris, written by A cworth). It is important, however, that N orris be separated from the Christian casuistry of the A thenian Mercury—and it should be noted that one of the most bitter and least fair attacks on N orris ever penned (by L ocke’s Continental friend Jean L e Clerc [1657–1736]) was published, as A cworth points out, by none other than the A thenian Mercury. S ee A cworth, 262–7. 111 �������������������� D oris Mary S tenton, The English Woman in History (N ew Y ork: The Macmillan Company, 1957), 219. 112 ���������������� S ee A cworth, 10. 113 ���� S ee The Poems and Prose of Mary, L ady Chudleigh, ed. Margaret J.M. E zell (N ew Y ork and O xford: O xford University Press, 1993), 12. Chudleigh’s poem “The E levation”

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evident in his response to a request by E lizabeth Thomas (the infamous “Corinna,” 1677–1731) for instructions on self-education, in which he refuses to assume that Thomas wants merely to promote her “Christian L ife and Practice,” and instead wonders if she might also be interested in “the Illumination of your Mind, and the Improvement of your R eason and Understanding in the Way of S cience and S peculation.”114 N orris’s respectful treatment of Thomas on this occasion probably had much to do with her continued defense of him to her scoffing Lockean lover Richard G winnet [“Pylades”].115 A nother of N orris’s female friends, however, became a L ockean herself. In 1690, N orris dedicated his Conduct of Human L ife to his correspondent, “the E xcellent L ady, the L ady Masham.” D amaris Masham (nee Cudworth), the daughter of Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, was a well-educated woman in whom Locke (not Norris) would ultimately find a philosophical defender, and at whose O ates estate L ocke would live out the last years of his life. A lthough it was at Masham’s instigation that L ocke intervened on N orris’s behalf in 1692 (see above, n. 89), N orris and Masham’s initially convivial relationship had soured by the middle of the decade. In 1696, Masham launched a bitter (and acute) attack on N orris and his theories in her anonymously published Discourse Concerning the L ove of God. N evertheless, that N orris would dedicate his study of the appropriate ends of “L earning and Knowledge” to a woman is characteristic of a thinker who, in a letter to Thomas, could write in the genderless plural, “we are all rational Creatures”116—much as Richardson, in a letter of 14 February 1754 to L ady Bradshaigh, could claim that “a tolerable knowledge of men will lead us to a tolerable knowledge of women. Mrs. S hirly has said well, where she says that the two sexes are too much conceived as different species.”117

(78) is a condensed version of N orris’s own “The E levation” (Miscellanies, 51–3), while her distinction between “Contingent” and “N ecessary” truths in her essay “O f K nowledge: To the L adies” (257) repeats N orris’s primary argument in Conduct of Human L ife. 114 ������������������ Richard G winnett, Pylades and Corinna, 2 vols (1731–32), 2: 201; this letter is reprinted in Perry, A stell, 484–5n60. In addition to A rnauld, Malebranche, and D escartes, N orris recommends “Mr. L ocke of Understanding,” though he admonishes Thomas to read it with “due Caution and Circumspection.” He also provides a program for Thomas to become a “Mistress of French so far, as to read a Book by the Help of a D ictionary, in a Month’s time.” 115 ���������������������������������������������������� S ee letter 22, “Pylades to Corinna,” in volume 1 of Pylades and Corinna. O n the occasion of N orris’s death, G winnet presses Thomas to read L ocke’s posthumously published attacks on N orris, as well as “Mr Bold’s” defense of L ocke from N orris’s criticisms (122). 116 ������������������ G winnett, 2: 202. 117 ���������������������������������� Forster Collection of Manuscripts, XI, f. 82. “Mrs. S hirley” is Harriet’s grandmother in Grandison; the section from which Richardson is quoting (L etter 55 of Volume 6) was, in fact, contributed by one of Richardson’s own female correspondents—none other than E lizabeth Carter. S ee The History of S ir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris, 7 vols in 3 (L ondon: O xford University Press, 1972), 3: 243 and n.

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By far the most “famous” female thinker and writer with whom the “famous” Mr. Norris had a close intellectual relationship, however, was “the first English Feminist” Mary A stell (1666–1731), a woman mentioned by several scholars as a possible model for Clarissa Harlowe.118 In her A S erious Proposal to the L adies, Part I (1694), A stell praised N orris’s Conduct of Human L ife as a foil to what “the world has turn’d up for L earning” and recommended N orris as an “excellent A uthor” who could teach women to “busy themselves in a serious enquiry after necessary and perfective truths.”119 A stell’s S erious Proposal was written during the year in which A stell and N orris carried on the correspondence that would be published as L etters Concerning the L ove of God (1695), which Richardson’s own female correspondent and friend S arah Chapone considered A stell’s most “sublime work.”120 A stell’s next work, A S erious Proposal to the L adies, Part II (1697), according to Ruth Perry, “is probably best understood as a training manual for N orris’s brand of Christian Platonism.”121 Finally, in her “magnum opus,” as Patricia S pringborg has called it,122 The Christian R eligion as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705; 3rd edition 1730), A stell defended N orris (and herself) from Masham’s assault on their L etters, and leveled her own attack on the man she and N orris believed had penned the assault, John L ocke.123 Astell’s relationship to Norris, in short, was such that the first of Astell’s works to be mentioned in her obituary in The Daily Journal of 29 May 1731 is “Her Correspondence with the famous Mr. N orris of Bemerton, on the celebrated S ubject of the L ove of God [which] gain’d her no small A pplause.”124

118 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� Bridget Hill uses this label in the title of her edition of A stell’s works (The First English Feminist: Reflections upon Marriage and other writings by Mary A stell [N ew Y ork: S t. Martin’s Press, 1986]). For A stell as a precursor to Clarissa, see A .H. Upham’s “A Parallel for Richardson’s Clarissa,” ML N 28 (1913): 103–5. Jocelyn Harris has also linked A stell with Clarissa and with its heroine. S ee S amuel R ichardson (N ew Y ork: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 15–16; “Richardson: O riginal or L earned G enius?” in S amuel R ichardson: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Margaret A nne D oody and Peter S abor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 193–4; and “G rotesque, Classical, and Pornographic Bodies in Clarissa,” in New Essays on S amuel R ichardson, ed. A lbert J. Rivero (N ew Y ork: S t. Martin’s Press, 1996), 114. 119 ����������������� S ee Mary A stell, A S erious Proposal to the L adies, Parts I & II , ed. Patricia S pringborg (L ondon: Pickering and Chatto, 1997), 21–2. 120 ����������������� Quoted in Perry, A stell, 488n8. It should be noted, however, that Richardson and Chapone became acquainted in 1750, and thus after the composition of Clarissa (see E aves and K impel, 351). 121 ������� Perry, A stell, 83. 122 ��������������������������������������������� S pringborg, “A stell, Masham, and L ocke,” 110. 123 ������������������������������������������������������������ S ee S pringborg, “Mary A stell (1666–1731), Critic of L ocke,” A merican Political S cience R eview 89.3 (1995): 621–33; also see my “Mary A stell’s Ironic A ssault on John L ocke’s Theory of Thinking Matter,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001): 505–22. 124 ������� Perry, A stell, 324.

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The reappearance of Richardson’s phrase, “the famous Mr. N orris of Bemerton,” in a popular newspaper of 1731 may not, in fact, be a matter of coincidence—it should be noted that Richardson was printing The Daily Journal at this time, and he was, as John D ussinger has shown, an occasional anonymous contributor to this and other newspapers.125 Be that as it may, the phrase is at least suggestive; people tend not to refer to someone as “famous” unless they assume some knowledge of that person on the part of their audience. I have suggested that N orris was “famous” in the eighteenth century on three counts: his philosophical distinction from L ocke, his promulgation of Malebranche, and his relationship to intellectual women like A stell. In the following chapters, accordingly, I offer reappraisals of Clarissa grounded in these aspects of N orris’s thought and reputation. E ach chapter will address a particular line of inquiry, but it strikes me as neither desirable nor possible to prevent them from bleeding one into the other. (A stell too was a critic of L ocke’s perceived materialism, for instance, as well as a proponent of Malebranche.) In the first chapter, “Un-Locke-ing Clarissa,” I am primarily interested in reassessing the prevalent critical supposition that the world of Clarissa operates according to L ockean assumptions—not only in matters of philosophy, but of politics, theology, and epistemology. In the second chapter, “Mary A stell, E lizabeth Carter, Clarissa Harlowe, and other ‘D escendants’ of N orris,” N orris’s close relationship with women like A stell and Chudleigh serves as the touchstone for an explanation and defense of the particular, perhaps peculiar, brand of female empowerment Richardson sought to promote in his novel. In the third and final chapter, “‘Out-Norrised,’” I seek to demonstrate the ways in which N orris’s Malebranchean arguments for G od’s direct role in the totality of human experience enable Richardson to reconcile his theodicean intentions with his commitment to tragic realism. My primary contention throughout this study is that it means something significant that Richardson worked so sedulously to include references to Norris within his novel, and my primary goal is to offer an explanation as to what that “something” might be. That we will never come “face to face” with the meaning of Clarissa—of any text, for that matter—does not, I maintain, release us from continuing in good faith to peer through the glass separating us from it.

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�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� John D ussinger, “‘S tealing in the great doctrines of Christianity’: S amuel Richardson as Journalist,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15.3–4 (2003): 451–506. For a full account of Richardson’s work as a printer, see K eith Maslen, S amuel R ichardson of L ondon Printer: A S tudy of his Printing Based on Ornament Use and Business A ccounts (D unedin: University of O tago, 2001), 28–9.

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Chapter 1

Un-L ocke-ing S amuel Richardson S amuel Richardson (1689–1761), successful printer, voluminous novelist, and irrepressible correspondent, makes scattered references to John L ocke (1632– 1704), empiricist philosopher, Whig theorist, and latitudinarian apologist, in works and letters spanning three decades. In 1733, the newly established printer, and former apprentice, composed and printed a moralistic conduct manual entitled The A pprentice’s Vade Mecum (1733), the third and final section of which, a warning “A gainst S cepticism and Infidelity,” quotes “the great Mr. L ocke (in his R easonableness of Christianity)” on the importance of revelation to true religion. Eight years later, as he scrambled for material with which to fill the reluctantly composed continuation of Pamela (Pamela, Part II [1741]), the author elected to allow his heroine’s thoughts and pen to wander at length through L ocke’s S ome Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), a work to which characters twice refer approvingly in his final novel, The history of S ir Charles Grandison (1753–54). Hester Mulso quotes Richardson’s reference to “PUZZLING LO CKE ” in a letter of 3 January 1751 to the author; although no known copy of Richardson’s letter exists, it is evident, as Tom K eymer has noted, that Richardson there attacked as obfuscatory a passage from L ocke’s Two Treatises on Government (1690) that Mulso had adduced in her epistolary debate with the author over the relative  ������������������� S amuel Richardson, A pprentice’s Vade Mecum: Or, Young Man’s Pocket-Companion, A ugustan Reprint S ociety, ed. A lan D ugald McK illop, nos. 169–70 (L os A ngeles: William A ndrews Clark Memorial L ibrary, 1975), 61.  ��������������������������������� For Pamela’s comments on L ocke’s Education, see the four volume S hakespeare Head edition of Pamela (O xford: Basil Blackwell, 1929), 4: 305–71; all further references to Pamela, Part II are to this edition, rather than to the significantly flawed Everyman edition. E aves and K impel note that by the time he reached Pamela’s comments on L ocke in Pamela, Part II , “Richardson had abandoned all effort to begin a plot”; they suggest A aron Hill as a likely source for Pamela’s “unfortunate and interminable interest in L ocke’s theories on bringing up children” (151, 41). It is worth noting, however, S arah S cudamore’s praise for Pamela’s “clear and plain” ruminations on “Mr. L ocke’s maxims,” which she “intend[s] strictly to adhere to” in raising her own “little boy” (letter of 12 March 1758; Barbauld, 3: 331). Richardson included several of Pamela’s comments on L ocke in A Collection of Moral Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and S ir Charles Grandison (1755), which has been reprinted as volume 3 of S amuel R ichardson’s Published Commentary on CLARISSA , 1747–1765, with an introduction by John D ussinger and an afterword by A nn Jessie Van S ant (L ondon: Pickering & Chatto, 1998); see, for instance, pp. 2–3. For Richardson’s later references to L ocke, see Grandison, 1: 59 and 2: 261.

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rights and duties of daughters and parents in matters of courtship and marriage. In a letter of 22 D ecember 1753 to Patrick D elany, the novelist defended himself from D elany’s charges of anti-intellectualism by citing his quotation of L ocke’s Education in Grandison, explaining that “Mr. L ocke, in the Passage hinted at, decries not L earning, nor L anguages.” The evidence would seem to suggest that S amuel Richardson was moderately interested in—if somewhat unsure of—John L ocke. But then, direct evidence almost never tells the entire story in matters of intellectual influence; that Richardson never mentions Rene D escartes, Isaac N ewton, or A dam S mith does not mean that his and their ideas never crossed paths. D uring his 30-year career as a printer, Richardson printed vast numbers of multifarious types of works, ranging from the sacred (sermons by George Whitfield, Patrick Delany, and Philip Skelton), the scientific (as printer for the Royal Society between 1744–62), and the imaginative (novels by Charlotte L ennox, plays by A aron Hill, poems by James Thompson), to the technical (as the official printer for the House of Commons between 1733– 61), the practical (Philip Miller’s The Gardeners Dictionary [1731] and William G iffard’s Cases in Midwifery [1734]), and the journalistic (as printer for a series of newspapers between 1723–46). His galaxy of correspondents included a thresher poet, an influential painter, an orthographer of the English language, the wife of a G erman poet, the E nglish translator of E pictetus, the leading medical theorist of the day, and the S peaker of the House of Commons. S amuel Richardson was, in short, very much a man of his age—perhaps quintessentially so, as Terry E agleton has suggested. If, then, Ian Watt is correct in asserting that John L ocke’s “thought everywhere pervades the eighteenth-century climate of opinion,” or Jocelyn Harris that L ocke’s “views on the mind’s capacity, education and political implications were as axiomatic as the Bible in the eighteenth century”—if, in other words, Richardson lived in the age of L ocke—it would seem logical enough to suppose that the connections between these two thinkers might supersede the novelist’s explicit references to this figure or his works. Indeed, prominent Richardson scholars regularly rely on precisely this supposition, both in their biographical descriptions of the author and in their readings of his novels, in particular Clarissa, thereby implementing what Richard A . Barney has characterized as “a strategy that portrays the transition  ���������������������������������������������� For K eymer’s discussion of this exchange, see R ichardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century R eader (N ew Y ork: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 121.  ���������������� Carroll, 262–3.  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� I.e., S tephen D uck, Joseph Highmore, Thomas E dwards, Meta K lopstock, E lizabeth Carter, G eorge Cheyne, and A rthur O nslow, respectively.  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� E agleton notes that as a “master printer,” Richardson “did not only share in the bourgeois public sphere of eighteenth-century E ngland; he helped to construct it” (The R ape of Clarissa: Writing, S exuality and Class S truggle in S amuel R ichardson [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982], 7).  ���������� Ian Watt, The R ise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, R ichardson and Fielding (Berkeley and L os A ngeles: University of California Press, 1960), 31; and Harris, Samuel R ichardson, 3.

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from philosophy to the novel in terms of cause and effect, in a process often characterized as a social ‘climate’ so thoroughly saturated by L ockean principles that it cannot help producing the precipitate of Lockean fictions ... .” Harris’s scholarship is particularly instructive, though hardly singular, in its commitment to this strategy. In Harris’s view, “among more secular E nglish philosophical works, Richardson seems especially familiar with John L ocke”; the novelist “must have been particularly susceptible” to L ocke’s thinking on a variety of topics, for although “formal education had been largely denied [Richardson], L ocke’s S ome Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) explained how to educate oneself, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) demonstrated the development of the reason, and his Two Treatises of Government (1690) advised rational men struggling to set up a just society.” Clarissa Harlowe’s opening dilemma at Harlowe Place, Harris maintains, reveals her to be a “L ockeian woman in a household of Filmerian men,”10 while in her battle with L ovelace for the right to self-determination, Clarissa subscribes to “L ocke’s belief” that the individual is sacrosanct. L ike her forbear, Pamela A ndrews, Clarissa has the “the courage” to proclaim “her thesis (or L ocke’s, or Christ’s) that to G od everyone is equal”; unfortunately for her, miscommunications, misunderstandings, and deceptions so mar her world that her faith in sublunary meaning is lost—a loss mirrored by the rancorous “history of Richardson criticism” which depressingly “confirms Locke’s fear that consensus about meaning is fragile.”11 Harris thus makes what amount to four fundamental L ockean claims for Richardson and his works of fiction, on each of which she keeps good critical company. According to the first claim, Locke’s empirically inclined philosophy provides Richardson a ground on which to build realistic characters formed in the crucible of experience. Ian Watt, of course, explicitly links the development of “formal realism” with the cultural diffusion of L ocke’s bedrock point that “truth can be discovered by the individual through the senses.”12 Carol Houlihan Flynn follows Watt in arguing that Richardson’s “own notion of the working mind ... reflects a Lockean empiricism, a confidence that the senses will enable us to perceive and make sense of reality.” But the author’s confidence, Flynn argues, proves misplaced. “O nce ... it is recognized that we perceive ‘reality’ through our senses,” she writes, “it follows that we can be deceived and betrayed through these same senses”; this sad truth is evidenced, according to Flynn, throughout Richardson’s novels, where the author belies his own philosophical faith in the senses by creating worlds

 ������������������� Richard A . Barney, Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in EighteenthCentury England (S tanford: S tanford University Press, 1999), 4.  ������������������������������������������������ Harris, “Richardson: O riginal or L earned,” 193. 10 �������������������� S ir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), a strident elaboration of the divine sanction for monarchical absolutism, was a primary target of L ocke’s Two Treatises. 11 �������� Harris, S amuel R ichardson, 3, 53, 94–5, 31, 131. 12 ��������� Watt, 12.

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of “flux.”13 Hence, argues Robert E rickson, the tragedy of Clarissa’s unwilling baptism into the world of experience; “all the impressions made upon [Clarissa’s] sensation by the force of external objects,” he contends, move her inexorably “toward a more L ockean interpretation of conscience,” despite her own desire to believe in the essentialist and “traditional notion of conscience implanted in the heart.”14 A ccording to the second claim, L ocke’s liberal, Whiggish political arguments underscore Richardson’s interest in the methods through which his culture divested, devalued, and in many respects hobbled even the most capable women in mideighteenth-century E ngland. Tom K eymer cites with approval Harris’s description of Clarissa as a “L ockian woman” in her aspirations toward self-determination, and he too stresses the centrality of L ocke’s Two Treatises to Richardson’s composition of the first installment of the novel. Keymer goes on to explain, however, that “Richardson’s thinking was never single in direction,” hence his surprising volta face in the debate with Hester Mulso, wherein “it is Mulso who is the L ockian,” while Richardson attacks L ocke’s contractualism as disruptive of social order.15 Jerry Beasley less equivocally contends that Richardson simply reflects his patriarchal age in accepting L ocke’s “demolishing [of] Filmer’s patriarchal theory of monarchy” while refusing to apply L ocke’s principles to “domestic relations.”16 A ccording to the third claim, L ocke’s brand of measured, reasonable Christianity adumbrates the spiritual motivations and interests of the characters populating Richardson’s novels, and is representative of the religious inclinations of the author himself. The notion that Richardson’s spiritual views flow from the stream of rational, E nlightenment Christianity promulgated by L ocke in works such as The Essay and The R easonableness of Christianity (1695) is widely shared, to the point that D avid Hensley has complained of the “prevalent secularizing critical orthodoxy” surrounding the novelist and Clarissa.17 O ne hears the echo of L ocke’s stated ambition for R easonableness—to discard the “speculations and niceties, obscure terms, and abstract notions” masquerading as Christian orthodoxy for the “plain and intelligible” religion preached by “Christ and his A postles”18—in Eaves and Kimple’s suggestion that Richardson “was content to confine himself to the simple, clear essentials of religion.”19 In his aptly titled chapter “Clarissa and ���������������������� Carol Houlihan Flynn, S amuel R ichardson: A Man of L etters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 240. 14 ���������� E rickson, The L anguage of the Heart, 214. 15 �������� K eymer, R ichardson’s Clarissa, 116, 122, 121, 225. 16 ��������������������������������������������������������������� Jerry Beasley, “Richardson’s G irls: D aughters of Patriarchy in Pamela, Clarissa and S ir Charles Grandison,” in New Essays on S amuel R ichardson, ed. A lbert J. Rivero (N ew Y ork: S t. Martin’s Press, 1996), 49n2. 17 ��������������������������������������������������������������� D avid Hensley, “Reading and Misreading Richardson as K ant,” in Talking Forward, Talking Back: Critical Dialogues with the Enlightenment, ed. K evin L . Cope and Rüdiger A hrens (N ew Y ork: A MS Press, 2002), 186. 18 ������������ John L ocke, The R easonableness of Christianity A s Delivered in the S criptures (1695), in John L ocke: Writings on R eligion, ed. Victor N uovo (O xford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 210. 19 ����������������������� E aves and K impel, 551. 13

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the Waning of Puritanism,” L eopold D amrosch, Jr. treats as symptomatic of the religious decline of Richardson’s age the novelist’s production of “a story [to some extent] in accordance with the assumptions of L ockean empiricism.”20 In a more radical extension of this position, Florian S tuber reads the result of Richardson’s efforts in Clarissa as a sure, if unwitting, step along the path “to the detachment of G od from ethics in late eighteenth-century philosophy, the disappearance of G od in the nineteenth century, and the death of G od in the twentieth.” L ike deists A dam S mith and D iderot—famous admirers, S tuber notes, of Clarissa— Richardson would appear to be yet another inheritor of L ocke’s E nlightenment religious principles.21 John D ussinger, more recently, has pointed to Richardson’s references to L ocke in several anonymously published pamphlets of the 1730s as adumbrations of the “fairly orthodox religious views” he would later “exhibit” in his “correspondence and fiction.”22 And, finally, according to the fourth claim, Locke’s de-essentialized discussion of words and meaning in Book 3 of the Essay suggests a precedent for the hermeneutical quagmire into which Richardson leads his characters, his readers, and, in the final analysis, himself as author. A ccording to Terry Castle, despite Richardson’s attempts to “preserve meaning” through imprinting words on pages, his novels ultimately work to reveal the “essential arbitrariness in the decoding act itself”—the result, she suggests, of Richardson’s “following L ocke” on the relationship between hermeneutics and epistemology. His heroine, a “naive exegete,” is thus “caught up ... in a pathology of reading” the etiology of which is the death both of any “transparent source of meaning” and, concomitantly, of Clarissa herself. 23 K eymer likewise explains that “for Clarissa, gaps yawn between idea and word and between writer and reader.” “Hers,” he maintains, “is a distinctively L ockian crisis,” one closely akin to the “indeterminacy” faced by readers who must rely upon “the faculty of judgment” which “Locke identifies” as the only resource for determining truth.24 Perhaps most remarkable in these L ockean readings of Richardson and his second novel is the nearly universal implication that, on each point, the author’s reliance on L ocke proves shortsighted, misplaced, or self-defeating. The senses obviously are not avenues to essential truths, after all, a fact of which L ocke was well aware.25 The social contract elaborated by L ocke as a ground for individual ����������������������� L eopold D amrosch, Jr., God’s Plots and Man’s S tories: S tudies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 259. 21 ����������������� Florian S tuber, “Clarissa: A Religious N ovel?” S tudies in the L iterary Imagination 28.1 (1995): 123n15, 105. 22 �������������������������������������������������������������������������� John D ussinger, “‘S tealing in the great doctrines of Christianity,’” 458. 23 �������������� Terry Castle, Clarissa’s Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in R ichardson’s “Clarissa” (Ithaca and L ondon: Cornell University Press, 1982), 50, 51, 57. 24 �������� K eymer, S amuel R ichardson’s Clarissa, 225 and 244. 25 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Cf. L ocke’s attack on the S cholastic emphasis on “substance” and “essence” in Essay, 3.6.9.444: “N or indeed can we rank, and sort Things, and consequently ... denominate them by their real Essenses, because we know them not. O ur Faculties carry us no farther towards the knowledge and distinction of S ubstances, than a Collection of those sensible Ideas, which we observe in them ... .” 20

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liberty was largely silent with regards to women, and it offered no certain comfort to Richardson, whose incipient authoritarianism conflicted with Locke’s arguments.26 L ocke’s “reasonable” religion threatens to disappear as religion at all, as a host of outraged Christian thinkers, from Edward Stillingfleet to William Law, and a host of smug deistic and skeptical thinkers, from John Toland to D avid Hume, pointed out.27 Consensus about meaning is indeed, as Harris puts it, “fragile” in the L ockean scheme, perhaps even, as Castle suggests, irredeemably arbitrary. In short, according to this widely shared approach, Clarissa carries ample evidence of its author’s devotion to L ockean principles—but it strains mightily under the unwitting burden thus entailed. To arrive at this comprehensively L ockean view of Richardson and his novel, however, one rather pressing question has been begged along the way: Might Richardson have been aware that L ocke provided unstable grounding for his ambitious second novel? For critics favoring a L ockean approach to Clarissa, the author unthinkingly tripped over his own L ockean tendencies. I wish to suggest that the contrary is at least equally plausible—i.e., that Richardson’s novel offers a critical examination of L ocke’s philosophical, political, religious, and epistemological positions, and that critics of L ocke such as N orris and A stell appealed to Richardson precisely inasmuch as they enabled his critical investigation. 1. Locke and the Senses Characters in Clarissa make frequent and insistent use of the word “sense” and its variants. This is particularly the case in the letters composed just after the heroine’s rape, as Clarissa and L ovelace attempt to explain themselves and their 26 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� Thus, even G ordon S chochet, who contends that “L ocke created the theoretical possibility of full political membership for women,” nevertheless admits that “L ocke did not call for the inclusion of women in the political community” and that “he left women pretty much as he had found them in Stuart society.” See “The Significant Sounds of S ilence: The A bsence of Women from the Political Thought of S ir Robert Filmer and John L ocke (or, ‘Why Can’t a Woman be More L ike a Man?’),” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L . S mith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 221. 27 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� Stillingfleet and Locke sparred over the religious implications of Locke’s R easonableness (and Essay) in a series of open letters during the years directly following its publication (1696–99). O n L aw’s rejection of L ocke, see below, pp. 70–71. John Toland, in many ways the primary target of Stillingfleet’s first attack, had found inspiration in Locke’s Essay for his deistic manifesto, Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), though, as B.W. Y oung has noted, L ocke himself rejected Toland and anyone else “who had seen in his theological pronouncements the high road to a Christianity purged of mystery ...” (R eligion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England [O xford: Clarendon Press, 1998], 27). O n his deathbed, Hume famously boasted that “he never had entertained any belief in religion since he began to read L ocke and Clarke”—much to Boswell’s dismay (The Journals of James Boswell: 1762–1795, ed. John Wain [N ew Haven: Y ale University Press, 1991], 247).

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behavior to their respective correspondents. The prerequisite to bringing down a “high-souled and high-sensed [girl]” such as Clarissa, L ovelace insists to Belford, is rendering her insensible: “NE VE R blame me for giving way to have art used with this admirable creature. A ll the princes of the air, or beneath it, joining with me, could never have subdued her while she had her senses” (889, 899). Clarissa agrees. Things had been different, she laments, had she “not been robbed of [her] senses, and that in the basest manner—you [L ovelace] best know how” (901). Indeed, upon thwarting L ovelace’s attempt to repeat his violation of her (the famous “Penknife scene”), Clarissa credits the fact that on this occasion, unlike before, “I have my SENSES ” (950). A “high-sensed girl” once again, Clarissa will not suffer from any of L ovelace’s “further baseness.” O n the surface, such pronouncements might seem to suggest Clarissa’s—and Richardson’s—endorsement of a strictly L ockean theory of knowledge according to which the physical senses, either directly or indirectly through mental reflection, provide the necessary cornerstone.28 But what, exactly, are Clarissa’s “SENSES ?” It is true that Clarissa proves herself a “high-sensed” woman during the course of the novel; it seems equally clear, however, that Richardson takes great pains to associate his heroine and her “SENSES ” with a tradition not only un-L ockean, but, in many respects, anti-L ockean. What success Clarissa manages in her fatal battle with L ovelace is achieved not by way of her physical senses, but in spite of them. Richardson is not behindhand in helping the reader to establish a particular meaning for Clarissa’s “senses.” A s a case in point, we might consider two descriptions Clarissa provides for the effects of the laudanum she unwittingly ingested just prior to the rape, the first to Lovelace, the second to Anna Howe (a portion of the first is cited above): Oh wretch! ... [H]ad I not been robbed of my senses, and that in the basest manner—you best know how ... . (901) I was betrayed back to the vile house, struggling under the operation of wicked potions, and robbed indeed of my intellects. (997)

The verbal echo underpinning Clarissa’s two descriptions of the same event (“robbed of my ...”) works to support what is already contextually clear: the only apparent point of distinction in Clarissa’s descriptions—sense or intellect— constitutes no difference at all. Indeed, for Clarissa, at least in reference to herself, the two terms are interchangeable, as her remembrance of the rape suggests: I remember, I pleaded for mercy ... . But no mercy found I!—My strength, my intellects, failed me! ... I was so senseless that I dare not aver that the horrid creatures of the house were personally aiding and abetting ... . [L ovelace] persisted to the last ... that they were really and truly the ladies they pretended 28

��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Locke’s first definitive statements regarding sensory perceptions as the basis for all knowledge can be found in the book one, chapter two of Essay. S ee, for instance, L ocke’s point in section 23: “If it shall be demanded then, When a Man begins to have any Ideas? I think the true Answer is, when he first has any sensation” (117).

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R eason and R eligion in Clarissa to be; declaring, that they could not take leave of me when they left the town, because of the state of senselessness and frenzy I was in. For their intoxicating, or rather stupefying, potions had almost deleterious effects upon my intellects, as I have hinted. (1011; emphasis mine)29

Clarissa’s “senses,” in short, are her “intellects.” Clarissa’s “soul” likewise stands in synonymic relationship to her “senses.” L ate in the novel, Belford, now Clarissa’s and the reader’s closest confidant, describes the heroine as follows: S he then turned from me towards the window, with a dignity suitable to her words; and such as showed her to be more of soul than of body at that instant. What magnanimity! No wonder a virtue so solidly based could baffle all thy arts—and that it forced thee ... to have recourse to those unnatural ones, which robbed her of her charming senses. (1103)

Belford’s logic suggests that Clarissa’s “senses” are “charming” precisely inasmuch as they derive from “soul” instead of “body,” a paradoxical formulation, to be sure, but one initiated by Clarissa’s preceding “digni[fied]” words, which emphasize her strength, not of body, but of intellect: “I presume to hope that I have a mind that cannot be debased, in essential instances, by temporary calamities: little do those poor wretches know of the force of innate principles ... who imagine that a prison, or penury, or want, can bring a right turned mind to be guilty of a wilful baseness.” If Belford’s language on this occasion sounds familiar, this is probably by design. Clarissa has already written of having been “robbed” of her senses / intellects, while L ovelace has already referred to Clarissa’s “charming” intellects. Belford’s use of “soul” in this instance also has precedents. It recalls, for instance, his curiously careful choice of words in summarizing Clarissa’s reputation in his opening letter to L ovelace. Though unacquainted with his friend’s new target, Belford can nevertheless remark that Clarissa is “celebrated for beauty; and so noted at the same time for prudence, for soul (I will say, instead of sense)” (502). Belford’s attention to diction in this initial description of Clarissa bespeaks a remarkable degree of thought on the part of Richardson as well. We should note, for instance, that by having Belford comment upon Clarissa’s reputation for “prudence,” Richardson disallows the potential for reading his sentence as a critique of the heroine for lacking “understanding” or “common sense”—for this, as L ois Bueler has shown, is what a lack of “prudence” would mean.30 Belford’s reasons for this deliberate substitution become clear a few sentences later (the proximity is telling), when, in explaining his and L ovelace’s rakish aspirations, Belford notes “we hope to live to sense, as long as sense can relish” (502–3). Taken together, the implication 29 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� A similar intermingling of “sense” and “intellect” is evident in the first semicoherent letter Clarissa manages after the rape; she writes, “let me hurry off my thoughts, lest I lose them again—Here I am sensible—A nd yet I am hardly sensible neither” (895). 30 �������������������������������������� S ee Bueler’s chapter on “Prudence” in Clarissa’s Plots, 117–40.

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of these two passages is that Belford would have used “sense” in his description of Clarissa had he not feared a misreading—there is a “sense” that applies to Clarissa, but it is not to be confused with the “sense” (i.e., the pleasures of the physical senses) Belford and L ovelace hope to “relish” as long as possible. O ne suspects that this vocabulary lesson is less Belford’s than Richardson’s, and is directed less at L ovelace than at the reader. A glance at Johnson’s various definitions of “sense” and its cognates in A Dictionary of the English L anguage (1755) provides a useful illustration of the difficulty involved in assigning these terms certain meaning. Sense can mean “1. Faculty or power by which external objects are perceived” or “2. Perception by intellect; apprehension of mind”; Sensible is defined as “1. Having the power of perceiving by the senses,” “2. Perceptible by the senses,” “3. Perceived by the mind,” and “4. Perceiving by either mind or senses.” A nn Jessie Van S ant, glancing at K arl Figlio, has suggested that “sensibility should be understood as the ‘matrix’ in which mind and body meet,”31 but Johnson’s curious second definition for “sensibleness” would seem to imply the possibility of separate activity as well: “A ctual perception by mind or body.” For his part, Richardson in Clarissa would seem to place a great deal of emphasis on Johnson’s “or”; it is remarkable how careful he is to keep his hero and heroine on opposite sides of the mind-body divide. In fact, the physical senses, when discussed in Clarissa, almost always signify pejoratively. “The eye, my dear, the wicked eye—has such a strict alliance with the heart!—and both have such enmity to the understanding!” (475), Anna writes to Clarissa. “What an unequal union, the mind and body!” she continues. “All the senses, like the family at Harlowe Place, in a confederacy against that which would animate and give honour to the whole, were it allowed its proper precedence” (475). Anna’s description is telling us something significant not only about Clarissa’s deplorable family, but about Richardson’s dualism. A s L eo Braudy puts it, “the division between mind and body that D escartes developed as an epistemological assumption has in Clarissa become an ontological imperative.”32 Predictably, the character most often associated with the traitorous physical senses in Clarissa is L ovelace. From his deathbed, Belton wonders rhetorically what solace Lovelace will find on his deathbed in “the transitory gratifications of sense which now engage all his attention” (1227).33 Belford similarly finds it impossible to understand how L ovelace could have his “senses so much absorbed in the woman [Clarissa] in her charming person as to be blind to the ANGEL that 31 ��������������������� A nn Jessie Van S ant, Eighteenth-Century S ensibility and the Novel: The S enses in S ocial Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 12. 32 ������������������������������������������������ L eo Braudy, “Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa,” in New A pproaches to Eighteenth-Century L iterature, ed. Phillip Harth (N ew Y ork: Columbia University Press, 1974), 194. 33 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Cf. Clarissa’s thinly veiled reference to L ovelace in her posthumous letter to Belford: “what, at that period [moments before death], must be the reflections of those (if capable of reflection) who have lived a life of sense and offence ...?” (1367).

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shines out in such full glory in her mind” (1299), a refrain Richardson echoes in his “Hints of Prefaces”: “Reformation is not to be secured by a fine Face, by a Passion that has S ense for its O bject ... .”34 We should note as well Belford’s sensitivity to diction when he uses against L ovelace his own grotesque physical account of the mental anguish caused by descriptions of the dying Clarissa: “I will,” Belford writes, “upon every occasion that offers, drive more spikes into thy hogshead, and roll thee downhill and up, as thou recoverest to sense, or rather returnest back to senselessness” (1074; see 1069). If before Belford is careful to use “soul” instead of “sense” in reference to Clarissa—and careful to point out the substitution—here he again demonstrates remarkable vigilance in his various employments of the word “sense.” Having established two sentences earlier that by “recoverest to sense” he means that L ovelace has recovered his capacity for “mental feeling” (1074) or for “sense” as it generally applies to Clarissa, Belford nonetheless hesitates; the last thing L ovelace needs, Belford would seem to suggest, is to return to the “senses” that best apply to him, for it was precisely his inability to eschew the physical senses that led him to rape Clarissa.35 E ve’s fall from E den is accomplished primarily by S atan’s appeals to her physical senses;36 not coincidentally, given Richardson’s familiarity with a tradition of writers who focused on this aspect of the Fall, Clarissa’s own fall from an unrecoverable paradise is presented to the reader as a collapse into the uncertain realm of sense perception.37 L ovelace’s comprehensive deception of Clarissa �������������������������������������������������������������������� S amuel Richardson, “Hints of Prefaces for Clarissa,” in volume 1 of S amuel R ichardson’s Published Commentary on CLARISSA , 1747–1765, with an introduction by Jocelyn Harris, ed. Thomas K eymer (L ondon: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), 321. 35 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� There is a line of criticism that reads L ovelace as non-sensual, even asexual. Judith Wilt argues that Clarissa’s rape may actually be performed by the “ladies” of the brothel rather than by L ovelace; Clarissa, she argues, learns that “the real enemy of woman is woman” (“He Could G o N o Farther: A Modest Proposal about L ovelace and Clarissa,” PMLA 92 [1977]: 27). John A llen S tevenson suggests that L ovelace’s various commentaries on the act of sex reveal a decidedly non-sensual libertine, one for whom the pleasures of sex belong “in the head ... not the body” (“‘A lien S pirits’: The Unity of L ovelace and Clarissa,” in New Essays on S amuel R ichardson, 87). James G rantham Turner agrees that “sex is empty and disgusting” for L ovelace (“L ovelace and the Paradoxes of L ibertinism,” in Samuel R ichardson: Tercentenary Essays, 70). In contrast to S tevenson and Turner, however, Belford, and through him Richardson, maintains that L ovelace’s fascination with “preparative stratagem” indicates the logical trajectory of his sensual nature, not his eschewal of it. A fter all with Clarissa has ended (except Morden’s revenge), L ovelace—predictably, tragically—is off for a sexual jaunt across Europe, not because he believes he will find satisfaction, but because he cannot imagine proceeding otherwise (1432, 1483). 36 ��������������������������������������������������� G enesis 3: 6—“A nd when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes ... she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.” 37 ������������������������������������������������������ Clarissa’s similarities to the E ve of G enesis (and of Paradise L ost) have been well established, most recently—and most thoroughly—by K eymer (R ichardson’s Clarissa, 112– 15). We can further specify Richardson’s use of this particular Biblical motif by recognizing that he has made Clarissa’s fall exemplify a belief he seems to have shared with a line of 34

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frequently relies on his providing fallacious, but convincing, physical evidence: Joseph L eman’s carefully choreographed shout in the garden at Harlowe Place provides auditory evidence to the disoriented Clarissa of a “furious brother here, armed servants there, an enraged sister screaming and a father armed with terror in his countenance” (380); a letter from this same duplicitous servant exculpates L ovelace by adducing L eman’s own misperception as the reason for his shouting in the garden (437);38 a carefully placed collection of sacred and moral literature lends its aura of acceptability to the inhabitants of Mrs. S inclair’s house (525–6); vomited pigeon blood suggests L ovelace is “really” sick (673, 676); letters from “A nna Howe” (L ovelace) appear to be from A nna Howe (811–14). These sorts of empirical legerdemains are particularly crucial in the events immediately surrounding Clarissa’s rape. Clarissa recalls that the prostitutes impersonating L ovelace’s kinswomen “were richly dressed and stuck out with jewels” (998); that their words to Clarissa were “tender,” “obliging,” and “respectful” (999); and that they had “the air, the dress, the dignity, of women of quality” (1009). L ovelace’s unintentional blush—really a reaction “to his pretended aunt” for mistaking “her cue in condemning [Mrs. S inclair’s] house” (1003; Richardson’s note)—provides evidence to Clarissa that L ovelace is “abashed” at having treated her so badly; “the blush, on this occasion,” she insists thinkers represented by Malebranche, N orris, A stell, and L aw: the Fall of man amounted to a Fall into empiricism. “I cannot help believing,” Malebranche writes in E lucidation Fifteen of S earch, “that one of the most deplorable consequences of O riginal S in is that we no longer have any taste or feeling for God ... . Feeling himself a sinner, man hides, flees the light, fears encountering G od and prefers to imagine in the bodies surrounding him a blind nature or power ... than to find in them the terrible power of a just and holy God who knows all and who does all” (657). For N orris, the “O riginal Pravity and D egeneracy of our N ature” is characterized first and foremost by our privileging the “good of Sense” over the “good of the Intellect” (Theory and R egulation of L ove [1688], 66). A stell, following N orris, linked the “darkn’d” state of human “Understanding” to the effects of the “Fall,” which resulted from an inability to “oppose the incursions of sense” (S erious Proposal, Part II, 98). L aw, in a text G eorge Cheyne recommended to Richardson, repeatedly describes the Fall in terms similar to these; he laments A dam’s decision to “will the knowledge of temporal nature” because it amounted to a substitution of “the light and spirit of this world” for “the light and spirit of Heaven”, and blames A dam for “[lusting] to have the sensibility of that good and evil which the beasts of this world have” (A n A ppeal to all that Doubt, or Disbelieve the Truths of the Gospel [1740] and The S pirit of Prayer [1749], in S tephen Hobhouse, S elected Mystical Writings of William L aw [N ew Y ork and L ondon: Harper and Brothers, 1948], 47, 70). S ee Cheyne’s letter of 9 March 1742 to Richardson in The L etters of Doctor George Cheyne to S amuel R ichardson (1733–43), ed. Charles F. Mullett (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1943), 88. 38 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� L eman explains that his “fears of being discovered to act on both sides had made him take the rushing of a little dog ... [for] some of his masters” (437). Clarissa’s response to Lovelace’s recitation of this letter—“Deep! deep! deep! ... [You] are, I see plainly ... a very artful, a very designing man” (438)—is noteworthy largely because she does not “see” the half of L ovelace’s “design” at this point.

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to A nna Howe, “was a deep-died crimson, unstrained-for, and natural” (1003). E ven Clarissa’s taste buds are used against her. O nce inside Mrs. S inclair’s house, Clarissa, as she explains, was “made to drink two dishes [of tea], with milk, complaisantly urged by the pretended ladies helping me each to one ... . I thought, transiently, that the tea, the last dish particularly, had an odd taste. They, on my palating it, observed that the milk was L ondon milk; far short in goodness of what they were accustomed to from their own dairies” (1008). “Y ou are in the world now” (530), A nna warns Clarissa when she leaves Harlowe Place with L ovelace, and this is precisely the problem, for her as for E ve. We need not read as unwitting the misgivings Richardson’s narrative exhibits in its consideration of the L ockean account of the relationship between sensory input and knowledge; much the same epistemological and moral discomfort had been registered by N orris, The Third E arl of S haftesbury, and likeminded thinkers in the early portions of the century. In N orris’s view, the physical senses are necessary for corporeal existence, but, following Plato and D escartes, this fact in no way justified, he maintained, relying on the information gleaned from them. As he puts it in Conduct of Human L ife, “A s for [the Material World], it is all throughout D arkness and O bscurity; and tho G od has placed a S ensible L ight in it, or rather something that may be an occasional Cause of such a S ensation, yet as to any purpose of Intellectual Illumination, it is still a blind confused Chaos.”39 To accept the various reports of the senses as accurate measures of physical processes was, as Malebranche had taught him, misguided, if understandable; to promulgate a theory of knowledge that, in N orris’s reading of L ocke, espoused these same senses as the necessary avenues to all truth, however, was both philosophically misleading and morally dangerous.40 In N orris’s view, the better theory of knowledge concentrated not on the body’s ability to sense physically, but on the soul’s ability to attend intellectually. It is in this same spirit that Mary A stell, in her S erious Proposal, Part II , declines to include “the S enses” in her “enumeration of the several ways of K nowing.” “[W]e’re more properly said to be Conscious of than to Know such things as we perceive by S ensation,” A stell explains; any “L ight which we �������� N orris, Conduct of Human L ife, 216. For S haftesbury’s “reverence” for L ocke, his former tutor, as a man and “detestation of L ocke’s ideas and their implications for society,” see Richard Voitle, The Third Earl of S haftesbury (Baton Rouge and L ondon: L ouisiana S tate University Press, 1984), pp. 230; cf. pp. 118–22. 40 ������� In his A Brief Consideration of the Remarques made upon the foregoing Reflections by the Gentlemen of the Athenian Society (appended to all but the first edition of Cursory Reflections), Norris argues that even allowing for the concept of “Reflection” does not change the primacy of physical sensation in the L ockean scheme: “For these Ideas of Reflection are but a Secondary sort of ideas that result from the various Compositions and Modifications of those Primary ones of Sensation ... . They are only a various Composition of the first” (reprinted after Norris’s Cursory Reflections in A ppendix Two of my and Melvyn N ew’s modern edition of L etters Concerning the L ove of God, 204). For an elegant defense of L ocke against N orris’s charge, see John W. Y olton, John L ocke and the Way of Ideas (O xford: Clarendon Press, 1956; reprint, 1968), pp. 91–5. 39

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suppose to be let into our Ideas by our S enses,” she continues, “is indeed very dim and fallacious ... .” “We must therefore withdraw our Minds from the World, from adhering to the S enses,” A stell warns her readers, “for ’tis these that usually S teal away the Heart, that seduce the Mind to such unaccountable Wanderings, and so fill up its Capacity that they leave no room for Truth, so distract its Attention that it cannot enquire after her.”41 Mary, L ady Chudleigh follows suit, arguing in her essay “O f K nowledge” that only by raising our thoughts “above sensible O bjects ... to Things purely Intellectual” can we “proceed in our researches after Truth.” 42 To reverse this relationship, she maintains in her essay “O f S elf-L ove,” to subject the “Intellectual Faculties to the S enses,” amounts to the “most convincing Proof” possible of being one’s own “E nem[y].”43 Prior to the Penknife scene, as we have seen, Clarissa’s susceptibility to sensory impressions rendered her vulnerable to L ovelace’s deceptions. His machinations during the Penknife scene itself, like those used to trick Clarissa away from Harlowe Place and to lure her back to Mrs. S inclair’s house, rely once again on providing sensory evidence in support of a ruse that will draw the heroine from her putative safe-haven. L ovelace drafts the entire cast of S inclair’s brothel into this final scheme; it abounds with sounds and sights that, he believes, cannot but convince Clarissa of the truth of the situation presented to her—namely, that he has accidentally discovered through D orcas’s carelessness Clarissa’s attempt to bribe her, and that Clarissa thus must abandon her locked room to rescue the helpful servant from a wrathful L ovelace. A s Clarissa waits in her room upstairs, she becomes, L ovelace knows, a captive audience for the commotion he creates below: Lovelace, upon finding the note, screams at the “trembling” Dorcas (“Cursed, confounded, villainous, bribery and corruption!”) before giving the interposing Will “a good cuff” (947); Mrs. S inclair, S ally, and Polly Horton’s feet “stamp, stamp, stamp,” while their tongues “rave, rave, rave” (947); D orcas, for her part, begs over and again (loudly, to be sure) that she not be forced to say who made the first advances, that her “poor lady” not be made to “suffer” (948). As in the events surrounding her escape from Harlowe Place, what Clarissa hears is designed to work in synergy with what she will see—though this time, instead of a man “running backward and forward,” she will encounter a carefully constructed persecutory scene: the trembling D orcas, surrounding her a mob of winded and red-faced women, and L ovelace with letter in hand. O n this occasion, however, it is L ovelace and his cohorts whose sensory dependence is underscored: �������� A stell, S erious Proposal, Part II , 103 and 113. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Chudleigh, 257. E zell annotates Chudleigh’s interest in distinguishing “between Truth and Falshood, Things that are S imple, and such as are Compounded” as a “reference to L ocke’s distinction between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ ideas” (257; n. to line 192); it is worth noting, however, that in the clause which follows—“Things that are Contingent, from such as are N ecessary” (257)—Chudleigh appears to be borrowing the key terms elaborated in N orris’s Conduct of Human L ife, where, to take just one example, N orris writes “For as I have shewn, ’tis not Contingent, but Necessary Truth, wherein the Perfection of the Understanding does consist” [182]). 43 ��������������� Chudleigh, 304. 41 42

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R eason and R eligion in Clarissa Just then, we heard the lady’s door unbar, unlock, unbolt--- ... . N ow, Belford, see us all sitting in judgement, resolved to punish the fair briberess—I, and the mother ... , the nieces S ally, Polly, the traitress D orcas, and Mabel. ... and hear her unbolt, unlock, unbar, the door. ... and then hear her step towards us, and instantly see her enter among us ... and with a majesty in her person and manner that is natural to her; but which then shone out in all its glory!—Every tongue silent, every eye awed. (948–9)

While the actors below (and Belford beyond) have become, in L ovelace’s account, expectant ears, awed eyes, and silent tongues, Clarissa, concomitantly, appears to them in all her non-corporeal brilliance: “A mouse might have been heard passing over the floor, her own light feet and rustling silks could not have prevented it; for she seemed to tread air, and to be all soul” (949). L ovelace’s description is also Richardson’s hint; as readers of N orris, A stell, or Chudleigh might expect of a woman “all soul,” Clarissa’s opening words immediately dispel L ovelace’s hope that she will react to sensory evidence as she did in the past: “O h thou contemptible and abandoned L ovelace, thinkest thou that I see not through this poor villainous plot of thine, and of these thy wicked accomplices?” (949).44 Clarissa’s is an intellectual triumph, not only over sensual enemies, but over a body whose witness she has learned not to trust. When she attempts later to explain her ability to thwart L ovelace in this attempt at a second rape, she points to an “uncommon elevation of mind” she experienced “before [she] entered into the horrid company” (1117). Richardson, too, underscores the ascendancy of Clarissa’s intellect in his comments on the scene. In the introduction to Meditation IV in Meditations Collected from the S acred Books (1750), Clarissa’s triumph “over L ovelace, and the wicked women” during the Penknife scene is attributed to her “noble exertion of spirit.”45 A nd in a reply of 21 January 1749 to S olomon L owe, who had suggested that Richardson could have enhanced his moral by having Clarissa marry L ovelace before she suffers and dies, the author again points to the “Penknife-S cene,” noting that Clarissa’s “Triumph of Mind” there would be negated if she were brought finally to accept L ovelace as a husband.46 It is surely telling that Clarissa’s boast to L ovelace, “I have my SENSES ,” is made while she holds a penknife to her own chest. S he will not hesitate to destroy through suicide the corporeal seat of her physical senses, the ones Lovelace desperately wishes to arouse, fully confident, as Astell puts it, that “that which is really [her] self, ... that particle of D ivinity within [her]” will 44 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� S arah Chapone, an enthusiastic admirer of N orris and A stell, provides a wonderful example of just such a reader. In her 22 February 1752 letter to Richardson, she notes that Clarissa’s “D efects in Judgment [brought on] that Train of Calamities, which gave her O pportunities of exerting all the latent Powers of her S oul” (Forster Collection of Manuscripts, XII , 2, f. 58). 45 ������������������� S amuel Richardson, Meditations Collected from the S acred Books (1750), in S amuel R ichardson’s Published Commentary, 1: 180. 46 �������������� Carroll, 123.

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“be happy and perfect when it’s [sic] unsuitable and much inferiour Companion is mouldring into D ust.”47 O f course, Clarissa’s ability to threaten her body bespeaks a truth Hensley, for one, has urged readers and critics not to ignore: even if she is described as “all soul” or “all mind,” Clarissa still leads a corporeal existence, still experiences physical sensations, still exists within the parameters of matter and time; she is in L ocke’s world, in other words, her preference for another world notwithstanding.48 For Hensley, Richardson may espouse in Clarissa the spirit’s N eoplatonic transcendence of the body, but he also displays a pre-Romantic recognition (one inspired by his friend and physician G eorge Cheyne)49 that “the soul” is “a moral personality that does not and never clearly can take leave of matter”;50 this dialectical tension, he argues, constitutes the central paradox of Richardson’s novel. L ike G .J. BarkerBenfield in his monumental The Culture of S ensibility (1992), Hensley traces the roots of all sensibility, even spiritual sensibility, to L ocke’s materialism; for both, the apparent “difference of sensibility”51 between L ocke and his detractors ultimately resolves into a question of how far to extend L ocke’s methods and terminology, and thus the difference is in degree, not in kind. E ven the “reactionary theology” of William L aw, argues Hensley (citing G .S . Rousseau), “echoes the terms and assumptions of L ocke’s epistemology,”52 and one hears in his argument �������� A stell, S erious Proposal, Part I, 6. D amrosch, Jr. points to Clarissa as Richardson’s philosophical riposte in the “Pauline and A ugustinian” tradition to “the way his culture was adopting empiricist psychology, which increasingly defined man as a sum total of senseimpressions that need not share any common denominator” (249–50). E ven if we conclude, with D amrosch, Jr., that Richardson was “ill-read”—critics have run the gamut on this question—we do know that Richardson was reading and thinking about at least one figure, John N orris of Bemerton, whose own resistance to L ocke’s perceived materialism was grounded in a Christian-Platonist tradition heavily indebted to S t. A ugustine and S t. Paul. 48 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� S ee D avid C. Hensley, “Thomas E dwards and the D ialectics of Clarissa’s D eath S cene,” Eighteenth-Century L ife 16 (1992): 131–52. 49 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� Cheyne (1671–1743) was a popular physician who stressed the mortification of the body as a means of purging the soul; interest in his relationship with Richardson has increased significantly in the past two decades. Along with Hensley, see Bechler, “‘Trial by what is contrary’”; Raymond S tephanson’s “Richardson’s ‘N erves’: The Physiology of S ensibility in Clarissa,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49, no. 2 (A pril–June, 1988): 267–85.; J.G. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of S ensibility: S ex and S ociety in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 7–15; and D avid S huttleton, “‘Pamela’s L ibrary’: S amuel Richardson and D r. Cheyne’s ‘Universal Cure,’” EighteenthCentury L ife 23 (1999): 55–79. A lso see Mullett’s edition of Cheyne’s letters to Richardson and A nita G uerrini’s excellent biography of Cheyne (Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The L ife and Times of George Cheyne (N orman: University of O klahoma Press, 2000). 50 ������������������������������� Hensley, “Thomas E dwards,” 148. 51 ����������� Ibid., 139. 52 ����������� Ibid., 138. 47

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a hint of Barker-Benfield’s sense that even the most rarified systems of sensibility rest, wittingly or no, on a L ockean base.53 It is true that in their elaborations upon the intellectual faculties, anti-materialist critics of L ocke like N orris and A stell have recourse to the physical “senses” they denigrate. But then, so too, many centuries before L ocke, did Plato and S t. Paul.54 I would argue that Richardson’s acknowledgement of the present union of mind and body in Clarissa (and in his personal letters) no more suggests his “opposition to the rationalist idea of the mind-body split” than do Malebranche’s, N orris’s, A stell’s, or Chudleigh’s similar acknowledgments.55 A s his frequent complaints about his physical health make clear, Richardson was highly attuned to the corporeality of the human being, to the physiological facts—often unfortunate—of bodies.56 53

�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Despite their attacks on Locke, neither Astell nor Shaftesbury, Barker-Benfield contends, “could free [themselves] from the sensational psychology L ocke systematized”; and N orris, for his part, “claimed to discount ‘the influence of the appetites and the senses’” (194; emphasis mine. Barker-Benfield is quoting Perry, A stell, 51). The phrase “claimed to discount” gives a far different impression of N orris’s arguments, of course, than would “discounted”; as I have argued elsewhere, neither A stell nor N orris would have perceived any clear difficulty in distinguishing between the ineluctability of the body’s influence on the mind and the philosophical (and moral) importance of minimizing that influence. S ee my essay “A re Y ou E xperienced?: A stell, L ocke, and E ducation,” in Mary A stell: R eason, Gender, Faith, ed. William K olbrener and Michal Michelson (Burlington: A shgate Publishing, 2007), 181–92. 54 ��� In Conduct of Human L ife, N orris, citing Hierocles, writes, “A s a blear E ye cannot behold a very bright Object till it be Purged so a Soul not yet Clarified and refined by Vertue is not qualified to gaze upon the Beauty of Truth” (210). The workings of the eyes also serve as one of A stell’s favorite analogies for explaining the operations of the intellect. In calling on women to forsake the physical senses for “an inward and S piritual S ensation” (S erious Proposal, Part II , 98), A stell explains that “our care then must be to open our E yes to that Beam of L ight which does in a more especial manner break in upon us” (108); she later writes, “as L ight is always visible to us if we have an O rgan to receive it ... so is Truth, we are surrounded with it, and G od has given us Faculties to receive it” (124). 55 �������������������������������������������������������������������������� Hensley, “Thomas E dwards,” 142. “S ince O riginal S in, man is,” Malebranche writes, “but flesh and blood. The least impression from his sense or passions interrupts his mind’s closest attention, and the flow of spirits and blood sweeps the mind along with it and continually drives it toward sensible objects” (S earch, 3.2.9.248). The lines Belford cites from N orris’s “The Meditation” read, “It must be done (my S oul) but ’tis a strange, / A dismal and Mysterious Change, / When thou shalt leave this Tenement of Clay” (Miscellanies, 30; Clarissa, 1229–30). Astell notes that “the Body and the Mind do so reciprocally influence each other, that we can scarce keep the one in tune if the other be out of it” (S erious Proposal, Part II, 112). Chudleigh complains that “our Bodies ... these heavy L umps of Matter ... depress the Mind, and hinder its O perations” (“O f Friendship,” 343–4). 56 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Richardson frequently refers to a nervous condition (probably Parkinson’s disease) in letters to his many correspondents. The most thorough account of Richardson’s disorder may be found in S tephanson’s “Richardson’s ‘N erves’”; see Cheyne’s letters to Richardson for the doctor’s frequently torturous recommendations to his patient—including, but not limited to, frequent inducements of vomiting, either by thumb or emetic.

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His heroine’s own body is raped, poisoned, and possibly impregnated; touching it touches the mind to which it is presently joined, and vice versa, as Clarissa herself notes early in the novel when she describes for A nna the palpitations of her heart prior to a meeting with S olmes: “O h my dear, what a poor passive machine is the body, when the mind is disordered” (303). Y et, however interconnected the two may be, Clarissa’s body is not her mind, Richardson insists; and by continually attempting to realize Clarissa’s character in immaterial terms, he hoped to make it clear that “Clarissa Harlowe” is something other, to borrow E rickson’s phrase again, than the collection of “all the impressions made upon human sensation by the force of external objects,” something other than what L ovelace can physically manipulate and violate.57 Furthermore, I would suggest that the paradox Hensley locates in Clarissa is one the novel shares with all attempts to use physical components (pen and paper), physical characters (Clarissa, for instance, but also S ocrates, to whom Clarissa is twice compared),58 and physical processes (reading with one’s eyes) to describe spiritual events and experiences.59 Though we might wonder with Hensley “how Clarissa’s time becomes eternity, or in what sense, like the ouroboros on her coffin, eternity swallows or sublates time,”60 we might just as profitably wonder how the “Word” was made “flesh,” how Christ “is risen,” in what sense a human being could ever be alpha and omega, or what the “Form of the G ood” looks like. The dialectic that Hensley localizes in Clarissa, the paradox of articulating spirit in terms of matter, is inherent to Christianity, to Platonism, and to various interminglings of the two. What is important, I think, is not that Richardson failed to distinguish fully his heroine’s physical senses from her soul’s faculties, her body from her mind, but that, in the age of L ocke, he directed his readers’ attention to the latter attributes. 57 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� In E rickson’s view, it is “relevant to Richardson, the author as master printer” that “for L ocke, ‘the person’ is an accumulation of a multitude of imperfectly retained ‘imprints’ from the external world and of ideas formed by internal reflection” (L anguage of the Heart, 214). I am suggesting that L ocke’s point is “relevant” to Clarissa primarily insofar as Richardson’s purpose in raising it seems to be refutation. 58 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ For Belford’s references to S ocrates see pp. 884 and 1307; for a full discussion of these passages, see below, chapter three, pp. 144–7. Braudy argues that “it is no mistake ... that Belford twice identifies Clarissa with Socrates, and, I would say, Socrates as opposed to Christ”; Platonism, Braudy contends, had the benefit of not maintaining a resurrection of the body, a process of doubtful interest, he believes, to Clarissa or her author (194n13). I suspect that whether the tomb is empty, as in Christianity, or the body is abstracted into nothing, as in Platonism, the point is largely the same. 59 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Mary Poovey’s description of Clarissa’s approach towards death seems to be driving at a similar point: “The terms in which Clarissa is described and the details with which she is associated reflect [the] transfiguration of the quotidian through association with the absolute” (“Journeys from This World to the N ext: The Providential Promise in Clarissa and Tom Jones” EL H 43 [1976]: 304). 60 ������������������������������� Hensley, “Thomas E dwards,” 148.

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In short, we simply do not get very far if we assume a L ockean context for the “SENSES” Clarissa celebrates on this occasion; to do so is to conflate categories that, as I have tried to demonstrate, Richardson is at pains to differentiate throughout his novel. Richardson’s attempt to establish a spiritual understanding of Clarissa’s “SENSES ,” one in opposition to L ovelace’s physical brand of sense, may indeed represent part of a broad cultural shift in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, as identified by Barker-Benfield, toward defining “sensibility” in moral terms.61 Y et it is important to remember, as John C. E nglish has cautioned, that “the concept of the spiritual senses (or a single spiritual sense) has a long history which can be traced back” at least to Plato; and N orris, E nglish notes, “referred to the spiritual senses with some frequency.”62 We will better understand Richardson’s comment on the senses in Clarissa, I suspect, if we approach it not as an intellectually careless misappropriation of Locke’s first fountain of knowledge, but as a thoughtful restatement of the argument of works like N orris’s Spiritual Counsel: Or, The Father’s Advice to his Children (1694), where, in an open letter, L ocke’s early philosophical adversary advises his son and daughter to keep “your S piritual S enses equally awake, and your outward S enses disengaged from worldly O bjects.”63 2. Locke and Meaning Clarissa became something of a testing ground for poststructuralist approaches to literature in the 1980’s in large part because the novel and its critical history seemed to prefigure in striking ways deconstructive interpretive theories that stressed the uncertainty inherent to any communicative act. William Beatty Warner, to take one famous (and infamous) example, urged a resistant reading of the novel wherein Richardson emerges as a “side-show illusionist” unable to control his own magic, Clarissa as a masochistic strategist deserving blame for the “refined cruelty with which she leaves this world,” and L ovelace as a D erridean angel whose deceptions of Clarissa are often enough justified by hers of him.64 D espite her evident qualms with Warner’s analysis, Terry Castle likewise concluded that, when it comes to deciphering what Richardson’s novel means, the answer is simple: “one’s reading is all.”65 Indeed, in her Barthes-inspired view, the primary lesson of Clarissa itself is that “meaning is conditioned by individual acts of interpretative aggression” and is thus “always in some sense only what meaning we have made—a contingent, mutable, human meaning.”66 The “hermeneutic libertinage” ordering the world of 61

����������������������� Barker-Benfield, xvii. �������������������������������������������������������������� John C. E nglish, “John Wesley’s Indebtedness to John N orris,” Church History 60.1 (1991): 59. 63 �������� N orris, S piritual Counsel, 485. 64 ����������������������� William Beatty Warner, R eading Clarissa: The S truggles of Interpretation (N ew Haven: Y ale University Press, 1979), xi and 269. 65 ����������� Castle, 56. 66 ��������������� Ibid., 55, 54. 62

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the novel, wherein, “as L ovelace is so fond of pointing out, it is always possible to ‘turn Black White’—to say something is and have it so,” according to Castle, leads to tragedy for its heroine, whose stubborn dedication to “natural signification” fails even unto death, and to a “debacle” for Richardson, whose “irritating” editorial additions to successive additions of his novel, far from rendering it into “the pellucid fable of Christian heroism he desired it should be,” serve only to make readers “conscious of the multiple liberties we can take.”67 S uch arguments not only accept Jocelyn Harris’s notion that “the whole history of Richardson criticism confirms Locke’s fear that consensus about meaning is fragile” (see above, p. 35), but celebrate it. L ocke’s prominence in interpretive discussions of Clarissa is perhaps nowhere more evident than in K eymer’s superb study, which attempts to accommodate, on the one hand, Richardson’s expectation that readers could with effort recover authorially sanctioned meaning from his novel and, on the other hand, the “undeniable force” of the “objections of postructuralist critics,” for whom the process of reading takes place in an unsanctioned arena.68 For K eymer, as for Harris, Richardson’s attention to L ocke’s consideration of words and meaning in the Essay leads to the “tragedy of solitude, inarticulacy, and deceit” found in Clarissa.69 Curiously, if the way into hermeneutic uncertainty in the novel lies in Richardson’s Lockean exposition of “the insufficiency of signs,” the way out, K eymer proposes, likewise may be found in L ocke, to whom K eymer turns in the final paragraphs of his book as a means of dispelling any suggestion that Richardson’s only interest was in forcing readers to “contemplate the awful indeterminacy of human life.”70 Richardson hoped, K eymer offers, that readers would approach his text in the spirit of humility proposed by L ocke “in his chapter ‘Of Judgment’”: “Where Locke identifies the faculty of judgment as a resource with which to encounter indeterminacy, so Richardson seeks to elicit in the reader just this remedial faculty, as a way of making sense first of the text, and then of the world itself.”71 Y et it is not at all clear how judgment, as L ocke describes it, resolves the indeterminacy in question, or that Richardson had any notion that it would do so as he composed and considered his novel. Indeed, although K eymer is eager to distinguish the interpretive positions of L ockean readers who “will take on the mantle of the novel’s missing judge and strive to order it himself” from the relativistic “babble of voices endlessly disputing the rights and wrongs of the case,”72 it is easy enough to see how the one approach could collapse into the other.

67

���������������������������� Ibid, 55, 59, 174, 176, 178. �������� K eymer, R ichardson’s Clarissa, 72. 69 ������������ Ibid., 225. 70 ����������� Ibid., 224. 71 ������������ Ibid., 244. 72 �������������������� Ibid., 243 and 242. 68

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S ir Charles G randison, as Harriet Byrom admiringly informs her readers, “never perverts the meaning of words”73—unfortunately for Clarissa, L ovelace is no G randison. It is hardly surprising that, lacking a referent for an unfamiliar reference he finds in a purloined letter from Anna to Clarissa, the “great namefather” (569) forces it into his own lexicon, treating it as a synonym for his own favorite infinitive, “to plot.” The first letter is dated April 27. ... She [Anna] says in it, I hope you have no cause to repent returning my Norris—It is forthcoming on demand. N ow, what the devil can this mean!—Her Norris forthcoming on demand!—The devil take me, if I am out-Norrised!—If such innocents can allow themselves to plot, to Norris, well may I. (634)

L ovelace here gives the lie to L ocke’s toothless admonition regarding words and meaning, and instead enacts its latent, unsettling potential: “For Words ... being no Man’s private possession, but the common measure of Commerce and Communication, ’tis not for any one, at pleasure, to change the S tamp they are current in; nor alter the Ideas they are affixed to.”74 If we take Castle’s view of L ovelace’s act of hermeneutical liberation, it may seem that Richardson is satirizing N orris’s Platonic faith in a stable realm of essential ideas by allowing L ovelace to go directly to the source, as it were, through disrupting his very name’s significance—much as Derrida transforms John R. Searle into “Sarl” in L imited Inc (1977). The L ockean road to meaning, in this view, leads for L ovelace not to consensus (after all, who says “’tis not for any one?”) but to interpretive jouissance, at the expense, appropriately enough, of L ocke’s earnest critic. However, given the irony of L ovelace’s invocation of N orris’s name—for he is, as I will suggest at some length in chapter three, “out-N orrised” in more ways than one—I would suggest the contrary possibility: namely, that Richardson is registering his wariness of the implications of L ocke’s position, if not of L ocke himself, through L ovelace’s unwitting play upon N orris’s name. Meaning had better rest on something more solid than consensus, Richardson warns his readers. In his own writings, N orris was sure that meaning was a function neither of consensus, as L ocke would have it, nor of “one’s reading,” as Castle contends. In his Cursory Reflections on L ocke’s Essay, he consistently distinguishes between two levels of truth, the “Truth of the S ubject,” which “is the same with a conformable Thought,” and the “Truth of the O bject,” which “is not the Thought it self, but that which is thought upon.”75 Norris accepted that the first level of truth, the “Truth of the S ubject,” was mutable, or, as he put it in Conduct of Human L ife, “contingent”; thus, the word “N orris” was subject to any number of possible employments, or to “Punning,” which Norris defines as “using Words in various S enses,” or “Canting,” which he defines as “using Words without any real S ense or N otion under them.”76 ������������ Richardson, Grandison, 2: 388. ������� L ocke, Essay, 3.11.11.514. 75 �������� N orris, Cursory Reflections, 188. 76 �������� N orris, Conduct of Human L ife, 190. 73

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The instability of the “truth of the subject” followed logically, in N orris’s view, from the limitations of the human condition. “[B]ecause we do not know all the E ssences of things, [we] must be supposed to make that only the E ssence which we intend to signifie by calling it by such a Name,” he explained.77 This is the constructivist vision of “reality” he had found in L ocke’s Essay and which Castle believes can be found in Clarissa, particularly in the “gleeful” pronouncements of L ovelace, for whom “The real is a function of personal vision.”78 For N orris, however, and I think for Richardson in Clarissa, this is only half of the story—and the least interesting half, at that. L ocke, Castle, and L ovelace, from N orris’s perspective, have “confounded Ideas with Words.” “’Tis true indeed,” he writes, “we are fain to sort and rank things by their N ominal E ssences, because the Real O nes are most times unknown; but that is no A rgument against the Being of real E ssences”79 Following a carefully Christianized Platonic logic, N orris conceives of truth as being, by definition, a prediscursive aspect of Divinity itself; as he puts it in his essay “A nother L etter to the same Person, concerning the true N otion of Plato’s Ideas, and of Platonic L ove,” “Plato makes his Divine Ideas not only the exemplary causes of things, but also (which is a consequent to the former) the measure of their Truth.”80 Whatever is true is so not hypothetically, as L ocke supposed, but actually, essentially, really, in the strict sense of the word.81 Indeed, in Norris’s view, Locke’s major mistake lies in the fact that he has “confine[d] his D iscourse to Truth of Words and Truth of Thoughts without the least mention of O bjective Truth,” which “consists not in the minds joyning or separating either S igns or Ideas, but in the E ssential Habitudes that are between the Ideas themselves.”82 The human mind arrives at truth, for N orris; it does not, properly speaking, create it, much as, for Descartes, our awareness of finitude rests always on an innate awareness of infinitude; “For by thinking we do not make Truth,” N orris insists, “but only perceive it as it is in it self, by attending to that L ight which shines upon us, and is intimately present with us.”83 But the existence of objective truth, of essential meaning, did not guarantee for Norris its easy acquisition. Even the most refined human minds, trapped in their �������� N orris, Cursory Reflections, 195. ������������������ Castle, 54 and 55. 79 �������� N orris, Conduct of Human L ife, 185 and 35. 80 �������� N orris, Miscellanies, 439. 81 ���� Cf. Essay, 4.11.14.638: “S uch Propositions are therefore called Eternal Truths, not because they are E ternal Propositions actually formed, and antecedent to the Understanding ... But because being once made, about abstract Ideas, so as to be true, they will, whenever they can be supposed to be made again at any time past or to come ... always actually be true.” 82 �������� N orris, Cursory Reflections, 196. L ocke himself struggles with the implications of his argument in book 4, chapter 4, of Essay. He there attempts to reconcile his insistence that “the Mind knows not Things immediately, but only by the intervention of the Ideas it has of them” with his desire to ground human knowledge in “the reality of Things.” A s he himself notes, it is a reconciliation that “seems not to want difficulty” (563; see pp. 562–73). 83 �������� N orris, Conduct of Human L ife, 123. 77 78

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“Terrestrial Vehicle[s],” struggle for a pittance of certain knowledge, a limitation N orris “ground[s] upon those Words of the A postle, Now we see through a Glass, darkly.”84 If N orris’s invocation of Paul’s famous phrase (1 Corinthians 13: 12) is a mark of his faith as a Christian, it is also an indication of his idealist and rationalist tendencies as a philosopher; following Plato and Paul, N orris deduces from the uncertainty permeating the human condition a level of certainty underlying all. The very possibility of various “truths” of “subjects” depends on the existence of a level of objective, eternal truth toward which human minds inevitably strive, but only rarely arrive. To see “darkly” is, in short, to see something. O n the one hand, then, N orris’s and L ocke’s respective pictures of the human being in the world are virtually indistinguishable. “What we know of G od is but little ... What we know of our selves perhaps is less, and what we know of the World about us is not much”—this is N orris in R eason and R eligion, but it could easily be L ocke in the Essay.85 How N orris and L ocke arrived at this picture, on the other hand, and the conclusions they derived therefrom, were different in ways that mattered to Richardson as he sought to muster a response to the L ovelacean evisceration of truth as a meaningful category. “The Patrons of S cepticism,” as N orris puts it, “had much more reason to conclude from the Disability of our Faculties, and the slightness of our A ttainments, than from the uncertainty and instability of Truth, that there is no Knowledge.”86 Pace Castle, Richardson was never really trying to create a “pellucid” fairy tale the moral truth of which could never be in doubt, though this charge is obviously helpful in building the case for his novel’s accidental relativism. He was, rather, attempting to create a narrative wherein opacity, far from precluding essential truth and meaning, served as a difficult guarantee, one available, if at all, only to the most attentive of readers. For his part, N orris early proffered the soul’s ability to exert “attention” as a bedrock principle of his thought. His explanation of it in “D iscourse upon Romans 12.3.” (reprinted in Miscellanies) represents, in A cworth’s words, “one of the most important philosophical statements of his early years.”87 This sermon is sometimes �������� N orris, R eason and R eligion, 211. ������������������������ Ibid., 233. Cf. L ocke’s Essay, book 4, chapter 3: “Of the Extent of Human Knowledge.” 86 �������� N orris, Human L ife, 225. 87 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� A cworth, 42. The sermon, also known as “The Root of L iberty,” is a reprint of a 1685 sermon N orris dedicated to his future correspondent Henry More. (The sermon, in fact, occasioned the correspondence, which can be found in N orris’s Theory and R egulation of L ove [1688]). If, as E rickson speculates in The L anguage of the Heart (185–7), Richardson drew his ideas about the physical and metaphysical heart in part from N orris’s Theory and R egulation of L ove, he would have been familiar with N orris and More’s epistolary debate regarding “A ttention” contained in the same text. S ee Theory and R egulation of L ove, 144–238 and appendix. N orris’s sermon, it should be noted, was written four years before he encountered Malebranche, who in his S earch A fter Truth also posits “A ttention” as central to a conception of a non-determined human being; as noted in the introduction, Norris’s first mentionings of Malebranche (whom he never hesitated to cite in support of his own views) are found in works written after the publication of Miscellanies. 84 85

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referred to as “The Root of Liberty,” and the alternate title is fitting inasmuch as it captures the essence of N orris’s engagement with a standard epistemological problem: if the “S oul necessarily wills as she understands,” and the “S oul necessarily understand[s] as the O bject appears,” it would appear that the human condition “terminates in Fatality”—i.e., that free will is an illusion because our passive experience of the outside world inextricably and inexorably shapes us. “Necessity,” in this case, “bounds our Horizon.”88 Y et N orris was no S pinozist (L ocke’s complaints notwithstanding89). In keeping with his Christian-Platonist inclinations, N orris found saving grace in considering human experience in terms of its fallen relationship to essential categories of knowledge. The human mind could strive toward, if rarely arrive at, objective truth, in his account, depending on the amount of attention exerted. “[A ]ltho the S oul necessarily understands or judges according to the A ppearance of things,” he writes, “yet that things should so appear ... is not alike necessary, but depends upon the degrees of A dvertency or A ttention which the S oul uses.”90 A s John H. Muirhead noted long ago, while “attention” carries little weight in L ocke’s version of human psychology, to N orris (and to those associated with him), “attention” was “a matter of first-rate importance.”91 Richardson’s pointed appeals for “attention” in Clarissa and in the prefatory materials accompanying it suggest that the same might be said of the novelist. Richardson, to be sure, hoped readers would approach his second novel attentively—even if it meant guiding them through his own intrusive efforts. “A ttention,” for him, was something akin to what we might today call “active listening,” as Christina G illis suggests,92 an analogy that captures the relationship between reader and text (or subject and object) in terms N orris would readily have appreciated. Already in the first edition of Clarissa, Richardson was willing to prod his readers into an “attentive” reading of the text; in an editorial footnote (one found, perhaps not coincidentally, just after Clarissa has spoken of her own revival of “attention” [1012]), Richardson writes, “The attentive reader need not be referred back for what the lady nevertheless could not account for [Tomlinson’s intimate knowledge of her family and affairs], as she knew not that Mr. L ovelace had come at Miss Howe’s letters” (1013). The dizzying array of misreadings—perceived, real, and in-between—he endured in the letters and conversations of friends and �������� N orris, Miscellanies, 342. ���������������������������������� S ee below, chapter three, p. 128. 90 �������� N orris, Miscellanies, 342. 91 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “L ittle as psychology owes to N orris as compared with L ocke, the place he assigns to attention is all to his credit. To him this was a matter of first-rate importance, seeing that, anticipating modern views, he found the seat of the freedom of the will not in the power of directly determining to overt action (this necessarily follows the dictate of the understanding), but in the power of attending or not attending more or less to an objective” (John H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in A nglo-S axon Philosophy: S tudies in the History of Idealism in England and A merica [N ew Y ork: Macmillan Company, 1931], 92–3). 92 �������������������������� Christina Marsden G illis, The Paradox of Privacy: Epistolary Form in Clarissa (G ainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984), 9. 88

89

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acquaintances alike convinced him to exert even more authorial influence in the following editions of his novel. In his “Hints of Prefaces for Clarissa,” a document Tom K eymer believes “began as an attempt (eventually set aside in favour of a short A dvertisement) to furnish the [second] edition of June 1749 with a substantial new Preface,”93 Richardson repeatedly underscores the importance of “attention” in the reading process. The Table of Contents added to the second edition (1749), as Richardson explains in “Hints of Prefaces,” was “D rawn up with a View to obviate such O bjections as have been made to particular Characters and Passages, thro’ want of A ttention to the S tory”; it will help careless readers, Richardson insists, to “attend to the Connexion, and to the Instruction aimed to be given ... .”94 The infamous footnotes Richardson added to the third edition of Clarissa (1751) are similarly designed explicitly to correct the mistakes of inattentive reading. “[W]ant of due attention” led readers to attribute too much merit to L ovelace on his sparing of Rosebud.95 “Readers as have been attentive to Mr. L ovelace’s manner of working” will not doubt his hand in manipulating Clarissa’s A unt Hervey.96 Those who would blame Clarissa for acting with “too much reserve” towards L ovelace “have not paid a due attention to the S tory.”97 It “must be owing to want of attention” that readers accuse Clarissa of being “over-nice.”98 In Castle’s widely shared view, Richardson came to a “belated, partial recognition of the indeterminacy of his fiction” only as an “afterthought,” hence the “petulant babble at the bottom of the page” of the third and subsequent editions of his novel.99 Y et Richardson’s later attempts to clarify the meaning of his novel, however reductive they may be, are extensions of what was already a central concern for the author as he wrote and revised the first edition, namely the desire to produce a text that could both demand attention and reveal intention. The author’s pre-publication letters to A aron Hill, whose suggestions for editing and revision the author solicited but only rarely accepted, offer a telling 93 ������������������������������������������������������������������ S ee K eymer’s introduction to “Hints of Prefaces for Clarissa,” in S amuel R ichardson’s Published Commentary, 1: 312–13. 94 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Ibid., 1: 327. Richardson may have borrowed this language from A stell, who advised women to read “such Books ... as are fuller of Matter than Words, which diffuse a light through every part of their S ubject, do not S kim, but Penetrate it to the bottom, yet so as to leave somewhat to be wrought out by the Reader’s own Meditations; such as are writ with Order and Connexion, the Strength of whose Arguments can’t be sufficiently felt unless we remember and compare the whole S ystem. ’Tis impossible to prescribe absolutely, and every one may easily find what Authors are most apt to stay their Attention, and shou’d apply to them” (S erious Proposal, Part II , 113–14). 95 ������������������� S amuel Richardson, Clarissa. Or, the History of a Young L ady, 3rd edition (1751). In vols 1–8 of The Clarissa Project, ed. Florian S tuber (N ew Y ork: A MS Press, 1990), 2: 157–8. 96 �������������� Ibid., 2: 305. 97 ������������� Ibid., 3: 14. 98 ����������������� Ibid., 4: 106–7. 99 ������������������ Castle, 172, 176.

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indication of how seriously Richardson took his intentions in Clarissa, long before the reactionary third edition.100 To Hill’s suggestion in a letter of 23 O ctober 1746 that Clarissa should be “in downright L ove,” and that L ovelace’s character, as Carroll puts it, “be softened,” Richardson responded by explaining that he “intended” Clarissa to be almost entirely “faultless” in her dealings with her would-be seducer; L ovelace, he explains, “I intend to be unamiable” (letter of 29 O ctober 1746).101 “I intend in him a new Character, not confined to usual Rules,” Richardson responded to Hill’s next revision of L ovelace’s character (letter of 5 January 1747).102 When Hill became flustered by Richardson’s increasingly impatient dismissals of his suggestions, Richardson tried (largely unsuccessfully) to ratchet down his tone, but not his position. “I never had the A ssurance to think [my S cribbling] any-thing extraordinary—O nly knew my Intention,” he assures Hill in a letter of 26 January 1747.103 Richardson accepts that Hill’s ascription of love to Clarissa is undeniably a “natural” reflection of “the Reasoning of young Women,” but he nevertheless “humbly” submits to Hill—in the passive voice— that “sufficient Attention is not given” in Hill’s revision “to [Clarissa’s] being so rigorously impelled” into L ovelace’s power; “I must still say ... I intended the Passion should be inspired and grow, unknown to herself.”104 By the midway point of his letter, Richardson’s impatience has once again begun to boil over. Hill has missed “one of the principal Morals” of Richardson’s “S tory” by calling Clarissa’s escape from Harlowe Place “a rash Elopement with a Man,” causing Richardson to lament how “little understood” are his intentions; “how can I but doubt my own Conduct in this S tory, when, if I did not, I must question your A ttention to it,” Richardson asks in frustration—and with only perfunctory modesty. That Hill could ever wonder if Richardson “intended” Clarissa “for an Example”—“indeed,” the author assures his wayward advisor, he “did, and that in the most trying and arduous Cases, or [he] would not have set Pen to Paper”—is grounds for near despondency. Richardson finds his “principal Design and End so liable to be misapprehended” that he wonders whether he should even bother to “trouble the World for its O pinion.”105 That he could not communicate his intentions in Clarissa even to a learned friend like Hill, whose attention he wished not to doubt, suggested to Richardson good reason for pessimism regarding “the

100

������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Cf. Julia G enster’s comment: “[Richardson] ultimately enforced his own design in the novel and defended his choices in the correspondence, perhaps most emphatically with A aron Hill, whose views Richardson solicited, then rejected” (“Belforded O ver: The Reader in Clarissa,” in Clarissa and her R eaders: New Essays for The Clarissa Project, vol. 9 of The Clarissa Project [N ew Y ork: A MS Press, 1999], 143). 101 ������������������������ Carroll, 70n55; 72, 73. 102 ����������� Ibid., 76. 103 ����������� Ibid., 78. 104 ���������� Ibid., 81. 105 ������������������� Ibid., 82, 83, 84.

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poor ineffectual History of Clarissa” (letter of 26 N ovember 1749 to S usanna Highmore)106—and, of course, for further, and ever less forgiving, clarification.107 Y et, when discussing with his correspondents the “meaning” of his next novel, S ir Charles Grandison, Richardson proves surprisingly diplomatic. In a letter of 10 O ctober 1754 to L ady E chlin, who had “[met] with Persons who quarrel with S ir Charles G randison,” Richardson seems rather to shrug his shoulders, admitting, “[I]t is impossible that Readers the most attentive, can always enter into the Views of the Writer of a Piece written, as hoped, to N ature and the Moment. ... every one putting him and herself into the Character they read, and judging of it by their own S ensations.”108 Indeed, the author proudly claims the ambiguities as his own, explaining, “Many things are thrown out in the several characters, on purpose to provoke friendly debate; and perhaps as trials of the reader’s judgment, manners, taste, and capacity.”109 To Hester Mulso, with whom he had clashed mightily three years earlier over Clarissa’s relationship to her parents, Richardson offers assurances that Grandison “abounds, and was intended to abound, with situations that should give occasion for debate, or different ways of thinking.”110 This is the same author who, in an epistolary rebuke to S usanna Highmore for questioning the motivational efficacy of “mere parental authority and filial obedience” when compared to the “ties of gratitude and love,” could claim unequivocally of Clarissa Harlowe, “A n example is an example; right is right; and wrong is wrong” (letter of 26 N ovember 1749).111 To quote John D ussinger, “will the real S amuel Richardson please stand up?”112 In part, Richardson’s discordant treatment of varying responses to these two novels may be explained by noting that his hermeneutical latitude surfaces during his composition of Grandison, a novel for which, as Jocelyn Harris shows in her splendid introduction, the author had no clear plan and, it would appear, little stomach. O ne might say, with only slight exaggeration, that Grandison is to Clarissa what Pamela, Part II is to Pamela. Certainly, from beginning to end, 106

������������������ Barbauld, 2: 217. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� It is worth noting that appended to the third and all subsequent editions of Clarissa was, as D ussinger explains, “a collection of quotations from the novel arranged alphabetically under various headings, together with a detailed index to each volume.” This index, yet another means of controlling the response of readers, would eventually grow into the comprehensive Collection of the Moral and Instructive S entiments ... in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and S ir Charles Grandison (1755). S ee D ussinger’s introduction to the reproduction of Collection in vol. 3 of S amuel R ichardson’s Published Commentary, p. vii. 108 �������������� Carroll, 316. 109 ������������ Ibid., 315. 110 ������������ Ibid., 311. 111 ���������������������� Barbauld, 2: 216, 218. 112 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� D ussinger, “S tealing in the great doctrines of Christianity,” 458n15. D ussinger is commenting upon another of Richardson’s characteristic vacillations, in this case his inconsistent interpretation of the implications of A dam and E ve’s Fall. 107

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Richardson was more protective of Clarissa than of Grandison; while he solicited friends and acquaintances for advice and assistance in writing both novels, his willingness to accept his readers’ ideas is notably absent in the correspondence surrounding the composition of Clarissa, almost as if the “trials” of his readers’ “judgments” in this case began even before publication. O f course, the Richardson of Grandison is older, in worse health, and somewhat beaten down, but perhaps also wiser—“The Critics,” he declaims in a letter of 9 O ctober 1754 to L ady Bradshaigh, “I am at their Mercy.”113 Where Richardson had complained in a letter of 19 N ovember 1747 to E dward Y oung of the “disputes” he “involved” himself in “with [his] poor Clarissa” by requesting revisions from readers of the manuscript, grumbling, “I wish I had never consulted any body but D r. Y oung, who so kindly vouchsafed me his ear, and sometimes his opinion,” in a letter of 21 A ugust 1754 to Hester Mulso, he proposed, quite to the contrary, handing the characters of S ir Charles Grandison over to his correspondents so that they could continue the story.114 In K eymer’s view, the author’s proposal for turning his readers into authors is perfectly fitting, a revelation, as it were, of the natural tendency of his theory of fiction; “S ir Charles Grandison, and the career of its author,” K eymer writes, “could not have reached a more appropriate close.”115 Richardson’s idea to farm out his novel’s characters, K eymer suggests, only extends, mutatis mutandis, the logic of one of the author’s most famous pronouncements on the appropriate level of readerly involvement in the creative process, made in a letter of 30 May 1754 to L ady Bradshaigh: It is not an unartful Management to interest the Readers so much in the S tory, as to make them differ in O pinion as to the Capital A rticles, and by L eading one, to espouse one, another, another, O pinion, make them all, if not A uthors, Carvers.116

A s crucial as this statement is to understanding Richardson’s thinking in Grandison, however, it is in important ways inappropriate to the compositional logic governing Clarissa; the phrases “‘making out,’ ‘carving,’ ‘judging,’ ‘debating,’ ‘thinking’ in ‘different ways,’” which K eymer quotes as comprehensively representative of Richardson’s theory of fiction, all spring from the letters Richardson wrote to Lady Bradshaigh as he was writing his final novel. Almost entirely absent from the author’s correspondence with his many Grandison interlocutors and advisers, L ady Bradshaigh among them, are calls for his readers’ “attention” or, concomitantly, announcements of his own “intentions.”

113

�������������� Carroll, 314. ���������������� Ibid., 84, 306. 115 �������� K eymer, R ichardson’s Clarissa, 76. 116 ����������������������������������������������������������������� Forster Collection of Manuscripts, XI, f. 87.; quoted in K eymer, R ichardson’s Clarissa, 74. Carroll provides a misreading of this letter, “carpers” for “carvers” (296). 114

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In other words, the liberality of Richardson’s attitude towards meaning in Grandison represents not just an expansion of his views in Clarissa, but a seachange—perhaps, to some degree, a giving up, but also a definitive shift in narrative interests and strategy. In both novels, it is true, Richardson deliberately involves his readers in a morass of competing perspectives, shifting psychologies, and minute details; only in Grandison, however, is the morass itself the point. “S ome debatable Things I have inserted,” the author explains to L ady Bradshaigh, “others let go, purely to be called to A ccount; and, if the Piece be read, to set People into D ebates” (letter of 5 O ctober 1753).117 The tautology of Richardson’s equation for Grandison is suggestive, particularly when compared to his similar, yet crucially different, pronouncements regarding Clarissa. Where in Grandison “debatable things” are impetuses to “D ebates,” insuperability in Clarissa, as Richardson makes clear in a letter of 29 O ctober 1746 to A aron Hill, is a means to an end that, strictly speaking, lies beyond debate: “[A] Reader should find no way to account for the Calamities [Clarissa] met with and to justify Moral E quity,” he explains, “but by looking up to a future Reward”; he “had not indeed, sat down to scribble on this S ubject, but with this View.”118 It is true that even in his most equivocal comments on Grandison, the author continues to point to the text itself as the final arbiter of attentive or inattentive readings, just as he did in the additions to Clarissa, and that “even here,” as K eymer puts it, “there survives a considerable sense of authorial control.”119 To L ady Bradshaigh’s insistence that S ir Charles “had some pleasing S ensations at leaving Italy,” Richardson responds, “If your L adiship will have it so, so let it be. The Book is now before you. That must determine us both.”120 What is missing from such comments, however, is the marriage of intention, attention, and meaning so crucial to the author’s comments on Clarissa. It is simply impossible to imagine Richardson saying of Clarissa Harlowe what he does of his next protagonist, S ir Charles G randison: “I don’t desire to be better acquainted with his Mind, than any of his Readers.”121 This is the same author, after all, who, after scoffingly wondering to Aaron Hill if he could trust “the World” to give Clarissa even one “attentive” reading, defends his decision to add a table of contents to the second edition by explaining that doing so will aid readers better to understand the novel “in the Way I chose to have it understood in” (letter of 12 July 1749).122 It may simply be that the distinction between Richardson’s respective conceptions of meaning in Clarissa and Grandison results from their differing subject matter, which K eymer (following Richardson) characterizes as “delicate”

117

������������� Carroll, 244. ����������� Ibid., 73. 119 �������� K eymer, R ichardson’s Clarissa, 74. 120 ������������������ Carroll, 300–301. 121 ������������ Ibid., 301. 122 ����������� Ibid., 126. 118

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vs. “critical,”123 but which might well be classified as “contingent” vs. “necessary.” In Grandison, Richardson returned to his roots, as it were, allowing readers to experience, as he had 13 years earlier in Pamela, what is required for “virtue” to be “rewarded” in the temporal world of everyday, lived experience. The truths that Richardson in Grandison are, as N orris might have put it, those of “the subject”— Lockean territory, in short—and it is thus fitting that the novelist would here encourage debate among his readers; his intention, in this case, is to encourage readers to “carve” from the text meanings that suffice for themselves. But if in Grandison, uncertainty is the point, in Clarissa, uncertainty has a point, and a “necessary” one at that—or, put another way, the point is that there is a “truth of the O bject,” as N orris would have put it, beyond the destabilizing contingencies of Clarissa Harlowe’s “history.”124 Thus the apparent paradox that Clarissa, the most conflicted and ambiguous of all Richardson’s novels, provoked from him the most strenuous avowals of determinate meaning, the most unapologetic commitment to what we now call the intentional fallacy. The intricately interwoven minutia of human experience with which Richardson filled his second novel—all 1500 pages of it, in the Angus Ross Penguin edition—both is and is not, as the author understood it, the thing. The interminable debates among readers over the propriety of Clarissa’s escape from Harlowe Place, the nature of her feelings for L ovelace, the titular salaciousness of the “fire scene,” or the heroine’s irrational fear of her father’s curse, seemed to Richardson quite literally to be distracting from the A rchimedean point of certainty on which he deliberately hinged the inscrutability of the events of his novel, the essential meaning that was, he believed, just visible to the attentive reader, and which justified in the author’s mind the insuperable difficulties of his plot. And yet that essential meaning, Richardson’s never quite articulate-able, essentially theodicean, final intention, is nowise visible to readers except through those inscrutable events. In this respect, the sprawling complexity of the first edition and the author’s near obsession with revision and clarification in subsequent editions may both be understood as signs of his commitment in Clarissa to an understanding of meaning according to which the failure to communicate truth in no way compromises its actual existence. “[W]e are aware, or hopeful,” Murray Brown writes of Richardson’s novel, “that somewhere in this enormous body of writing lie the keys to understanding. ... It is this enigmatic and unmanageable quality that compels us to seek a greater understanding but without the promise—

�������� K eymer, R ichardson’s Clarissa, 72. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� D ussinger suggests that Clarissa’s inability to maintain an inviolably sincere posture as storyteller points to the novel’s larger recognition: “[T]he truth is always out of reach, beyond language and the mind’s reductive categories of experience” (“Truth and S torytelling in Clarissa,” in Tercentenary Essays, 41). I am suggesting N orris helped Richardson to mitigate the damage of just this awareness—that the truth is out of reach has no bearing, in N orris’s view, on its existence. 123 124

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and only the hope—that it even exists.”125 What Richardson found in N orris, and what he did not find in Locke, was philosophical grounds for promising that his readers’ hopes (and quite possibly, as Heather Zias astutely suggests, his own126) were not in vain—that on the other side of the darkened glass lay a key to his enigma. 3. Locke and Political Liberalism L ike so much else having to do with his biography, Richardson’s political leanings are notoriously opaque. It is not possible even to label him Whig or Tory with any certainty. E arly in his career, Richardson associated with such vehement Tory critics of Robert Walpole as A rchibald Hutcheson and Francis A tterbury, and he served as printer for The True Briton, a twice-weekly newspaper championing the antigovernment views of Philip, D uke of Wharton. K eith Maslen demonstrates that “all 74 issues” of Wharton’s paper, published between June 1723 and February 1724, came from Richardson’s press—thus putting him in precarious proximity to a barely closeted Jacobite who, by 1725, was out of the closet and in the service of the Pretender on the continent. “E xactly how Richardson managed both to remain the printer,” Maslen writes, “and avoid notice can only be guessed.”127 It seems likely that whatever his involvement with the likes of Wharton—John D ussinger has recently provided solid evidence that he did more than print The True Briton128— Richardson was both careful and conflicted enough not to commit himself quite beyond the pale. Indeed, in the same year that Wharton flew England and the ascendant Walpole, Richardson’s press began printing The Daily Journal, a paper that, if not an official Whig organ, certainly did its best to remain on good terms with the powers that were. O n this point, William S ale surely had Richardson right: 125 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Murray L . Brown, “T.C. D uncan E aves, Ben D . K impel, and the L ife: A Brief and A pologetic Memoir,” 1650–1850: Ideas, A esthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 9 (2003): 331. 126 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “[D ]escribing the reader who mishandles the text as ‘inattentive’ is a way to keep up the appearance that a reader’s reformation through greater attention is always possible. But labeling a reader ‘inattentive’ may also be a subtle means of implying something like ‘This novel was not written for someone such as yourself.’ ... Perhaps, in the end, Richardson had to guard against the cynicism of realizing he had preached a very long sermon to the already converted” (Heather Zias, “Who Can Believe? S entiment vs. Cynicism in Richardson’s Clarissa,” Eighteenth-Century L ife 27.3 [2003]: 118). 127 ������������ Maslen, 28. 128 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� Richardson appears to be the anonymous author of several letters printed in Wharton’s paper in the years immediately following the S outh S ea Bubble (1720). S ee D ussinger’s “S amuel Richardson’s ‘E legant D isquisitions’: A nonymous Writing in the True Briton and O ther Journals?” S tudies in Bibliography 53 (2000): 195–226. A lso see D ussinger’s entry for Richardson in the new DNB, where he underscores Richardson’s “risky” and “daring” involvement with Tory critics of Walpole early in his printing career.

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“his association with both Tory and Whig periodicals is evidence of the attraction of the two conflicting ways of life.”129 Richardson’s allegiance to liberal political theory is, at best, equally ambiguous. This point can be illustrated by considering just where the author would have aligned himself with respect to James, Jr.’s description of Clarissa’s unmarried status prior to her escape from Harlowe Place: “The vile wretch you have set your heart upon speaks ... plainly to everybody, though you won’t. He says you are his and shall be his, and he will be the death of any man who robs him of his PRO PE RTY ... . My father supposing he has the right of a father in his child is absolutely determined not to be bullied out of that right” (223). O bviously, James, Jr. is a mean-spirited antagonist, and his tone and demeanor encourage us to reject his logic. A nd yet, it is not at all clear that the author himself would follow our lead in taking this step. Keymer deduces Richardson’s qualified support for James, Jr.’s deeply conservative, essentially Filmerian view of the father-child relationship from Hester Mulso’s spirited responses to Richardson (Richardson’s letters to her do not survive). To Richardson’s annoyed reference to “PUZZLING LO CKE ,” apparently an attack on L ocke’s defense of active political resistance prompted by Mulso’s appeal to his authority, Mulso indignantly responds, “Poor Mr. L ocke, who is called PUZZLING LO CKE ... . ours is, I believe, the first cause he ever puzzled.”130 In the end, K eymer suggests, Richardson’s “opposite allegiances to patriarchal authority and individual liberty” forced him to remain evasive on a question where neither position struck him as “wholly right” or “wholly wrong.”131 It is only fitting, then, that for all her biting reflections on her misogynistic family, Clarissa (like Richardson) never explicitly questions the fundamental axioms of James, Jr.’s argument; the metonymic date of death she will eventually have inscribed on her coffin, Belford learns late in the novel, “was the fatal day of her leaving her father’s house” (1306). Richardson, one imagines Mulso writing in an unsent letter, had little business charging anyone else with being “PUZZLING .” But then, Mulso is herself forced into an awkward parenthetical admission in the course of linking her feminist argument to L ockean political theory. Having quoted L ocke on the natural liberty from his father of a son who has reached “an age of discretion” and a “state of reason,” Mulso writes, “(A nd if his son, I presume his daughter too; since the duty of a child is equally imposed on both, and since the natural liberty Mr. L ocke speaks of arising from reason, it can never be proved that women have not a right to it, unless it can be proved that they are not capable of knowing the law they are under).”132 N either Carole Pateman nor Patricia S pringborg would be surprised to learn that in her debate with Richardson, 129 ���������������������� William M. S ale, Jr., S amuel R ichardson: Master Printer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950), 35. 130 ���������������� Hester Chapone, The Works of Mrs. Chapone, 4 vols in 2 (Boston, W. Wells and T.B. Wait and Co.: 1809), 1: 86–7. 131 �������� K eymer, R ichardson’s Clarissa, 121–2. 132 ���������������� Chapone, 1: 39.

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Mulso was forced to infer feminist implications from L ocke’s argument on behalf of male children. From L ocke to Rousseau, Pateman has shown, liberal theorists historically have found ways around allowing their arguments to “extend to beliefs about women.” “From the outset,” she argues, “liberal theorists were content to ignore their own arguments about the conventional character of authority relationships, and to fall back on arguments from ‘nature’ for female individuals.”133 O ur tendency to see “feminist political thought ... as beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft, and as an outgrowth of ‘liberalism,’” in Pateman’s view, is vastly to oversimplify a complicated history; “[A ]rguments that can reasonably be seen as ‘feminist’ ... have been made by women writers of varying, and sometimes surprising, political allegiences.”134 S pringborg, for her part, likewise criticizes the “progressivist assumptions” modern scholars often rely upon in disqualifying politically conservative early-modern women from the feminist fold.135 “The refusal to apply the term ‘feminist’” to such women “involves a kind of reverse anachronism,” S pringborg argues. “It assumes that we moderns, or postmoderns, have a monopoly on the claim to feminism, and that to pass the test earlier thinkers would have to exhibit the sort of Whiggish political progressivism that could only be the outcome of the process in which they were engaged.”136 Indeed, as S pringborg demonstrates, “critics of liberalism” such as A stell, A phra Behn, and Judith D rake played a central role in determining the trajectory of western feminism.137 Put differently—without Mary A stell, no Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97). It is a crooked line, however, that connects these two early feminists. A side from a first name, and a shared concern for their sex, Astell and Wollstonecraft shared scant theoretical common ground.138 In her Vindication of the R ights of Women (1792), Wollstonecraft applied L ocke’s theories of social contract and education, as L ocke himself had not, to women, arguing from his liberal principles for the rights of women as free individuals; furthermore, L ocke’s sense-based epistemology underscores, as Miriam Brody notes, “the whole of the Vindication.”139 (E ven her attack on the identification of women with a materialized sensibility, Barker-Benfield ���������������� Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critical A nalysis of L iberal Theory (N ew Y ork: John Wiley & S ons, 1979), 171. A lso see Pateman’s The S exual Contract (S tanford: S tanford University Press, 1988). 134 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Carole Pateman, “Women’s Writing, Women’s S tanding: Theory and Politics in the E arly Modern Period,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, 367. A stell, for her, offers “a prime example of early modern women writers who were political conservatives, but who nonetheless present arguments that fall squarely within the themes of feminist political thought” (“Women’s Writing, Women’s S tanding,” 368–9). 135 ������������ S pringborg, Mary A stell: Theorist of Freedom, 12. 136 ���������� Ibid., 6. 137 ���������� Ibid., 26. 138 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� O n this point, see Regina Janes, “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, or Mary A stell and Mary Wollstonecraft Compared,” S tudies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 5 (1976): 121–39. 139 ������������������������������������������������� S ee Brody’s introduction to Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the R ights of Women, ed. Miriam Brody (L ondon: Penguin Books, 1992), 44. 133

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argues, is made from an essentially L ockean-N ewtonian materialist position.140) A stell, a conservative High-Church Tory, abhorred L ocke’s political writings and considered his allegiance to sensory knowledge not only philosophically misguided, but morally dangerous. Her final sustained work, Christian R eligion, offers a comprehensive—and explicit—rejection of L ocke’s thinking in matters of philosophy, religion, and politics.141 While A stell called on women to empower themselves by eschewing marriage, thereby escaping those twin epitomes of physicality (sex and reproduction), Wollstonecraft embraced motherhood as a woman’s most powerful feminist expression.142 True, Wollstonecraft, like A stell, insisted that women were more than bodies, and that their latent intellectual capacities equaled those of men, but she had no truck with her culture’s hypocritical demand of chastity from women and not men, and she blamed Richardson for making “Clarissa tell L ovelace that he had robbed her of her honour,” adding that Richardson “must have had strange notions of honour and virtue” to believe that Clarissa could be “degraded” without her “consent.”143 Clarissa’s stringent association of “virtue” with physical inviolability rankled Wollstonecraft’s sense of fair play, as evidenced by her posthumously published novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), and it probably rankles that of many modern readers.144 For her part, however, A stell would well have understood Clarissa’s intensely moralistic view of female sexuality—one is tempted to say that for A stell, as for S haron D eevey 300 years later, “every fuck is a rape,” every sexual encounter, 140

������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Barker-Benfield, 16. Cf. Janes’s point regarding Wollstonecraft’s attack on the cult of sensibility: “[T]he sexual character of women, that idealization of feminine weakness and docility, was an opponent A stell did not have to confront, for it emerged as the dominant mode for talking about women only in the forties and fifties of the century” (134). 141 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� A stell moved her major criticism of L ocke to an appendix in the second and third editions of Christian R eligion (1717, 1730); the appendix to the second edition is reprinted as A ppendix Three in my and Melvyn N ew’s modern edition of L etters Concerning the L ove of God, 221–50. S ee also my “Mary A stell’s Ironic A ssault.” 142 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Janes notes that while “the primary social model Wollstonecraft holds out for women is respectable motherhood,” A stell saw motherhood as, at best, “a martyrdom for the sake of raising up souls to heaven” (134, 135–6). Janes is thinking of A stell’s famously unenthusiastic “endorsement” of marriage at the conclusion of S ome Reflections Upon Marriage as a means of continuing the “Human Race” (in A stell: Political Writings, ed. Patricia S pringborg [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 77–8). O ne senses that, were it not for this unfortunate fact of biology, A stell would gladly write off the institution altogether. 143 �������������������� Wollstonecraft, 168. 144 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Wollstonecraft’s incomplete novel offers a thoughtful defense and exploration of female sexuality. Maria climactically argues in favor of something remarkably close to free love before a court of law; perhaps more pertinently, her wardress in prison, Jemima, bitterly wonders how being raped could have anything to do with a woman’s virtue. For a good synopsis of the novel and its “revolutionary view of sexuality,” see Jane S pencer, The R ise of the Woman Novelist: From A phra Behn to Jane A usten (O xford: Basil Blackwell L td, 1986), 132–9.

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however circumstanced, a ruination of sorts. Wollstonecraft may have lamented the over-identification of women with their bodies, but in the end she knew, in Janes’s words, that women “must find happiness in this world, or not at all,”145 and that meant redefining women’s relationship to material reality, not transcending it. Modern western feminism has tended to follow the path laid out by Wollstonecraft, arguing in a variety of different ways that the female body, so often the object of male violence, also offers a site of resistance to the patriarchal codes surrounding it. But the feminism with which Richardson identified rested on a very different set of assumptions. In her correspondence with N orris, the aptly titled L etters Concerning the L ove of God, A stell argued that bodies quite literally do not matter.146 If A stell articulated a “feminist physiology,” as Helen Thompson argues, it was one defined in a strictly negative manner.147 The line of feminism to which Richardson subscribed in Clarissa, in other words, was decidedly not part of the liberal-contractural tradition to which today’s feminism tends to trace its roots. Indeed, even aside from the indications that Clarissa owes much to A stell as a model, Richardson and A stell would belong together, if only for the similar set of problems they have presented modern feminist scholarship. A s has happened with Richardson, more than a few modern readers of A stell have shown a pronounced (over)determination to read her social criticism as a reflection of liberal contractualism, this despite the elegantly simple and convincing warning Joan K . K innaird issued in 1979, just as interest in A stell began to explode: “The later history of E nglish feminism has done much to obscure the conservative origins of the movement, and thus to perpetuate in scholarship a liberal bias which has kept us from recognizing that ... conservative A nglican thought also promoted the dignity of women, educational reform, and the ideal of companionate marriage.”148 In the introduction to her collection of excerpts from A stell’s writings, for instance, Bridget Hill insistently denies any connection between A stell’s “feminism” and her religious conservatism: A stell may not have been part of a “radical movement,” Hill contends, but neither are her “enlightened 145

����������� Janes, 136. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ I am thinking, of course, of Judith Butler’s influential (and still widely read and cited) Bodies That Matter (N ew Y ork: Routledge, 1993). 147 ���������������� Helen Thompson, Ingenuous S ubjection: Compliance and Power in the EighteenthCentury Domestic Novel (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Thompson contends that the “feminist congruity of A stell’s L etters and her Christian R eligion with her critique of marriage lies not in their repudiation of pleasure but rather in the fact that they again radicalize men’s and women’s physiological indifference ... .” (42). S he points to an “A rethra Franklin refrain” as capturing “the eighteenth-century feminism advanced by Astell: ‘she’s flesh and blood, just like a man’” (15). As I have argued elsewhere, Astell was not an immaterialist—but her sense of “R-E -S -P-E -C-T” derives less from physiological “indifference” than from physiological irrelevance; women, she might have put it, have souls that matter. S ee my “A re Y ou E xperienced?” 148 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� Joan K . K innaird, “Mary A stell and the Conservative Contribution to E nglish Feminism,” The Journal of British S tudies 19 (1979): 75. 146

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views on women ... dependent on ‘conservative A nglican thought.’”149 Feminism is by definition liberal in its foundation, in Hill’s formulation, and any intermingling of it and conservative thought can be dismissed as at best an accident of history, at worst an embarrassing example of the human being’s capacity for holding incompatible beliefs. It is perhaps with this assumption in mind that Hill and K athleen S quadrito mistake A stell’s bitterly ironic attacks on L ocke as statements of “respect” for his positions, and that Jacqueline Broad, in a recent essay, attempts to conflate the incongruous feminist positions of Astell and of Locke’s supporter D amaris Masham into a univocal argument.150 S cholars have been equally eager to accentuate putative distinctions between A stell and N orris.151 It is telling that of the two works most directly associating A stell with N orris, L etters only recently saw new life in a modern edition, while A stell’s Christian R eligion, her “magnum opus,” as S pringborg characterizes it, and most sustained critique of L ocke—and, it should be added, a hearty endorsement of N orris—continues to languish in a very few rare book rooms. Far from associating A stell with L ocke, Richardson, like his contemporaries, would have recognized that Astell’s positions derived in significant ways from her correspondence (literal and figurative) with the “famous Mr. Norris, of Bemerton.” Ballard, in his entry on A stell in Memoirs of S everal L adies, notes that A stell’s letters to N orris “have been much applauded for their good sense, sublime thoughts and fine language, and if there was nothing more remaining of this worthy gentlewoman’s performances, this alone would perpetuate her memory to latest posterity.”152 (Ballard, it should be noted, borrowed S arah Chapone’s copy of L etters for his work on the Memoirs.153) While Ballard approvingly cites N orris 149

������������������ Bridget Hill, 53. �������������������������������������������������������������������������� S ee Jaccqueline Broad, “A dversaries or A llies? O ccasional Thoughts on the Masham-A stell E xchange,” Eighteenth-Century Thought 1 (2003): 123–50. 151 �������������������������������������������������������� O n this point, see my “A stell’s Ironic A ssault,” 507–9. 152 ������������� Ballard, 383. 153 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� S arah Chapone accrued little fame as an author, though her son John married the “little spit-fire” and future Blue Stocking Hester Mulso. Sarah Chapone provided invaluable assistance, however, to G eorge Ballard in his hagiographic Memoirs of S everal L adies (which contains glowing entries on both A stell and Chudleigh); furthermore, Richardson considered her, according to E aves and K impel, “one of the best of female writers” (351), an opinion at which the novelist probably arrived through reading Chapone’s anonymously published (and strikingly A stellian) tract, The Hardships of the English L aws in R elation to Wives (1735). (S ee Tom K eymer’s entry on Chapone in the new DNB; excerpts from Hardships are included in Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity, ed. Vivian Jones [N ew Y ork: Routledge, 1990].) In a letter of 24 N ovember 1750 to Richardson, Chapone describes Ballard’s project and asks Richardson if he would be interested in subscribing. “Memoirs of the L ives of S everal L adies,” she writes, “is design’d to preserve the Memories of such L adies, as have been distinguish’d either for their K nowledge in the L earned L anguages, or their S kill in any of the A rts & S ciences”; the accounts are “chiefly confined,” however, “to their Proficiency in Learning and Religion.” 150

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as his “voucher” for the “peculiar grace and excellency of style and thought” of A stell’s letters, he links L ocke with A stell only negatively, quoting a “worthy friend” on the “genteel foil” A stell’s Christian R eligion provides both to L ocke’s “whimsical idea of thinking matter” and to his attempt in The R easonableness of Christianity (1695) to “subvert the true faith.”154 Furthermore, it was in the article “N orris,” not “L ocke,” as contained in “one of the supplemental volumes to Bayle’s Great Historical Dictionary,” that Ballard found a long description of A stell by D r. Francis A tterbury (1662–1732), Bishop of Rochester.155 It is important that critics of Richardson’s novels recognize the intellectual and personal allegiance, both real and perceived, between A stell and N orris. N ot recognizing this connection has allowed Harris, one of our very best Richardson scholars, insistently to put A stell in the company of L ocke in her discussions, an association A stell would have found alarming, and one Richardson would not have expected. Harris suggests, for example, that A stell followed L ocke in arguing “for girls to be educated as readily as boys,” and that A stell elaborated L ocke’s contractualism into the domestic sphere; she demanded, Harris claims, “a balance of powers very much akin to the checks on a constitutional monarchy” and asked the “unanswerable” L ockean question in Some Reflections Upon Marriage, “If absolute S overeignty be not necessary in a S tate, how comes it to be so in a Family?”156 In fact, Pamela’s climactic complaint in Pamela, Part II at the conclusion of her exegesis of L ocke’s Education—“[A ]nd who, I pray, as our S ex is generally educated, shall teach the Mothers? How, in a word, shall they come by their K nowledge?”157—suggests quite the contrary, an A stellian awareness on Richardson’s part of L ocke’s virtual silence regarding the education of women.158 Furthermore, A stell would have been known to Richardson not as a harmonious proselytizer of L ocke’s political arguments, but as someone who “A mong the most E minent E xamples of Piety and Religion,” she concludes, “are Mrs. A stell, and Mrs. Rowe, who lived and died such exalted Patterns of both.” (Chapone apparently refers to E lizabeth Rowe [1674–1737], whose Friendship in Death [1740] Richardson printed. Ballard’s Memoirs, however, does not include an entry on her.) Richardson’s response is not extant, but from Chapone’s reaction in her reply of 15 D ecember 1750, it appears he made a generous offer: “I am greatly obliged to you, for your goodness to my friend Mr Ballard. I shall immediately inform him of the whole you are so kind to say & do for Him” (Forster Collection of Manuscripts, XII , 2, ff. 17–18, f. 10). Chapone apparently spoke to Ballard about Richardson’s offer, but, according to Perry, Ballard “avoided an introduction to Richardson for unknown reasons” (Ballard, 40). When Ballard’s book appeared in 1752, Richardson’s name was included in the list of subscribers. 154 ������������ Ibid., 389. 155 ������������ Ibid., 387. 156 �������� Harris, S amuel R ichardson, 15, 3. 157 ������������������� S amuel Richardson, Pamela [...] IN FOUR VOL UMES , 4: 363. 158 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Cf. S arah Hutton’s views on this matter, as expressed in her comparison of L ocke to Masham: “Unlike L ocke, [Masham] deplores the denial of education to women and argues in favour of women’s education” (“D amaris Cudworth, L ady Masham: Between Platonism and E nlightenment,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 1 [1993]: 39).

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had “obtained great popularity among the high church party as one of the most strenuous impugners of the principles of L ocke.”159 A stell had forcefully rejected L ocke’s contractual theory of government and his liberal Whig politics, not only in her Reflections and in Christian R eligion, but in a series of political pamphlets written in the service of the Tory party in 1704.160 In fact, her statement in Reflections, “If absolute S overeignty be not necessary. ...,” is not an endorsement of L ocke’s political views, but an ironic complaint against his hypocrisy for not extending his absurd argument to its equally absurd logical conclusion—i.e., from the political to the domestic realm. “A bsolute S overeignty” is necessary for the good of the state, A stell believed, and it is for this reason that, in work upon work, she celebrates the virtues of passive obedience and attacks the dangers of contractual theory. Indeed, in a letter to N orris, A stell’s only complaint against “passive obedience” is that, whether directed towards G od or “G overnors,” it ought to be more active.161 Her consistency on this point, in fact, led her to argue that in order for a woman to be free, she must remain single—a married woman has a religious duty to remain obedient to her husband, just as a political subject owes allegiance to the Monarch, just as a human being is responsible to G od. A stell, for one, would have appreciated Richardson’s struggle to wind a politically and religiously conservative way between the twin poles of freedom and duty, and she would have agreed entirely with the author’s refusal to follow the course charted by the “PUZZLING” Locke. The irony Springborg finds in the fact that Astell’s “social criticism derives ... from assumptions she shares with Filmer”162 pervades Richardson’s likeminded social criticism. Instead of attempting to see Clarissa as a “L ockean woman in a household of Filmerian men,” we would do well to consider her feminist arguments in their properly conservative—and decidedly unL ockean—context.163 4. Locke and Religion A s already suggested, I believe there is good reason to qualify Harris’s contention that Richardson’s novels derive their “power” from his “trust” in “the apotheosis ���������������� S amuel Maunder, The Biographical Treasury; A Dictionary of Universal Biography, 7th edition (L ondon: L ongman, Brown, G reen, and L ongmans, 1851), s.v. A stell. 160 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� For an excellent summary of A stell’s role in promulgating the High-Church, Tory cause, see Perry, A stell, chapter 7, “In the S ervice of the L ord.” 161 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� A stell writes, “I cannot discern wherein the Virtue of a bare S ubmission consists, such a passive O bedience to GOD is like the new N otion some have got of passive O bedience to their G overnours, a being content to suffer when we know not how to help it; but our D ivine A morist has an intire Complacency in whatever GOD allots, he in a manner goes forth to meet it, chuses, justifies, and rejoyces in it” (L etters, 129). 162 ���������� Ibid., 4. 163 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Cf. S pringborg,: “Tory feminism, it seems to me, is an interesting candidate for Begriffsgeschichte, and we have to be able to get past the modern Gestalt of feminism in order to retrieve the phenomenon in its infancy ...” (Mary A stell: Theorist of Freedom, 12). 159

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of reason in his time,” as represented by John L ocke.164 The unequivocal approach to Richardson, however, is almost always the wrong one; “reconceptualizing Richardson’s relationship to the E nlightenment”165 is not tantamount to denying that relationship. N o one who has read Richardson’s novels could doubt that their author valued human reason; the word “reason” surfaces throughout his works of fiction, invariably in positive terms. “A man should desire nothing of his wife, but what is reasonable and just,” Mr. B. writes to his new bride.166 “I pursue the dictates of my own reason,” Clarissa reminds her would-be seducer L ovelace (271). “D oes it not then behove every man of true honour,” S ir Charles G randison asks rhetorically, “to shew, that reason has a greater share than resentment in the boldness of his resolves?”167 While scholars undoubtedly should work to avoid “substituting secular rationalistic assumptions for indispensable historical research,” as per Hensley’s admonition,168 they would also do well to remember Richardson’s express wish, as articulated in his “Concluding NOTE” to his final novel, that all moral questions will “come to stand on the firm footing of reason and religion.”169 These are precisely not the sorts of religious sentiments endorsed by William L aw (1686–1761), the model, according to Hensley, for “the counter-E nlightenment religious polemic of Richardson’s fiction.”170 While in his most popular work, A S erious Call to a Devout and Holy L ife (1729), L aw could write, “Reason is our universal law, that obliges us in all places, and at all times; and no actions have any honour, but so far as they are instances of our obedience to reason,”171 once he was introduced to the mystical works of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624) in the early 1730’s by physician G eorge Cheyne,172 L aw came utterly to reject all attempts to maintain a salubrious relationship between reason and faith. A s A lan S ell puts it, for the later L aw, “reason offers no support to Christianity, nor is it capable of refuting it.”173 Typical of L aw’s views is a lengthy refutation of L ocke in his Demonstration (1737), in which he claims that “crafty reason” is “the most pestilent offspring of the serpent” and recommends instead Boehme’s anti-rationalistic gnosticism.174

�������� Harris, S amuel R ichardson, 3. ��������������������������������������� Hensley, “Reading and Misreading,” 187. 166 ������������ Richardson, Pamela, 469. 167 ������������ Richardson, Grandison, 1: 265. 168 ��������������������������������������� Hensley, “Reading and Misreading,” 189. 169 ������������ Richardson, Grandison, 3: 465. 170 ���������������������������������������� Hensley, “Reading and Misreading,” 190. 171 ������������� William L aw, A S erious Call to a Devout and Holy L ife (L ondon, 1729), 498; quoted in Y oung, 127. 172 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Bechler writes, “L aw’s short-hand journal records that it was actually D r. Cheyne who had been ‘the providential occasion’ of his meeting or hearing of the mystic who was decisively to influence his religious development” (96). 173 ���������������� A lan P.F. S ell, John L ocke and the Eighteenth-Century Divines (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), 65. 174 ������������������ Quoted in Walker, William L aw, 125. 164 165

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It is difficult to imagine Richardson seconding Law’s unadulterated disavowal of the efficacy of reason in matters of faith, even in the “dialectical” manner suggested by Hensley. The novelist shied away, we know, from the theologian James Hervey because, as he explained it, “a serious and good divine, of my acquaintance, sees him, as to his doctrines, too mystic; and I think him inclined to the enthusiastic part of Methodism” (letter of 31 March 1750 to L ady Bradshaigh175)—not that such qualms prevented Richardson from printing Hervey’s evidently popular works.176 O ne cannot be sure, of course, what constituted “too mystic” in Richardson’s mind, but it is surely significant that John Wesley, the founder and leader of Methodism (already suspect to Richardson), condemned L aw’s Boehmian writings as enthusiastic and obscure.177 It is true, as Rosemary Bechler has noted, that Richardson printed for L aw, that a poem by Boehme is included among the miscellaneous section of his papers, and that Cheyne thanked Richardson in a letter of A ugust 1742 for passing along “some ‘Jacob Behemen.’”178 But such connections can be explained without presuming that Richardson “shared G eorge Cheyne’s esteem for L aw not only as their mutual friend but as spiritually ‘the greatest best Man, and the most solid and deep of this island.’”179 I would suggest, more modestly, that it was quite possible to be drawn to aspects of L aw’s thought—the immediacy of God’s relationship with His creation, the efficacy of spirit, the impotency of matter, the validity of the religious mindset—which L aw shared with a number of Christian-Platonist thinkers (Boehme, to be sure, but also Malebranche, the subject of L aw’s own Master’s thesis, and his E nglish proponent, N orris) without subscribing whole cloth to a gnostic rejection of rational theology. What Clarissa says of L ovelace might go for Richardson’s view of religion as well: “What a worse than Moloch-deity is that which expects an offering of reason, duty and discretion to be made to its shrine!” (242). It is with good reason—and on the basis of solid “historical research,” to borrow Hensley’s phrase—that John D ussinger has recently urged scholars to return from the brink, as it were, in their appraisals of Richardson’s religious inclinations. Having first exploded the evidence on which Bechler rested her influential essay establishing Richardson’s allegedly cabalistic relationship with a “Brethren” of fellow mystics, D ussinger points to several anonymous pamphlets and journalistic pieces published in the 1720s and 1730s that were likely written by Richardson, each demonstrating, he believes, that “Richardson, like many other A nglicans, expressly admired L ocke’s ‘reasonableness’ and the similar approach taken by later

175

���������������� Barbauld, 6: 13. ������������������������������������������� Richardson printed 10 editions of Hervey’s Meditations and Contemplations between 1748 and 1753. S ee Maslen, entries 327–42. 177 ������������������� S ee Brazier G reen, John Wesley and William L aw (L ondon: E pworth Press, 1945), especially chapter 7, “Wesley’s O pen L etter of 1756,” 129–61. 178 ������������� Bechler, 96. 179 ������������������������������������������� Hensley, “Reading and Misreading,” 191n12. 176

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defenders of the Church and ‘Christianity.’”180 For instance, in the preface to the anonymously published The Infidel Convicted: or, a brief defence of the Christian R evelation (1731), Richardson’s speaker provides “unanswerable arguments from Mr. L ocke” in order to convince those “S matterers in Infidelity” not wholly lost to “A theistical or Deistical” tendencies of the “excellency of the Christian morality.” His turn to L ocke is purposeful, thoughtful, and fully complimentary: [A ]s Mr. L ocke is reckon’d upon by some Persons, as the Corner-stone of the present S cepticism; and as a different Use has been doubtless made of his Writings, then he ever intended; I have, in the Course of the A rgument, selected a few Paragraphs from that sublime Reasoner, in Vindication of Christianity; which I believe must have a better E ffect from him, than from any other A uthor, as he was a L ayman, and not to be suspected of Priestcraft; but, on the contrary, was known to be a strenuous A dvocate for Reason ... .181

Though, in D ussinger’s view, such sentiments place Richardson fully in the mainstream of L atitudinarian orthodoxy, it is surely worth noting the rhetorical context established within the preface itself. Richardson turns to L ocke precisely because he realizes his arguments ought to carry weight with those skeptics so eager to use reason against religion; if a “sublime Reasoner” such as L ocke can offer a “Vindication of Christianity,” the question might go, what freethinking rationalist dare not listen? This is just the sort of writing strategy one might expect of a man who could adopt at 11 years of age an elderly voice in a moralistic letter admonishing “a widow of nearly fifty” to live up to her own “zeal for Religion” in her dealings with her neighbors;182 and, in a sense, this childhood anecdote goes to D ussinger’s larger point: Richardson was a writer long before he began writing novels. He wrote for a variety of purposes and from a multitude of perspectives, adopting various guises, patterns of allusion, and narrative positions, depending on his goals and intended audience. E ven within the early publications D ussinger has discovered and reprinted, in fact, one finds Richardson quite deliberately elaborating remarkably different lines of argumentation. Consider, for instance, the peroration to Richardson’s attack on freethinkers in an anonymous letter of 12 May 1733 to the Weekly Miscellany. Here, Richardson’s narrator moves away from the L ockean strand of fully reasonable, worldly theology, expatiating instead 180 S ee D ussinger, “S tealing in the great doctrines of Christianity,’” 467. D ussinger demonstrates that Bechler’s assumption of a mystical brotherhood results from “a complete misreading” of Cheyne’s use of the term in letters to Richardson—Cheyne, ever anxious about sales of his books, “is referring to the brethren of booksellers who are needed to publish his works and may also be risking their money in the process!” (455). Tom Keymer makes the same point in his review of Passion and Prudence: Essays on the Novels of S amuel R ichardson, ed. D avid Blewett, R eview of English S tudies 54.213 (2003): 127–9. 181 ��������������������������������������������������������������������� D ussinger, “S tealing in the great doctrines of Christianity,’” 483–4. 182 ��������������������� E aves and K impel, 8.

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on the ways in which the “Christian R eligion ennobleth and enlargeth the Mind,” thereby allowing a clear view of “the Intellectual World” beyond the “little and low things” upon which “He whose N otions are stinted to a few miserable Inlets of S ense” will mistakenly focus his attentions. “How little must the A musements of S enses, and the ordinary Occupations of mortal Men,” the speaker wonders, “seem to one who is ingaged in so noble a Pursuit, as the A ssimilation of himself to the Deity, which is the proper E mployment of every Christian?”183 This speaker sounds remarkably like, not L ocke in R easonableness of Christianity, but N orris in his poem “The E levation,” wherein, as the speaker approaches full congress with divinity, he comes to disdain “Those Pageant G lorys ... / Which charm and dazle mortals eyes.” “[I]n this higher S phere,” he exclaims, “How do I mortals, with their joys despise.”184 A lready in his early work as a journalist, then, Richardson displays a keen ability to shift his rhetorical position in a sustained, thoughtful manner. Indeed, it was likely just this rhetorical flexibility that led Richardson’s bookseller friends to urge him to write the book of model letters from which Pamela sprung.185 S een in this light, Richardson’s tack to N orris’s brand of theology in Clarissa is in keeping with long established tendencies. E ven as Richardson stressed in the preface to The Infidel Convicted L ocke’s potential as a foil to freethinkers, after all, his support was tempered by an awareness that “sceptics” had used L ocke’s system for their own principles.186 It is very much like Richardson that, having once played down L ocke’s role in encouraging theological uncertainty, he would later turn to the other side of the argument; this is, after all, the same man who, having written a monumentally popular novel celebrating the heroine’s ability to reform an aristocratic rake, would aim his next novel at destroying the “dangerous but too commonly received notion, that a reformed rake makes the best husband” (36). Richardson was doubtless familiar with N orris in the decades before writing Clarissa; he is glanced at implicitly in the third part of The A pprentice’s Vade Mecum and explicitly in Pamela, Part II .187 When he turned to N orris in a more 183

�������������������������������������������������������������������� D ussinger, “S tealing in the great doctrines of Christianity,” 496–7. �������� N orris, Miscellanies, 54. 185 ���������������������������������� S ee E aves and K impel’s account in Biography of the relationship between Pamela and Familiar L etters (1741), 87–91. 186 �������������������������������������������������� Richardson had printed a fifth edition of Locke’s R easonableness of Christianity, with responses to John E dwards’s exceptions, in 1731; he would also print a sixth edition in 1736. S ee Maslen, entries 446–7. 187 �������������������������������������������� Richardson’s criticism in the third part of A pprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734) of those who would attempt to account for “the Mysteries of A lmighty God” with “our short-sighted Reason” (57) appears to owe a debt to N orris’s similar complaint in A n A ccount of R eason and Faith (1697), a work, D ussinger has noted, recommended in a “major unacknowledged source of A pprentice’s Vade Mecum III ,” John L eake’s The S cholars Manual. Being a Collection of Meditations, Reflections, and Reasonings, Design’d for Establishing and Promoting Christian Principles and Practice, Irreligious and S ceptical Times ... (1733). S ee D ussinger, “Fabrications from S amuel Richardson’s Press,” Papers for the Bibliographical 184

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sustained fashion it was because he needed him—not because his religious views had somehow changed, or because he had come to reject definitively the religious implications of L ocke’s positions, but because the novel he was trying to write required the sort of theological framework provided by N orris—“an excellent Christian,” as Belford characterizes him (1229)—and those associated with him. Perhaps more than anything else, N orris’s value to Richardson derived from his ability to mediate the extremes represented by L ocke and L aw. Unlike L aw, N orris never tired of arguing that reason and the theocentric perspective, if properly understood, were mutually supportive; he thus offered a corrective to, not a rejection of, L ocke’s commitment to reasonable religion. A s L ocke would do in his Essay, N orris echoed the famous phrase of Cambridge Platonist Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83) in his essay “Considerations Upon the N ature of S in,” likening “the L aw of R eason” to “that Candle of the L ord that lights every man that comes into the world,” and further defining it as “the vicarious power of God in [the human being’s] soul”188—much as Pamela in Pamela, Part II characterizes “the sweet D awnings of Reason” in her child as a “bright E manation of that Ray of D ivinity, lent to the human Mind ... .”189 In this respect, Richardson, who famously complained in a letter of 31 A ugust 1741 to Cheyne that Pamela’s piety had caused people to think him “too much a Methodist,”190 shares more of an intellectual ground with John Wesley than with the post-Boehme William L aw.191 Richardson, like Wesley, respected L ocke; yet, as E nglish writes of Wesley, Richardson “found in N orris something which he had missed in John L ocke,” having to do S ociety of A merica 100.2 (2006): 261. Pamela quotes a stanza from N orris’s “The tenth O de of the second Book of Horace translated” in Pamela [...] IN FOUR VOL UMES (3: 119; note that neither the reference to “Mr. Norris” nor the stanza are included in the E veryman edition). I am grateful to John D ussinger for alerting me to these early examples of Richardson’s interest in N orris. 188 �������� N orris, Miscellanies, 367, 383. S ee L ocke, Essay, 4.3.20.552: “The S ubject part of Mankind, in most Places, might, instead thereof, with A egyptian Bondage, expect A egyptian D arknes, were not the Candle of the L ord set up by himself in Men’s minds, which it is impossible for the Breath or Power of Man wholly to extinguish.” 189 ������������ Richardson, Pamela [...] IN FOUR VOL UMES , 4: 360. 190 ������������ Carroll, 47. 191 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Wesley and L aw had initially shared a close intellectual and personal relationship; indeed, Law has long been considered the author of “the first published defence of the Methodists” (G reen, 55), The Oxford Methodists (1733), though G erda J. Joling-van der S ar has compellingly disputed the attribution in a recent essay (“The Controversy Between William L aw and John Wesley,” English S tudies 87.4 [2006]: 442–65); the first two editions of this work, incidentally, were printed by Richardson (Maslen, entries 413 and 414). A fter an acrid epistolary debate over the conditions of salvation in 1738, the two theologians cut ties; L aw’s fascination with Boehme cinched the divide, and prompted Wesley’s attack on L aw’s mysticism in an “O pen L etter” of 1756. In a journal entry of O ctober 23, 1739, Wesley wrote, “I read over Mr. L aw’s book on the N ew Birth (The Grounds and R easons of Christian R egeneration, or the New Birth ... . [1739]): Philosophical, speculative, precarious; Behmenish, void, and vain! ‘O what a fall is there’” (quoted in Green, 76).

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with “humanity’s [direct] knowledge of G od.”192 L ike Wesley, Richardson was accused of religious enthusiasm, and, also like Wesley, he denied such charges: “It is a fundamental principle with us,” Wesley wrote, “that to renounce reason is to renounce religion, that reason and religion go hand in hand, and that all irrational religion is false religion.”193 Hensley has urged us to see Richardson’s theology as a dialectical system wherein the author bounced back and forth “between L ocke and L aw.”194 I would suggest that the author’s references to N orris in Clarissa suggest his desire to shoot the gap, as it were. “Wesley,” according to A lan S ell, “may be placed somewhere between L ocke and L aw (though somewhat closer to the former) on our ‘antireason/reason is all’ continuum.”195 This was a position carved out, Wesley knew, by the likes of N orris, Malebranche, and other of L ocke’s early critics, who, while suspicious of the theological trajectory of L ocke’s thought (perhaps unfairly, as John W. Y olton has argued196), nevertheless shared his E nlightenment faith in the value of human reason. In terms of his own religious beliefs, Richardson probably fell somewhere nearby on this continuum, and with him a whole host of contemporary men and women who clung to belief in the mystery of the Trinity, the certainty of eternal life, and the omnipotence of an all-loving G od, and protested steadfastly the reasonableness of it all. In Richardson’s conflicted—hence human—mind, there appears to have been room for L aw, L ocke, N orris, and a variety of other, often incongruous, theological thinkers. My concentration on the latter bespeaks not, then, what Richardson “really thought,” but what he was thinking as he created the fictional world of Clarissa. It is possible, I think, to overstate the understatement of Richardson’s religious intentions in Clarissa, a point I will elaborate at some length in chapter three. For present purposes, it will suffice to recall that that while L ocke and L aw go unmentioned in Clarissa, “The Rev. Mr. N orris” appears in each installment.

192

������������ E nglish, 60. �������������������� Quoted in S ell, 66. 194 �������������������������������������� D avid Hensley, “Thomas E dwards,” 138. 195 ���������� S ell, 65. 196 �������������������� S ee John W. Y olton, The Two Intellectual Worlds of John L ocke: Man, Person, and S pirits in the E ssay (Ithaca & L ondon: Cornell Univ. Press, 2004). Y olton locates in the Essay a surprising (even to him) allegiance to and interest in orthodox “Christian doctrine” (150), leading him to speculate as to how “all of those religiously oriented features could have been missed or misread” by L ocke’s early critics. “The answer,” he concludes, lies in the “alternate ontology and epistemology” these readers accepted as a matter of course, and which the Essay disrupted—“a belief in real essences of a fixed kind, a belief in mind and body as two distinct substances fundamentally different ...” (151). E pistemological suspicions, in other words, unnecessarily fed theological ones, in Y olton’s view. 193

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Chapter 2

Mary A stell, E lizabeth Carter, Clarissa Harlowe, and other “D escendants” of N orris Margaret Collier (1717–94), daughter of A rthur Collier (1680–1732)—an admiring supporter and neighbor to “N orris the Platonist, rector of Bemerton”—and sister to Jane Collier (1715–54?), never married, thanks in part to Henry Fielding’s success in thwarting her “design” on one John Williamson in L isbon. A t Fielding’s death in 1754, Margaret’s service as governess to his and his wife’s daughter ended, leaving Margaret aging, poor, and essentially alone. (Jane had died earlier that same year.) E ventually, Margaret took a position as caretaker to an elderly couple who lived in a small cottage on the Isle of Wight; there, as described in her letter to Richardson of 3 O ctober 1755, she occupied a room with no door and ate her meals “out of a platter” while “sitting on an earthen floor.” In order to pass the time—and much, one can imagine, needed passing—Margaret entertained her employers by reading aloud from Clarissa and S ir Charles Grandison. For a few years, at least, she also fought loneliness by maintaining a correspondence with her favorite author. D espite E aves and K impel’s characterization of their correspondence as “desultory,” Margaret and Richardson’s brief exchange contains one of the most revealing discussions to be found in any of the novelist’s letters on a topic much debated contemporaneously and of late, namely Richardson’s attitudes toward women. In her first letter, Margaret complains that Henry Fielding’s Voyage to L isbon (1755) had been attributed to her only because it is so very bad: “this is the disadvantageous light poor women are held in,” she laments, “by the illnature of the world ... . If a man falls short of what is expected from his former The quotation is from Robert Benson, Memoirs of the L ife and Writings of the R ev. A rthur Collier (1837; Bristol: Thoemmes A ntiquarian Books L td, 1990), 16. Cf. A cworth, 305–9. For Richardson’s relationship with the Collier sisters, see above, pp. 23–4; cf. E aves and K impel, 202–4.  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� Williamson, according to Martin Battestin, had become “Fielding’s favorite companion” in L isbon, and the novelist apparently hated the thought of losing his new friend to the 36-year-old Margaret, whom he considered “the most artfull, wicked B------ in the world” (Henry Fielding: A L ife [N ew Y ork and L ondon: Routledge, 1989], 598–9).  ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Barbauld, 2: 75. Collier’s pathetic description of herself elicited 5 guineas from Richardson in his response of 24 D ecember 1755—enough, the author hoped, for her to purchase a door (Barbauld, 2: 84).  ���������������������� E aves and K impel, 204. 

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genius in writing ... then ‘to be sure it was his sister, or some woman friend, who was with him.’” Conversely, if a woman writes well, Margaret notes, with an eye perhaps to S arah Fielding’s David S imple (1744), “and have a brother, then to be sure—‘S he could not write so well; it was her brother’s, no doubt.’” S he appeals to Richardson for his comments on her sex’s “hard case,” calling him “the only candid man ... with regard to women’s understanding; and indeed their only champion and protector ... in [his] writings.” In his response, Richardson acknowledges the truth of Margaret’s complaint, but then turns the mirror of blame back on Margaret and other “capable” women who “hide their talents in a napkin, and are afraid, lovely dastards, of shewing themselves capable of the perfections they are mistresses of.” “It is well,” he half-seriously warns, “I have not the punishing of such degraders of their own sex ... ; for do they not, by their wilful and studious concealments of the gifts G od has blessed them with, confess, at least indirectly, an inferiority to the other [sex]?” O nly by revealing their “GodGiven talents,” Richardson insists in his final letter to Margaret, could women “vindicate the honour of [their] sex.” In Richardson’s view, then, intellectually gifted women had an obligation to shine, and not just in the private, domestic arena, but for the public at large—he had little patience with the prevalent “anxiety of competence” from which women writers of his day could hardly help but suffer.10 If a woman could write well, she ought to publish, and the wider the disbursement of her work, the better for her and her sex. Nor was Richardson, a powerful and culturally influential printer after all, only theoretically a promoter of women’s writings. By the time 

����������������� Barbauld, 2: 77. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Battestin notes that Henry Fielding contributed a Preface to the second edition of his sister’s novel, assuring readers that “the assistance she received from him was negligible— consisting merely in ‘two or three Hints.’” Fielding felt the need, in fact, to protest that he had been out of town during its composition (379). S arah Fielding, incidentally, took up the study of foreign languages against her brother’s wishes soon after the publication of David S imple—with D r. A rthur Collier, Margaret’s brother, as her tutor. S ee Battestin, 380–81.  ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Barbauld, 2: 78. Cf. Perry’s comment: “N ot only private readers, but women writers and intellectuals also championed Richardson—lifted him on their shoulders—paraded him as one of theirs, as they had no man before him” (“Clarissa’s D aughters: O r, The History of Innocence Betrayed. How Women Writers Rewrote Richardson,” in Clarissa and her R eaders, 122).  ����������������� Barbauld, 2: 82.  �������������� Ibid., 2: 94. 10 ������������������ William McCarthy, Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a L iterary Woman (Chapel Hill: University of N orth Carolina Press, 1985), 54; quoted in S ylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the L ife of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (O xford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 155. A s Myers aptly notes, eighteenth-century women writers’ “concern about their competence would not be unreasonable, given the generally unsystematic nature of their education; and fear of male animosity would also not be unrealistic, since they could perceive it all around them” (155). 

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of Clarissa, Richardson’s press had printed editions of works by Mary Barber, S usanna Centlivre, Mary Chandler, E liza Haywood and E lizabeth Rowe; works by Charlotte L ennox, S arah Fielding, S arah Chapone, and Margaret’s sister Jane Collier would issue from his press in the years after, as would a singular testament to the intellectual potential of women, E lizabeth Carter’s translation of the works of E pictetus (1758; 2nd ed. 1759).11 Indeed, within the body of his second novel, and long before his exchange with Margaret or his familiarity with Carter, Richardson had linked theory to practice by inserting Carter’s anonymously published “O de to Wisdom” into the second volume. Clearly, Richardson saw in the poem the “GodGiven talent” he believed women ought to share with the world, and he was more than willing to play a part in fulfilling the unknown “lady’s” obligation. Had Richardson only wanted a woman’s erudite ornamentation for Clarissa, he certainly could have gone to a less troublesome source than Carter’s “O de”; as it was, he went to a great deal of trouble, and got a fair amount of it in return. A lthough Carter’s friend (and Richardson’s future correspondent) Catherine Talbot was rapturous on encountering Carter’s poem in Richardson’s novel, Carter had a far different reaction.12 The story of Richardson’s borrowing can be found, among other places, in E aves and K impel’s Biography. As they relate it, after the first two volumes of Clarissa were released in 1747 (Clarissa, now a virtual prisoner in Harlowe Place, includes the “O de” and her music for its last stanzas in her letter of 24 March to A nna Howe), Carter wrote to Richardson, complaining that “to print any thing without the consent of the person who wrote it, is a proceeding so very ungenerous and unworthy of a man of reputation, that, from the character I have heard of you, I am utterly at a loss how to account for it.”13 Richardson immediately sent Carter an exculpatory explanation: he had included the “O de” despite having a “redundancy of material” because it answered both his need for excellent supplementary material “from our best Poets” and, since he knew it was “by a lady,” his desire to “do honour to the sex.” He could not discover the author, but did not credit Clarissa with writing it. He had gone to great expense “by setting it to musick” and by having it “engraved and wrought highly,” thus distinguishing the piece within his novel. Richardson’s letter, the biographers note, had its intended effect: Carter wrote to Catherine Talbot that she had “received so civil an answer ... that [she] knew not how to be angry with him.”14 Thus far E aves 11

���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� S ee the entries for these authors in Maslen: Barber (20–22), Carter (listed under “E pictetus,” 266–7), Centlivre (120–21), Chandler (124–9), Chapone (130), Collier (163–4), Fielding (278–84), Haywood (323–35), L ennox (432–5), and Rowe (716–18). 12 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� In her letter to Carter of 28 D ecember 1747, Talbot wrote as follows: “O h, but your owl! How was I charmed, and how we were all charmed, when t’other day in reading Clarissa, out it flew most unexpectedly, and outdid the nightingale ... . How came it there? A re you so happy as to be acquainted with these Richardsons? I am sure they must be excellent people, and most delightful acquaintance. There can be no doubt, can there, that you love Clarissa?” (Carter, S eries of L etters, 1: 243). 13 �������������������������� E aves and K impel, 214–15. 14 ������������ Ibid., 215.

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and K impel—as a biographical sketch of the events surrounding the “borrowing,” their account serves well. But while the biographers treat this episode as if it carried little more than anecdotal significance, there is a good deal of evidence, both in Clarissa and in these surrounding events, to suggest that this particular moment in the composition of the novel deserves closer inspection. The biographers, for instance, quite rightly connect Richardson’s claim that his aim in printing the “O de” was to “do honour to the sex” with his knowledge that its author was a woman. Clarissa too believes that the “O de” “does honour to our sex, as it was written by one of it” (Clarissa, 231). But where the biographers leave off, Clarissa continues. The “O de,” Clarissa suggests, is “not unsuitable to my unhappy situation”; the final three stanzas, she writes, “were my lesson.” In order to stress the importance of this “lesson,” Richardson—at no small expense—had these lines engraved, along with a musical score, on a fold-out sheet for the first three editions of his novel:15 No more to fabled names confin’d; To thee! Supreme all-perfect mind, My thoughts direct their flight. Wisdom’s thy gift, and all her force From thee deriv’d, eternal source Of intellectual light! O h send her sure, her steady ray, To regulate my doubtful way, Through life’s perplexing road: The mists of error to control, A nd through its gloom direct my soul To happiness and good. Beneath her clear discerning eye The visionary shadows fly O f folly’s painted show. S he sees through ev’ry fair disguise, That all, but VIRTUE ’S solid joys, Is vanity and woe. (233)

Richardson found in Carter’s “O de” an apt adumbration of the point on which he knew he would be ending his novel—the Christian-Platonist valorization of the spiritual experience of the “S upreme all-perfect mind,” the “eternal source / O f intellectual light,” over the “visionary shadows” of the material, and 15 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The stanza most prominently figured on this sheet in the first three editions—and the only one present on the single-page engraving of the fourth edition—is the first of these three; it expresses most fully the Platonic heights to which the “O de” aspires. For a thorough account of the history of the “O de” as it has appeared in the different editions of Clarissa, see Janine Barchas, “The E ngraved S core in Clarissa: A n Intersection of Music, N arrative, and G raphic D esign,” Eighteenth-Century L ife 20 (May 1996): 1–20.

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transitory, world. Perhaps as importantly, this complimentary argument was being made by a woman. But Richardson could have found a similarly spiritually rarified poem in many different places, even one written by a woman—Elizabeth Rowe, perhaps, whose works Richardson had printed (and one of Carter’s favorite models).16 To explain Richardson’s conspicuously keen interest in highlighting this particular poem within his novel, we will need to consider not only the poem’s otherworldly philosophical comment, and not only its status as the product of a woman’s mind, but its authorship—as Richardson mistakenly had it, that is. The woman Richardson believed had penned “The O de to Wisdom” would have had a particular obligation, in his mind, to share her talents with the world, and she would have been a particularly fitting source for his heroine’s “lesson.” Here, in less expurgated form, is what Richardson wrote to E lizabeth Carter to justify his appropriation of her poem: Be pleased, Madam, to receive a faithful relation of the occasion of the trespass I have made, for which you call me to severe, however just, account ... . I have a worthy kinswoman, Miss E lizabeth L ong her name, who shewed me the O de to Wisdom, as a piece she knew I should admire ... . I wanted not matter for the piece I had then ready for the press, I had a redundance of it ... but the O de being shewn me as written by a lady, and the intention of my work being to do honour to the sex ... I was so pleased with it, that I desired my kinswoman to give me what light she could as to the author ... . S he said, she had herself, when in Wilts, been desirous of knowing who the author was, but had no other intimation given her, than that the O de was really written by a lady, and by one whom she had the honour once to see. Whence she conjectured the lady to be a descendant of the famous Mr. N orris, of Bemerton.17

E ven given N orris’s lack of stature in most studies of Richardson and, more generally, of the eighteenth century, the biographers’ decision to ignore Richardson’s mention of him here is somewhat surprising, if consistent. O f course, E aves and K impel could not be expected to acknowledge each and every personage they came across in Richardson’s myriad notes and letters—but they probably should have recognized some possible significance for the “famous Mr. Norris” invoked here, if not from Richardson’s letters, then from Clarissa itself, wherein N orris’s name and his works, as noted in the introduction, make regular appearances. Richardson’s appeal to N orris in the letter to Carter may suggest, on the one hand, a deliberate rhetorical strategy. Richardson, as Carol Houlihan Flynn has shown, did not lose his considerable epistolary abilities when he turned from fiction to personal correspondence. Flynn argues, for instance, that the author’s seemingly naïve pronouncements to S arah Wescomb on the personal letter have 16 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Myers notes that Carter celebrated Rowe’s life and writing in her poem “O n the D eath of Mrs. Rowe” (1737), and suggests that Rowe “was the closest thing to a female role-model for a person of E lizabeth’s interest and attitudes” (48). 17 ������������ Pennington, Memoirs, 1: 101–2.

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less to do with his “real” position than with his “trying to bolster up a shrinking Miss Westcomb, working at banishing her diffidence.”18 Richardson’s letter to Carter similarly works to elicit a particular response, in this case, both approbation and forgiveness. It seems highly unlikely that Richardson would drop a name without being cognizant of its probable effect, especially in a letter with such obvious ameliorative intentions. A lmost certainly, then, when he insists that to the best of his knowledge the author of the “O de” is a female “descendent” of “the famous Mr. N orris, of Bemerton” (the two, incidentally, were not related), he does so in part to flatter Carter by associating her poetry with that of Norris. But flattery surely is not the whole story here; if it were, Richardson could easily have found an even more “famous” name than “Mr. N orris.” More likely, Richardson’s letter, in this instance, is telling us as much about his interest in the “O de” as about his desire to placate Carter. I would suggest that Richardson was, in fact, telling the truth—his desire to use the “O de” in Clarissa sprang in large part from his desire to forge and to underscore a connection between his own work and that of a woman closely tied to “the famous Mr. N orris, of Bemerton.”19 A s noted in the introduction (see above, pp. 30–31), it is possible that Richardson is remembering the phrase “the famous Mr. N orris, of Bemerton” from an obituary printed by his own press in 1731 (and which he himself could plausibly have composed) celebrating the life of N orris’s best known female associate, Mary Astell (1666–1731). The first of Astell’s accomplishments there mentioned is “her Correspondence with the famous Mr. N orris of Bemerton, on the celebrated S ubject of the L ove of God.” To be sure, the model N orris and A stell provide for an epistolary relationship would have held particular interest for Richardson. Indeed, the important and long-lasting bond between these two figures might never have developed had not A stell assumed and found in N orris a ready audience for a woman’s intellectual endeavors, much as Margaret Collier, some sixty years later, assumed such an audience in Richardson. In the opening of her first letter to Norris, Astell makes it clear that she expects from him a level of respect sometimes hard to come by: S ir, Though some morose G entlemen wou’d perhaps remit me to the D istaff or the K itchin, or at least to the G lass and the N eedle, the proper E mployments as they fancy of a Womans L ife; yet expecting better things from the more E quitable and ingenuous Mr. Norris, who is not so narrow-Soul’d as to confine Learning 18 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� Flynn, 265. S ee Flynn’s excellent discussion of Richardson’s protean (even L ovelacean) employments of the personal letter in chapter seven, 263–89. S ee also K eymer’s discussion of these letters in light of Richardson’s correspondence with E usebius S ilvester (R ichardson’s Clarissa, 34–44), in which Richardson finds himself the object of epistolary manipulation. 19 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� N orris had three sons and a daughter. O ne son, John N orris, Jr., did indeed settle in Wiltshire, and the daughter, E lizabeth, settled in the vicinity. Richardson would have had good reason, in other words, to believe his kinswoman’s report. S ee A cworth, 313n13.

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to his own S ex, or to envy it in ours, I presume to beg his A ttention a little to the Impertinencies of a Womans Pen.20

Her “Impertinencies” and N orris’s responses came to several hundred pages of material, and were of such high quality that N orris, in a proleptically Richardsonian gesture, begged A stell for the right to publish their correspondence, assuring A stell that “if you communicate your L etters you will be a general Benefactor to Mankind, who will be highly obliged to thank you.”21 In her reply, after first perfunctorily and disingenuously suggesting to N orris that he publish his letters alone, A stell appeals to precisely the argument Richardson would later make to Margaret, backing into agreement with N orris only in the hope that her letters might inspire her own sex and dispel the skepticism of the other: I cannot imagine to what Purpose mine will serve, unless it be to decoy those to a Perusal of them, who wanting Piety to read a Book for its Usefulness, may probably have the Curiosity to inquire what can be the Product of a Womans Pen, and to excite a generous E mulation in my S ex, perswade them to leave their insignificant Pursuits for Employments worthy of them. For if one to whom N ature has not been over liberal, and who has found but little A ssistance to surmount its D efects, by employing her Faculties the right way, and by a moderate Industry in it, is inabled to write tolerable S ense, what may not they perform who enjoy all that Quickness of Parts and other A dvantages which she wants? A nd I heartily wish they would make the E xperiment, so far am I from coveting the Fame of being singular, that ’tis my very great Trouble it should be any bodies Wonder to meet with an ingenious Woman.22

A s Margaret Collier would later complain of readers in her day, A stell knew that her own readers would hesitate to believe that an “ingenious Woman” was a woman at all. N orris accordingly felt compelled to offer his own reputation as a voucher that A stell’s anonymous contributions were indeed written by “a young G entlewoman.” In order “to obviate a Diffidence in some who from the surprizing Excellency of these Writings may be tempted to question whether my Correspondent be really a Woman or no,” N orris can only respond, “indeed I did not see her write these L etters, but ... I have all the moral and reasonable A ssurance that she did write them, and is the true A uthor of them, that can be had in a thing of this N ature.”23 It is both historically and intellectually appropriate, then, that in his defenses of women’s intellectual capabilities, Richardson frequently adduces as evidence a woman he initially took to be a relation of “the famous Mr. N orris, of Bemerton.” A stell pleaded with the women of her day to “inform the World” that “an 20 Mary A stell and John Norris: L etters Concerning the L ove of G od, ed. E . D erek Taylor and Melvyn N ew (A ldershot and Burlington: A shgate, 2005), 69. 21 ���������� Ibid., 63. 22 ���������� Ibid., 66. 23 ���������� Ibid., 56.

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Ingenious Woman is no Prodigy to be star’d on.”24 In his letter of 25 July 1754 to Thomas E dwards, Richardson called on “Women of real G enius” to emulate “Miss Carter” by showing their written “Performances” to the “World” so as “to mend” it;25 E dwards responded, “O that you could (and if not you, I know not who can) persuade [women of intellect] to emerge quite and vindicate their just clame [sic] to genius, against the doubters and maligners!”26 L ady Bradshaigh, to be sure, was a “doubter and maligner” of her sex inasmuch as she insisted that Richardson could “not persuade” her to “approve of learning in women”; in his response to Bradshaigh’s dissension, Richardson points to “Miss C----” as an exemplary learned woman, and concludes “that genius, whether in men or women, should take its course: ... as a ray of divinity, it should not be suppressed.”27 A stell similarly begins her defense of and exhortation to her female readers in S erious Proposal, Part I with an assumption of divine connectedness: “N o solicitude in the adornation of your selves is discommended, provided you imploy your care about that which is really your self, and do not neglect that particle of D ivinity within you, which must survive, and may (if you please) be happy and perfect, when it’s [sic] unsuitable and much inferiour Companion is mouldring into D ust.” Indeed, it is precisely on this assumption that A stell rests her essential argument: “Women ... are capable of the best.”28 Carter, Richardson seemed to feel, exemplified exactly A stell’s point. S o too does Clarissa Harlowe. Clarissa seems not only to be uncannily linked in Richardson’s mind to the “famous Mr. N orris, of Bemerton,” but also to draw strength as a woman from this connection. This is as A stell would have expected; it was to the “ingenious pen” of this “excellent author” that, in her S erious Proposal, Part I, A stell had directed those women readers eager to “busy themselves in a serious enquiry after necessary and perfective truths, something which it concerns them to know, and which tends to their real interest and perfection.”29 Clarissa owes her exemplary education and heightened spiritual sensibilities, for instance, not to her biological mother, whose passive role in the disaster at Harlowe Place both Clarissa and A nna much lament, but to her “more natural mother,” as Mrs. Harlowe calls her after Clarissa’s death, Mrs. Judith N orton (1405). Belford recognizes in Mrs. N orton “the woman well-educated,” and he deduces that Clarissa “owed to this excellent woman many of her good notions” (1370). A s E rickson has noted, Mrs. N orton’s “name recalls that of ... John N orris,”30 and indeed it was from “her father,” who was “one of the soundest divines and finest scholars in the kingdom” (Clarissa, 1167),

�������� A stell, S erious Proposal, Part II , 72. ���������������� Carroll, 309–10. 26 ���������������� Barbauld, 3: 94. 27 ������������������������ Barbauld, 6: 70, 79–80. 28 �������� A stell, S erious Proposal, Part I, 6, 10. 29 ������������� Ibid., 21–2. 30 ���������� E rickson, L anguage of the Heart, 211. 24 25

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that Mrs. N orton received her own education (211).31 Clarissa’s relationship with Anna Howe, the other significant member of her female circle, is similarly couched in terms provided by N orris. “The difference in our tempers,” A nna writes in explaining her relationship with Clarissa, “is probably the reason that we love one another so well, that in the words of N orris no third love can come in between,” a reference to N orris’s poem “D amon and Pythias. O r, Friendship in perfection,” in which Pythias proclaims, “We have stuck so close, no third could come between.”32 Furthermore, it is “through” N orris that A nna attempts to assist her friend once Clarissa has left the security of home. She sends a note for fifty guineas in her “Norris’s Miscellanies,” a note Clarissa later returns, saying “pardon me, my best, my kindest friend, that I return your N orris” (512–13).33 Finally, as Harris has noted, Clarissa, like Astell, benefited greatly from corresponding with divines in her youth.34 Much like A stell’s own famous L etters with the “reverend gentle[man]” John N orris, Clarissa’s letters, as Clarissa explains in her will, “exhibit a correspondence that no young person of my sex need to be ashamed of” (1417). Highlighted in A nna Howe’s list of her deceased friend’s many accomplishments, in fact, is her relationship with D r. L ewen, “with whom likewise she held a correspondence by letters” (1470). L ike A stell, Clarissa proves her intellectual mettle in part by holding her own in a correspondence on “serious subjects” (1417) with a learned, respected, and (necessarily) male theologian. It is easy enough, in short, to see why, as he considered Carter’s poem, Richardson would so readily have subscribed to her mis-identification as a relation of Norris— and why, metaphorically understood, the mistake was not one. E ventually, Carter would become the embodiment of A stell’s fundamental contention that women too deserved educational opportunities. The premier female intellectual of her age, a leading Blue S tocking who, according to S amuel Johnson, understood G reek

31 ���������������������������������������������������������������������� N orris’s relatively progressive views on education are evident in his S piritual Counsel: Or, The Father’s A dvice to his Children (1694)—i.e., not “to his S ons.” Here, N orris recommends a life of spiritual piety but also of study, including (of course) Malebranche, but also “the Cartesian and the Experimental philosophy” (500). A stell, according to Ballard, owed her education to the special attentions of “an uncle” who recognized her “excellent natural parts and great propensity to learning” (382; see also Perry, A stell, 53). Carter too was “permitted the opportunity to work in L ondon as a woman of letters,” according to Myers, because of the “special views and hopes of her father” (46). Catherine Talbot, Myers notes, was similarly blessed with an education by her “foster father,” the Revd Thomas S ecker, who “encouraged Catherine’s intellectual interests in the classics, in E nglish and French literature, in history” (63). 32 �������� N orris, Miscellanies, 95. 33 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ A nna “seems eager,” Janet Todd suggests, “to lure Clarissa” into a single life with this money (Women’s Friendship in L iterature [N ew Y ork: Columbia University Press, 1980], 56. A reminder, perhaps, that N orris’s associate A stell had urged women to choose a single life over marriage? 34 ������������������������������������������� Harris, “O riginal or L earned G enius,” 193.

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better than more celebrated—and formally educated—male scholars,35 Carter, like A stell, is well described as a “feminist,” and would likely have acknowledged herself as such. The word “feminism,” and derivations thereof, of course, can be applied only anachronistically to the eighteenth century. Thus, when Bridgett Hill deemed A stell “The First E nglish Feminist,” and when Ruth Perry labeled her “an E arly E nglish Feminist,” both writers used—as they themselves note—a descriptive word to which A stell herself had no recourse.36 This is not to say that A stell should not be considered a feminist, or that, given the opportunity, she would have hesitated to apply the word to herself and her positions. Her concern for her sex, to be sure, is never far from any of her works. Both parts of S erious Proposal and the Reflections Upon Marriage aim explicitly to teach, celebrate, or defend women, and even in more explicitly theological-philosophical works like L etters and Christian R eligion, A stell remains cognizant of her role as a female spokesperson. A stell’s contemporary supporter and friend Mary, L ady Chudleigh, another of N orris’s admiring correspondents, provided her own poignant complaint against male attitudes toward marriage in her poem The L adies Defence (1701). L argely a response to the intense misogyny expressed by John S print in his sermon The Bride-Woman’s Counsellor (1699), Chudleigh’s poem points, as A stell had done, to the sexual and monetary greed at the heart of many marriage proposals, and cleverly discovers the misogynist projection at work in male complaints about female foibles. (Her spokesperson “Melissa,” incidentally, may very well have provided a verbal cue to Pamela’s response to Mr. B’s “rules” for his new wife in Pamela.37) Nor did Astell’s feminist influence die with her in 1731; Sarah Chapone could still wax eloquent when praising A stell and the “D ivine N orris” in her letters to Richardson—and burn with A stellian indignation, as we shall see, when that same author seemed to abandon the positions he had struck on behalf of women in Clarissa. A nd yet, Chapone’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, A stell’s feminist credentials have proven notoriously elusive. E ven for scholars sympathetic to the “varying, and sometimes surprising, political allegiences” of early feminists (to borrow Pateman’s phrase38), expectation at times determines interpretation. In her biography of A stell, for instance, Perry notes the “early feminist’s” express “wish” ������������ Pennington, Memoirs, 1: 13. ������������������������������������������������������������������������� I refer to the titles of Perry’s and Hill’s respective studies of A stell. 37 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� To the Parson’s claim, “[Husband’s] will be kind, when [wive’s] no more offend,” Melissa responds with the rhetorical question, “O f our O ffences who shall Judges be?” (ll. 272–3). To Mr. B.’s twin pronouncements on husbands and wives, “A man should desire nothing of his wife, but what is reasonable and just,” and “she must not shew reluctance ... in obliging him” as long as “he took care to make her compliance reasonable,” Pamela twice responds, “Y et who, all this time, is to be the judge? ... Y et, again I ask—Who is to be the judge?” (Pamela, 469). 38 ��������������������������������� S ee above, chapter 1, pp. 104–5. 35

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in L etters Concerning the L ove of God that she “could read that ingenious A uthor [Malebranche] in his own L anguage, or that he spake mine.”39 In Perry’s view, A stell’s enthusiasm for N orris’s intellectual hero would have diminished had she read his works, especially in light of the following passage from Malebranche’s S earch A fter Truth: ’Tis the Woman’s Province to determine concerning the Fashions, to judge of Language, to distinguish the genteel Mien, and the fine and Courtly Behaviour ... . G enerally [women] are incapable of Penetrating into Truths, that have any Difficulty in the Discovery ... . Their consideration terminates on the surface and out-side of things: and their Imagination has neither strength nor reach enough to pierce to the bottom of [perplex’d Questions] ... . But though it be certain, that this D elicacy of Fibres of the Brain is the principle Cause of all these E ffects; yet it is not equally certain, that it is universally to be found in all Women ... . ’Tis in a certain Temperature of the L argeness and A gitation of the A nimal S pirits, and Conformity with the Fibres of the Brain, that the strength of parts consists: and Women have sometimes that just Temperature ... . There are Women that are L earned, Couragious, and Capable of every thing.40

A stell, Perry believes, would have found irritating and offensive Malebranche’s claims that “the fibers in [most] women’s brains were too soft and delicate” to arrive at “the most difficult and abstract truths” and that women were thus ill suited for “philosophy,” despite his admission that “there were exceptional women who were strong, constant, and rational.”41 In her edition of A stell’s S erious Proposal, Part I, S pringborg agrees with Perry, even taking her argument a difficult step further. She suggests that when Astell refers to a man who claimed “that Women have no S ouls,” she “may be overstating the position of Nicholas [sic] Malebranche,” who “maintained that ‘the fibres in women’s brains were too delicate and weak to plumb philosophical truths,’” and who thus “persuaded women to forget philosophy and concentrate on ‘deciding on fashion, choosing their words and discerning good tone and nice manners’ [S pringborg’s translation].”42 ������� Perry, A stell, 149. ��������������������������������������������������������������� I am quoting from p. 87 of Thomas Taylor’s 1694 translation of S earch A fter Truth, because, as we shall see, this is the edition Chudleigh and A stell read. The same passage can be found on p. 130 of L ennon and O lscamp’s 1980 translation. 41 ������� Perry, A stell, 78. 42 �������� A stell, S erious Proposal, Part I, 23; 57–8n124. I call S pringborg’s continuation of Perry’s argument a “difficult step” because the legitimacy of her annotation depends upon A stell being able to do what she has admitted to N orris she cannot—read French. A stell’s S erious Proposal, Part I was almost certainly composed during the same year as her correspondence with N orris (1693), so she could not very well have learned Malebranche’s language in between her statement to N orris and her writing of S erious Proposal, Part I. N or could she have read Taylor’s translation of S earch A fter Truth, which did not appear until 1694. In short, A stell is almost certainly not thinking of Malebranche in this passage. 39

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A stell’s friend and exponent Chudleigh, however, had a far different view of Malebranche and of the significance to women of his writings. Indeed, in the preface to The L adies Defence, Chudleigh quotes exactly the same passage cited by Perry and S pringborg to show that Malebranche stands as a proponent of women’s intellectual potential: That we are generally less K nowing, and less Rational than the Men, I cannot but acknowledge; but I think ’tis oftener owing to the illness of our E ducation, than the weakness of our Capacities. The learned F. Malebranche says, ’Tis in a certain Temperature of the L argeness and A gitation of the A nimal S pirits, and conformity with the Fibres of the Brain, that the S trength of Parts consists; and he tells us, That Women are sometimes blest with that just Temperature, and are L earned, Couragious, and capable of every thing.43

Perry and S pringborg selectively stress Malebranche’s initial musings at the expense of his final point in order to highlight his anti-feminist tendencies; Chudleigh employs the opposite strategy to underscore the opposite implication; each reading occupies, as it were, the other’s blind spot. S uch antithetical interpretations of a single passage tell us a great deal about the different needs and contexts of seventeenth-century “feminists” and of feminists today. Understanding these differences may help to explain how it is that while recent scholars of A stell like Perry and S pringborg complain that Malebranche’s S earch A fter Truth degrades women, A stell herself, having read Taylor’s translation, approvingly directs her readers to this “extraordinary G enius.”44 A similarly polarized range of contrary readings has emerged in various critical attempts to decipher the degree to which Richardson sympathized in Clarissa with the sorts of predicaments faced by women, and how far he wished to prod his readers on this score. O ne hesitates to generalize much about the now legion readings of Richardson’s novel, but there do seem to have emerged two lines of criticism with respect to such questions, the first admiring to the point of forgiveness, the second disappointed to the point of damnation. A dmirers, including such scholars as Margaret A nne D oody, Jocelyn Harris, Ruth Perry, Howard Weinbrot, and Florian S tuber, are quick to excuse the novel’s regressive tendencies in order to highlight its progressive potential. From this perspective, Clarissa’s unabated suffering throughout her story redounds to those members of society who surround and fail her—a rapacious family, a monstrous suitor, a misogynist rake, a timid reverend—and thus, the more she suffers, the greater the indictment of a culture unable to sustain a woman of Clarissa’s potential. This is the position to which K atherine Rogers, for instance, gives voice: “Constantly affirming women’s capacity and desire to be independent, Richardson developed 43

��������������� Chudleigh, 12. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� A stell quotes Malebranche on the difference between the false learning of “Men of L etters” and the often attentive understanding of uneducated women and children in Reflections, 21–2; see also n. 30 to these same pages. 44

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in Clarissa the tragic conflict between this potential and the patriarchal society which systematically repressed it.”45 For those in the disappointed camp, on the other hand, Richardson is to blame for missing an opportunity, for flirting with a feminist perspective that his novel works finally to refute. In this view, despite offering flashes of feminist insight— the heroine’s heady refusal to accede to the unreasonable demands of her father or her would-be seducer, A nna’s incisive dissection of the pitfalls of marriage for women—the novel’s tragic end amounts to a dunning statement about the capacity of women to negotiate the world they inhabit. For critics adopting this line of thinking, Richardson afflicts his heroine in order to provide an implicitly sadistic warning to women readers about their natural limitations and their proper, subordinate relationship to men. Thus Jerry Beasley complains that while Clarissa initially “dares to speak in defiance of the male center of power and authority ... . her death proclaims the affirmation of the ultimate Fatherly authority”; the once rebellious daughter becomes “the silent child of God,” a final testament to the “proper structuring of authority” and thus, it is implied, a foil to the novel’s early engagement with a legitimate feminist outlook.46 Clarissa may challenge, to some degree, her patriarchal culture, but she dies a willing bride of Christ, a subservient daughter of G od; A nna, for all her complaining, marries Hickman. Whatever progressive impulses he may have humored in his novel, according to this line of criticism, Richardson’s deeply conservative ideological bent constricted his imagination to the point of failure. I do not propose to decide which of these lines of argumentation ought to be privileged. (O ne is reminded of the consternation surrounding Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness [1902], which has been presented both as a trenchant indictment of colonialism and as the work of a “bloody racist.”) It may simply be that Richardson’s novel is the adequate reflection of his own complicated, and sometimes unclear, views of women. O n the one hand, Richardson (the father of daughters, after all) saw in women untapped intellectual potential, creating in him the conviction that women deserved both more respect and better opportunities than his society generally afforded them. This is the Richardson who emerges in the endorsements of E lizabeth Carter noted above—the Richardson whose first heroine criticizes Locke for failing to provide for the education of women, whose second heroine outthinks one university educated man after the other, and whose final hero insists that “genius ... be encouraged, as well in the one Sex as in the other.”47 O n the other hand, Richardson (the father of daughters, after all) knew that, for reasons both natural and cultural, women were susceptible to a set of dangers from which men were immune, encouraging in him a streak of 45 �������������������������������������������������������� K atherine Rogers, “Richardson’s E mpathy with Women,” in A uthority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. A rlyn D iamond and L ee R. E dwards (A mherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 128–9. 46 ������������������������������������ Beasley, “Richardson’s G irls,” 42–4. 47 ���� S ee Pamela [...] IN FOUR VOL UMES , 4: 362–3; and Grandison, 3: 251.

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protective patriarchalism. This is the Richardson who informs S arah Chapone in a letter of 2 March 1752 that “Women, for their own S akes, shou’d not wish to be [independent]” and that “S ubordination is not Punishment but to perverse or arrogant Spirits”; whose first heroine is “rewarded” by marriage to a man who makes it a “rule” for her to “think his D ispleasure the heaviest thing that can befal [her]”; whose second heroine interprets her father’s perverse curse as a sign of her own failing; and whose “good man” responds to his sister’s sarcastic comment, “you have no doubt that there is a natural inferiority in the [intellectual] faculties of us, poor women; a natural superiority in you, imperial men,” by saying, “G enerally speaking, Charlotte.”48 It would not surprise Richardson to learn that texts function as Rorshach tests, ferreting out the biases and projections of readers, sifting them in reciprocal fashion; if readers are “carvers” in Richardson’s oft-cited formulation, they can be carved in their turn. In her introduction to a recent collection of essays on A stell, for instance, Patricia S pringborg retracts her former unwillingness to admit A stell into the feminist fold; “Having myself referred to A stell mostly as a protofeminist, I realize now that I was wrong to do so,” she writes. “The refusal to apply the term ‘feminist’ to those women who early engaged in the struggle to be recognized as minds and bodies with autonomy and rights granted to men involves a kind of reverse anachronism.”49 It is in precisely the opposite direction that L ois Chaber moves in a recently published volta face re-reading of Clarissa. Her essay begins, Twenty-five years ago, in the radical days of the 1970s, when I was teaching Clarissa in A lbany, N ew Y ork, I had made for myself a T-shirt emblazoned with the feminist logo of the clenched fist combined with female sex sign, and the words “Write O n Clarissa,” which I proudly wore to class, a gesture which epitomized my conviction then that S amuel Richardson’s novel was the ultimate feminist text of the eighteenth century.50

A s one might suspect from the title of her essay (“Christian Form and A ntiFeminism in Clarissa”), Chaber’s “present views on Clarissa are much more ambivalent,” the result, she explains, of her recent detection of “a considerable vein of Christian patriarchal authoritarianism” running throughout the novel’s plot and characterization. The split among Richardson critics as to the novel’s rightful claim to recognition as a “major feminist text” ultimately resolves, Chaber explains, into “describing the proverbial glass of water: is it half empty, or half full?”51 The implication of the question, as framed by Chaber, is that it demands a “yes” or “no” answer. Y et, if postmodern theories of reading have taught us anything, it is that ���������������� S ee Richardson, Pamela, 452; and Grandison, 3: 246. ������������ S pringborg, Mary A stell: Theorist, 6. 50 �������������������������������������������������� L ois Chaber, “Christian Form and A nti-Feminism in Clarissa,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15.3–4 (2003): 507. 51 ����������� Ibid., 508. 48 49

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what Chaber found in Richardson’s novel in the 1970s—or what Chudleigh found in Malebranche 300 years ago—cannot easily be “replaced” as inadequate by what someone finds today, any more than we can dismiss as “wrong” those women who, as the twentieth century began, “experienced [Clarissa] as potentially feminist at a moment when the very terms of the ‘woman question’ were taking shape,” thereby instigating a Richardson “revival” just when “the women’s suffrage movement was at its height.”52 But while it would be convenient to attribute wholly to the shifting needs of readers their antipodal reactions to Richardson’s novel, doing so would diminish a central peculiarity at its core. Indeed, keeping in mind the model provided by early feminists like A stell and Chudleigh, I would suggest a new answer to the question Chaber puts to Richardson’s novel: Clarissa’s glass is half full because it is half empty. Put another way, any attempt to separate out the conservative, authoritarian, Christian aspects of the text from its liberal, feminist, secular tendencies relies upon an intellectually untenable distinction. The opening to A stell’s Christian R eligion offers a useful point of entry into the reading of Clarissa I am proposing. A stell begins her argument as follows: If GOD had not intended that Women shou’d use their Reason, He wou’d not have given them any, for He does nothing in vain. If they are to use their Reason, certainly it ought to be employ’d about the noblest O bjects, and in business of the greatest Consequence, therefore in Religion ... . S he must serve GOD with Understanding as well as with A ffections, must love Him with all her Mind and S oul, as well as with all her Heart and S trength; in a word, must perform a reasonable S ervice if she means to be acceptable to her Maker.53

Is this a progressive argument on behalf of women as fully reasonable beings? O r a regressive attempt to delimit the sphere and influence of women by subordinating them to the ultimate Patriarch? The problem, I hope it is becoming clear, is that the answer to both questions must be “yes,” but in a manner that is not logically counterproductive, for the one reading depends entirely on the other. A stell’s “feminist” argument rests upon a conservative, Christian framework—as does Richardson’s novel. Richardson shares his assumptions about marriage, in fact, with E ngland’s “first feminists.” Though, as his final novelistic attempt to create the quintessential “G ood Man” might suggest, Richardson sympathized with A nna Howe’s complaint that “there is not one man in an hundred whom a woman of sense and spirit can either honour or obey”—the world of Clarissa is, after all, full to bursting with morally and intellectually failed men—he did not agree with his creation’s angry suggestion that men, strictly speaking, made women “promise 52 ��������������� Janet A ikins, “Clarissa and the N ew Woman: Contexts for Richardson S cholarship,” S tudies in the L iterary Imagination 28.1 (1995): 67–86. 53 ������������� Mary A stell, The Christian R eligion, A s Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705; 3rd edition 1730), 5–6.

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both ... in marriage” (1456).54 G od, through his Revealed Word, did that (A nna, perhaps, would add “for them”). In other words, although Richardson understood with Clarissa that “men were the framers of the matrimonial office, and made obedience a part of the woman’s office” (182), both he and his creation take it as a scriptural given that to marry Clarissa to L ovelace—or, for that matter, to any man—would necessarily subordinate her; indeed, it was for this reason that he resisted calls to have Clarissa accept L ovelace after all his sins against her.55 Clarissa urges her conservative understanding of the marriage contract on her father, in fact, as a primary reason for not marrying S olmes: given the renouncement of will a woman makes on becoming a wife even to a good husband (“the best prospects”), surely she ought to have the right to insist on “such a man as she can approve” (148–9). Clarissa’s “feminist” resistance to marriage, in other words, which several critics have rightly identified as “Astellian,” is predicated on a fundamentally conservative understanding of the relationship of husbands and wives—one that is equally in keeping with A stell. A stell advised women to avoid marriage in her famous Reflections Upon Marriage, it must be remembered, precisely because, like Clarissa, and like Richardson, she fully accepted the husband’s prerogative as a scripturally sanctioned given. A s S pringborg puts it, for A stell “[t]he submission of women to their husbands, like the submission of citizens to their sovereigns, far from being a case of free individuals contracting into subordination, ... was rather a case of divinely ordained hierarchy.”56 Thus it is that, in a precursor to Clarissa’s anxious appraisal of married life, A stell advises marriage only to that woman “who can be so truly mortify’d as to lay aside her own Will and D esires, to pay such an intire S ubmission for L ife, to one whom she cannot be sure will always deserve it.”57 A stell’s supporter Chudleigh, too, despite giving voice to myriad insightful 54 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� A nna continues on a decidedly A stellian note, “Well do your sex contrive to bring us up fools and idiots in order to make us bear the yoke you lay upon our shoulders; and that we may not despise you from our hearts (as we certainly should if we were brought up as you are) for your ignorance ... .” (1456). Cf. A stell’s S erious Proposal, Part I: “We’re indeed oblig’d to them [men] for their management, in endeavouring to make us so [very mean and contemptible], who use all the artifice they can to spoil, and deny us the means of improvement ... . Were the Men as much neglected, and as little care taken to cultivate and improve them, perhaps they wou’d be so far from surpassing those whom they now dispise, that they themselves wou’d sink into the greatest stupidity and brutality” (9). 55 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� In his 21 January 1749 response to S olomon L owe, Richardson insists that to marry Clarissa to L ovelace after his “unmanly O utrage” would deprive “her sex” of a “glorious Figure” and “E xample” (Carroll, 123). 56 ����������������������������������������� S ee S pringborg’s introduction to A stell, Political Writings, xxvii. 57 �������� A stell, Reflections, 130. Perry locates a similar evasiveness in A stell on the issue of parental authority: “in asserting that a woman, in marrying, tacitly agreed to obey a possibly unworthy authority, A stell seems never to have considered what obedience a woman owed her father, apart from what she thought children of both sexes owed ‘parents’ or ‘family.’ It will be remembered that her own father died when she was twelve. G rowing up in a

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complaints on behalf of women as wives in poem The L adies Defence, has Melissa promise toward the end of the poem that, come what may, wives will continue to be “ever Constant and O bedient”; even if their “soft S ubmissions are in vain,” she insists, good wives will “bear [their] Fate, and never once complain.”58 Richardson’s friend and correspondent S arah Chapone, also a devotee of A stell’s writings, grudgingly arrives at a similar, and clearly exasperating, conclusion in the course of an epistolary debate with the novelist regarding the status of women and wives: “There is one E xempt Case, in which G od has invested a particular S et of Men with great A uthority; and that by his own Declaration, not for the E ase and A dvantage of the G overned, namely, the A uthority of the Man over his Wife” (letter of 22 February 1752).59 Richardson was quick to point out her concession in his 18 A pril 1752 response: “A fter all, you confess, ‘That the A uthority of the Husband is as clear and incontestible as any of the Ten Commandments.’”60 For Richardson and his creation, as for A stell, Chudleigh, and Chapone, the Bible minced no words when it came to the authority of husbands—leaving Christian Feminists to bear a cross emblazoned with the word “obey.”61 A s L eslie Richardson puts it, Clarissa “understands very clearly that marriage would reduce her to a husband’s possession.”62 S mall wonder, then, that the heroine, who recognizes that a woman has “more in her own power, as a single person, than it is probable she would be permitted to have at her disposal as a wife!” (152), begs incessantly her family for permission to live a single woman. It was with dilemmas like Clarissa’s in mind, in fact, that A stell had composed her first published work, A S erious Proposal to the L adies, Part I (1694). In it, she urged construction of all-female religious academies in which a woman could, on the ideal hand, devote herself to improving her culturally stunted mind through a rigorous Christian-Platonist program of reading, meditation, and dialogue with likeminded members of the “happy Society,” and, on the practical hand, find a sanctuary wherein she would “not ... be inveigled and impos’d on ... neither household of women made it possible for her to regard male power as an unnecessary trespass on the freedom of women—a thought that might not have occurred to a woman who had grown up subject to the regular exercise of power by her father or other male relatives” (A stell, 162–3). 58 ��������������������������������� Chudleigh, 39; ll. 811, 813, 814. 59 ������������������������������������������������� Forster Collection of Manuscripts, XII , 2, f. 58. 60 ������������������ Ibid., XII , f. 70. 61 ��������������������� The ceremony for the S olemnization of Matrimony in the Book of Common Prayer (1662) required that women promise to “love, cherish, and obey” their husbands; men repeated the less onerous pledge to “love and cherish” their wives. The distinction is based on Paul’s call in E phesians 5: 22–33 for women to “submit” to their husbands and to be “subject” to them, while men are admonished to “love their wives as their own bodies.” Cf. A nna Howe’s fear that Clarissa will come to “pronounce ... the little reptile word O BEY ” to L ovelace, just as her “mamma” did to James, S r. (278). 62 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ L eslie Richardson, “L eaving her Father’s House: A stell, L ocke, and Clarissa’s Body Politic,” S tudies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 34 (2005): 161.

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be bought nor sold, nor be forc’d to marry for her own quiet, when she has no inclination to it ... .”63 Richardson’s interest in A stell’s idea is evident not only in Clarissa, but throughout his novels and correspondence. Harris has noted that A stell’s proposal provided Richardson the outlines for S ir Charles G randison’s plan for constructing “Protestant Nunneries” in the fourth volume of Grandison.64 The author’s curiosity in such a scheme actually appears much earlier. Between the composition of Clarissa and Grandison, for instance, Richardson had explored in an undated letter of 1749 a similar possibility in chastising L ady Bradshaigh for her “severity” toward “that class of females called old maids”: I have heretofore told you, Madam, what unhappy creatures of your sex I would (were I able) build an hospital for; and at the time I thought to have mentioned, that I would have had worthy old maids, of slender or no fortunes, employed as their guardians, sisters, and directresses, in the particular wards of it. A nd indeed, Madam, I would wish to see, and have often said so, a public and genteel benefaction erected for the support of decayed old maids, of such, in particular, who had never had it in their power to marry with prudence, or who had been perfidiously deserted by our sex, on the score of small fortune, or the like.65

A fter noting that in Rome “celibacy and the single life is a reputation and merit in both sexes,” Richardson rhetorically wonders, “shall those be punished with contempt for living single, and that by their own sex, who have not had it in their power to be married?”66 S uch a hospital might obviate the need, Richardson concludes, for the proposed, and tellingly named, “college for Magdalens” which would indeed be constructed in 1758, and to which the author would contribute and, in 1760, serve as an annual governor.67 E ven as early as 1740, Richardson’s first heroine is able to find comfort in fantasizing about a single-life with her sisterservant and mother figure, Mrs. Jervis: “She [Mrs. Jervis] wished it was in her power to live independent; then she would take a little private house, and I should live with her like her daughter.”68 Clarissa, for her part, incessantly begs her family for the right to live as a single woman, insisting to her former suitor Wyerly on her death bed that “things had not happened that did happen” had she “been allowed” her choice of a “single life”(1268).69 A nna, directly echoing A stell, likewise suggests early in the novel �������� A stell, S erious Proposal, Part I, 27, 39. ������������ Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, 2:355–6; see Harris, Samuel R ichardson, 15–16. 65 ����������������� Barbauld, 4: 252. 66 �������������� Ibid., 4: 253. 67 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� E aves and K impel ably document Richardson’s interest and involvement in Robert D ingley’s project (463–5). Richardson worked diligently to see the anonymous The Histories of S ome of the Penitents in the Magdalen House into print, finally publishing it himself in two volumes in 1760 (Maslen, entries 459–60). 68 ������������ Richardson, Pamela, 58. 69 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “A s I have frequently offered, I will live single with all my heart, if that will do” (139; see also 172, 179, 202, 305, 593). 63 64

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that the two friends “live together” as single women rather than “be cajoled, wiredrawn, and ensnared, like silly birds, into a state of bondage or vile subordination ... courted as princesses for a few weeks, in order to be treated as slaves for the rest of our lives” (133).70 Though Mrs. N orton, as one might expect, is “convinced” at once that Clarissa’s A stellian offer to live single “ought to be accepted,” and even proposes it to the Harlowes, her agreement with Clarissa on this question only proves to her male-dominated audience the ubiquity of a romantic “perverseness ... in female minds” (178). A s with A stell’s own proposal, Clarissa’s plan for a single life meets with scorn, derision, and mockery from men in positions of power.71 A stell’s plan was squashed by Bishop G ilbert Burnet (1645–1715) on the strength of its Papist aroma, leaving A stell bitterly, if not completely candidly, to insist in her “A ppendix” to Christian R eligion that she had “heard it generally complain’d of by very good Protestants, that Monasteries were A bolish’d instead of being Reform’d ... tho’ none that I know of plead for Monasteries, strictly so call’d, in England, or for any thing else but a reasonable provision for the E ducation of one half of Mankind, and for a safe retreat so long and no longer than our Circumstances make it requisite.”72 A stell’s backhanded compliment to Catholicism reverberates in Clarissa’s audacious suggestion that, “were ours a Roman Catholic family, how much happier for me, that they thought a nunnery would answer all their views!” (83). Such a fantasy underscores the absence of the Protestant female community A stell had envisioned, and the events of Clarissa mark, at least in part, the consequences of that lack.73 ������������ S ee A stell, Reflections, 44: “S he must be a Fool with a witness, who can believe a Man, Proud and Vain as he is, will lay his boasted A uthority, the D ignity and prerogative of his S ex, one Moment at her Feet, but in prospect of taking it up again to more advantage; he may call himself her S lave a few days, but it is only in order to make her his all the rest of his L ife.” 71 ����������� S ee Perry, A stell, 228–30 for a useful summary of satires directed at A stell. O f particular note are two separate depictions in 1709 of A stell as “Madonella,” an otherworldly projector, in The Tatler. Perry believes S wift was the author, though S teele and A stell had animus enough for one another to make his authorship equally plausible. 72 ������������������������ A stell, “A ppendix” from The Christian R eligion, A s Profess’d by a Daughter of The Church of England (1717), appended to Mary A stell and John Norris: L etters Concerning the L ove of G od, ed. E . D erek Taylor and Melvyn N ew (Burlington: A shgate Publishing, 2005), 235. Comments such as this may have led to the prevalent notion among scholars of A stell that, as Barney puts it, “A stell’s school would be only a temporary oasis for women’s study and self-examination, before they reentered the world to take up their lives as daughters, wives, or mothers” (186). A lthough A stell does allow for temporary inhabitants, her proposal makes it clear that permanent residence will also be possible for those “who are convinc’d of the emptiness of earthly E njoyments, who are sick of the vanity of the world, and its impertinencies ...” (S erious Proposal, Part I, 18). In other words, we need to distinguish between A stell’s text and her later defenses of it. 73 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Perry similarly suggests that “the closing of the convents meant the end to an alternative refuge for a woman outside of her family circle—a refuge whose lack Richardson dramatically illustrated in Clarissa” (A stell, 133). 70

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If Richardson found it logically impossible to translate his heroine’s mode of feminism into a married state, then, the single life Clarissa craves proved equally elusive, not for logical, but for practical reasons. A straea Hill, A aron Hill’s daughter and an early reader of Clarissa in manuscript and published form, saw clearly how A stell’s plan would have contributed to Clarissa’s relief: How fast, if E ngland had such S anctuary Retreats as Protestant N unneries, wou’d a Clarissa’s State contribute to the filling of ‘em!—I am sure, for my own part, cou’d I have found myself in such a S ituation as Hers was when she left her Father’s House (and S ister Minny bids me add for her part, too) I shou’d have made such haste to take a place there, as to wave all Right to a probation year, for seasoning N ovices into a sense of their own undisturb’d Felicity. For certainly no vow cou’d be a rash one, that but help’d a woman to throw off, to D istance unsurmountable, the L ovelace’s, and Mowbray’s and Belton’s, and Tourville’s, and Solmes’s, and sad Harlow’s [sic]! (Letter of 13 December 1748)74

Without such an institution to turn to, Clarissa is left with very few tenable options. A nna advises Clarissa to “resume” the estate (the so-called “dairy-house”) granted her in her G randfather’s will: “RES UME . If you do, all the rest will follow ... . Who indeed, as you say, would marry, that can live single?” (133–4). Clarissa is reluctant, however, to “litigate with [her] papa” (134) over the estate, which she, for reasons both of duty and of politics, gave over to her father’s control (42). Her unwillingness to stake her claim leaves her, of course, fully in her family’s strangely malignant clutches; but then, to proceed along A nna’s proposed line of action would necessarily precipitate precisely the utter break with her family Clarissa wishes desperately to avoid. Furthermore, Clarissa’s family likely would not allow her to claim the “dairy-house” without a fight, as Richardson himself points out in a letter of 2 March 1752 to S arah Chapone; “But had she been inclined to assume her E state (not resume, for she never was in Possession of it) as her E lder Uncle was one of her Trustees, and against her; and as Cousin Morden was the other, and abroad, she shews, that she could not have done it with E ffect.”75 It is not at all certain, for that matter, that G randfather Harlowe’s bequest would provide Clarissa the footing she would need in a legal battle. A s Brian McCrea has pointed out, G randfather Harlowe himself admits that his decision to leave this estate to Clarissa is “not strictly conformable to law, or the forms thereof,”76 and various members of Clarissa’s family threaten her on this point, 74

���������������������������������������������������� Forster Collection of Manuscripts, XIII , 3, f. 139. ����������������� Carroll, 200–201. It is worth noting that after L ovelace nearly rapes her during the so-called “fire-scene,” the now desperate Clarissa returns to the possibility of “taking her good N orton for her directress and guide, and living upon her own estate in the manner her grandfather had intended she should live.” “This scheme,” L ovelace reports, “she doubted not that her cousin Morden, who was one of the trustees for that estate, would enable her (and that as she hoped, without litigation) to pursue” (850). 76 �������������� Brian McCrea, Impotent Fathers: Patriarchy and Demographic Crisis in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (N ewark: University of D elaware Press, 1998), 124; see Richardson, Clarissa, 53–4. 75

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including her own mother, who menacingly warns, “Take notice that there are flaws in your grandfather’s will; not a shilling of that estate will be yours, if you do not yield” (107).77 To blame Clarissa for lacking the “psychological strength” to “rationally assess her situation, decide that her father is behaving inappropriately, and arrange her life accordingly” by exerting her “economic independence” thus not only unfairly measures her by a hopelessly anachronistic standard—how many 21st-century 19-year-old English women would find this easily done?—but also simplifies beyond recognition the complexity of her predicament.78 A s Ruth Perry has noted, “women intellectuals” of Richardson’s day by and large accepted that Richardson’s novel “fairly represented the plight and concerns of their sex.”79 Richardson knew well the enormous economic and social difficulties faced by single women like Margaret Collier, whose descriptions of her unenviable life in 1755 followed hard on the heels of her unmarried older sister’s unenviable death; Jane, probably the Collier sister who had lived “as family” with the Richardsons in 1750, expired, according to E aves and K impel, “between the middle of 1754 and the fall of 1755.” It was around the same time that Margaret D utton, the unmarried daughter of neighbors, died at the Richardson’s house at Parson’s G reen of a consumption “brought on,” he felt sure, by her unfortunate but necessary reliance upon a “‘most sordid Brother-in-law.’”80 S he, like Jane, had just barely seen her fourth decade. E ven if Margaret Collier managed to remain healthy—and she was herself approaching 40 years of age, it should be noted, during the time of her correspondence with Richardson—her living conditions were hardly an endorsement of “the single life.” Margaret might very well have struck Richardson as another E lizabeth E lstob, whose maddening story had driven G eorge Ballard to write his hagiography of learned E nglishwomen in 1752. Ballard had discovered this intellectual sexagenarian, once a highly celebrated S axon scholar, “sadly reduced to keeping a small primary school, where she single-handedly taught the rudiments of reading and writing to the children of sheep farmers and stocking weavers.” Having found the “overworked” and “rattled” E lstob, Ballard and his

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������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Cf. Uncle A nthony’s similar warning on p. 157. Clarissa’s grandfather has died before the novel begins, but the influence of his will on the plot is pervasive. By leaving Clarissa both his money and his “dairy-house,” G randfather Harlowe establishes the potential for her either to usurp James, Jr.’s role as the focal point of family pride—and resources—or, in a worst case scenario, to reject her family and live independently, thereby heightening their suspicions and fears regarding L ovelace. It is worth remembering that as the novel ends the Harlowes are contesting yet another will—Clarissa’s own. 78 ���������������������� S ee Mona S cheuermann, Her Bread to Earn: Women, Money, and S ociety from Defoe to A usten (L exington: University Press of K entucky, 1993), 63. 79 ����������������������������������� Perry, “Clarissa’s D aughters,” 122. 80 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� E aves and K impel, 203, 201. S ee Richardson’s letter of 3 January 1757 to S arah S cudamore (Forster Collection of Manuscripts, XIV, 2, f. 75).

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supporter S arah Chapone sought, and found, a position “that offered her more leisure and security in her frailty and advanced age.”81 Richardson wrote Clarissa in the decade before E lstob’s rediscovery; even then, however, he understood clearly enough the unmentioned exegencies encumbering A nna’s brave suggestion to Clarissa that the two of them “go off privately” and “live and die together” (331). A s Perry has demonstrated, “For different but interrelated reasons ... women of both the landowning and working classes lost economic power within the family and status in society in the course of the eighteenth century.”82 While Clarissa is particularly attuned to the “tragedy of disinheritance”—Richardson’s novel, Perry notes, “enacts this disinheritance drama with the clarity of dumbshow”—eighteenth-century British fiction is “full of heroines who make desperate attempts to find employment as paid companions, governesses, schoolteachers, sempstresses, actresses, musicians, painters, or writers—but who, in the end, can only establish themselves by marrying well.”83 Richardson’s inability to launch his fictional heroine into a single life of security, happiness, and economic well being, in other words, is in large part a reflection of his position in the midst of a particular historical tide; where A nna Howe’s “live or die” formula might carry the patina of romance for twenty-first century readers, Richardson with good reason felt in it the weight of a fatalism that, decades later, Jane A usten and Charlotte Brontë would well have recognized. Mary Wollstonecraft’s complaint on behalf of single women, made some forty years later in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), is telling: “Few are the modes of earning a subsistence, and those very humiliating.”84 Indeed, of all the single women Richardson knew, and there were many, probably E lizabeth Carter presented the best argument for remaining unmarried; and though he considered Carter exemplary in this regard, he also considered her the exception, not the rule—the excellent analyses of A manda Vickery and Betty S chellenberg notwithstanding.85 A s S ylvia Myers explains, Carter resisted 81

������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� S ee Perry’s introduction to her modern edition of Ballard’s text (21, 23). The death of E lstob’s brother (and collaborator), Perry explains, quickly transformed E lizabeth’s life into a battle for subsistence (21, 23). 82 ������������ Ruth Perry, Novel R elations: The Transformation of Kinship in English L iterature and Culture 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 64. 83 ���������� Ibid., 62. 84 ����������������� Quoted in Perry, Novel R elations, 219. 85 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Vickery ably disputes the convenient notion that the condition of elite women in eighteenth-century E ngland amounted to separate-sphere slavery; it is important to note, however, that her corrective assumes marriage either as a goal or as an accomplished fact for the women in question, and thus has virtually nothing to say about the condition of single women. S ee The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s L ives in Georgian England (N ew Haven: Y ale University Press, 1998). S chellenberg offers a similarly compelling case for considering mid-century writers like E lizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte L ennox, and S arah Fielding as integral parts of the literary world of the day, not simply as liminal hangers-on to the male establishment. S ee The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain

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marriage because she saw, as A stell had seen, “that marriage involved a power relationship in which men dominated women.”86 A s a single woman, then, Carter managed “to achieve a degree of satisfying independence which was supported by her friendships.”87 But a “degree of satisfying independence” is only just that—a “degree.” In their letters, Carter and her also single friend Catherine Talbot remark frequently upon their shared lot as members of a “society of spinsters,” sometimes good-humoredly, sometimes with a resignation bordering on despondence. A s Talbot sees it in a letter of 27 June 1744, Carter’s depression over the impending loss of a close friend to marriage leaves her with two options: either, she suggests, the 27-year-old Carter “should be beforehand with her” and find in marriage an “inseparable friend”—or she must “turn Roman Catholic” and join a “whole sisterhood of friends secluded from the rest of the world.”88 Talbot had a personal, if complex, affinity for the first alternative; for Carter, however, neither is an option.89 N o suitable man has presented himself, she notes in her response, and even if she could join a convent, she would have to find a way to avoid “breaking [her] neck” escaping. (“I make a scruple of keeping birds in a cage,” she explains, S terne-like.90) Two years later, Carter announced to Talbot her decision to give up thinking about marriage entirely: “I do not know a man upon earth that would be troubled with me, and therefore I have for some time thought it but right and prudent to give up all schemes of this sort to my younger sister, and sit quietly down with my books, and half a dozen friends, who between sense and nonsense engage my attention agreeably enough to prevent my finding any thing very deplorable in my condition.”91 Carter’s decidedly open-minded father, however, had not yet given up on his daughter’s prospects. When, in 1749, John D alton expressed interest in E lizabeth, who was then living in L ondon, the Reverend Carter, Myers explains, felt compelled to remind her “that a settlement arranged with prudence is better than a single life, ‘which is errant, & S eldom meets with much E steem’” (letter of 5 February 1749).92 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). A s S chellenberg shows, S arah Fielding, Richardson’s friend and a discerning reader of Clarissa, provides another exception to the general rule—she too, like Carter, remained single and proved a successful writer. 86 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Myers, 111. I will not speculate, as some have done, on Carter’s sexuality. Whatever else may be said, it is clear that Carter did not need to be a lesbian to remain unmarried. 87 ���������� Ibid., 60. 88 �������� Carter, S eries of L etters, 1: 61. 89 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Unlike Carter, Talbot formed significant emotional attachments to at least two men, both of whom married other women. Her relationship with G eorge Berkeley (son of the philosopher) is especially revealing and not a little sad; Berkeley, 12 years her junior, loved her and proposed marriage in 1758, but Talbot, then 37, felt compelled to reject him despite her reciprocal feelings. A s Myers puts it, the relationship “might have ended in matrimony, if ... But too much was against it” (115; see 113–17). Cf. E aves and K impel, 357–64. 90 �������� Carter, S eries of L etters, 1: 65. 91 �������������� Ibid., 1: 155. 92 ����������� Myers, 110.

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E lizabeth’s retreat to D eal followed her decision not to accept; “if she did not intend to marry,” her frustrated father made clear, “she should live ‘retired, and not appear in ye World with an E xpence, which is reasonable, upon ye E xpectation of getting an Husband; But not otherwise’” (letter of 6 March 1749).93 N ot even so nurturing a father as Reverend Carter—he “had given his sons and daughters the same classical education,” Myers explains, and “seems to have encouraged [E lizabeth] to think of herself as an independent person capable of taking risks”94—could help but believe that his daughter ought to marry, for her own sake as well as for that of her family. L ike the Reverend Carter, Richardson respected women who were independent; he valued their intellectual potential; he understood how they might be drawn to the idea of a single life; and he felt certain that they should marry if at all possible. S cheuermann complains that “Richardson never suggests, as novelists later in the century do, that a woman should have some other alternative to a repugnant marriage than staying in her parents’ house or dying.”95 S urely, this is in part because the evidence for such an alternative in 1747 was, at best, mixed. A stell, it should be remembered, never explained exactly how those women considering her advice in Reflections could expect to maintain themselves as single women— and, for a variety of cultural, legal, political reasons, the prospects of a woman doing so only grew more dim, as Ruth Perry has shown, as the eighteenth century unfolded.96 S arah Chapone, whose enthusiasm for A stell was matched only (and not coincidentally) by her devotion to Clarissa Harlowe, seems equal parts dumbfounded and irked by Richardson’s refusal in an undated exchange (probably March 175297) to support her contention that women ought to be encouraged to remain single and independent if they so desired. S he considers his claim to have women’s best interests in mind a “most surprizing A ssertion,” especially coming from the “benevolent and equitable” author of Clarissa, and she proceeds to turn back on Richardson the A stellian arguments for female independence she had found in his novel. “What great or noble can be expected of a Creature so silly that it cannot be trusted with its insignificant self?” she wonders, as Astell had wondered; “S urely it cannot have the Image of G od impressed upon it, neither can it be capable of receiving his L aws.”98 Richardson’s response, if he gave one, does not survive. In theory, Chapone had him over the proverbial barrel; the author’s ennobling presentation of Clarissa Harlowe carried implications for women’s capabilities that, in Chapone’s view, he was now attempting to deny. But outside the world of his novel—outside a world he could control—practice, in

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����� Ibid. ���������� Ibid., 46. 95 ����������������� S cheuermann, 62. 96 ������������������������������������������������������ S ee chapter 1 (“The great disinheritance”) of Perry’s Novel R elations, 38–76. 97 �������������������������������������������������� E aves and K impel explain in their A ppendix to the Biography (“Richardson’s Correspondence,” 661) that this letter is undated but is a response to his of 2 March 1752. 98 ������������������������������������������������������ Forster Collection of Manuscripts, XII , 2, ff. 53, 54. 94

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Richardson’s mind, trumped theory. In practice, Richardson might have pointed out, Chapone was married. Indeed, not even so insightful—and often contemptuous—a critic of Richardson as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu could quite find her feet on this question. Montagu had been a friend of A stell’s and had early on been captivated by the older woman’s arguments on behalf of women; it is not surprising, then, that the “one good thing” she has to say about Richardson’s Grandison is “his project of an E nglish Monastery.” “It was a favorite S cheme of mine when I was fiveteen,” she explains bemusedly and wistfully in a letter of 20 October 1755 to her daughter, L ady Bute, “and had I then been mistress of an Independent fortune, would certainly have executed it and elected my selfe L ady A bess.99 Montagu had personal reasons for stressing this point. Her granddaughters, as she saw it, were likely not marriageable; “I look upon my G rand daughters as a sort of L ay N uns,” she wrote to her daughter in a letter of 6 March 1755. “D estiny may have laid up other things for them, but they have no reason to expect to pass their time otherwise than their A unts [both unmarried] do at present.” G iven these circumstances, “a learned E ducation” ought to be provided the young women; “I know by E xperience it is in the power of S tudy not only to make solitude tolerable but agreeable,” Montagu explained. “I have now liv’d almost seven years in a stricter Retirement than yours in the Isle of Bute, and can assure you I have never had halfe an hour heavy on my Hands for want of something to do.”100 In her biography of Astell, Perry suggests that Montagu’s comments reflect her sense of her granddaughters’ “inclinations” to a “quiet intellectual life.”101 But Montagu did not know her granddaughters; she only met them toward the end of her life, some seven years later. It thus seems more likely that her advice draws not on her detection of a shared A stellian temperament in the girls, but on her assessment of the dim prospects of finding suitable husbands for women whose aristocratic blood far outstripped their dowries. “My only D esign,” Montagu insisted in 1755,

��������������������������� L ady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete L etters of L ady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols (O xford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3: 97–8. 100 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Ibid., 3: 25. In her biography, Isobel G rundy explains L ady Mary’s educational advice as follows: “Her spur was the news that her eldest granddaughter, at almost fifteen, showed marked promise, particularly in mathematics. L ady Mary responded with a brief essay on how to educate a girl ‘not only capable but desirous of L earning’. S he begins and ends her letter with self-justification: Lady Bute herself had clearly been capable of learning; but her mother had expected that as only daughter of a wealthy father she would attract ‘the highest offers’ in marriage, and would be a great lady with no time to read. The subtext was that she had not foreseen L ady Bute’s rebellion and disinheriting. S he now assumed that her granddaughters would be too poor to marry. This made it all the more important to teach them well, for only the educated could be happy in domestic retirement” (L ady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment [O xford: O xford University Press, 1999], 523–4). 101 ������� Perry, A stell, 272. 99

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“is to point out to my G rand D aughters the method of being contented with that retreat to which probably their circumstances will oblige them.”102 Montagu was attempting, in other words, to provide her daughter and sonin-law (future Prime Minister under G eorge III [1762–63]) a plan for making a virtue of what at the time seemed necessity. Men have “so many roads ... to meet good Fortune,” as Montagu put it to L ady Bute upon learning of the birth of her son; women “have but one ... and that surrounded with precipices, and perhaps, after all, better miss’d than found” (letter of 15 A pril 1755).103 Three years later, Montagu would reveal just how much weight her “perhaps” had carried: I wish L ady Mary’s D estiny may lead her to a Y oung G entleman I saw this S pring. He is S on to Judge Hervey, but takes the name of D esbouverie on inheriting a very large Estate from his Mother. He will not charm at first sight, but I never saw a young Man of better understanding, with the strictest notions of Honor and Morality, and, in my opinion, a peculiar sweetness of temper. O ur A cquaintance was short, he being summon’d to E ngland on the D eath of his Y ounger Brother. I am persuaded he will never marry for Money, nor even for Beauty. Y our D aughter’s character perfectly answers the D escription of what he wish’d his Bride ... . (letter of 4 July 1758)104

Montagu well understood, with A stell, the risks to which women exposed themselves in marriage—even better than A stell, whose knowledge was only theoretical.105 “In a L ottery where there is (at the lowest computation) ten thousand blanks to a prize,” Montagu wrote, “it is the most prudent choice not to venture.”106 A nd yet she could not help but fantasize about the imprudent choice—about granddaughters who would venture, after all. “Y ou will laugh,” she admitted to her daughter, “at the Castles I build in relation to my G rand children ... .”107 Montagu complained in her letter of 20 O ctober 1755 to L ady Bute that Richardson in Grandison “is so eager for the multiplication of [marriages], I suppose he is some parish Curate, whose chiefe profit depends on Weddings and christenings.”108 There is doubtless something to her remark, as well as to John 102

��������������� Montagu, 3: 27. ������������� Ibid., 3: 83. 104 ���������������� Ibid., 3: 154–5. 105 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� L ady Mary eloped with E dward Wortley Montague in 1712; as Perry notes, L ady Mary grudgingly admits in a letter of 22 S eptember 1755 to her daughter that “the 2 first Tomes of Clarissa touch’d me as being very near ressembling to my Maiden Days” (Montagu, 3: 90). D uring the summer of 1712, Perry writes, L ady Mary’s “father tried to force her to marry a man she did not like. When she appealed to her relatives to intercede for her at the time—much as Clarissa does in the novel—she was told that she was a silly romantic and that no one married for love” (“Clarissa’s D aughters,” 120). 106 ��������������� Montagu, 3: 24. 107 �������������� Ibid., 3: 155. 108 ������������� Ibid., 3: 91. 103

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Carroll’s quip that “in Richardson’s eyes a single young lady in possession of independence and a large fortune was on the verge of disaster.”109 But to leave it at this both overstates and oversimplifies Richardson’s position in this matter. The novel Montagu attacks provides ample evidence, in fact, that however strong Richardson’s suspicions of the single life as a realistic option for women, this possibility never lost its fascination for him. Harriet Byrom, Grandison’s E nglish heroine, sounds a great deal like Montagu—or is it the other way around?—in her appraisal of unmarried women: “[L ]et not those worthy young women, who may think themselves destined to a single life, repine over-much at their lot; since, possibly, if they have had no lovers, or having had one, two, or three, have not found an husband, they have had rather a miss than a loss as men go.”110 With no father or mother to control her, an independent fortune, and good sense to boot, Harriet is herself decidedly eligible for the unmarried existence she seems willing, perhaps even eager, to accept as her lot: “I must love the man to whom I would give my hand,” she tells the rakish S ir Hargrave Pollexfen, “well enough to be able, on cool deliberation, to wish to be his wife; and for his sake (with my whole heart) choose to quit the single state, in which I am very happy.”111 It is telling that Richardson would create within his final novel a heroine so well prepared to live a single life; it is equally telling that, having set the bar for potential suitors so high, Harriet immediately meets a hero who leaps it with ease. Indeed, S ir Charles himself would appear to embody his author’s split allegiances in this matter. Upon his father’s death, S ir Charles promises both his sisters “an absolute independence on your brother” so that their “actions and conduct may be all your own.” His generosity of spirit elicits from Charlotte and Caroline the perfectly ameliorative response: “[W]e must think it the highest felicity, that we are in the power of such a brother ... . We cannot, we will not, be independent of you.” “O ne of my first pleasures,” Sir Charles happily exclaims, “will be, to see you both happily married.”112 If Richardson seems less revolutionary in Grandison, less feminist in outlook, this may in part reflect his own defensive tendencies as a writer; the author approached each new novel as an opportunity to clarify, generally in a conservative direction, issues of morality or propriety a previous novel had raised. But it is also the case that the open-ended plot of Richardson’s final novel tied his hands in a way that his previous had not. That he allowed himself in Clarissa to explore the condition of women, including the possibility of their independence, in ways that a reader like Chapone could find satisfying results directly from the paradoxically liberating weight of the conclusion to which he knew his heroine would at last arrive. Having reached a similar narrative crossroads in the final volume of S ir Charles Grandison—both the minor character L ucy S elby and the major character ������������������������������ S ee Carroll’s introduction to S elected L etters, 22. ������������ Richardson, Grandison, 1: 232. 111 Ibid., 1:96. 112 �������������� Ibid., 1: 374. 109 110

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Clementina della Poretta channel romantic disappointment into a stated desire to remain single—Richardson creates a well respected spinster, one L ady G ertrude, to whom the central female characters appeal for thoughts on “the single state.” This “S age,” herself an admitted “old maid,” refuses to “write partially on that side of the question.” A lthough she can imagine exceptions, she feels sure that, in general, “a woman is most likely to find her proper happiness in the married state.”113 Clarissa, a character slated to die, needs no such advice. In its full commitment to an A stellian form of feminism, in other words, Clarissa represents not an anomaly in Richardson’s thought, but rather a uniquely unencumbered exploration of ideas that never had been nor would be far from his creative mind. O n the one hand, Clarissa’s death may be seen as the manifestation of an allergic reaction between A stell’s brand of feminism, which urged women to live chaste and single, and a culture that had little place for single women to “live” at all. On the other hand, however—and this has been the far more difficult hand to accept—Clarissa’s death works to validate the central argument feminists like A stell were making: in the eyes of G od, women were equal to men. Jocelyn Harris has suggested that in positing death as Clarissa’s only escape, Richardson shows himself “locked into a despair about the female condition that he shared with many women writers of his time, particularly Mary A stell.”114 It also shows him determined to follow A stell’s feminist argument to its logical, paradoxical foundations. In her preparations for death, Clarissa becomes the virtual embodiment of the thesis developed by N orris and A stell in their spiritual manifesto, L etters Concerning the L ove of God (1695; 2nd ed. 1705; 3rd ed. 1730), according to which “the true way to Felicity” lies in turning desire away from “the creature” and toward G od—“We may as reasonably expect that a S tone should go up Hill and down Hill at the same time,” A stell there insists, “as that the S oul should at once love GOD and any thing besides him.”115 A stell had herself initiated the correspondence with N orris in S eptember, 1693 with an incisive critique of his explanation of the Malebranchean theory that God alone deserves and satisfies human love. Norris was both wise and humble enough to see that A stell’s criticism was meant as a corrective, and he and A stell were soon in perfect harmony in arguing, to borrow from A stell’s ninth letter, as follows: “He that enjoys GOD cannot D esire any thing out of him, because of the infinite Fulness of God ... . He that has discovered the Fountain will not seek for troubled and failing S treams to quench his Thirst: He can never be content to step aside to catch at the S hadow who is in Pursuit and View of the S ubstance. The S oul that loves GOD has no occasion to love other things ... .”116 Norris fittingly appeals to “the great Spanish Seraphick St. Theresa” in his ������������ Richardson, Grandison, 3: 407–8. ������������������������������������������������������������������������ Jocelyn Harris, “G rotesque, Classical and Pornographic Bodies,” 116–17. 115 ������������������� A stell and N orris, L etters, 114–15. 116 ������������������������������������������������������������������������ Ibid., 115. John A llen S tevenson suggests that we can better understand Clarissa if we treat of it not as an expression of orthodox Christianity but of G nosticism. Though he 113

114

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prefacing defense of the message and tone of L etters;117 A stell, a solid A nglican if ever there was one, was also likened to the Catholic saint by E lizabeth Thomas in her poem “A lmystrea.”118 We need not be surprised, then, that “without any apparent familiarity with the histories of Teresa and John, Richardson managed to transcend his own tradition to create a mystic saint who recreates the Catholic saints’ experiences and meditations in their own language.”119 Clarissa’s mystical language derives from works like L etters, which, though mindful of the writings of Theresa and John, belong firmly in Richardson’s “own” tradition. The major points of A stell and N orris’s argument are central to Richardson’s imagining of Clarissa’s final weeks of life. In his preface to L etters, N orris insists that “the Heart is the Sacrifice that GOD demands”;120 Clarissa, near death, agrees, writing to Mrs. N orton that “God will have no rivals in the hearts of those he sanctifies” (1338).121 No rivals—not even an A nna Howe, or a Mrs. N orton, those friends whom Clarissa had once hoped to join in a female community of their own creation. For Janet Todd, Clarissa’s refusal to see the women who occupy her “last thoughts” is a marker of how fully the heroine has been channeled into a “traditional,” “patriarchal” plot.122 O n this point, however, Clarissa (and her creator Richardson) are following A stell’s theoretical argument and personal lead. In her seventh letter to N orris, A stell explains that although tearing oneself away from desire for a “Sister Soul” is difficult, it is also necessary, not only “morally,” but practically—“a S ister S oul may give somewhat better E ntertainment to our L ove than other creatures can, but she is not able to fill and content it.”123 Clarissa, echoing wisely admits of limitations to this approach, he believes it has the advantage of explaining Clarissa’s and L ovelace’s shared attitude toward the material world in the novel; “for the true gnostic, matter itself is intrinsically evil,” and on this point, he believes, Richardson’s characters, and perhaps Richardson himself, are true gnostics (“A lien S pirits,” 93). A ssuming N orris and A stell too were “orthodox Christians,” I would propose the major point of their L etters as a more likely source for Richardson’s devaluing of all things composed of “matter,” as well as a better explanation of Clarissa’s final attitude toward the world—material goods are good, but they simply cannot compete with the spiritual satisfaction found in an attentive contemplation of G od. 117 ������������������� A stell and N orris, L etters, 58. 118 ������� Perry, Mary A stell, 111. 119 ���������� Flynn, 27. 120 ������������������� A stell and N orris, L etters, 57. 121 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Richardson accentuates Clarissa’s spiritual triumph by placing the sensual L ovelace just beyond the pale of Clarissa’s recognition of satiety in G od. A ppropriately, the same man who rapes Clarissa’s body but never touches her “self” insists, even after Clarissa’s death, on his rights to her literal “heart” (1384), thus missing the “whole heart” that Clarissa “gave up ... to a better hope” (1374), or to G od. O n learning of Clarissa’s death, L ovelace wishes to do “everything that can be done to preserve the charmer from decay” (1383), the (il)logical last gasp of his futile sensuality. 122 ����� Todd, 63. 123 ������������������� A stell and N orris, L etters, 100.

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A stell closely on this point, explains to Belford that “the truly friendly love that has so long subsisted between my Miss Howe and her Clarissa, although to my last gasp it will be the dearest to me of all that is dear in this life, has already abated of its fervour; has already given place to supremer fervours” (1342). Clarissa’s ostensibly hermitic desire not “to see objects so dear to me [Miss Howe and Mrs. N orton]” for fear that they might “bring me back again into sense, and rival my supreme love” (1338),124 when coupled with her pathetic parting with A nna’s picture (1357), enacts both the letter and the spirit of A stell’s proscription in L etters to “cut off all D esire from the Creature, ... shut up all A venues of our S ouls from created good, even from those dearest Idols that bear the nearest Resemblance to our Maker.”125 N or, it would appear, did A stell hesitate to put theory into practice. Before Clarissa’s dying struggle came A stell’s own, as described by Ballard in his Memoirs: “Her thoughts were now so entirely fixed upon God and eternity that for some days before her death she earnestly desired that no company might be permitted to come to her, refusing at that time to see even her old and dear friend the L ady Catherine Jones, purely because she would not be disturbed in the last moments of her divine contemplations.”126 In keeping with A stell’s model, in other words, Clarissa of course discovers that only God satisfies completely, that no creature, not even a husband or a true friend, can finally serve as His adequate surrogate.127 Despite the paradox implicit in finding self-worth through existential prostration, Clarissa does indeed prove her charge to Lovelace, “My soul is above thee, man!” (646), by valuing her “S elf” solely for its participation with—and subsumption within—D ivinity. This is as one would expect of any “descendant” of N orris. O f course, as Flynn puts it, that “the answer” to Clarissa’s many problems “lies in heaven” is “cold comfort to the common reader in the real world.”128 A nd yet Clarissa’s experience is not, in her own estimation, ascetic in nature. “I am now above the quick sense of those pleasures which once most delighted me,” she explains in refusing to see her dearest friends; “By various methods [G od] deadens all other sensations, or rather absorbs them all in the love of Him” (1338). Clarissa discovers that directing her desire toward divinity, as A stell puts it, gives “Wings to this E arthly Body that presses down the soul.”129 “Whilst our S ouls are inebriated with its Pleasures, our very Bodies partake of its S weetness”130—this is A stell’s description of “the L ove of GOD,” but it is one Clarissa would surely second. 124

������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ A s discussed in the previous chapter, “sense” here refers to the corporeal world of physical objects Clarissa is attempting to surmount. 125 ������������������� A stell and N orris, L etters, 117. 126 �������������� Ballard, 392. 127 �������������������������������������������������������������������������� Howard D . Weinbrot contends that by having Clarissa bypass the church and speak “directly to G od” in death, Richardson implicitly includes the too-worldly Christian institution among those things upon which Clarissa learns she cannot depend (“Clarissa, E lias Brand, and D eath by Parentheses,” in New Essays On S amuel R ichardson, 117–40). 128 ����������� Flynn, 255. 129 ������������������� A stell and N orris, L etters, 99. 130 ���������� Ibid., 98.

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N or, in Clarissa’s mind at least, does her coming end spell the end of her earthly friendships. Janet Todd complains that Clarissa’s death “returns her to her father and severs her friendship [with A nna] forever,”131 but this certainly is not Clarissa’s impression of her death, nor would it have been that of N orris and A stell. Indeed, far from believing that death will sever her friendship with A nna, Clarissa rapturously envisions the time when the two friends will be “all light and mind,” exclaiming “then how unalloyed, how perfect, will be our friendship!” For Clarissa, far from separating her from A nna “forever,” returning to her “father” guarantees their eternal bond: “our love then will have one and the same adorable object, and we shall enjoy it and each other to all eternity!” (1348). Friendship, in this scenario, is not destroyed, but deferred, and in a manner that bothered S arah Chapone—a “common reader” who inhabited a “real world”—not at all: “The Cement [of friendship],” she explained to Richardson (borrowing from A stell and N orris’s L etters), “is such, that (I trust) it shall not be dissolved, even when L ife itself goes out. For all true L overs of G od, like needles touched by the L oad-S tone, not only cleave to him their magnet, but also to one another” (letter of 15 D ecember 1750).132 N or would such a deferral have bothered another “real” reader, E lizabeth Carter, who felt sure that Heaven is “a society” wherein “the connections of virtue [i.e., present friendships] will be immortal, as the spirits by which they are formed.”133 In the conclusion to her rethinking of the “political implications” of Richardson’s novel, Chaber suggests that “the close link between Christian patriarchal tradition and masterpieces of the Western literary canon poses, indeed, a continuous and perhaps ultimately irresolvable dilemma for feminist critics.”134 A s the example of A stell makes clear, however, an equally pressing “irresolvable dilemma” haunts the link between Christian tradition and Western feminism itself. Chaber sees in Clarissa’s death the signs of an avenging providence that has finally disciplined a wayward daughter: [I]t is this saintly passivity, this refusal to ‘do’ anything, which, in Richardson’s Christian patriarchal view, earns Clarissa her final freedom as well as the reconciliation with her D ivine Father. A few hours before death, she recites the lesson she has learned about the renunciation of self-reliance: ‘BUT GOD AL MIG HTY WO ULD NO T LE T ME DE PEND FO R CO MFO RT UPON ANY BUT HIMSEL F.’135

Quite to the contrary, Leslie Richardson finds in the heroine’s “quest for death” a “desperate attempt to claim property in her own person”:

131

���������� Todd, 63. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Forster Collection of Manuscripts, XII , 2, f. 10. Chapone is echoing a passage from A stell’s prefacing contribution to L etters: “A ll true L overs of GOD being like excited N eedles, which cleave not only to him their Magnet, but even to one another” (66–7). 133 ������������ Pennington, Memoirs, 2: 401. 134 ������������� Chaber, 535. 135 ���������������� Ibid., 530. S ee Clarissa, 1356. 132

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“I am nobody’s,” asserts Clarissa’s will; her relations hear in this a piteous complaint, for they assume that a young woman must belong to someone, but we could as easily read this statement as her final claim to self-ownership: I am nobody’s but my own.136

The position articulated by A stell and championed by Richardson in Clarissa, however, insists that we merge these discrepant readings into one: Clarissa belongs to no-body because she belongs to G od. A s A stell advises readers in her guide to female education, S erious Proposal, Part II , when a woman has a proper share of “Pride” and “Humility,” her “S elf-E steem does not terminate in her S elf but in GOD , and she values her self only for GOD ’s sake.”137 For Clarissa, as for A stell, this is an empowering truth—even unto death.138 “Bless—bless—bless—you all—and now—and now ... come—O h come— blessed Lord—Jesus!”—thus Clarissa expires, as described by Belford, her final word “but half-pronounced” (1362). Hers is precisely the G od-centered death A stell rapturously envisions in L etters: Thrice happy S oul that canst look through the Veil, and notwithstanding that thick Cloud of Creatures that obscures thy View, discern him that is invisible, live in the L ight of his Countenance all the Time of thy sojourning here, and at last pure and defecate, with a K iss of thy Beloved, breath out thy self into his sacred Bosom!139

Beasley calls on readers to be suspicious of the “S criptural frame of reference” from which Clarissa draws her “moral authority” and “power,” contending that “the authority Clarissa assumes is not her own but something inscribed upon her by religious tradition, which is a male tradition, and by her male author, who has created her to be the vessel of virtue and piety.”140 E arly feminists like A stell and Chudleigh, however, would have pushed readers toward precisely the opposite conclusion. In Reflections Upon Marriage, A stell urges women to keep in mind the eternity they will spend in Heaven, “a time when that distinction, now so much us’d to her Prejudice, shall be no more ... [and] her S oul shall shine as bright as the 136

����������������������� L eslie Richardson, 167. �������� A stell, S erious Proposal, Part II , 179. In other words, Perry’s appraisal is correct only insofar as we keep in mind the theological burden “self-determination” entailed for A stell: “From Mary A stell’s writings [Richardson] absorbed a strong feminist tone asserting women’s right to self-determination” (Perry, “Clarissa’s D aughters,” 119). 138 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Cf. Patricia Meyer S pack’s comment on Clarissa’s “paradoxical assertion of self ... . Her humility before G od corresponds to no abasement before man” (“The G rand Misleader: S elf-L ove and S elf-D ivision in Clarissa,” S tudies in the L iterary Imagination 28.1 [1995]: 19). 139 ������������������� A stell and N orris, L etters, 131. A stell uses an obsolete sense of “defecate” meaning “spiritually purified”; see the note to this passage in L etters, 164. 140 ������������������� Jerry C. Beasley, “Clarissa and E arly Female Fiction,” in Clarissa and Her R eaders, 73. 137

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greatest Heroes.”141 Chudleigh similarly ends her L adies Defence by capping her acknowledgment of a husband’s prerogative with a confident vision of an eternal afterlife where, “free from the Confinement of our Clay,” the souls of women shall “the whole of N ature know; / S ee all her S prings, her secret Turnings view, / and [speaking to the men] be as knowing, and as wise as you.”142 For them, as for Carter, as for Chapone, as for Richardson in Clarissa, a “S criptural frame of reference” offered not only a way into the game, but a trump card. O f course, there is an empirical void at the center of the reader’s experience of Clarissa’s acquisition of “happiness” through death, as at the center of A stell’s form of feminism; both Clarissa’s final moments of life and Astell’s argument on behalf of women are haunted by what might be characterized as a divine lacuna. A s Florian S tuber puts it, That Clarissa believes in G od does not mean that He is actually present in the world of her novel ... . G od comes closest to appearing in the world of Clarissa in those circumstances which surround the heroine’s death. Her last words echo those which end the Bible ... and the smile with which she dies “seemed to manifest her eternal happiness already begun.” It only seems; the reader may believe it or not.143

Even before her death, as Belford records it, Clarissa finds that she cannot adequately communicate her premonitions of blissful immortality: “O h dear gentlemen, said she, you know not what foretastes—what assurances—A nd there she again stopped, and looked up, as if in a thankful rapture” [1362]). Clarissa’s language here suggests a direct indebtedness to A stell, who in S erious Proposal, Part II describes the “unutterable Bliss” of the “Holy S oul” upon discovering “GOD ” to be the “only proper and adequate O bject of our L ove”: “S he tasts a Pleasure which the World can neither give nor take away ... . [Her mind] has a Foretaste, and thereby a well-grounded A ssurance, of never-ceasing Joys to Come!” (emphasis mine).144 If Clarissa and A stell seem to protest too much, this is because everything is riding on their being right—without a G od, both Richardson’s tragedy-turnedcomedy and A stell’s argument on behalf of women collapse utterly. But where is He to be found? How is His presence (or existence) to be confirmed? It was back to N orris, in particular to his Malebranchean arguments for G od’s ineluctable presence in all human affairs, that A stell turned in her magnum opus as she sought to answer such questions.145 Richardson, as we shall see in the next chapter, found Norris’s affinity for Malebranche equally useful in his own attempt at theodicy.

�������� A stell, Reflections, 75. ���������������������������������� Chudleigh, 39–40, ll. 827, 831–3. 143 ����������������� S tuber, 119. S ee Clarissa, 1362. 144 �������� A stell, S erious Proposal, Part II , 166–7. 145 ��������������������������������������������� I refer (as S pringborg has done) to A stell’s Christian R eligion. For A stell’s defense there of N orris and Malebranche (and herself), see my “Mary A stell’s Ironic A ssault.” 141 142

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Chapter 3

O ut-N orrised Is there a G od in the world of Clarissa? D espite Richardson’s insistence in a letter of 29 O ctober 1746 to A aron Hill that his novel is religious at its core—he “had not indeed, sat down to scribble on this S ubject” except for his desire to “inculcate in this Piece” the Christian doctrine of heavenly reward for present suffering— answering this simple “yes/no” question has proved remarkably difficult, and not simply because of our ever-increasing distance from the religiously oriented century in which Richardson wrote and was read. Indeed, the novel itself, for all its author’s interest in this question, seems, at times, remarkably ambiguous in its answer. A representative sampling of this ambiguity can be found in Clarissa’s pathetic response to L ovelace’s invocation of divinity in his “sincere” post-rape offer of marriage. L ovelace promises, “If you can forgive a repentant villain ... I vow by all that’s sacred and just (and may a thunderbolt strike me dead at your feet, if I am not sincere!), that I will by marriage, before tomorrow noon ... do you all the justice I now can do you.” Clarissa despondently replies, “O h thou guileful betrayer! There is a just God, whom thou invokest: yet the thunderbolt descends not; and thou livest to imprecate and deceive ” (902). There is a G od, Clarissa seems to be saying, even if He does not do those things we might expect (or hope) of an omnipotent, omnipresent, and just D eity. But where, exactly, is G od outside of these defining, empirically verifiable, characteristics? To date, the most thorough and rigorous critical response to such questions can be found in the work of L eopold D amrosch, Jr. A pproaching Clarissa as a sign of the “Waning of Puritanism,” D amrosch, Jr. argues that the novel’s ambiguity regarding the presence of God in human affairs reflects a late step in the advance of secularism in the eighteenth-century. “Rather than invoking a populous world of spirits and miracles as Bunyan and D efoe do,” D amrosch, Jr. writes, “Richardson presents a strangely quiet and opaque universe governed by a G od who is trusted but never seen or heard.” To be sure, Clarissa “attains an intimate conviction of divine support, but G od sends her none of the overt messages that Crusoe receives, and she is sustained entirely by faith in things unseen.” Thus, while Richardson hoped, following A ddison’s defense of divinely sanctioned tragedy, to justify Providence by immersing his putatively Christian readership within a tragic quagmire from which only faith in “a future Reward” offered escape, his 

������������� Carroll, 73. ������������������� D amrosch, Jr., 241.  ������������� Ibid., 235–6.  ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� Richardson’s words, as found in his letter of 29 O ctober 1746 to A aron Hill (Carroll, 73). 

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reluctance in Clarissa to allow G od to “[show] his hand directly,” as D amrosch, Jr. puts it, has the unintended effect of desanctifying the novel’s events for the reader. L ike the G od of the “bleak Jansenist Racine,” the “deus absconditus” of Clarissa is “cut off from communication with man,” and thus “is so hidden that he threatens to vanish altogether.” With both G od (a deus absconditus) and Richardson (a narrator absconditus) essentially absent from the world of the novel, Clarissa, D amrosch, Jr. concludes, falls into line with “the assumptions of L ockean empiricism”; in demanding its readers pick out “significant details from the flux of circumstance” without recourse to divine (or authorial) sanction, the novel mirrors the state of a society inexorably coming to focus more on “Man’s S tories” than on “G od’s Plot.” “The lightning strikes not,” in other words, because in a world governed by L ocke’s secondary causes, lightning bolts fall where they may. If for D amrosch, Jr., Clarissa’s G od has disappeared from view if not from existence, in his essay “Clarissa: A Religious N ovel?”, Florian S tuber goes one step further, arguing that, on close inspection, Clarissa reveals itself as something other than the religious novel for which, perhaps at Richardson’s behest, critics have taken it. For S tuber, the praise afforded the novel’s moral system by such eighteenth-century deists as A dam S mith and D iderot underscores contemporary recognition of the fact that Clarissa, far from being “essentially religious,” lacks any fundamental dedication to Richardson’s cherished “Christian S ystem.” The novel’s titular Christian import, according to Stuber, is at best superficial, at worst irredeemably muddled. In reality, he argues, Richardson’s novel is composed of layers of “supernatural machinery” infused by a thoroughly “secular humanism”; “skeptical readers,” he concludes, are thus fully justified in seeing “God ‘tacked on to [Clarissa’s] ethical system as an afterthought.’” In S tuber’s view, then, the best means of understanding the apparent ambiguity in Clarissa regarding divine presence is simply to understand that Providence exists in the world of the novel not as a “real presence,” but only as a rhetorical superstructure imposed upon it by Richardson. Pace D amrosch, Jr., S tuber believes that G od disappears from view not because Richardson’s struggle to reconcile human and divine agency was against the historical tide, but because the author was not really interested in theology at all. Y et D avid G raham, a contemporary reader whose views on Clarissa Richardson praised, had this to say in a letter of 22 A pril 1750 by way of excusing the novel’s poor reception among some readers: 

��������������������� D amrosch, Jr., 257–8. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� D amrosch, Jr., 259. D amrosch, Jr. also notes that this situation “has antecedents in Puritan narrative,” but his insistence on characterizing the G od of Clarissa as absent works to disable the similarity, as he himself allows: in Puritan narrative, “the details can be left unshaped because only G od knows how to shape them, and with both G od and Richardson now absconditi, it is never clear that a comprehensive structure is possible” (259).  �������������������������������������������� S tuber, 121; see Richardson’s Postscript to Clarissa, 1498.  ��������������������������������������������� S tuber, 118, 122, 121. S tuber is applying to Clarissa a quotation from K aren A rmstrong, History of God (N ew Y ork: K nopf, 1994), 315. 

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Y ou have taken upon you to foist into your work several obsolete opinions about the Œconomy of Providence, and have furbish’d up and beautified an old machine call’d G race, that hath been cast, time out of mind, amongst the lumber of E nthusiasm ... . [Y ]ou have dared to soar above N ature in an age that hath lost all relish of Christianity.

G raham, it seems, did not believe that G od had absconded from the world of the novel; and far from seeing Clarissa’s theology as a thinly veiled precursor to the secular humanism of D iderot, he believed it to be infused with an “obsolete” form of Christianity, one that took seriously such putative enthusiasms as Providence and Grace. Equally interesting, if less immediately striking, is his final summary of the theological implications of the novel, wherein, according to G raham, Richardson inculcates the doctrines of Christianity by “soar[ing] above N ature” (emphasis mine). G raham’s praise doubtlessly heartened an author anxious for his work to be read religiously; this does not mean, however, that his appraisal should be dismissed as hollow flattery. Indeed, one of Richardson’s primary goals with Clarissa, as I will attempt to show, was to reaffirm the validity, even the necessity, of a theocentric worldview to a culture slipping, he feared, into a form of religious skepticism fueled, as in the case of Hume, by a growing suspicion that there simply were no tenable grounds to discuss, much less to “relish,” anything beyond “N ature.”10 Richardson’s novel is thus nothing short of an attempt at the impossible: “to soar above N ature” while remaining grounded, to imbue with spiritual meaning his fictional record of the quotidian minutia of lives presented as “history.”11 To this end, Richardson adopts in Clarissa neither the gnostic mysticism then being popularized by his acquaintance William L aw (wherein the created world, as a portion of divinity, becomes sanctified), nor the natural religion of such self-avowed deists as Bolingbroke (wherein divinity, evident only through



��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Forster Collection of Manuscripts, XV, 2, f. 82. G raham was a “student of K ing’s College” with whom Richardson seems to have had a brief, if enthusiastic, acquaintance; see E aves and K impel, p. 313. 10 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� In his letter of 16 February 1756 to the Reverend Peter Peckard, Richardson admits his “dislike” of Hume “for his attempts to sap the foundations of our common Christianity” (Barbauld, 5: 109). It is telling, however, that he does so in the course of advising Peckard to tone down his fulminations against Hume and Bolingbroke in a piece Richardson was to print. A s always, Richardson’s “true” position on any particular issue must be considered in light of the various hats he wore and agendas he pursued. 11 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� A s D amrosch, Jr. notes, “it has become a commonplace that Puritan autobiography played an essential role in the development of the novel” (34). While admitting that these narratives offered “highly conventional and predictable” models for communicating private experiences, he stresses the tension at the heart of the most “interesting” examples, wherein writers “grope” to find meaning in experiences that are often “woundingly equivocal” (34, 35; see 34–59).

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creation, becomes naturalized).12 Instead, and again in keeping with his rhetorical tendencies throughout Clarissa, he splits the difference, as it were, between these two extremes by incorporating into his novel an understanding of divine activity popularized in the early part of the eighteenth century by E nglish proponents of N icolas Malebranche, in particular John N orris, but also Mary A stell, the early William L aw, and, somewhat later, John Wesley. The strength of Malebranche’s system lay, its admirers believed, in positing a nature that was already supernatural (but without resolving into S pinozism), a divinity whose real presence served as the precondition of all human experience, even the experience of doubting the real presence of divinity (but without resolving into Calvinism). The difficult theological trajectory along which Richardson constructed his novel, in short, not only allows for skeptical readings—it invites them. The situation of the skeptical reader, in fact, closely mirrors that of the novel’s most consistently skeptical character. L ike L ovelace, the reader may freely choose to deny G od’s operative reality in the world of Clarissa. A s S tuber puts it, “Richardson carefully leaves open a space between the possibility and the fact of G od’s intervention in this world,” one “which in his or her faith the reader may choose to leap over.” A s a result “the religious elements” of the novel “are both ‘there’ and ‘not there.’”13 Richardson’s interest in Malebranche’s brand of theocentrism, however, suggests his hope that readers would recognize another possibility, one that is both more complex and less ambiguous: such elements, to follow S tuber’s phrasing, are “there,” though, in our human freedom, we may choose to perceive them as “not there.” A s he does with L ovelace, Richardson attempts to place readers in a situation where leaping, or not, amounts to a nonstarter—our choices carry profound implications for our relationship to divinity, but not for G od’s existence or, perhaps more importantly, His presence to us. In this sense, his novel is the great literary theodicy of the century, a Paradise L ost that issued from an intellectual milieu far different from the one Milton inhabited. The serious theodicean impulses animating Clarissa distinguish it from Richardson’s first work of fiction. In Pamela, indeed, G od exists as a static element “tacked on” to the framework of the novel. Time and time again, the heroine concludes her relation of her story’s particular episodes with perfunctory references to the interposition of “D ivine G race,” “the goodness of ... Providence,” “the wonderful ways of Providence,” and “the blessed turn[s] of Providence”; Pamela is “RE WA RDED ,” she too-much protests, by “GOD , the A ll-gracious, the

12 ����������������������������������������������������������������������� In a letter of 30 D ecember 1754 to Thomas E dwards, Richardson wrote of Bolingbroke, “I imagine, that these Works of the quondam Peer, so far as they favour the Cause of Infidelity, rather abound with Objections against the Christian System, that he thought N ew, than were really so” (Carroll, 317). Richardson is likely referring to the posthumous publication in 1754 of The Works of the late R ight Honorable Henry S t. John: L ord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols. 13 ����������������� S tuber, 120, 121.

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A ll-good, the A ll-bountiful, the A ll-mighty, the A ll-merciful GOD .”14 Richardson himself worried that Pamela’s incessant apostrophes to Providence, which by his own account were peripheral additions, might suggest “A ffectation.”15 In the author’s defense, one might, of course, point to the fact that the vast majority of the letters constituting the novel come from the heroine’s own pen—15-year-old servants cannot be expected to have particularly sophisticated theological views. But Pamela, who, as Mr. B tauntingly points out, is quite well read,16 is no ordinary servant to begin with; and, at any rate, the problem goes deeper than consistency of character. Pamela herself nicely sums up Richardson’s dilemma when, late in the novel, she exclaims to Mr. B, “you have left me nothing to pray for.”17 In Pamela, Richardson constructs a world inhabited by self-sufficient characters whose motivations can be understood along fully human lines, characters who, put another way, have little need to “pray for” anything. It is a comedy where “Virtue” inevitably meets with “Reward,” where all of the novel’s characters ride unfailingly the heroine’s coattails to a happy conclusion.18 The Providence so frequently appealed to in Richardson’s first novelistic effort thus cannot but appear as a fully predictable entity, something much more akin to an invisible S ir Charles G randison (whose pervasive desire to do well by everyone ties his hands as surely as if he were, like Henry Fielding’s Blifil, consistently evil) than to the unknowable Yahweh of Moses, or to the grim, if loving, Father of the G ospel. N evertheless, Richardson does show in Pamela flashes of interest in the vexed theological issues he would investigate in Clarissa. Pamela’s contemplation of suicide,19 for instance, provided Richardson a trial run, as it were, for one of the primary questions of Clarissa: how is one to reconcile the human being’s freedom, as expressed in the act of suicide (or of murder, or of rape), with a controlling, active Providence? What is the nature of the relationship between the “Myself” that nearly throws Pamela into a pond and the “D ivine Will” that “delivers” Pamela from that self?20 O f course, in Pamela, such questions have a habit of short-circuiting—the “D ivine Will” that allows Pamela to save herself ������������ Richardson, Pamela, 209, 308, 342, 375, 515. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� S ee Richardson’s letter of 8 O ctober 1741 to Henry Fielding’s friend Ralph A llen: “Pamela’s G ratitude and Thankfulness to the S upreme Being, I have, on all such O ccasions, as my Judgement wou’d enable me to think proper, kept up: A nd it was my Intention to avoid A ffectation on this Head” (Carroll, 51). 16 ������������ Richardson, Pamela, 63. 17 ����������� Ibid., 385. 18 ������������������������������������������� N ot that one cannot wonder, as readers of Pamela often do, if Mr. B is the “reward” Pamela thinks he is. My point is merely that as the novel ends, not one character, not even Pamela’s detested Mrs. Jewkes, fails to be included in the universal grace afforded by the heroine’s goodness. 19 �������������� Ibid., 211–14. 20 ����������� Ibid., 214. 14 15

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from herself subsequently rewards her with what she seems really to want in the first place, and thus Providence becomes a function of human wish-fulfillment. But what if, hypothetically, Pamela, having decided against suicide, and trusting to “G od A lmighty,”21 were to return to Mr. B’s home, only to be raped? S uch questions, while anathema to the author’s conception of his first novelistic triumph, invigorate his second. Richardson turns to theodicy precisely when he turns to human tragedy—a relationship Milton, for one, would well have understood. A s in Pamela, characters in Clarissa frequently refer to the Providence controlling their affairs. Clarissa, in fact, often sounds a great deal like Pamela on this point. “What have we then to do but ... to choose right, and pursue it steadily, and leave the issue to Providence?” (106), Clarissa rhetorically asks A nna Howe early in the novel, before her hardships have truly even begun. L ater in the novel, having been forsaken by her beloved family, tricked away to a brothel, drugged by prostitutes, and raped by L ovelace, Clarissa can still maintain, “I will leave to Providence, when I am out of this house, the direction of my future steps” (933). The Providence of Clarissa, however, is not the Providence of Pamela, as the second heroine’s continual, even darkly ironic, suffering makes clear—once Clarissa is “out of” S inclair’s detested house, her “future steps” take her, among other places, to debtor’s prison. Judith N orton, Clarissa’s spiritual mentor, shares Clarissa’s certainty that “GOD governs the world, and permits some things and directs others, as He pleases” (991); since “we are assured that nothing happens by chance,” she asks of Clarissa, “how shall we know what to pray for, when we pray for anything but that God’s will may be done?” (1154, 1153). In Pamela, such sentiments, when expressed, carry little, if any, theological baggage. But then, in Pamela, “God’s will” would never have to be explained, as it is in Clarissa, by way of a posthumous letter from the heroine to her father: “Had I escaped the snares by which I was entangled, I might have wanted those exercises which I look upon now as so many mercies dispensed to wean me betimes from a world that presented itself to me with prospects too alluring: and, in that case (too easily satisfied with worldly felicity) I might not have attained to that blessedness which now ... I humbly presume (through the D ivine goodness) I am rejoicing in” (1372). It is a telling marker of the distance between the Providential outlooks of the two novels, in other words, that when Clarissa echoes Pamela’s hollow call to spiritualism—“This is a poor transitory life in its best enjoyments” (1337)—she does so not in the context of present worldly rewards, but as a woman two days away from death.22 21

����������� Ibid., 212. ������������������������������������ The “contrast between the worlds of Pamela and Clarissa is very great,” as K eymer aptly puts it. “Instead of skirting the problem, habitually evaded by eighteenthcentury writers, of providential inequality, [Clarissa] directly addresses it, urging an older, bleaker theology in place of the usual bland assertions of cosmic harmony and beneficence” (R ichardson’s Clarissa, 211). K eymer’s phrase, “bleaker theology,” recalls D amrosch, Jr.’s similar comparison of Clarissa to the “bleak Jansenist Racine” (see above, p. 112), and 22

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Clarissa’s conviction that her suffering is an effect of Providential control never wavers, but one detects in several of her references to Providence a tinge of existential angst nowhere evident in Pamela. A fter the rape, for instance, Clarissa exclaims in Job-like frustration, “G reat and good G od of Heaven ... give me patience to support myself under the weight of those afflictions, which thou for wise and good ends, though at present impenetrable by me, hast permitted!” (909). Indeed, throughout Clarissa, characters refer to “fate,” really another word for Providence, as being somehow strange, capricious, or perverse.23 “What a perverse fate is mine!” (329), Clarissa exclaims as the situation at Harlowe Place degenerates. D espite her best efforts to be “wise,” to “choose and to avoid everything,” Clarissa finds that all of her “wisdom [is] now, by a strange fatality, likely to become foolishness” (243). When the heroine proves prophetic by “foolishly” running off with Lovelace, Anna’s first impression is that “there seems ... a kind of fate in your error” (579). Fate manifests its perversity not only by turning Clarissa’s best intentions awry; it also “determines” those around Clarissa in unexpected ways. Clarissa’s family, as Clarissa, A nna, and L ovelace each notes, are all “strangely determined” in their behavior toward her (61, 279, 375); and, as her death approaches, Clarissa still maintains, “there was a kind of fatality, by which our whole family was impelled, as I may say; and which none of us were permitted to avoid” (1268). E ven L ovelace complains, in an early letter to Belford, that “FA TE is weaving a whimsical web for thy friend; and I see not but I shall be inevitably manacled” (517); more famously, having been run through by Col. Morden’s sword, L ovelace insists, “there is a fate in it! ... a cursed fate!—or this could not have been!” (1487). Like characters in a Pirandello drama, the cast of Clarissa seems, at such times, dimly aware of being passive players in a plot hidden “in the womb of fate” (a phrase E rickson believes Richardson borrowed from N orris); as L ovelace, quoting Cowley, puts it, “A n unseen hand makes all our moves” (656).24 E ven as they ascribe to a “strange” Providence the vicissitudes of their various lives, however, these same characters protect for themselves a remarkable degree of self-determination. Indeed, directly after blaming “a cursed fate!” for his mortal makes a quite similar point—G od, in this view, is hidden from his creation to the point of disappearing. It is precisely to this difficulty, I will suggest below, that Richardson brings N orris’s Malebranchean thought to bear. 23 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� D amrosch, Jr. writes, “We know, of course, or Richardson wants us to know, that what looks like fate is actually ... Providence” (253). 24 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ E rickson cites this passage from Cowley as an analogue for “Richardson’s suggestive phrase ‘the womb of fate’ as it occurs in his preface and in the words of ... Belford” [see Clarissa, 1178]; he notes that Richardson’s source for the phrase “may be the opening lines of ‘The A dvice’” in N orris’s Miscellanies (Miscellanies, 33; E rickson, L anguage of the Heart, 247n6). Cf. D ussinger’s point that “the action of the novel rises and falls with the ineluctability of G reek tragedy; and neither Clarissa nor L ovelace seems to be wholly responsible for their respective fates, as the will of Providence is fulfilled” (“Conscience and the Pattern of Christian Perfection in Clarissa,” PMLA 81 [1966]: 237).

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wound, L ovelace reasserts his capacity for choice, insisting “I have provoked my destiny” (1487). This moment cannot simply be dismissed as Lovelace’s final expression of bravado (though it probably is this as well), for he is not alone in his use of such apparently contradictory formulations. A nna, for instance, similarly vacillates between two seemingly irreconcilable ways of parsing the blame for Clarissa’s flight with Lovelace: I wonder not at the melancholy reflections you so often cast upon yourself in your letters, for the step you have been forced upon on one hand, and tricked into on the other. A strange fatality! As if it were designed to show the vanity of all human prudence ... . But I will stop—How apt are weak minds to look out for judgements in any extraordinary event! ’Tis so far right that it is better, safer, and juster, to arraign ourselves, or our dearest friends, than Providence; which must always have wise ends to answer in its dispensations.(577)

A nna’s logic here is particularly tortured. First, she exculpates Clarissa by ascribing her step to a “strange fatality”; she then quickly changes her position, deciding that it is “better, safer, and juster” to assign credit, or rather blame, to the people involved for their own behavior, and thus not to Providence. Y et she ends by reinstating Providence’s active role after all, concluding that it has “wise ends” for its apparently “strange” dispensations. While the reader may not initially understand A nna’s argument, Clarissa, it would appear, does, for she turns to the same rationale in explaining her flight with L ovelace from Harlowe Place. Clarissa characterizes as “impiety” her appropriation of the concluding lines from A ct 3 of D ryden and L ee’s Oedipus. A Tragedy (1678): “Impute my errors to [the gods’] own decree; / My FEE T are guilty; but my HEA RT is free.” D espite the “general similitude” the lines “bear to [her] unhappy yet undesigned error,” such an appropriation, Clarissa explains, “would be throwing upon the decrees of Providence a fault too much my own” (568).25 O f course, and despite her caveat, she does appropriate them, and she thus adopts (through the back door, at least) a Providential perspective of her difficulties. At other times, however, Clarissa leaves Providence out entirely; in another analysis of her difficulties, Clarissa concludes, “Mr. Lovelace’s baseness, my father’s inflexibility, my sister’s reproaches, are the natural consequences of my own rashness” (1178–9), thus leaving readers stuck, once again, in a morass of human and divine interaction. Following S tuber, one might build on Clarissa’s hint of a “natural” genesis for her story to suggest that the “unseen hands” guiding the characters in Clarissa belong not to Providence, but to each other. For example, the invisible James Harlowe, Sr., Clarissa’s somewhat inexplicably beloved father, heavily influences 25

������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ D amrosch, Jr. believes that Clarissa hesitates to endorse fully these lines because they imply “a pagan, or existential, relation to fate” (258); in light of other such vacillations on her part, I tend to take her at her word—Clarissa “shies away,” in D amrosch, Jr.’s words, not from paganism, but from too readily blaming Providence for her actions.

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his daughter’s psychology, behavior, and outcome within the novel. N ot only “despotic” and “absolute,” but “arbitrary” as well (Clarissa, 37, 95), James, S r. will not be negotiated with because his power to choose for his daughter, in his view, needs no negotiation, as is made clear in the one letter he condescends to send Clarissa during the whole of the first installment: “Prepare ... to obey. You know our pleasure ... . I’ll hear no pleas. Will receive no letter, nor expostulation” (190–91). E ven if L ovelace were “an angel,” Clarissa’s mother informs Clarissa, if James, S r. “made it a point that [she] should not have him, ... he would not have his will disputed” (97). Richardson may well have had Clarissa’s heavenly Father in mind in creating Clarissa’s earthly one. Jocelyn Harris has suggested that “like G od in the O ld Testament, Clarissa’s father is omnipotent, invisible, absolute, and unjust.”26 But Richardson was not Pierre Bayle, and, like most of his E nglish contemporaries, he would have had little problem justifying even the most heinous activities ascribed to G od in the O ld Testament.27 In being both absolute and unjust, then, James S r. might better be seen as a parody, not an exemplar, of divinity as Richardson would have understood it.28 This seems especially likely when we come to consider James, S r.’s putative “omnipotence”; as Clarissa understands quite well, James, S r. does not wield anything close to unmitigated patriarchal power. Indeed, as McCrea points out, Richardson ties Clarissa’s tragic outcome quite directly to the “failings of fallible and weak patriarchs”; Clarissa is victimized not only by a patriarchal system, but by impotent patriarchy.29 A s Richardson has devised his novel, furthermore, the leading strings of human manipulation pass beyond the father (and his encroaching son), to an “invisible hand” neither James, S r. nor James, Jr. would ever have suspected—that of their worst enemy. In his dealings with Clarissa, her family, and her friends, L ovelace fancies himself, not surprisingly, fully in charge. L ovelace gleefully explains using Joseph L eman, ostensibly James, Jr.’s spy, as a means of controlling the would-be controller:

�������� Harris, S amuel R ichardson, 52. ��������������� Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique was first published in the last decade of the seventeenth century (vol. I 1695, vol. II 1697). A n E nglish translation of it was published in 1710, with a revised version appearing in 1734–38; an expanded translation, entitled A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, was published 1734–41. The Dictionary’s critical treatment of scripture—in any other text, Bayle points out, S amson would be recognized as a murderous thug—was a touchstone for controversy throughout the century. Belford surely speaks for Richardson in his praise for the Bible as a means to Truth: “O dd enough, with all our pride of learning, that we choose to derive the little we know from the undercurrents, perhaps muddy ones too, when the clear, the pellucid fountain-head is much nearer to come at” (1125). 28 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� D amrosch, Jr. likewise believes that “Harlowe is a dreadful parody of the A ugustinian G od,” but that “the parody comes uncomfortably close to the original” (235). 29 ������������ McCrea, 122. 26 27

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R eason and R eligion in Clarissa By means of his [James, Jr.’s] very spy upon me I am playing him off as I please; cooling, or inflaming, his violent passions, as may best suit my purposes; permitting so much to be revealed of my life and actions, and intentions, as may give him such a confidence in his double-faced agent, as shall enable me to dance his employer upon my own wires. (144–5)

L ovelace similarly gloats over his manipulations of Clarissa’s best friend: “Thou seest, Belford, that my charmer has no notion that Miss Howe herself is but a puppet danced upon my wires, at second or third hand” (464). A s such passages suggest, like any good puppeteer, L ovelace works diligently to disguise his hand’s guiding effects. He accomplishes this primarily by creating the illusion of selfdetermination for those he controls, which, in the case of human beings, means using their capacity to make choices—their individual wills—as the vehicle for his own will. In his first letter to Belford after Clarissa’s escape from Harlowe place, L ovelace triumphantly announces the Harlowes’ complicity in his success: I knew that the whole stupid family were in a combination to do my business for me. I told thee that they were all working for me, like so many underground moles; and still more blind than the moles are said to be, unknowing that they did so. I myself, the director of their principle motions; which falling in with the malice of their little hearts, they took to be all their own. (387)

The Harlowes’ natural propensity for hubristic ire serves L ovelace well; through carefully leaked boasts and threats, Lovelace can fan fires already burning at Harlowe Place, thereby creating the emotional inferno that drives Clarissa directly to him without implicating himself. Clarissa’s self-determination likewise provides an important means by which Lovelace exerts influence over her. She “chooses,” for instance, the very house (S inclair’s) that L ovelace has designed, via a tendentious letter from the ostensibly upstanding Tom D oleman, she should. A s L ovelace explains it, Every possible objection anticipated! Every accident provided against!—Every tittle of it plot-proof! Who could forbear smiling to see my charmer, like a farcical dean and chapter, choose what was before chosen for her; and sagaciously (as they go in form to prayers, that G od would direct their choice) pondering upon the different proposals, as if she would make me believe she has a mind for some other? (472)

For the boastful and supremely confident Lovelace, God’s power provides the perfect analogy for his own. In other words, when L ovelace laments to Belford “but why will this admirable creature urge her destiny? Why will she defy the power she is absolutely dependent upon?” (423), he is, to be sure, exaggerating his own status to G od-like proportions. But he also means it—and so does Richardson, who has not put such words in L ovelace’s mouth unthinkingly. It is L ovelace, in fact, not James, S r., who provides the most insistent example in Clarissa of someone with what we might today call a “god-complex.” True,

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Lovelace has obvious affinities with God’s would-be rival Satan, as Damrosch, Jr., Harris, and K eymer have rightly noted; but what makes S atan “satanic” is precisely his desire to usurp G od’s role as G od.30 Indeed, L ovelace frequently likens his own designs to those of G od. He tellingly attributes to himself, for instance, the activity Clarissa associates with D ivinity—the proper direction of lightning—in explaining his ability to manipulate Clarissa’s family: But don’t think me the cause neither of her family’s malice and resentments. It is all in their hearts. I work with their materials ... . I only point the lightning and teach it where to dart ... . I only guide the effects: the cause is in their malignant hearts. (464)

This same amalgam of human causes and “divine” effects is also at work in the explicitly Christian analogy L ovelace draws in the passage above between Clarissa’s “choosing” of S inclair’s house and those who pray that “G od would direct their choice”; there, L ovelace syntactically positions himself as G od—it is he, after all, who is secretly “directing” her “choice.” But these, he assures Belford, are only a few of his many “providences” (473), less than half of which will ever be recognized as such. It is only fitting that, in explaining Belford’s partial understanding of his providential “circulation,” L ovelace would quote S t. Paul’s famous Platonic description of the human being’s presently obscured view of G od: “as in a glass wilt thou see it” (431).31 A reader wishing to support S tuber’s line of interpretation might suggest that such representations of G od and his workings, as found in the most egocentric, most cruel, most whimsical, least benevolent characters of the novel, are precisely the point: Richardson vitiates, not vivifies, any theological foundation for G od’s involvement in His creation by satirically suggesting that, for all our hopeful implications of D ivinity in the ways of the world, “Providence” is only an a posteriori label applied to the human machinations of a gouty blow-hard, his namby-pamby son, and a morally vacuous rake. “Richardson ... did not believe ... that G od interests Himself directly or immediately in human affairs,” S tuber explains. “A t least, in his novel, he keeps from asserting as a fact that which only appears to be possibly so.”32 From S tuber’s perspective, then, when Clarissa insists in a posthumous letter to her uncles, “the ways of Providence are unsearchable” (1375), this speaks not to the novel’s interest in defending G od’s place in human experience, but to Clarissa’s (and to some readers’) inability to see that what we call “Providence” is in actuality a fully natural, often human, cause not yet discovered. For Richardson in Clarissa, however, the distinction between “human” and “divine,” “natural” and “supernatural,” no longer obtains; and thus the parody 30 ������������ S ee K eymer, S amuel R ichardson’s Clarissa, 90–96, Harris, S amuel R ichardson, 66–85, and D amrosch, Jr., 237–41. 31 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (I Corinthians 13: 12). 32 ������������� S tuber, 119.

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actually functions in reverse, targeting those who, like L ovelace, confuse invisibility with absence. Michael McK eon has rightly urged us to recognize that “not faith, but a crisis of faith” lies at the heart of the nearly ubiquitous affinity of eighteenth-century readers and writers for providential plots; rather than indicating a “widespread belief in providential justice,” he suggests, “it is more likely that the artistic convention of poetic justice will become important for a culture in which divine justice is felt to be in jeopardy.”33 Richardson in Clarissa registers a prescient awareness, it seems to me, of the force of McK eon’s argument by attempting to establish “divine justice” without having recourse to the sort of “poetic justice” his readers expected.34 What S tanley Fish claims of Milton in Paradise L ost, in other words, goes for Richardson in Clarissa as well: both authors display “a willingness to risk all in order to bring the reader to self-awareness.”35 L ovelace is both the medium for and the target of Richardson’s irony on this point, as made clear, not coincidentally, by Lovelace himself. Upon finally managing to position himself, surreptitiously and parasitically, as the go-between for Anna and Clarissa’s letters to each other, Lovelace finds, as he expected (and hoped), a number of infuriating references to himself; but he also encounters a mystery: The first letter is dated April 27 ... . She [Anna] says in it, I hope you have no cause to repent returning my Norris—It is forthcoming on demand. N ow, what the devil can this mean!—Her Norris forthcoming on demand!—The devil take me, if I am out-Norrised!—If such innocents can allow themselves to plot, to Norris, well may I. (634)

L ovelace has no way of knowing, of course, that A nna had attempted to secrete money to Clarissa in her copy of N orris’s Miscellanies, nor, for that matter, that Clarissa had refused;36 the definition Lovelace ascribes to the “verb” Norris— “to plot”—is, nevertheless, unwittingly appropriate. L ovelace, as we have seen, fancies himself a plotter extraordinaire; having found evidence of a counter-plot on the part of the female confidants, he vows to “let loose” his “plotting genius” upon both women, announcing once again, “I will not be out-Norrised, Belford” (639). ���������������� Micheal McK eon, The Origins of the English Novel: 1600–1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 124. 34 ������������������������������������������������������������������������ Richardson specifically addresses this distinction in his Postscript to Clarissa, complaining that readers of his day “expect from the poets and dramatic writers ... that they should make it one of their principal rules, to propagate another sort of dispensation, under the name of poetical justice, than that with which G od by Revelation teaches us he has thought fit to exercise mankind; whom, placing here only in a state of probation, he hath so mingled good and evil as to necessitate them to look forward for a more equal distribution of both” (1495). 35 ��������������������� S tanley E ugene Fish, S urprised by S in: The R eader in Paradise L ost (N ew Y ork: S t. Martin’s Press, 1967), 211–12. 36 �������������������������������� S ee above, introduction, p. 15. 33

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Margaret A nne D oody correctly suggested many years ago that “L ovelace is ‘outN orris’d’ by Clarissa’s joyful acceptance of death,”37 but in her limited account of Norris, she does not note that being “out-Norrised” carries far more specific, and devastating, implications. A s Richardson has constructed his own plot, the “out-N orrising” of L ovelace entails not only Clarissa’s disruption of L ovelace’s plot by dying, but G od’s own triumph as the Providential A uthor, whose Plot not even L ovelace can escape. It is with his death, after all, that Richardson decided to conclude his novel. A s Malebranche’s best known disciple, N orris provides a pregnant context for L ovelace’s—or any human being’s—desire to “plot.” N orris relied on Malebranche’s related theories of occasionalism and vision in G od in making a sustained philosophical case for including G od in all aspects of human experience; for him as for the French priest, both the wiggling of a pinky finger and the mental activity exerted by N ewton in theorizing gravity derive, in a quite direct sense, from God’s all-sufficient power, and Richardson would hardly have been alone in recognizing this aspect of the “famous Mr. N orris.” In his Elucidations of the S earch A fter Truth, a series of clarifications, defenses, and elaborations of the primary work, Malebranche explained that “it is necessary, I do not say in order to be a Christian but to be a philosopher, to have recourse to G od.”38 While much of S earch after Truth reads like a scientific treatise on topics ranging from optics to anatomy to physics, at its core, Malebranche explains in E lucidation 15, lies the fundamental contention that truly philosophical inquiry is of necessity a function of theology as found in the Bible.39 Y et as much as N orris’s thought developed from his careful and sympathetic study of Malebranche, it is important to note that he did not need Malebranche to “know” that human beings depended entirely and directly on G od; indeed, prior to encountering Malebranche, N orris could write in his essay “Considerations Upon the N ature of S in,” “what can be more indecorous than for a Creature to violate the commands, and trample upon the A uthority of that awful excellence to whom he owes his life, his motion and his very being?”40 The final portion of Norris’s sentence is, of course, scriptural (Acts 17: 28—“For in him we live, and move, and have our being”); and N orris had encountered other such formulations of G od’s universal presence in the works of O rigen (185–254?), Plotinus (205–70?), A ugustine (354–430), Hierocles (circa 430?), A quinas (1225–74), and S uarez (1548–1617), among others. In Malebranche’s rigorously detailed analyses of the “practical” effects of G od’s omnipresence, in other words, Norris found a scientific framework for what he already believed— that the human being depended entirely on G od. When N orris sounds the Pauline 37 ��������������������� Margaret A nne D oody, A Natural Passion: A S tudy of the Novels of S amuel R ichardson (O xford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 156. 38 ������������� Malebranche, S earch, 662. 39 ���� S ee S earch, E lucidation 15, for Malebranche’s discussion of scriptural precedents for his refusal to accept the existence of secondary causes as such (672–85). 40 �������� N orris, Miscellanies, 383.

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note as proof of his position, then, he is not so much following Malebranche as agreeing with him: O Being it self, ’tis in thee that I live, move, and have my being. O ut of thee I am nothing, I have nothing, I can do nothing ... . Being it self is the cause of all particular Beings, for all particular Beings are what they are by partaking of Being it self ... . particular Beings wholly depend upon Being it self.41

S uch passages may very well have inspired Belford’s “serious thought” on “G od” as he begins his reformation, wherein the “S UPRE ME S UPE RIN TENDEN T and FA THE R of all things” is deemed “the BEING of beings” (969). In Belford’s formulation, as in N orris’s or Malebranche’s (or S t. A ugustine’s), ontological particularity is inherently a function of G od’s universal presence.42 O f course, as Richard A . Watson has complained, “O ccasionalism without G od is nonsense. Y ou must take G od seriously to take occasionalism seriously.” 43 N orris did both, nor was he the only likeminded thinker with whom Richardson was familiar. In her Christian R eligion (1705; 2nd ed. 1717), for instance, A stell, along with defending both occasionalism and vision in G od, writes, “I can as soon question my own Being, as the Being of a GOD , for I A m only because He Is ... . [G od] is not far from every one of us, for in Him we L ive, Move, and have our Being, as the very Heathens own’d ... . He has more right in us than we have our selves, since we subsist only by His Power, depending upon Him for every moment of our Being.”44 “We ... are His Creatures,” A stell insists, “and ... depend upon Him entirely.”45 William L aw, who wrote his M.A . thesis at Cambridge on �������� N orris, R eason and R eligion, 17, 26. ������������������������������������������������ L ocke sometimes speaks of G od as “Being” (e.g., S ome Thoughts Concerning Education, where he refers to “the incomprehensible nature of that infinite Being” [Works, 8: 129]), but he does not accept N orris’s or Malebranche’s A ugustinian conception of G od as Being, according to which the human being has a necessary and prediscursive sense of God’s infinite pervasiveness; as McCracken puts it, “the refutation of the claim that God is universal being L ocke took to be straightforward” (138). It is worth noting that when L ocke cites S t. Paul’s phrase “in him we live, move, and have our being,” he refuses to decide on its technical veracity: “I leave every one to consider,” he writes in the Essay, whether the “emphatical [words] of the inspired philosopher S t. Paul, In Him we live, move, and have our Being, are to be understood in a literal sense” (2.13.26.179). For L ocke’s rejection of N orris and Malebranche on this point, see his “Remarks Upon S ome of Mr. N orris’s Books” (Works, 9: 258–9) and his “A n E xamination of P. Malebranche’s O pinion of S eeing A ll Things in G od” (Works, 8: 254–5). 43 ������������������������������������������������������������ Richard A . Watson, “Malebranche, Models, and Causation,” in Causation and Early Modern Philosophy: Cartesianism, Occasionalism, and Preestablished Harmony, ed. S tephen N adler (University Park: Pennsylvania S tate University Press, 1993), 90. 44 �������� A stell, Christian R eligion, 6–7, 61. “A s the very Heathens owned” refers to Paul’s acknowledgment that A eschylus and other G reek writers had argued similarly for G od’s ubiquitous presence (A cts 17: 28). 45 ���������� Ibid., 56. 41 42

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Malebranche,46 underscores throughout his many works Malebranche’s contention that human experience is of necessity a function of divine presence: The weakness of our state appears from our inability to do anything, as of ourselves. In our natural state we are entirely without any power; we are indeed active beings, but we can only act by a power, that is every moment lent us from G od ... . To think that you are your own, or at your own disposal, is as absurd as to think that you created, and can preserve your self. It is as plain and necessary a first principle, to believe you are thus God’s ... as to believe, that in him you live, and move, and have your being.47

E ven when L aw had found in Jacob Boehme new theosophical master, his conceptions of the absolute and direct dependence of the human being on G od remained basically unchanged; “G od ... is not an absent or distant god, but is more present in and to our souls than our own bodies,” L aw continued to insist.48 “[It is] literal, real, immutable, and eternal truth ... when it is said that ‘in G od we live and move and have our being.’”49 When John Byrom, L aw’s steadfast supporter and Richardson’s acquaintance, “defended Malebranche as saying the same thing as Paul, ‘In him we live and move,’ etc.,” he was only making explicit a connection already present in the works of N orris, A stell, L aw, and other Christian-Platonist thinkers.50 Even Law’s most significant and acerbic detractor, John Wesley, himself an admiring reader of L ocke, N orris, and A stell (and, just maybe, S amuel Richardson’s acquaintance51), shared an affinity for Malebranche’s theocentric conceptions of the human being. A lbert C. O utler maintains that “Wesley was more heavily influenced by Malebranche’s ‘occasionalism’ than was any other eighteenth-century

46

������������������������������������������������������������������������������ A ccording to E rwin Rudolph, L aw “absorbed” Malebranche’s “teachings” while at Cambridge, completing his thesis in 1712 (William L aw [Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980], 48). A. Keith Walker notes that Malebranche was the “most significant” early influence on Law, and that L aw could still claim in 1729 that he was willing to go to Paris to “converse with anyone who had known” the French priest (7). 47 ����� L aw, A S erious Call, 295–6, 441. 48 ����� L aw, The S pirit of Prayer (1749), in Hobhouse, 68. 49 ����� L aw, A Demonstration of the Gross and Fundamental Errors of a late Book called “A Plain A ccount of the Nature and End of the S acrament of the L ord’s S upper” (1737), in Hobhouse, 5. 50 ������������������������������������������������� S ee Byrom’s D iary entry for 31 D ecember 1729, in Private Journal, I: 399; quoted in Hoyles, Edges of A ugustanism, 105. 51 �������������������������������������������������� In a note discussing Wesley’s edition of N orris’s Christian Prudence, Bueler writes, “Wesley was a close friend of the L ondon printer Charles Rivington ... . Rivington in turn was a close personal and professional friend of [S amuel] Richardson’s, and his heirs published Clarissa. I cannot help wondering whether ‘Mr. Richardson,’ the old friend whom Wesley mentions visiting on a trip to L ondon in 1729 ... was our author” (169n8).

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British theologian”;52 possibly O utler has in mind passages such as the following from a letter of 17 June 1746 to John S mith: I believe firmly, and that in the most literal sense, that ‘without God we can do nothing’; that we cannot think, or speak, or move an hand or an eye without the concurrence of the divine energy; and that all our natural faculties are G od’s gift, nor can the meanest be exerted without the assistance of His S pirit.53

L ike Richardson, Wesley, we know, admired L ocke heartily, and believed fully in free will and in secondary causes.54 This did not prevent him, however, from deploying Malebranchean metaphysics when he thought it rhetorically appropriate—nor from recommending works by both Malebranche and L ocke, often in the same breath.55 But one need not go to known readers of Malebranche and N orris like Wesley to encounter similarly theocentric expressions of the human being’s dependency on G od. In The S earch A fter Truth, Malebranche wrote: But natural causes are not true causes; they are only occasional causes that act only through the force and efficacy of the will of God ... . For how could we move our arms? To move them, it is necessary to have animal spirits, to send them through certain nerves toward certain muscles ... . A nd we see that men who do not know that they have spirits, nerves, and muscles move their arms ... . Therefore, men will to move their arms, [but] only G od is able and knows how to move them ... . [T]here is no man who knows what must be done to move one of the fingers by means of animal spirits. How, then, could men move their arms? These things seem obvious to me and, it seems to me, to all those willing to think, although they are perhaps incomprehensible to all those willing only to sense.56

I have no evidence that E dward Y oung (1683–1765), the author of Night Thoughts (1742–45) and Richardson’s favorite consultant during the composition of Clarissa,57 was particularly familiar with Malebranche or with any of his E nglish ������������������������ S ee the introduction to The Works of John Wesley: Volume I, Sermons I, 1–33, ed. A lbert C. O utler (N ashville: A bingdon Press, 1984), 59. 53 �������� Wesley, L etters, 2: 71. 54 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Unlike Malebranche and N orris, Wesley believed that “secondary qualities are just as real as figure or any other primary one” (“Thoughts upon Necessity”; quoted in Richard Brantley, L ocke, Wesley, and the Method of English Empiricism. [G ainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984], 72). 55 ������������������������������������������������������������������������� O n two separate occasions, Wesley recommends simultaneously both L ocke’s Essay and Malebranche’s Search. S ee Wesley’s letter of 8 S eptemeber 1781 to his sister S arah and his letter of 18 A ugust 1784 to Mary Bishop (L etters, 7: 82, 228). 56 ������������� Malebranche, S earch, 449–50. 57 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ S ee Richardson’s letter of 17 N ovember 1747 to Y oung: “What contentions, what disputes have I involved myself in with my poor Clarissa, through my own diffidence, and for want of a will! I wish I had never consulted any body but Dr. Young” (Carroll, 84). 52

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exponents; nevertheless, in a letter to Richardson of 30 A pril 1758, Y oung sounds remarkably similar to the French philosopher: G od willing, who this moment has a thousand agents at work for my sake, of which I know nothing, though they are all within me, and should any of them cease to work, it would prove my instant death—I mean the animal functions. Y et how merry should I make the world, should they hear me say ‘If it please G od, I will rise from my seat;’—or, ‘I will open my mouth;’—or, ‘If it please G od, I will set pen to paper, &c.’ S o ignorant are our wise ones of G od and man.58

Richardson, Y oung clearly implies, was not one of the “ignorant ... wise ones” who failed to see G od’s involvement in the ostensibly natural activities of “man.” N or did E lizabeth Carter believe, as Malebranche puts it, that “natural causes are true causes”: “S uperior power is an intelligible expression,” she explained in a 1770 letter to E lizabeth Vesey, “natural causes is not: this is by no means the only instance in which the nursery teaches common sense, and Philosophy talks jargon.”59 Indeed, in an unpublished fragment entitled “Thoughts on the O ld Testament,” Carter begins with precisely the point any of Malebranche’s adherents would have stressed: “In the Bible ... A lmighty G od is upon every occasion placed before the mind in such a manner, that it is never suffered to lose sight of his perpetual and immediate agency.”60 Though, as she somewhat defensively protested in a letter of 17 O ctober 1764 to her friend E lizabeth Montagu, she had never read more than “quotations” from Malebranche, her correspondent’s jab (Montagu would appear to have suggested that in her Platonism, Carter reminded her of Malebranche) is telling both of Carter’s tendencies and of the degree to which Malebranche’s name still carried particular significance, even in the later half of the century.61 William Warburton’s appraisal of the different “fortunes of Malebranche and L ocke” in a letter of 3 March 1759—“N ow L ocke is universal, and Malebranche sunk in obscurity”62—is surely overstated. Whether imbibed directly, translated through avowed admirers like N orris, or digested altogether unwittingly, Malebranche’s brand of theocentrism continued to exert a pull on a variety of British thinkers eager to combat, in the words of Carter, the perceived ascendancy of a materialist philosophy that “breaks all connexion between earth and heaven ...” (letter of 30 O ctober 1763 to E lizabeth Vesey).63 58

���������������� Barbauld, 2: 48. ������������ Pennington, Memoirs, 2: 161. 60 �������������� Ibid., 2: 408. 61 �������� Carter, L etters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montagu between the years 1755 and 1800, 3 vols (1817; reprint, N ew Y ork: A MS Press, 1973), 1: 251–2. Carter explains that Malebranche’s “system does not seem to be exactly the same with that of Plato,” though she admits, “O n so abstruse a subject, I suppose it is not easy to form any very distinct notion of what either of them meant.” “I am awed by this subject,” she concludes. 62 ������������������������ Quoted in McCracken, 18. 63 �������� Carter, S eries of L etters, 3: 229. 59

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O f course, Malebranche’s theocentric vision of human existence carried with it a grave difficulty, one Locke adroitly pointed to in his posthumously published “Remarks upon Some of Mr. Norris’s Books.” Addressing specifically Norris’s version of Malebranche’s theories of “vision in G od” and “occasionalism,” L ocke writes, with evident frustration, N o machine of G od’s making can go of itself. Why? because the creatures have no power; can neither move themselves, nor any thing else ... . How then comes he to perceive or think? ... God produces the thought; let it be infidelity, murmuring, or blasphemy ... . A man cannot move his arm or his tongue; he has no power; only upon occasion, the man willing it, G od moves it. The man wills, he doth something; or else G od, upon the occasion of something, which he himself did before, produced this will, and this action in him. This is the hypothesis that clears doubts, and brings us at last to the religion of Hobbes and S pinosa [sic], by resolving all, even the thoughts and will of men, into an irresistible fatal necessity ... . But perhaps it would better become us to acknowledge our ignorance, than to talk such things boldly of the Holy O ne of Israel.64

What goes for N orris could go for any of Malebranche’s adherents. In other words, if, as L aw writes, “we cannot lift up a hand, or stir a foot, but by a power that is lent us from G od,”65 it thus follows that the act of pulling a trigger in murder, or the physical procedures of rape, must then resolve into “a power that is lent us from G od.” The human being, in this case, appeared to L ocke to be no more than a necessitated machine, while G od stands guilty of the host of human sins. Malebranche realized the strength of this criticism early on. He attempted to answer it in his E lucidation 1 of the S earch under the heading “God produces whatever is of a real nature in sensations of concupiscence, and yet He is not author of concupiscence,”66 arguing that while God causes all pleasureable modifications of the soul, he does not cause the sin inherent in sinful pleasure—ergo sexual pleasure is still pleasure, though it may also be sinful, depending on the circumstance. N orris responded to A stell’s own qualms on this score with a similar proposition, suggesting that “’tis the circumstantiating of [Pleasure] that is the E vil. A nd of this GOD is not the Cause, but the S inner, who rather than forego such an agreeable S ensation will enjoy it in such a Manner and in such Circumstances as are not for his own or for the common G ood, and therefore unlawful.”67 A stell seems to have been convinced; in her “A ppendix” to the 2nd edition of Christian R eligion, she contends, with an eye toward L ocke, that “If meditation and a disquisition of Truth has carry’d you beyond the prejudices of sense, you are convinc’d that GOD is the True Efficient Cause of all our Good, of all our pleasing Sensations, and that without any reflection on the Purity of His Nature.”68 ������� L ocke, Works, 9: 255–6. ����� L aw, A S erious Call, 498. 66 ������������� Malebranche, S earch, 556. 67 ������������������� A stell and N orris, L etters, 85. 68 ������������������������� A stell, “A ppendix,” 234. 64

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His criticisms notwithstanding, L ocke ultimately found himself in much the same position as Malebranche—or as any Christian, for that matter, unwilling to follow Calvin down the path to predestination. E ven rejecting Malebranche’s particularly strong reading of G od’s involvement in human affairs, L ocke, like most Christians, still wished to believe in the coexistence of divine omnipotence and human self-determination. For his part, L ocke simply dismissed the matter as irresolvable. “I cannot make freedom in man consistent with omnipotence and omniscience in G od, though I am as fully perswaded of both as of any truths I most firmly assent to,” he admitted in letter of 20 January 1693 to William Molyneux, “[a]nd therefore I have long since given off the consideration of that question.”69 O n this point, then, L ocke was essentially in agreement with Malebranche and his supporters, who likewise recognized these conflicting theological claims as fundamentally mysterious. But where Malebranche (or N orris, or A stell, or L aw) willingly reins in the impulse to attempt to unravel logically this point—A stell, for instance, confidently proffers it as a rhetorical question70—L ocke pushes one step further in a “short conclusion” to his private analysis, thereby opening up a profoundly skeptical possibility: “[I]f it be possible for G od to make a free agent, then man is free, though I see not the way of it.” In other words, L ocke agreed with Malebranche on G od’s omnipotence—“The taking away of G od, though but even in thought, dissolves all,” he insisted71—but Malebranche deliberately thrust G od into the fabric of human experience in ways L ocke deemed unphilosophical. Malebranche agreed with L ocke on the problem of free will, but L ocke forced his reasoned analysis further than Malebranche thought theologically necessary. ������������ John L ocke, The Correspondence of John L ocke, 4: 625–6; quoted in Barney, 45. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� McCracken notes that though Malebranche attempted to reconcile the human capacity to will with our utter dependence on G od, “in the end, he was forced to concede that he could not solve the problem of our freedom, or explain clearly how to reconcile our impotence with our ‘power’ to resist our inclinations. Human freedom must always be shrouded in mystery, he concluded, because the nature of our own souls is hidden from our view” (110; see S earch, 547–8). N orris defended human liberty in an epistolary debate with Henry More, printed as an appendix to Theory and R egulation of L ove, the first work, appropriately enough, wherein N orris explicitly endorses Malebranche’s positions on G od’s necessary role in all human experience. In her S erious Proposal, Part II, A stell answers anti-Trinitarian thinkers by adducing precisely the mystery in question: “We are conscious of our own L iberty, who ever denies it denies that he is capable of Reward and Punishments, degrades his N ature and makes himself but a more curious piece of Mechanism; and none but A theists will call in question on the Providence of GOD , or deny that he G overns A ll, even the most Free of all his Creatures. But who can reconcile me these? O r adjust the limits between GOD ’s Prescience and Mans Free-will?” (101). In his own response to those, specifically Tindal, who would use Christianity’s mysteries against it (The Case of R eason [1731]), L aw similarly proffers, as A . K eith Walker summarizes it, “the paradox that man receives everything from G od and yet he is morally responsible and exercises free will” (77). 71 ����� From A L etter concerning Toleration, in Works, 6: 47; quoted in S ell, John L ocke and the Eighteenth-Century Divines. 69 70

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Richardson in Clarissa is with Malebranche on both points. Human beings depend fully on an omnipotent and omnipresent G od; human beings independently will their own choices: these were indisputable truths that allowed of no “if.” That they could not easily or logically be reconciled was no more an argument against their validity than were similarly logical objections to the doctrine of the Trinity—a point of mystery that Richardson, we know, wanted no assistance in accepting.72 The best means to “see the way of it,” for Richardson, is through the Bible, as evidenced by the scriptural companion to Clarissa, Clarissa’s Meditations Collected from the S acred Books (1750), a collection of carefully selected O ld Testament passages that Richardson initially planned to include in his novel.73 A lthough, as K eymer shows, Richardson seems for artistic reasons to have resisted the urge to include each of the thirty-six individual meditations in his novel,74 E rickson has argued persuasively that Clarissa’s Meditations nevertheless “has a place of central importance in our experience of the novel”; by writing herself into scripture, E rickson contends, Clarissa allows scripture to rewrite her, thus preparing herself for her spiritual victory over L ovelace and the world.75 I would add that Clarissa’s Meditations affects our “experience of the novel” in part because it mirrors—and, in its own way, seeks to answer—the Providential questions the novel raises. Clarissa’s largely Job-derived questions in Meditations I–VI (e.g., “Why died I not from the womb?”) receive antiphonal responses in subsequent Meditations in the form of scriptural articulations of the mutual roles played by Providence and individual will in forming human experience. O n the one hand, in Meditations VIII and IX, G od is an entangler, and He receives “blame” as the Jobean inspiration for suffering innocence: “Why is light given to one, whose way is hid; and whom G od hath hedged in?”; “Thou hast appointed my bounds that I cannot pass.”76 Meditation XVII , which Richardson included in the novel, makes similar claims for God’s pervasive influence by way of Job: “Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, oh ye, my friends! for the hand of God hath touched me” (Clarissa, 1207). 72

��������������������������������������������������������������������������� In his 2 June 1753 response to L ady Bradshaigh’s recommendation of S wift’s “S ermon on the Trinity,” Richardson explains, “I have no notion of men’s attempting to explain a mystery. In short, I am afraid of raising doubts in my own mind, which I cannot, from the nature of the subject, lay” (Barbauld, 6: 251). 73 ��������������������������������������������������������������� S ee Tom K eymer’s headnote to the Pickering & Chatto reprint of Meditations (S amuel R ichardson’s Published Commentary, 1: 154–60). 74 ������������������������������ S ee Tom K eymer, “Richardson’s Meditations: Clarissa’s Clarissa,” in S amuel R ichardson: Tercentenary Essays, 89–109. K eymer suggests that Richardson’s hesitancy to include the entirety of Meditations in his novel—indeed, even to release to more than a few friends Meditations as a separate text—may well have sprung from his “anxiety ... to make his heroine wholly innocent of proclaiming her own integrity” (107). A s with Job, in other words, Clarissa’s expression of “piety” in Meditations could not avoid “a strong undertow of presumptuousness.” 75 ����������������������������������� E rickson, “‘Written in the Heart’: Clarissa and S cripture,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2.1 (1989): 39, 43–4. 76 ������������ Richardson, Meditations, 1: 189 and 1: 191.

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Y et, only 20 pages earlier in the novel, Richardson included Meditation XII , a compilation of verses from E cclesiastes and Psalms entitled “Poor mortals the cause of their own misery.” It makes precisely the opposite point: SAY not thou, It is through the L ord that I fell away; for thou oughtest not to do the thing that he hateth. S ay not thou, He hath caused me to err; for He hath no need of the sinful man. He Himself made man from the beginning, and left him in the hand of his own counsel. (1189)

O n the one hand, then, G od as Providence “hedges” Clarissa in; on the other, her human “misery” is the product solely of “her own counsel”—we have seen these two positions presented in the body of the novel before, not only by Clarissa, but by A nna and L ovelace, as they seek to understand the relationship between their own choices and the “strange fate” they dimly perceive to be working through them. In the Meditations, however, Clarissa’s voice merges directly with scriptural authority, thereby making explicit the sort of theologically grounded point one finds adduced by Elizabeth Carter, to take one pertinent example, in her “Thoughts on the O ld Testament”: “Without any restraint of that freedom of will which [G od] has imparted to rational natures, his providence is represented as determining all the consequences of their actions, and conducting the whole complicated scheme of the universe with unerring wisdom to the purposes of infinite goodness.”77 Richardson’s turn to the Bible in his efforts to resolve this difficulty is just what Malebranche or Norris would have recommended. “There is an infinity” of Biblical passages, Malebranche claims in E lucidation 15 of S earch, supporting a strictly theocentric interpretation of created existence.78 Richardson and N orris, in fact, appeal to several of the same scriptural passages in their respective attempts to justify, if not to explain, the mystery of G od’s role in the affairs of free agents; Richardson, for that matter , may well have borrowed these references from N orris. In Meditations XVI and XIX, Clarissa quotes from Psalm 139, a collection of verses Richardson would have found both in N orris’s Miscellanies in poetic form and in his R eason and R eligion as support for Malebranche’s theories: O Lord, thou hast searched and known me! Thou knowest my down-sitting and uprising: Thou understandest my thoughts afar off. Thou compassest my path, and my lying-down, and art acquainted with all my ways. There is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord! thou knowest it altogether.79 Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art ������������ Pennington, Memoirs, 2: 408. ������������� Malebranche, S earch, 672. 79 ������������ Richardson, Meditations, 1: 208. 77 78

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there. If I take the wings of the morning, and swell in the uttermost parts of the sea: E ven there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right-hand shall hold me. If I say, S urely the darkness shall cover me: E ven the night shall be light about me. For, the darkness hideth not from Thee; but the night shineth as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.80

In “The Christian L aw A sserted and Vindicated,” N orris quotes from E cclesiastes 43 to support his point that “we should discern great reason to be cautious how we set limits to the D ivine O mnipotence”;81 Clarissa, in Meditation XXXII , quotes the entirety of this scriptural chapter, ending on the fundamental point N orris came more and more to stress as he aligned himself with Malebranche: By Him the end of [the various creations constituting the universe] hath prosperous success; and by His word all things consist. WE may speak much, and yet come short: Wherefore, in sum, HE IS ALL . Who can magnify Him as he is?—For there are yet hid greater things than these be; for we have seen but a few of his works. He is everlasting to everlasting.82

This, one of a series of concluding Meditations, provides implicitly the “answer” to the Providential questions running throughout both Clarissa’s collection of scriptural passages and Richardson’s novel. That we do not understand how human liberty and Providential control coexist, Richardson—through Clarissa, through Clarissa’s Meditations—suggests, is inconsequential. “There are hid greater things than these,” and coexist they do.83 L ovelace, not surprisingly, provides the skeptical control for Richardson’s theological experiment. For L ovelace, the only hidden “great things” worth mentioning are his own strategies for controlling others. A s before, Richardson stresses the deep theological irony of L ovelace’s arrogance by having his character invoke the unrecognized N orris—and N orris’s favorite Biblical description of G od’s present hidden-ness—to describe his own (to use L ovelace’s self-description) ������������������������������ Ibid., 1: 214–15; cf. N orris, Miscellanies, 123–5; and R eason and R eligion, 65–6. �������� N orris, Miscellanies, 230. 82 ������������ Richardson, Meditations, 1: 242. 83 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Cf. Bueler’s discussion of Job as it relates to the “Tested Woman Plot” in Richardson’s novel, pp. 35–40. Bueler stresses the fact that Job comes to his awareness of G od’s power not by being told of it, but by being asked by G od’s voice to respond appropriately—“the definition of God’s power comes from Job” (40). Where Bueler accentuates the interpretive power this affords Job, who may now “formulate the relationship between Creator and creature,” I would suggest that what drew Richardson to this story was not Job’s interpretive freedom, but rather his capacity, even in the midst of his suffering, to arrive at the only acceptable answers about G od’s “omniscience and omnipotence” (40), as suggested at the conclusion to his story (Job 42: 1–3—“Then Job answered the LO RD , and said, I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee. Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not”). 80 81

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“providences”: “let me give thee [Belford] this caution; that thou do not pretend to judge of my devices by parts; but have patience till thou seest the whole. But once more I swear, that I will not be out-Norrised by a pair of novices” (691).84 In becoming the primary means by which Richardson seeks to demonstrate the validity of N orris’s fundamental contention, L ovelace is indeed “out-N orrised”: despite the reality of human liberty, and despite our present inability to see the “whole” of G od’s “devices,” no human being, not even an ingenious plotter like L ovelace, lies outside of G od or, it follows, of His Providential plot.85 From the Malebranchean perspective, there is no “outside,” and in the most direct and immediate manner of speaking. A s N orris puts it, From the intimate Union that is between the D ivine and Human N ature[,] [a]ll things are full of G od ... . G od is the Immediate Place of S pirits and S ouls, who all live, move, and have their being in him ... . G od dwells in us by his special Presence, by the S pirit of G race and Benediction. But we dwell in G od Essentially and Totally ... . All Spirits good and bad, however qualified, dwell in him. For where else should they dwell, since he is all, and fills all?86

“He is all,” N orris claims in explaining that “all S pirits good and bad ... dwell in [G od].” “HE IS ALL ,” Clarissa writes in Meditation XXXII , defending G od’s omnipotence and omnipresence.87 “A ltho’ thou sayest, Thou shalt not see God, yet judgment is before him: ... The deceiver and the deceived are his” (emphasis mine).88 A stell and L aw likewise agreed, and for much the same philosophicaltheological reason. “Hence I conclude That GOD only Is,” A stell writes, “and that all Beings besides His, are only the mere Creatures of His Will.”89 “Man lives and moves and has his being in the divine nature, and is supported by it,” L aw contends in The Grounds and R easons of Christian R egeneration, or the New-Birth (1739), “whether his nature be good or bad.”90 A ccording to the theological framework on

84

�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� For L ovelace’s earlier borrowing of this verse, see above, p. 122. For N orris’s quotations of this verse (I Corinthians 13:12) see, to take just a few examples, “The A spiration” in Miscellanies, 117; Conduct of Human L ife, 211; R eason and R eligion , 24; Practical Discourses Upon Several Divine Subjects, 4 vols (1690; 1691; 1693; 1698), 1: 169 and 4: 256; and L etters Concerning the L ove of God, 56. 85 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� Cf. Chaber’s sense that L ovelace’s damnation results from his inability, or unwillingness, to recognize “his own role as a mere pawn in G od’s hands” (525). 86 ������������� John N orris, Christian Blessedness: Or, Discourses Upon the Beatitudes Of Our L ord and S aviour Jesus Christ (1690; N ew Y ork and L ondon: G arland, 1978), 158–9. This text serves as volume 1 of Practical Discourses. 87 ������������ Richardson, Meditations, 1: 242. 88 �������������� Ibid., 1: 217. 89 �������� A stell, Christian R eligion, 8. 90 ������������� William L aw, Christian R egeneration (1739), in Hobhouse, 16; also quoted in Hensley, “Thomas E dwards,” 131.

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which Richardson constructed his novel, in short, L ovelace the rapist exists in G od as fully as Clarissa the saint—the “deceiver” and the “deceived” are His.91 Richardson’s theodicy, however, demanded that he demonstrate something more than this. Had the author shown only that even L ovelace is “fated” to “live, move, and have his being” in G od, but left him ignorant of this truth, how could he then dole out to his character the divine “Punishment” he seemed to be “calling out for”?92 A novelist hoping to inculcate the rational pleasures of Christian faith could not very well show G od to be an idle and unconcerned Being for whom “now a bubble bursts, now a world,” but neither could he depict him as an utterly hidden but ultimately vindictive Being who punishes His creatures for failing to notice the presence of an absent D eity.93 O utside, in the world of readers, L ovelace’s ignorance would lend credence to the accusation that Richardson damned his creation without offering a chance at salvation.94 Richardson’s defense of G od in Clarissa thus depends in large part on a just prosecution of L ovelace. 91

������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� This formula comes close to the one proffered by Chaber in her reading of the active Providence at the heart of Richardson’s novel: “A paternalistic G od permits men to do evil actions, which he redirects so that only those whom he has personally appointed suffer from them. By implication, to remain passive is to be directly affected by the hand of G od, while to choose to effect some plan of action is to be passive inadvertently” (511). N orris (following Malebranche) would have drawn no distinction between G od’s “permission” and his “redirection”—G od is invariably at work, and not only “through chance timings and unexpected reversals” (Chaber, 523). Human beings are both always active and always passive, in other words. 92 ����������������������������������������������������������� L etter of 26 O ctober 1748 to L ady Bradshaigh (Carroll, 94). 93 ��������������� Pope writes in Essay on Man, “Who sees with equal eye, as G od of all, / A hero perish, or a sparrow fall; / A toms or systems into ruin hurl’d; / A nd now a bubble burst, and now a world” (E pistle 1, ll. 87–90). In a letter of 16 March 1752 to Thomas E dwards, Richardson registers his approval of an anonymous “lady’s” criticism of the theological implications of these lines: ‘ This thought,’ says the lady, ‘appears to me far from a just one, and rather a poetical flight than sound reasoning. It is true, that in the sight of the Supreme Being the greatest of his works may be very inconsiderable, as there must be an infinite distance between the Creator and the creature: but still, as he has made unalterable differences between his creatures, and we must suppose, from our notions of his attributes, wisdom, justice, &c. that as by one he knows exactly these differences, so he will by the other act according to them. We cannot think an atom and a system, a hero and a sparrow, to be of equal value in his sight. Besides, we are told to the contrary in Scripture, Matt. x. 31. To us finite creatures objects appear greatly lessened, and confounded, by distance; which I take to proceed from some imperfections in our organs. But it cannot be so with G od; and we should take care, when we presume to speak of him, and describe his attributes, not to borrow resemblances from our own imperfect nature, and impute to G od the defects of man.’ (Barbauld, 3: 39–40) 94 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ O n 6 Janurary 1749, L ady Bradshaigh (as Belfour) angrily wrote to Richardson, “I fancy, S ir, you found yourself remarkably easy as to L ovelace, when you had him sent to destruction, both of body and soul” (Barbauld, 4: 244). It is worth noting that, from Richardson’s perspective, L ovelace’s soul precisely is not destroyed, though it would be better for him if it were.

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A s anyone who has read past Richardson’s preface to Clarissa knows, Richardson goes out of his way to insist that L ovelace and his friend Belford, their egregious character-flaws notwithstanding, are neither atheists, nor skeptics (what we would now call agnostics), nor even deists: It is not amiss to premise, for the sake of such as may apprehend hurt to the morals of youth from the more freely-written letters, that the gentlemen, though professed libertines as to the fair sex ... are not, however, either infidels or scoffers; nor yet such as think themselves freed from the observance of other moral obligations. ON the contrary, it will be found in the progress of the collection, that they very often make such reflections upon each other, and each upon himself and upon his actions, as reasonable beings who disbelieve not a future state of rewards and punishments (and who one day propose to reform) must sometimes make. (35)

True to the “editor’s” word, Belford remarks in his first letter to Lovelace: Wicked as the sober world accounts us, we have not yet, it is to be hoped, got over all compunction. Although we find religion against us, we have not yet presumed to make a religion to suit our practices. We despise those who do. A nd we know better than to be even doubters. In short, we believe a future state of rewards and punishments. But as we have so much youth and health in hand, we hope to have time for repentance. (502)95

Much later, as the rape approaches, Belford can still urge L ovelace to consider the disjunction between his acknowledged beliefs and his proposed action: “We neither of us are such fools as to disbelieve a futurity, or to think, whatever be our practice, that we came hither by chance, and for no end but to do all the mischief that we have in our power to do” (715). L est L ovelace be tempted to laugh at Belford’s gravity, Belford reminds him by way of James 2:19 that “thy ridicule will be more conformable to thy actions, than to thy belief—Devils believe and tremble,” adding the putatively rhetorical question “Canst thou be more abandoned than they?” (715). A ccording to both Belford and Richardson, then, L ovelace accepts on an intellectual level the truth of that system of Christian morality his actions deny, though, as Belford’s comparison makes clear, this is hardly a mark of redemption—even devils “believe and tremble.” The problem of L ovelace’s religiosity is as old as the novel itself. A mong contemporaries, Joseph Highmore, for one, found Richardson’s characterization of L ovelace as a believer outlandish, irritating, and pointless, as he made clear in a pre-publication letter to the author:96 95

������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Cf. Richardson’s echo of Belford in a disturbingly gleeful send-off to Bolingbroke, who had died two years earlier, and whose posthumous attack on revealed religion had been recently published: “He seems to have been willing to frame a Religion to his Practices. Poor Man! He is not a doubter now!” (letter of 30 December 1754 to Thomas Edwards; Carroll, 316) 96 �������������������������������������������������� E aves and K impel date this letter, “A utumn, 1747.”

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R eason and R eligion in Clarissa Mr. L ovelace is so determin’d a Villain, so resolutely wicked, and perseveres in his Hellish Purposes with such unshaken Constancy, that to suppose him at the same time to have any Thought of Religion, and especially any Veneration for it, is not only utterly inconsistent with his Character, but instead of being any Recommendation, is, on the contrary, the greatest Reproach to Religion: A nd I think it wou’d be doing greater Honour to it, to suppose him an Infidel, or even an A theist. What sort of an Idea must a man have of G od, who shall act in the cursed manner he is represented to do ; and yet flatter himself that he shall be pardon’d and accepted by that Being whom he is confessedly and resolvedly affronting in so egregious a manner, on the weak pretence, that, after gratifying every wicked Inclination, and committing the worst and basest Crimes that human N ature is capable of ... , he designs some time or other to repent and reform? I say, what N otion must such a man have of G od and Religion? A nd can any reasonable man, and one who is religious himself, think he does Honour to both, by pretending that this Conduct, and these S entiments, are consistent? I own I cannot conceive anything more derogatory to the Honour or G od and his moral Perfections, or less serviceable to the Cause of true Religion, than such Suppositions. No! Let the Dog be an Atheist, or worse, if worse can be; or, at least, say nothing about his religious S entiments; unless he is represented as an abominable Hypocrite.97

Initially, the author responded to Highmore’s criticism in a characteristically Richardsonian manner, allowing another, better reader (R. S mith) to respond for him.98 In the first place, Smith argues, Lovelace’s respect for “religion” follows logically, in a Cartesian sense, from his own existence: “To suppose Mr. L ovelace, Villain as he is, has some Veneration for Religion, as the Best upon the Whole, is no more than what all Men, virtuous or not, must necessarily have ... . Where is the Inconsistency to suppose, that L ovelace, a Man of great natural and acquired Talents, has yet the S ense to own a G od, without which he cannot account for himself?” S econdly, the precedent for L ovelace’s contradictory approach to Christianity lies in the common practices of E nglish society: “[Highmore] cannot but know, that Theoretical and Practical Religion are two different things; that N ominal Christianity may be where Real is not; and that the actions of Him who calls himself Most Christian may not always be even al-most Christian.” It is 97 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Forster Collection of Manuscripts, XV, 2, f. 86. Cf. L ady Bradshaigh’s comments, while posing as “Belfour”: “O, Sir! ... You have drawn a villain above nature; and you make that villain a sensible man, with many good qualities, and you have declared him not an unbeliever” (undated letter; Barbauld, 4: 200). 98 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ E aves and K impel speculate that this same man, “a certain R. S mith,” may have helped Richardson in creating the character E lias Brand (219). Cf. K eymer’s account of Jane Collier’s defense of the “Fire S cene” in Clarissa. K eymer suggests that Collier’s letter (along with shorter defenses from other friends) fortified Richardson against accusations of salacious intent, and thus he “continued to resist pressure to damp down the scene” (“Jane Collier, Reader of Richardson, and the Fire S cene in Clarissa,” in New Essays on S amuel R ichardson, 153).

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entirely consistent to imagine that L ovelace, whose Passions never allow him to consider for long “those Topics which are above the World,” could obscure his own knowledge that “he ought to dread [G od’s] Vengeance for the Violation of the eternal L aws of Rectitude.” Besides, S mith inquires on a more pragmatic note, “What will the A dviser do to secure the admirable Clarissa’s Character, in entering upon Terms with such an open Profligate, when, before, she had rejected Wyerly on this very account?”99 Richardson took the portraitist’s criticism very seriously. E ventually, this private debate made its way into the public presentation of the novel when, in the Postscript to the third edition (1751), Richardson made a postemptive strike, as it were, against those readers who might repeat Highmore’s mistake. The Postscript, which in the first edition had stood exclusively as a means of defending the socalled “catastrophe” of Clarissa’s conclusion, becomes in the third edition a forum for responding to “S everal O bjections ... to different Parts of the preceding History,” among them one made “by some worthy and ingenious persons” who contended that L ovelace should have been “drawn an Infidel or S coffer.”100 That Richardson’s sentiments on this matter were in accord with those of S mith, and that Richardson thought highly of S mith’s arguments, is evident in Richardson’s belated response. Following S mith (and, interestingly, Belford), Richardson argues that “it is ... too well known that there are very many persons ... whose actions discredit their belief. A nd are not the very devils, in S cripture, said to believe and tremble?”101 A lso like S mith, Richardson makes the writerly point that Clarissa’s former rejection of Wyerly on religious grounds demands that L ovelace be different on this score. But while Richardson follows S mith closely in justifying his decision not to place his novel’s antagonist beyond the pale, he ultimately goes further than S mith by adducing a positive argument for creating L ovelace as he does. In S mith’s account, L ovelace’s character can be defended on both experiential and aesthetic grounds; in Richardson’s, L ovelace’s tenuous status as “believer” is a didactic necessity. “The reader must have observed,” Richardson insists, “that great and, it is hoped, good use, has been made throughout the work, by drawing Lovelace an infidel only in practice.” To be sure, Richardson’s appeal to didacticism may in part reveal his realization that in defending L ovelace as an accurate depiction of worldly practice, both he and S mith were treating Clarissa as if it were Tom Jones. N evertheless, I would suggest that on this point, at least, Richardson is correct—to fully “O ut-N orris” his character, the author necessarily could not allow him to be a true atheist. In explaining the “good use” of L ovelace’s refusal of atheism, Richardson cites L ovelace’s “frequent remarks, when touched with temporary compunction” as well as his “last scenes,”102 points so vague that they can be, and have been, 99

���������������������������������������������������� Forster Collection of Manuscripts, XV, 2, ff. 87–8. ������������ Richardson, Clarissa (1751), 8: 277, 291. 101 ��������������� Ibid., 4: 559. 102 ����� Ibid. 100

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easily ignored or dismissed by scholars of Richardson’s novels. L ois Bueler and Tom K eymer, for instance, identify the “good uses” of L ovelace’s belief quite differently than does Richardson, and both, either directly or by implication, refuse Richardson’s explanation for this aspect of L ovelace’s character. For Bueler, L ovelace’s ability simultaneously to accept and to thumb his nose at G od’s power is typical of the D on Juan character-type, to whose pedigree L ovelace belongs: “D on Juan is marked by his impiety or disregard for Providence ... . This trait may take the form ... of his bold refusal to fear the D ivine power in which he professes belief. O r it may appear as the frank unbelief of late Renaissance and E nlightenment freethinking or ‘atheism.’”103 Though Richardson deliberately patterned his antagonist to be another D on Juan, his creative nerves failed him, according to Bueler, when it came to D on Juan’s (and L ovelace’s) religious skepticism. For reasons both psychological and historical, Richardson felt compelled to protect L ovelace and himself from the “taint” of “religious libertinage” that might accrue from an unrelenting subscription to the D on Juan model, hence his pleas of didactic purpose. Bueler dismisses the author’s defensive claims, however, focusing instead on the viability of L ovelace’s status as a religious believer. To her mind, “Richardson protests too much”; the author’s insistence that L ovelace is an atheist only in practice cannot mask his “point about him throughout,” namely that for L ovelace, “the practice, the stage role, is all there is.”104 D evoid of essence entirely, untouched by the moral framework operative for the other characters in the novel, L ovelace is, in Bueler’s view, utterly removed from those levels (moral, ethical, spiritual) on which religious belief obtains in Clarissa.105 L ovelace is a believer de nom, but an atheist de facto. K eymer, for his part, is relieved that Richardson did not relent to Highmore’s insistence that L ovelace be made an atheist, since doing so would have resulted in his “making the caricature [of a freethinker] too blunt.”106 L ike Bueler, however, he finds that Richardson’s refusal to tag Lovelace as an outright atheist answered personal and pragmatic, not didactic or artistic, concerns. O n the one hand, “the pressures of audience expectation inhibited him from developing the intellectual side of L ovelace’s libertinism to the full”; on the other hand, as Richardson and S mith had noted, “Clarissa could have nothing to do with an open atheist.”107 103

������������ Bueler, 102. �������������� Ibid., 105–7. 105 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Cf. Cynthia Wolff’s similar sentiment, which Bueler cites: “at first the reader may be deluded—believing, with Clarissa, that the disguises merely serve to hide the real L ovelace from our view. A s the novel progresses, however, we gradually come to realize that there is no real L ovelace behind the mask, that the mask itself is L ovelace, and that the formlessness of his nature, the very absence of a coherent identity, makes it impossible for him to limit himself by engaging in any social role” (S amuel R ichardson and the Eighteenth-Century Puritan Character [Hamden: A rchon Books, 1972], 105). 106 �������� K eymer, R ichardson’s Clarissa, 165. 107 ������������ Ibid., 166. 104

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In K eymer’s view, Highmore actually had it right, if unwittingly: “if L ovelace could not, for the sake of the novel’s or its heroine’s reputation, be made an open atheist, he could indeed be made ‘an abominable Hypocrite.’” N oting L ovelace’s appeals to such hallmark religious scoffers as Mandeville and S haftesbury, his doubt over whether women have souls, and his a posteriori justification for Church rituals, K eymer argues that while many readers may “follow Clarissa in crediting L ovelace’s professions” against religious skepticism, better readers might note with A nna Howe that “in this matter L ovelace ‘is certainly a dissembler, odious as the sin of hypocrisy.’”108 K eymer concludes that L ovelace is, in fact, the religious hypocrite Highmore had suggested as a second option, disguised only by Richardson’s refusal to label him directly as such: This evasiveness in the matter of L ovelace’s scepticism is tactically shrewd: it enables Richardson to acquit Clarissa of knowingly negotiating with an ‘infidel’ and himself of perpetrating an irreligious text, while tacitly tarring L ovelace with the hypocrisy popularly alleged against deism and thought to be its most subversive characteristic ... . Richardson thus points the reader towards A nna’s view of L ovelace while reserving the option of Clarissa’s view to allay the fears of the over-zealous.109

O ne might well wonder why, if L ovelace is the religious hypocrite Highmore wanted, Highmore failed to recognize as much? Why, for that matter, did not S mith, or at least Richardson, simply respond to Highmore by pointing to the same evidence Keymer finds that Lovelace is just what the painter had suggested he should be? G iven Richardson’s efforts to blacken L ovelace’s character in subsequent editions of the novel, it seems unlikely that the author would continue to remain “tacit” about L ovelace’s religious hypocrisy, probably the blackest character trait of all in the eyes of Richardson and many of his readers. Richardson had good reason, I would suggest, to refuse to admit of his creation that he was either an atheist or a well-disguised religious hypocrite. His vision of L ovelace is more complicated than either of these options, L ovelace as non-believer, or L ovelace as non-believer who presents himself as believer. For Richardson, L ovelace is neither a true atheist nor (what is really the same thing) a religious hypocrite. Rather, he is a believer who will not accept the logical ramifications of his belief, or, put another way, a believer who will not believe. It is possible that Richardson found Belford’s label for his and L ovelace’s unpracticed belief—“we are not atheists, except in practice” (969)—in N orris’s sermon “Concerning Practical A theism”; be that as it may, N orris there provides a useful context for understanding the complexity of L ovelace’s religiosity. For N orris, as for S mith and Richardson, atheism can be founded elsewhere than explicit denial or implicit hypocrisy. L ike Richardson, who insisted that readers need only look around themselves to find persons whose “actions discredit ����������� Ibid., S ee Clarissa, 451. �������� K eymer, R ichardson’s Clarissa, 167.

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their beliefs,” N orris appeals to common experience in support of this thesis: “That the Profess’d Belief of a D eity is consistent with an ill L ife I need not say much because ’tis what we all know by visible E xperience.”110 N orris acknowledges that there are “N otional” atheists who “expresly deny the being of G od and ridicule Belief of him,” and he is well aware of the ease with which the religious hypocrite may infiltrate the ranks of the true believers: “’tis ... very possible that he who outwardly professes the Belief of a G od, may in his Heart believe no such thing.”111 In Bueler’s and K eymer’s views, L ovelace belongs somewhere between these two positions. Y et N orris outlines a third position as well, one much closer, I think, to where Richardson situates L ovelace: But suppose him not only to believe a G od, but to think rightly of him too, yet after all he may yield so little actual A ttention to this habitual Belief and K nowledge, he may so seldom think upon G od, and so little Consider what he Believes and thinks of him, as still to lead an ill L ife ... . The thing I plainly intend is this; ’Tis a very possible, and indeed a very O rdinary thing for Men not to consider and not to attend to the Consequences of what they Believe and know (there are so many Passions within, and so many sensible Impressions without to divert them from it).112

We saw in chapter 1 how diligently Richardson works throughout Clarissa to establish L ovelace’s close allegiance to the physical “senses,” or his susceptibility to “sensible Impressions” as N orris here puts it. We now can see that the relationship between L ovelace’s sensualism and his practical atheism is causal, not incidental. In other words, a reader of N orris would fully understand that a person like L ovelace could “believe a G od” and “think rightly of him too” and yet, at the same time, could fail to “attend” to what he “Believes” and “knows.” It is worth considering just what this particular “practical atheist” does believe and know. K eymer, as we have seen, suggests that L ovelace’s words reveal him as a religious hypocrite. It is important, however, to put the examples K eymer cites in their immediate context, and to allow to L ovelace his propensity for lying to himself for the purposes of convenience. L ovelace, for instance, appears to know quite well that Clarissa has a soul, and only tells himself otherwise in a vain attempt to establish a moral system in which he could remain infinitely innocent despite his crimes against her; “I am willing to believe,” L ovelace puts it,

�������� N orris, Practical Discourses, 4: 163. �������������������� Ibid., 4: 157, 164. 112 ������������������������������������������������ Ibid., 166–7. Compare A stell’s similar point in Christian R eligion: “A theism is not Tenable, the shrewdest Wits among our L ibertines, who are most desirous to throw off the Fear of GOD , and of a Future L ife, that they may indulge themselves as they please in this, are not able to maintain it. Much less can the little Fry defend it with their noise and confidence, which can’t silence the convictions of their own Minds, tho’ the violence of their A ppetites may over-rule them” (59). 110 111

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not “I believe” (704, emphasis mine).113 His appeal to Mandeville, furthermore, comes two days prior to the rape, as he attempts, in his own words, to “justify myself to myself” (847), a reference to the “lurking varletess CONS CIEN CE ” (658) whom he simply cannot shake; and it is worth noting that in the same letter L ovelace makes a similar—and similarly ineffective—appeal to “the poets of two thousand years” who “tell us that Jupiter laughs at the perjuries of lovers.” A s for L ovelace’s sense that “all human good and evil” is “comparative” (720), this would have passed in Richardson’s day as an orthodox view of the world, just what Clarissa herself allows (“A ll human excellence ... is comparative only” [853]), and just what the novelist himself would later claim in an undated letter to “Belfour”: “The best of our happiness here is but happiness by competition or comparison.”114 Finally, it is certainly significant that Lovelace’s unmystical, pragmatic pronouncements on church ritual—“if [those ceremonies] answered any good end to the many, there was religion enough in them” (1145)—pertain specifically to Catholic rituals witnessed “at Rome and in other popish countries.” Lovelace would not be the first son of the English Church to have doubts about the efficacy of Catholic ritual, as opposed to the “purified” Anglican system (e.g., S wift in A Tale of a Tub); more than anything, his statement is probably indicative of his creator’s increasing Christian latitude (which reaches its apogee in S ir Charles Grandison),115 not his own deism. In fact, when it comes to Clarissa’s brand of Christianity, L ovelace believes and knows a great deal. D espite his tendency to mock the moral rigor of others, L ovelace 113

������������������������������������������������������������������������������ L ovelace’s defense of himself to the ladies of his family similarly points to willful self-justification, not “belief”: “Forgive me, ladies, for saying that till I knew her, I questioned a soul in a sex, created, as I was willing to suppose, only for temporary purposes—It is not to be imagined into what absurdities men of free principles run, in order to justify to themselves their free practices” (1037). Indeed, in moments of openness, L ovelace can speak in awestruck terms of Clarissa’s soul, “the divinity within” that so ennobles her—“how the G od within her exalted her, not only above me, but above herself” (647, 853). 114 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Barbauld, 4: 222. Thomas E dwards, one of Richardson’s favorite readers and certainly no deist, also echoes L ovelace’s point in his letter of 15 A pril 1756 to Richardson: “G od knows what is best for us; and he has kindly mixed its peculiar troubles and inconveniences with every state of life, in order to lead us to him, to wean us from the world, and to urge us to prepare for a better, where alone true happiness is found” (Barbauld, 3: 133). A stell offers a similar formulation in S erious Proposal, Part II : “This world is not a soil for perfect Happiness to G row in, G ood and E vil are blended together, every Condition has its S weet and Bitter ... .” (174). That L ovelace cannot draw the appropriate heavenly lesson from his realization does not render his point any less orthodox. 115 ��������������������������������������������������� For Richardson’s latitude regarding Catholicism in S ir Charles Grandison, see E aves and K impel, 552–3. The biographers note that “among Richardson’s papers is a poem called ‘A Catholic Christian’s D ying S peech’; the speaker belongs to the Church of E ngland but holds that there is truth in all creeds and addresses the ‘G od of all Churches’” (553). The marginal note to this poem reads “see L aw’s A ppeal, p. 279.” It is one of John Byrom’s poetic renderings of L aw’s prose.

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experiences his own moments of religious seriousness, and these often arise in the most unlikely of situations. In his opening letter, for instance, L ovelace haughtily explains to Belford his refusal to pretend not to recognize “what everyone sees and acknowledges,” namely his pleasing exterior and graceful manner. His reasons for allowing his “vanity” to “extend only to personals,” however, is decidedly unpretentious. Unlike his accomplishments of person, which are “self-taught, selfacquired,” L ovelace’s mental abilities, he knows, redound not to himself: “For my PA RTS , I value not myself upon them ... . if I had anything valuable as to intellectuals, those are not my own; and to be proud of what a man is answerable for the abuse of and has no merit in the right use of is to strut, like the jay, in a borrowed plummage” (144). It is an odd textual moment, an interruption of the supremely self-confident voice to which the reader had just been introduced, but one that, tellingly enough, Richardson cites approvingly in a letter to L ady Bradshaigh.116 True, L ovelace immediately reassumes his track: “But to return to my fair jilt ... .” For a brief moment, however, he sounds surprisingly grave—like, say, a John N orris: S ince then G od is that Intelligible L ight, in which we see and know, and since we see and know so much Truth as G od is pleased to discover to us of himself, we may hence collect to the advantage of D evotion, First, What little Reason the Wisest of us all have to be proud of our understanding and knowledge.117

O r William L aw: Human life implies nothing of our own, but a dependent living in G od ... . [the creature’s] power can only be so much of the divine Power acting in them; their wisdom can be only so much of the divine Wisdom shining in them.118

N or is this L ovelace’s only unexpected slip into religious truth. In another such moment, L ovelace the empiricist approvingly quotes Clarissa’s devaluation of secondary causes: Her duty and her gratitude, she gravely said, to the D ispenser of all good, would secure her she hoped against unthankfulness ... . S o, Belford, for all her future joys she depends entirely upon the Invisible G ood. S he is certainly right; since those who fix least upon second causes are the least likely to be disappointed— A nd is not this gravity for her gravity. (681–2)

116 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ In a letter of 22 A pril 1752, Richardson writes, “E ven L ovelace can say, ‘if I have any thing valuable as to intellectuals’ ...” (Carroll, 213). Here and elsewhere, L ovelace’s voice becomes apothegistic; for an excellent discussion of Richardson and his characters as interminable advice givers, see K evin Cope’s essay “Richardson the A dvisor,” in New Essays on S amuel R ichardson, 17–33. Cope does not mention L ovelace’s various articulations of theological “truisms,” however. 117 �������� N orris, R eason and R eligion, 132. 118 ����� L aw, A S erious Call, 182.

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L ovelace’s Christian-Platonist recognition that the material world of secondary causes pales in comparison to the “Invisible G ood” is surprisingly out of character. This is “gravity for her gravity”—but from whence did it spring? How, for that matter, can the same character who has so often characterized his own manipulative schemes as “providences” ultimately admit to Belford in a conscience-ridden letter after Clarissa’s death that he “never was such a fool as to disbelieve a Providence” (1428)? It is worth noting that, unlike the moments cited by K eymer of L ovelace’s irreligious attitude, in each of these cases Richardson presents L ovelace with his psychological defenses lowered, not raised. I am suggesting, in other words, that we reverse K eymer’s formula: L ovelace is most hypocritical not in his expressions of religious belief, but when he contradicts those beliefs in order to maintain a conveniently irreligious position. Richardson, in fact, makes exactly this point in explaining to “Belfour” why L ovelace could not in the end be reformed. L ovelace, he writes in a letter of 15 D ecember 1748, is guilty of “sinning against the L ight of K nowledge, and against the most awakening Calls & Convictions.”119 This is a crucial statement of Richardson’s conception of L ovelace’s psychology. L ovelace’s sin, Richardson tells us, stems neither from a lack of knowledge nor from a hypocritical profession of knowledge, in either of which case the truth could still logically dawn on him. Instead, like Marlowe’s Faustus and Milton’s S atan, L ovelace is, as Patricia Meyer S pack puts it, “self-condemned to damnation”120 by his refusal to act on the “L ight of K nowledge” that he actually has—redemption is impossible because L ovelace denies or obscures what he knows to be true. E ffectively, then, as N orris puts it in his “D iscourse Concerning Practical A theism,” L ovelace “has” the L ight without “having it”: “If the L ight be not present to him for ready use when he is to walk by it, ’tis all one as if it were at the other side of the Hemisphere ... . For he has it not to order his Motions by it, though he has it.”121 L ovelace “knows,” in other words, that the human intellect is only a ray of divinity; he knows that second causes mask the universal True cause; he knows that even at his or her most free, the human being always acts in a drama composed and directed by an ever-present Providence. His conscience, “that great and Universal O racle lodged in every Man’s Breast,” as N orris puts it, calls him time and time again to do well 119

�������������� Carroll, 103. ���������� S pack, 11. 121 �������� N orris, Practical Discourses, 4: 169. Cf. N orris’s similar point in Conduct of Human L ife, a portion of which is quoted above: “[G od] may be said to enlighten us in a double respect, either Fundamentally and Potentially, by putting us into a Capacity of Illumination, by his intimate Union and Presence with us; or else Effectually and A ctually, when we attend to his D ivine L ight, which is always present to us, tho we are not so to it. In the Former S ense he enlightens every Man, in the latter only those who duly consult him and attend to him” (199). A stell echoes N orris’s argument in Christian R eligion: “But tho’ the L ight shine ever so bright about us, we can have no Vision unless we open our E yes. Tho’ the motives are ever so strong and powerful, yet they are but motives; they are most proper to Perswade, but they neither can nor ought to Compel” (63). 120

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by Clarissa; he responds not by heeding “that L ight Within S o Darkly Talked of,” but by attempting to destroy it (Clarissa, 848).122 A nd lest we mistake the source of the “L ight,” or from whence these “Calls and Convictions” come, we should note Richardson’s more complete phrasing of his point in the original Postscript to Clarissa, where the author blames L ovelace for “persevering in his villainous views, against the strongest and most frequent convictions and remorses that ever were sent to awaken and reclaim a wicked man” (1498; emphasis mine). S yntactically, the “sender” here remains buried in the passive voice, and the reader can choose to leave its identity ambiguous. But, of course, syntax can only elide agency, it cannot eradicate or change it. The “sender,” for both L ovelace and the reader, remains, noticed or unnoticed, acknowledged or not. There simply is no ontological exit from the pervasive power of G od, Richardson is insisting. The flood of all human plots necessarily channels into a single stream—death—and from thence into one of two strictly delimited (and eternal) oceans: heaven or hell. Richardson’s interest in this theological fact, as he took it to be, probably explains his curious insistence on sanctifying S ocrates. Consider Belford’s choice of allusion in his first post-rape response to Lovelace: Oh LOVELACE! LOVELACE! had I doubted it before, I should now be convinced that there must be a WO RLD A FTE R THIS , to do justice to injured merit, and to punish such a barbarous perfidy! Could the divine SO CRA TES , and the divine CLA RISSA , otherwise have suffered? (884)

Much later in his reformation Belford returns to the “divine S ocrates” as a means of explaining Clarissa’s freedom from “any wilful errors” (1307). Richardson himself refers to Belford’s first invocation of the “divine Socrates” as the final word to one of his most oft-cited defenses of Clarissa’s conclusion (letter of 15 D ecember 1748). I quote it in full, because of an important parenthetical remark Richardson adds to Belford’s original epistolary paroxysm: A Writer who follows N ature and pretends to keep the Christian S ystem in his E ye, cannot make a Heaven in this World for his Favorites; or represent this L ife otherwise than as a S tate of Probation. Clarissa I once more averr [sic] could not be rewarded in this World ... . Upon this Conviction, it is, that Mr. Belford in his 122 �������� N orris, Conduct of Human L ife, 202. For N orris, Richardson, and other likeminded Christian thinkers, conscience is our connection to G od, its activity the evidence of His continued presence within “every Man’s Breast.” D ussinger has noted that “whether he calls it ‘conscience’ or ‘feeling heart,’ Richardson implies throughout [Clarissa] that man has within him an intuitive judge to which one must answer for all his actions and that furthermore this inner voice is directly related to the Holy S pirit” (“Conscience,” 238). “G iven this view of conscience,” L esley Berry writes, “L ovelace’s murder of his own conscience is blasphemously shocking” (“A nfractuous Ways,” in S amuel R ichardson: Passion and Prudence, 122). It is important to recognize, however, that L ovelace is, strictly speaking, unsuccessful; “conscience ... though it may be temporarily stifled, cannot die,” he ruefully admits (934).

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L etters upon the Villainous O utrage cries out, which is one of my great Morals— ‘O L ovelace, L ovelace, had I doubted it before, I should now be convinced, that there must be a World after This, to do Justice to injured Merit, and to punish such a barbarous Perfidy! –Could the Divine Socrates & the Divine Clarissa (and I may add, could the primitive Martyrs) otherwise have S uffered?’... A h; Madam! ... Forgive me an interrupting Sigh; and allow me a short Silence.123

The same man who was hesitant to entertain D avid Hartley’s Universalist arguments for fear of “weakening Foundations”124 would seem here to offer a quite similar thought as one of his “great Morals”; the same man who refused to read S wift’s “S ermon on the Trinity” for fear of “raising doubts” in his own mind about “fundamentals” here adduces “a World after This” as the only recompense for a pagan martyr’s suffering.125 Why would the author deliberately choose—and on more than one occasion—to walk such a theologically precarious path? Richardson may at first seem to be taking sides with the likes of deist John G ilbert Cooper, whose L ife of S ocrates (1749), a rebuttal to the “injurious Treatment” of S ocrates and other “ancient Philosophers” in William Warburton’s Divine L egation of Moses (1738), appeared almost simultaneously with Clarissa.126 But if Richardson’s parenthetical addendum to Belford’s pronouncement (“and I may add, could the primitive Martyrs”) puts S ocrates in the company of the earliest Christian martyrs, it does not put Richardson exclusively in the company of deists. E lizabeth Carter was certainly an orthodox Christian in her time, one who, like Richardson, spent a great deal of time reading and studying the Bible, and one who, again like Richardson, feared disrupting the fundamentals of Christianity by over-reasoning.127 But even Carter’s hobbyhorse, E pictetus, whom she at one point 123

��������������� Carroll, 108–9. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� S ee Richardson’s letter of 30 May 1754 to L ady Bradshaigh (Carroll, 308). For an account of Richardson’s uncertainty on this point, see E aves and K impel, 554. A s noted earlier, Richardson’s press printed several editions of D avid Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749). 125 ����������������� S ee above, n. 72. 126 �������� Cooper, The L ife of S ocrates, Collected from the Memorabilia of Xenophon and the Dialogues of Plato, 4th ed. (L ondon, 1771), v. Warburton famously argued that the lesson of pagan thinkers like S ocrates is the woeful inadequacy of the human mind to come of its own accord to scriptural Truth. Without the atonement of Christ, as Moses was taught by D ivine revelation, it was impossible for human beings (including G od’s O ld Testament chosen people) to attain a state of futurity; S ocrates and his followers proved themselves incapable of achieving Heaven by their uninspired belief that they could! Cooper counters by suggesting that the uncanny similarities between the teachings of S ocrates and Christ point to G od’s “mediate” revelation of Truth to the G reek philosopher, and thus to his redemption. 127 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� N ote, for instance, Carter’s echo of Richardson’s fears regarding the doctrine of the Trinity in a letter to an unnamed friend: “You mention as a particular difficulty a most awful subject, on which I know not how to express myself without fear and trembling; and yet I trust that ... I shall be withheld from saying any thing that may tend to mislead either you or 124

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calls a “better Christian” than E rasmus, could not rival S ocrates in her eyes: as she explains in a 1763 letter to Catherine Talbot, “I entirely agree with you in thinking [Epictetus] greatly inferior to Socrates; but I do not see sufficient reason to reduce him to a level with our modern Heathens.”128 Carter praises S ocrates for his ability to focus on Truth despite the general myopia of his culture, to pass “through all the impediments of long established error, ... through clouds and darkness” and arrive at “D ivine illumination.”129 “It would,” she explained to E lizabeth Vesey in a letter of 22 May 1766, “have been impossible for S ocrates, to have parted from his friends ... if he had not fortified his mind by hopes full of immortality.”130 The “D ivine S ocrates,” in other words, had proponents within the pale of mainstream A nglicanism as well as without; one suspects that somewhere between Warburton’s dismissal of S ocrates’s reasonings as hopelessly short of Revealed Truth and Cooper’s defense of S ocrates’s reasonings as perfectly adequate to it lay Christians like Carter and Richardson, whose religious, philosophical, and psychological needs were far too inconsistent for either of these unequivocal approaches. What is certain is that, rhetorically speaking, this pre-Christian martyr offered a devastating foil to the character type embodied by L ovelace—“our modern Heathens,” to borrow again Carter’s complaint. A lthough neither Richardson nor Carter was willing unequivocally to seat S ocrates in Heaven—both do seem to lean that way—each saw in him at the very least a striking example of what S t. Paul had meant by those with “the law written in their hearts” (Romans 2: 14–15). A s Carter, describing S ocrates’s philosophy, puts it in her Introduction to The Moral Discourses of Epictetus, “even this best system is excelled by Christianity ... . and that is enough to teach us thankfulness for the blessing of a better information.”131 It is in comparison to pagan S ocrates, in other words, not to Christian Clarissa, that L ovelace’s sin stands in starkest contrast. The Word has myself ... . With regard to the doctrine itself, what you say of the presumption of not being neutral in that part of it, which certainly exceeds all the powers of our limited faculties to comprehend, is certainly right; but there are other parts very clearly revealed ... . I wish it was in my power to prevail on you to suppress that dangerous curiosity which weakens and neglects the evidence afforded” (Carter, Memoirs, 2: 392–3). 128 ������ Ibid., 1: 381, 202–3 . By “modern Heathens,” Carter has in mind atheists, deists, and unorthodox believers of various stripes and colors; like Richardson, however, she takes particular exception to Bolingbroke: in a letter of 1755 to Talbot, Carter notes that “it is with great consistency that L ord B[olingbroke] has treated Plato and S t. Paul with equal virulence, as I am told he has” (1: 189). 129 ��������������� Ibid., 2: 381. 130 �������� Carter, S eries of L etters, 3: 286. Cf. Carter’s praise for S ocrates in her Translator’s Introduction to The Moral Discourses of Epictetus (N ew Y ork: E .P. D utton & Co, 1928; Carter’s original translation of A ll the works of Epictetus [...] appeared in 1758, and was printed by Richardson’s press). Unlike the S toics, Carter explains, S ocrates recognized that only “the doctrine of a future state” could adequately reconcile the “present appearances of things” to “the justice, wisdom, and goodness of G od” (xv). 131 ���������� Ibid., xx.

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been revealed to L ovelace; as S t. Peter puts it in his second epistle (2:21), “For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them.” L ovelace is thus guilty on two scores; not only has he refused, recalling Richardson’s phrase, to heed the “awakening calls, and convictions” that even a S ocrates could hear; he has also “[sinned] against the L ight of K nowledge,” or revelation. Far better to have been a “D ivine” heathen like S ocrates, in short, than a “Practical A theist” like L ovelace—or like Belton and S inclair, whose deaths prepare the reader for this crowning theological-existential point.132 Belton’s consumptive death comes first. As readers might expect, given our experience with L ovelace’s unconquerable conscience, Belton, as his health worsens, is racked with guilt for his various sins, which extend from living unmarried with a woman (one “Thomasine”), to “several enormities” committed while under the influence of “the heat of youth and wine,” to a duel that resulted in the death of the other combatant, to, most nefarious of all, the apparent murder of his own uncle—as Belford puts it, “Alas! Lovelace, I fear, I fear, he came too soon into his uncle’s estate” (1227, 1231, 1242). His “conscience standing in the place of a thousand witnesses,” and “stinging him all the time too” (1227, 1242), Belton feels certain that his behavior has placed him outside of G od’s mercy and grace, which he, like L ovelace, has time and time again rejected (1230). This does not mean, however, that he feels himself outside of G od. Quite to the contrary, Belton fully recognizes that he cannot escape God’s justice (1226), that as bad as his final hours are, “bad will be changed to worse, nay, to worst of all; and that worst of all to last beyond time and to all eternity” (1227). Belton is trapped. In a striking portrayal of the “old machine call’d G race,” his “heart is hardened” so that he “can now neither repent nor pray” as he knows he “ought,” yet he feels the need for prayer and repentance nonetheless. (1227).133 In the end, Belton is left with only two “shocking” prayers to make, as Belford incredulously explains—either that he could never have been born or that he could cease to exist: “To hear the poor man wish he had never been born! To hear him pray to be nothing after death! Good God! how shocking!” (1242). Shocking and, Richardson expects the reader to add, impossible. A rguments for the natural immortality of the soul proliferated throughout the eighteenth century. Many of these came in response to L ocke’s hesitant suggestion “that G od can, if he pleases, superadd to Matter a Faculty of Thinking,” or to those who, following L ocke, argued that the soul, like all material substances, may only 132 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ D amrosch, Jr. suggests that, as with other markers of divine power, “the tragedy of damnation ... is carefully limited” in Clarissa. “Richardson,” he writes, “locates it entirely in L ovelace” (258). The deaths of Belton and S inclair suggest to me that Richardson’s treatment of damnation is far more thorough, and more explicit, than D amrosch, Jr. allows. 133 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Here as elsewhere, Spack notes, we find Richardson “[exploring] in scarifying detail the maxim that character is fate.” I am puzzled, however, by S pack’s suggestion that in “exposing the terror of this truism,” Richardson avoids “any possible theological implications” (11).

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exist temporarily.134 Richardson may have been familiar, for instance, with Bishop Stillingfleet’s attacks on Locke’s idea in a pamphlet war the two waged during the 1690s, or with S amuel Clarke’s famous debate with A nthony Collins (often fought by proxy through reference to non-juror Henry D odwell, who had argued, as Robert G . Walker explains, that the soul was naturally mortal and “was rendered immortal only through the grace of baptism”135). Astell had seconded Stillingfleet in a bitterly ironic attack on L ocke’s hypothesis in her Christian R eligion, three editions of which had been published by 1730. N orris too had carried on an important debate with D odwell, arguing that the soul was “naturally” immortal, but only through G od’s direct role in rendering it so; nature is always supernatural, from the Malebranchean perspective.136 E ven before L ocke had published his Essay, however, N orris had proffered the immortality of the soul as the ultimate incentive to religious behavior in an essay printed as part of his Miscellanies (“O f the slightness of all S ecular, and the importance of minding our E ternal, Interest”). His argument seems very much to have appealed to Richardson as he considered Belton’s (and, as we shall see, S inclair’s and L ovelace’s) demise: It highly concerns us to be very careful concerning our final interest, because of the vast, the infinite Moment of the thing. For certainly it can be no less [than] whether a man shall be Damn’d or S aved, eternally Happy, or eternally Miserable. N o man certainly that thinks at all, can think this an indifferent matter, or if he does he will one day be sadly convinc’d of the contrary, when he shall curse the day of his Birth, and wish for the Mercy of A nnihilation.137

A s we have seen, Belton does indeed, much to Belford’s horror, “curse the day of his Birth,” and he does “wish for the Mercy of A nnihilation”; as N orris here makes clear, however, this “mercy” simply is not available to the human being.138 134 ���� S ee Essay, 4.3.6.540–41. Y olton provides a thorough history of various readings and misreadings of L ocke’s suggestion in Thinking Matter. L ocke, Y olton is careful to note, did not “believe” the soul to be material—rather, he simply wished to underscore our lack of knowledge on this point in order to prevent indefensible pronouncements of certainty one way or the other (17). The most famous and unapologetic of these was probably French physician and philosopher Julien O ffray L a Mettrie (1709–51), whose L ’Homme-machine (1747) expounded a strictly materialistic and atheistic worldview. 135 ������������������ Robert G . Walker, Eighteenth-Century A rguments for Immortality and Johnson’s R asselas, E nglish L iterary S tudies Monograph S eries N o. 9 (University of Victoria: E nglish L iterary S tudies, 1977), 10. 136 ��������������������������������������������������������� N orris’s refutation of D odwell was printed in two books, A Philosophical Discourse Concerning the Natural Immortality of the S oul (1708) and A L etter to Mr. Dodwell Concerning the Immortality of the S oul of Man (1709). 137 �������� N orris, Miscellanies, 184. 138 �������������� Cf. A stell in Christian R eligion: “O but say some, why shou’d GOD thrust me into Being whether I wou’d or no, imposing such Conditions on me, that had it been left to my choice, I wou’d have refus’d Being rather than have consented to them?” (63). A lso cf. Richardson’s preface to Meditation XXVI, which Richardson directs explicitly

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Belton suspects as much. Indeed, Richardson turns directly to N orris as a means of contextualizing Belton’s terrible realization that G od’s plot is inescapable. In an attempt to comfort his inconsolable friend, Belford quotes a couplet from N orris’s poem “The Meditation”: Death could not a more sad retinue find, S ickness and pain before, and darkness all behind. (Clarissa, 1229) 139

Belton is taken with it. O n the following day he asks Belford “who was the author of the two lines I had repeated to him,” and makes his friend “speak them over again” (1229). A fter explaining that N orris was “an excellent Christian” and an “excellent divine ... who had little else but human frailties to reproach himself with,” he goes on to quote the entirety of the opening two stanzas: It must be done, my soul: But ’tis a strange, A dismal and mysterious change, When thou shalt leave this tenement of clay, A nd to an unknown—somewhere—wing away; When Time shall be E ternity, and thou Shalt be—thou knowest not what—and live—thou know’st not how! Amazing state! no wonder that we dread To think of death, or view the dead; Thou’rt all wrapt up in clouds, as if to thee O ur very knowledge had antipathy

“Then follows,” Belford writes, “what I repeated,” Death could not a more sad retinue find, S ickness and pain before, and darkness all behind. (1229–30)

Far from comforting Belton, however, these lines only add to his sense of guilt. He rhetorically asks Belford, “if death be so repugnant a thing to human nature that good men will be startled at it, what must it be to one who has lived a life of sense and appetite; nor ever reflected upon the end which I now am within

at materialists—“In the following Meditation ... are set forth the arguments by which the Ungodly may be supposed to encourage themselves and others in their sensual pursuits.” The Meditation itself reads, “The ungodly said, but not aright, ‘O ur life is short—and in death of a man there is no remedy ... . For we are born at all adventure; and we shall be hereafter, as tho’ we had never been: For the breath of our nostrils is as smoke, and a little spark in the moving of our hearts ... . Come on, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that are present; and let us speedily use the creatures, like as in youth ... .’ S uch things the wicked did imagine, and were deceived; for their own wickedness hath blinded them ... . For G od created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity” (Meditations, 1: 229–30). 139 �������� N orris, Miscellanies, 30.

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view of?” (1230).140 Belford can provide no comforting answer, nor, upon Belton’s death, can he be sure whether or not his friend’s “crimes were above the size of G od’s mercies” (1243). A s Richardson has laid the scene before the reader, however, there can be little doubt of Belton’s fate. Belford himself darkly admits, “I heartily wish, we could have seen one ray of comfort darting in upon his benighted mind before he departed. But all, alas! to the very last gasp was horror and confusion” (1243). “Horror and confusion” rule as well in the account Belford gives of S inclair’s death. O n the one hand, the scene itself pullulates with “confused” images of disheveled prostitutes lounging about the room and with “horrible” descriptions of the fleshy Procuress, having broken her leg in a drunken “tumble down stairs” (1389), raving in agony on her death bed. A s with Belton, however, the “horror and confusion” applies most forcefully to the psychological agonies of the person dying in sin, incapable of seeking mercy but fully aware of having desperate need of it—S inclair can admit “my conscience smote me” but cannot bring herself to call for a clergyman in order to repent: “Who sends for a parson while there is any hope left? The sight of a parson would be death immediate to me!—I cannot, cannot die!” (1392). Like Belton, Sinclair is terrified at the prospects of futurity, and Richardson has her echo the lines from N orris quoted earlier by Belford as a preface to her own “shocking” calls for annihilation: Am I to die thus miserably!—of a broken leg in my old age! ... No time for my affairs! No time to repent!—And in a few hours ... who knows, who can tell where I shall be!—Oh! that indeed I never, never, had had a being! ... [I] would compound for all future hopes, so as I may be nothing after this! (1389)141

The desperation of S inclair’s wish, of course, bespeaks its futility—annihilation, escape from G od’s plot, is impossible. A nd, indeed, the reader is left with little doubt as to “where” S inclair will “be” once death comes—as Belford puts it, “hell” has “already begun in her mind” as she awaits with terror “the dreadful state she is now upon the verge of!” (1394). It seems clear that Richardson deliberately positioned these two scenes as theological precursors to L ovelace’s own death. O ne need only consider Clarissa’s posthumous letter of admonition to L ovelace to see that Richardson considered the three deaths like in kind: I wish you to consider your ways. Y our golden dream cannot long last ... . When once a dangerous sickness seizes you; when once effectual remorse breaks in upon you; how dreadful will be your condition! ... Not one good action in the 140

�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Weinbrot writes of this scene, “N o wonder Belford ends the grim scene, in which both poem and Belton depict graceless souls, with this exclamation to L ovelace: ‘G od convert us both!’” (118). 141 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Cf. Sinclair’s similar, if again unwitting, invocation of Norris on p. 1392: “I find you think I shall die! And what I may be, and where, in a very few hours—who can tell?”

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hour of languishing to recollect, not one worthy intention to revolve, it will be all conscience and horror; and you will wish to compound for annihilation. (1426)

E rickson believes that this passage represents Clarissa’s O ld Testament warning to L ovelace that he is in danger of “being written away or blotted out of the ‘book of life’ with the stroke of a pen”—in other words, that Lovelace’s final wish will be to prevent annihilation.142 Using Belton’s and Sinclair’s final wishes as models, however, it seems likely that Clarissa’s words mean precisely the opposite: L ovelace will wish (in vain, it is implied) he could be annihilated, “compound” here indicating the desire to barter for a lighter sentence.143 But L ovelace will not be annihilated, Richardson is suggesting, any more than was Belton or S inclair, any more, for that matter, than was S ocrates or Clarissa.144 When Clarissa tells Belford that she has “earnest wishes for the good of L ovelace’s soul, and that from considerations of its immortality” (1342), in other words, she is not merely spouting piety. Rather, she is giving voice to what Richardson believed was the ineluctable characteristic of the human being, of “excellent Christians” like N orris, of “divine” heathens like S ocrates, even of “practical atheists” like L ovelace. For all, as Belford puts it, a “boundless ocean of eternity” (1306) necessarily waits.145 Clarissa’s “earnest wishes” for L ovelace’s soul, however, cannot dissipate the “conscience and horror” he has brought upon it. He himself admits, during a severe bout of depression following Clarissa’s death, that “it was all conscience and horror indeed!” (1430). And though Lovelace believes he has, a few days later, gained the ascendancy over conscience, “the worm that never dies,” and can even claim that he will “quickly be what I was—life, spirit, gaiety, and once more the plague of a sex that has been my plague” (1432), in the end, conscience becomes, as it had for Belton and Sinclair, a final form of earthly punishment, largely because, as with them, L ovelace cannot bring himself to repent.146 A fter giving L ovelace ���������� E rickson, L anguage of the Heart, 222. OED, s.v. “compound,” 13b.: “To discharge any liability or satisfy any claim by a compromise whereby something lighter or easier is substituted.” 144 ���������������������������������������������� Milton had already touched on this subject in Paradise L ost, where Moloch adduces annihilation as a potential benefit of storming heaven: “More destroy’d than thus/ We should be quite abolisht and expire. / What fear we then? what doubt we to incense / His utmost ire? which to the heighth enrag’d, / Will either quite consume us, and reduce / To nothing this essential, happier far / Than miserable to have eternal being ...” (2. ll. 92–8). But perhaps Marlowe’s Faustus best captures the angst immortality inspires in the mind of the person dying in sin: “Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul? / O r why is this immortal that thou hast? / ... . O soul, be changed into little water drops / A nd fall into the ocean, ne’er be found. / My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!” (5. 14. 114–15, 127–8). 145 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Belford concludes this discourse on futurity with his second reference “the divine S ocrates” (1307). 146 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ In a letter of 1748 to E dward Moore, Richardson writes, “I w’d not punish more than was necessary in his person, a poor Wretch [L ovelace] whom I had tortured in Conscience (the punishment I always chose for my punishable Characters)” (Carroll, 118). 142 143

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the fatal thrust, Morden twice attempts to direct L ovelace to penitent prayer: “A h monsieur, you are a dead man!—Call to God for mercy! ... [S]natch these few fleeting moments, and commend yourself to God” (1486, 1487). For Lovelace, however, whose efforts throughout the novel have involved playing Providence to his own self-fashioned world, to “commend” himself to G od with his dying breaths would be an ultimate concession of defeat.147 Indeed, far from calling to G od, L ovelace spends his remaining hours addressing the “Fair S ufferer” herself, whose ghost both terrifies and tantalizes him: He was delirious, at times, in the two last hours; and then several times cried out, Take her away! Take her away! but named nobody. And sometimes praised some lady (that Clarissa, I suppose, whom he had called upon when he received his death’s wound) calling her, Sweet Excellence! Divine Creature! ... And once he said, Look down blessed Spirit, look down!—And there stopped. (1487)

Though De La Tour believes that Lovelace’s final words—“Blessed ... Blessed ... . LET THIS EXPIATE!”—are addressed “no doubt to Heaven; for his dying eyes were lifted up” (1487–8), the reader will recall that L ovelace has yet to mention G od or His abode, but that Clarissa’s spirit has already been explicitly positioned “up” relative to Lovelace. It is a final moment of Richardsonian irony at Lovelace’s expense, one that the author believed would point readers to the correct assumption concerning L ovelace’s “fate”—that the author had “given rather a dreadful than a hopeful E xit, with respect to Futurity, to the unhappy L ovelace” (letter of 1748 to E dward Moore).148 “Moralists of the eighteenth century and later want to say ‘Clarissa goes to heaven and L ovelace goes to Hell,’” Margaret A nne D oody writes, “while twentieth-century critics wish to say that Richardson in his simplicity said so. But in the terms of Boehme’s mysticism that is a ludicrous statement.”149 For D oody, this “statement” is “ludicrous” because “in Boehme’s (and L aw’s) vision, no place and no soul-being is totally deserted by the divine.” In other words, because “the D ivinity is to some extent within every human being,” D oody contends, “there must be a limit to punishment, moralism, and reprobation.”150 O ne need only look 147 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� From this perspective, L ovelace’s refusal of “ghostly attendance, and the S acraments in the Catholic way” (1488) is probably less a mark of his adherence to A nglicanism than of his fatalism. 148 ������������������������������������������������������������������������� Carroll, 122. Richardson here writes of L ovelace’s last words, “LE T THIS E XPIA TE ,” that they are “all his apparent Invocation and address to the S UPR EME.” We should note, however, that Richardson is deliberately taking de la Tour’s perspective here—in other words, even if we assume L ovelace’s last words are to G od (note the “apparent”), they still, Richardson points out, display a “wonted haughtiness of spirit” utterly incompatible with the humility a “hopeful” end would require. 149 ���������������������������������� Margaret A nne D oody, “The G nostic Clarissa,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11.1 (1998): 77. 150 ����������������������������������������������� Ibid., 78. D oody has not been alone in reading Clarissa as an expression of Boehmen theology; see above, chapter 1 (70–75).

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to the theocentrism of Malebranche, N orris, A stell, or the early L aw (e.g., the very popular S erious Call) to see that D oody’s claim constitutes a nonsequitur; from these figures, Richardson learned quite the opposite lesson from the one Doody proposes. Far from guaranteeing a limit to L ovelace’s punishment, the innerpresence of D ivinity, the light within, is what renders him culpable. It also, of course, renders him potentially redeemable. D oody believes Clarissa inclines to Boehme’s system; I suspect, however, that on the subject of divine reward and punishment, it inclines much more closely to the likes of N orris, for whom the business of life could be summarized thusly: “There is a good fight to be fought, there is a whole Body of sin to be destroy’d, there are Passions to be mortify’d, Habits to be unlearnt ... in a word there is a Heaven to be obtain’d, and a Hell to be avoided.”151 O r of A stell, who bluntly explained, “S ince GOD has made us Immortal, and it does not become Him to annihilate His O wn Work, the E ternal Misery of an O bstinate S inner, is necessary and unavoidable.”152 The G od of Clarissa may be hidden, but the “Œconomy of Providence,”153 Richardson knew, ensured that all outstanding debts must be satisfied in the end. E mpirically, of course, G od does not appear in the novel, just as G od does not appear in real life, if by “appear” we mean well aimed lightning bolts and voices from burning bushes. One is thus free to see the flux of quotidian experience in Clarissa as just that, flux, rather than as the hidden “part” of a divine “whole.” D avid Hume (1711–76), we know, found in Malebranche a precursor to his own empirical skepticism.154 That a Pyrrhonean skeptic could find in a radical theosophist evidence for his skepticism provides a useful model for understanding the relationship between Clarissa and such unabashedly secular admirers as D iderot. Malebranche may lead to Hume, but Malebranche is not Hume, precisely because there is a G od in the French Father’s philosophy. Clarissa’s theological concerns do not resolve into secularism, precisely because there is a G od in the world of the novel. By attempting in Clarissa a rigorous defense of a theocentric view of human experience, one that refuses the comforting deus ex machina inhabiting Pamela, Richardson necessarily took seriously the very skepticism—

�������� N orris, Miscellanies, 183. �������� A stell, Christian R eligion, 65. 153 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� This is G raham’s phrase (see above), but it is worth noting that Richardson would soon put it in S ir Charles G randison’s mouth (3: 248). 154 �������������������������������������������������������������������������� S ee McCracken, chapter 7, “Hume” (255–90). “A fter all,” McCracken writes, “in defending the doctrine that G od is the only true cause, Malebranche had felt called upon both to give reasons for rejecting our ordinary supposition that there is some natural necessity connecting events that are always conjoined, and to provide some explanation of how we come so strongly to believe that there is such a necessary connection, if none exists. In doing so, Malebranche provided both a critique of natural causality as ‘necessary connection’ and a psychological account of the way in which the constant conjunction of events leads us to believe in such a natural necessity” (256). 151

152

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or even cynicism, as Zias suggests155—his novel works to reject. Readers may choose to follow L ovelace in attempting to read G od out of the world of Clarissa; this is the freedom implicit in the human condition, and this is the risk Richardson took as a novelist. Richardson hoped, however—and however much in vain—that these same readers would see in L ovelace’s end the tragic potentiality of this freedom; namely, that they too could be “out-N orrised” when they least expected it.

155 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� Zias suggests that Richardson “attempts to counter cynical readings of both Pamela and Clarissa by giving voice to cynicism within the novels themselves” (107), but she believes that Richardson found the problem of cynical readings insuperable. To my mind, Fish’s analysis of Milton provides a much closer parallel for Richardson’s treatment of cynics who refuse to believe—as does Matthew 13. 13: “Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.”

Bibliography Works By Samuel Richardson Richardson, S amuel. A pprentice’s Vade Mecum: Or, Young Man’s PocketCompanion. 1733. In A ugustan R eprint S ociety 169–70. E dited with an introduction by A lan D ugald McK illop. L os A ngeles: William A ndrews Clark Memorial L ibrary, 1975. ———. Clarissa, or The History of a Young L ady. 1747–1748. E dited by A ngus Ross. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985. ———. Clarissa. Or, the History of a Young L ady. 3rd edition. 1751. In vols 1–8 of The Clarissa Project, edited by Florian S tuber. N ew Y ork: A MS Press, 1990. ———. A Collection of Moral Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and S ir Charles Grandison. 1755. In vol. 3 of S amuel R ichardson’s Published Commentary on CLARISSA , 1747–1765. With an introduction by John D ussinger. A fterword by A nn Jessie Van S ant. L ondon: Pickering & Chatto, 1998. ———. “Hints of Prefaces for Clarissa.” In volume 1 of S amuel R ichardson’s Published Commentary on CLARISSA , 1747–1765. With an introduction by Jocelyn Harris. E dited by Thomas K eymer. L ondon: Pickering & Chatto, 1998. ———. The History of S ir Charles Grandison. 1753–1754. E dited by Jocelyn Harris. 7 vols in 3. L ondon: O xford University Press, 1972. ———. Meditations Collected from the S acred Books. 1750. In vol. 1 of S amuel R ichardson’s Published Commentary on CLARISSA , 1747–1765. With an introduction by Jocelyn Harris. E dited by Thomas K eymer. L ondon: Pickering & Chatto, 1998. ———. Pamela, or Virtue R ewarded. 1740. 1801 edition. With an introduction by Margaret A . D oody. E dited by Peter S abor. N ew Y ork: Penguin Books, 1980. ———. Pamela, or Virtue R ewarded [...] IN FOUR VOL UMES . S tratford-UponA von: S hakespeare Head Press; O xford: Basil Blackwell, 1929. Richardson’s Correspondence Barbauld, A nna L aetitia, ed. The Correspondence of S amuel R ichardson. 6 vols. L ondon, 1804. Carroll, John, ed. S elected L etters of S amuel R ichardson. O xford: Clarendon Press, 1964. Forster Collection of Manuscripts in the Victoria and A lbert Museum (48E 548E 10). Vols XI–XVI. S lattery, William, ed. The R ichardson-S tinstra Correspondence and S tinstra’s Prefaces to Clarissa. Carbondale and E dwardsville: S outhern Illinois University Press, 1969.

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Other Primary Sources A ddison, Joseph. L etters of Joseph A ddison. E dited by Walter G raham. O xford: Clarendon Press, 1941. A stell, Mary. ‘A ppendix,’ from The Christian R eligion, A s Profess’d by a Daughter of The Church of England. 1717. In Mary A stell and John Norris: L etters Concerning the L ove of G od. E dited by E . D erek Taylor and Melvyn N ew. Burlington: A shgate Publishing, 2005. ———. The Christian R eligion, A s Profess’d by a Daughter of The Church of England. 3rd edition. L ondon, 1730. ———, and N orris, John. L etters Concerning the L ove of God. 1705. In Mary A stell and John Norris: L etters Concerning the L ove of G od. E dited by E . D erek Taylor and Melvyn N ew. Burlington: A shgate Publishing, 2005. ———. A S erious Proposal to the L adies, Parts I & II . 1694, 1697. E dited by Patricia S pringborg. L ondon: Pickering and Chatto, 1997. ———. Some Reflections Upon Marriage. 1706. In A stell: Political Writings. E dited by Patricia S pringborg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Ballard, G eorge. Memoirs of S everal L adies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for Their Writings of S kill in the L earned L anguages, A rts and S ciences. 1752. E dited by Ruth Perry. D etroit: Wayne S tate University Press, 1985. Benson, Robert. Memoirs of the L ife and Writings of the R ev. A rthur Collier. 1837. Bristol: Thoemmes A ntiquarian Books L td, 1990. Boswell, James. The Journals of James Boswell: 1762–1795. E dited by John Wain. N ew Haven: Y ale University Press, 1991. [Burney, Frances]. Diary and L etters of Madame D’A rblay, A uthor of Evelina, Cecilia, &c. E dited by her N iece. 7 vols. L ondon, 1842. Byrom, John. Private Journal and L iterary R emains. E dited by Richard Parkinson. 2 vols. Manchester: Chetham S ociety, 1854–1857. Carter, E lizabeth. L etters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montagu between the years 1755 and 1800. 3 vols. 1817. Reprint, N ew Y ork: A MS Press, 1973. ———. The Moral Discourses of Epictetus. 1758. N ew Y ork: E .P. D utton & Co, 1928. ———. A S eries of L etters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Mrs. Catherine Talbot , from the year 1741 to 1770; to which are added, L etters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Vesey, between the years 1763 and 1787; published from the original manuscripts in the possession of the R ev. Montagu Pennington, M.A . 2 vols. 1809. Reprint, N ew Y ork: A MS , 1975. Chapone, Hester. The Works of Mrs. Chapone. 4 vols. in 2. Boston: W. Wells and T.B. Wait and Co., 1809. Cheyne, G eorge. The L etters of Doctor George Cheyne to S amuel R ichardson (1733–43). E dited by Charles F. Mullett. Columbia: University of Missouri, 1943. Chudleigh, Mary. The Poems and Prose of Mary, L ady Chudleigh. E dited by Margaret J.M. E zell. N ew Y ork and O xford: O xford University Press, 1993.

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Weinbrot, Howard D . “Clarissa, E lias Brand, and D eath by Parentheses.” In New Essays On S amuel R ichardson, edited by A lbert J. Rivero, 117–40. N ew Y ork: S t. Martin’s Press, 1996. Wilt, Judith. “He Could G o N o Farther: A Modest Proposal about L ovelace and Clarissa.” PMLA 92 (1977): 19–32. Wolff, Cynthia. S amuel R ichardson and the Eighteenth-Century Puritan Character. Hamden: A rchon Books, 1972. Y olton, John W. John L ocke and the Way of Ideas. O xford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Reprint, 1968. ———. Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. O xford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. ———. The Two Intellectual Worlds of John L ocke: Man, Person, and S pirits in the Essay. Ithaca & L ondon: Cornell University Press, 2004. Y oung, B.W. R eligion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England. O xford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Zias, Heather. “Who Can Believe? S entiment vs. Cynicism in Richardson’s Clarissa.” Eighteenth-Century L ife 27.3 (2003): 99–123.

Index This index makes particular reference to historical names and modern authors. S ubheadings for central concepts and texts follow particularly significant entries. A cworth, Richard, 16, 19, 24, 28, 54, 77, 82 A ddison, Joseph, 26, 28, 111 A ikens, Janet, 91 A llen, Ralph, 115 A llentuck, Marcia, 27 A rmstrong, K aren, 112 A stell, Mary and atheism, 140–41, 143 Clarissa, a possible model for, 30 the Fall, impressions of, 43 and feminism, 64–9, 86–8, 90–96, 100–109 and L ocke, 44–5, 48, 67–9, 148 and Malebranche, 86–8, 114, 124, 128–9, 133 mind-body connection, 48 and N orris, 30–31, 48, 67–9, 82–5, 104–9 soul, immortality of, 153 Wollstonecraft, compared to, 64–6 A tterbury, Francis, Bishop of Rochester, 68 A ugustine, 23, 47, 123–4 Ballard, G eorge, 20, 67–68, 85, 97, 106 Barber, Mary, 79 Barchas, Janine, 80 Barker-Benfield, G.J., 47–8, 50, 64–5 Barney, Richard A ., 34–5, 95 Battestin, Martin, 77–8 Bayle, Pierre, 68, 119 Beasley, Jerry, 36, 89, 108 Bechler, Rosemary, 17, 47, 71 Benson, Robert, 77 Berkeley, G eorge (Father), 24, 99 Berkeley, G eorge (S on), 99 Berry, L esley, 144 Bible A cts 17:28, 123–5 I Corinthians 13:12, 54, 121

E cclesiastes 43, 132 James 2:19, 135 Matthew 13:13, 154 II Peter 2:21, 147 Psalm 139, 131 Romans 2:14–15, 146 Boehme, Jacob, 70, 74–5, 125, 152 Bolingbroke, Henry S t. John, Viscount, 113, 135, 146 Boswell, James, 12, 38 Bradshaigh, L ady, 3, 5, 11–12, 29, 59–60, 84, 94, 130, 134, 136, 142, 145 Braudy, L eo, 41, 49 Broad, Jacqueline, 67 Brody, Miriam, 64–5 Brooks, Peter, 3–5 Brown, Murray, 61–2 Budd, A dam, 13–14 Bueler, L ois, 18–19, 24, 40, 125, 132, 138 Burnet, G ilbert, Bishop of S alisbury, 19, 95 Burney, Frances, 18 Byrom, John, 17, 27, 125, 141 Carroll, John, 102–3 Carter, E lizabeth, E pictetus, translator of, 145–6 feminism, 84–6, 109 Grandison, her contribution to, 29 Heaven, impression of, 107 and Malebranche, 127, 131 N orris, mistaken by Richardson as his relation, 15, 81–2 N orris, recommended to her, 18 “O de to Wisdom”, included by Richardson inClarissa, 79–82 Richardson’s admiration of, 84–6, 89, 98–100 S ocrates, impressions of, 145–6 Cash, A rthur, 6–7 Castle, Terry, 37–8, 50–56 Centlivre, S usanna, 79 Chaber, L ois, 90–91, 107, 133–4 Chandler, Mary, 79

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Chapone, S arah, 17, 46, 67, 79, 86, 90, 96–8, 100–101, 107, 109 Cheyne, G eorge, 47–8, 70–72, 74–5 Chudleigh, Mary, L ady, 28, 45, 48, 86–8, 91–3 Clarke, S amuel, 148 Collier, A rthur (Father), 23–4, 77 Collier, A rthur (S on), 78 Collier, Jane, 23–4, 77, 79, 97, 136 Collier, Margaret, 23–4, 77–9, 82–3, 97 Collins, A nthony, 148 Cooper, John G ilbert, 145 Cope, K evin, 142 Cudworth, Ralph, 24, 29 D amrosch, Jr., L eopold, 37, 47, 111–13, 116–19, 121, 147 D elany, Patrick, 34 D escartes, Rene, 23, 24, 41, 44, 136 D odwell, Henry, 148 D oody, Margaret A nne, 88, 123, 152–3 D uncombe, William, 11 D ussinger, John, 31, 37, 58, 61, 71–4, 144 D utton, Margaret, 97 E agleton, Terry, 34 E aves and K impel, 2–3, 15–16, 24, 33, 36, 67, 72–3, 77, 79–82, 94, 97, 99, 113, 135–6, 141, 145 E chlin, L ady, 58 E dwards, Thomas, 84, 114, 135, 141 E lstob, E lizabeth, 97–8 E nglish, John C., 50, 74–5 E pictetus, 145–6 E rickson, Robert, 18–19, 36, 49, 84, 117, 130, 151 Fielding, Henry, 77–8, 115 Fielding, S arah, 24, 78–9, 98–9 Fish, S tanley, 122, 154 Flynn, Carol Houlihan, 35–6, 81–2, 105–6 G enster, Julia, 57 G illis, Christina Marsden, 55 G raham, D avid, 112–13, 153 G rant, Patrick, 19, 27 G reen, Brazier, 71, 74 G rundy, Isobel, 101 G uerrini, A nita, 47 G winnet, Richard, 29

Harris, Jocelyn, 1, 30, 35, 38, 51, 58, 68–9, 85, 88, 94, 104, 119, 121 Hartley, D avid, 145 Haywood, E liza, 79 Hensley, D avid, 36, 47–50, 70–71, 75, 133 Herbert, G eorge, 14 Hervey, James, 71 Highmore, Joseph, 135–9 Highmore, S usanna, 58 Hill, A aron, 2–3, 10–11, 56–8, 60, 96, 111 Hill, A straea, 96 Hill, Bridget, 30, 66–7, 86 Hilles, Frederick W., 4 Holtz, William, 7–8 Hoyles, John, 23 Hume, D avid, 12, 38, 113, 153 Hutton, S arah, 68 Janes, Regina, 64–5 Johnson, S amuel, 5, 12, 18, 41, 85–6 Johnston, Charlotte, 21–2 Joling-van der S ar, G erda, 74 K ermode, Frank, 4 K eymer, Tom, 1, 7–8, 34–7, 42, 51, 56, 59–60, 63, 72, 116, 121, 130, 136, 138–43 K innaird, Joan K ., 66 L ams, Victor, 19 L aw, William and Boehme, 70–71, 113–14, 125, 152–3 the Fall, impressions of, 43 and L ocke, 74–5 and Malebranche, 71, 114, 124–5, 128–9, 133 and N orris, 17 and Richardson, 17, 70–71, 74–5, 113–14, 141–2, 152–3 L ennox, Charlotte, 79 L ocke, John, and A stell, 44–5, 48, 67–9, 148 and feminism, 63–9 and Malebranche, 25–7, 124–30 and N orris, 14, 20–23, 38, 44, 48–50, 52–5, 61–2, 74–5 as ostensible touchstone for Richardson inmatters of philosophy, 34–6, 38–50 theology, 34–5, 37, 69–75

Index politics, 34–6, 62–9 signification, 34–5, 37, 50–62 Richardson’s references to, 33–4, 63, 68–9, 71–4 thinking matter, theory of, 147–8 L owe, S olomon, 46, 92 McCarthy, William, 78 McCracken, Charles, 19, 28, 124, 129, 153 McCrea, Brian, 96, 119 McK eon, Michael, 122 Malebranche, N icolas, and A stell, 86–8, 114, 124, 128–9, 133 and Carter, 127, 131 and feminism, 85–8, 90–91 the Fall, impressions of, 43 and L aw, 71, 114, 124–5, 128–9, 133 and L ocke, 25–7, 75, 124–30 mind-body connection, 48 and N orris, 23–8, 85, 114, 123–34, 148, 148–54 philosophy, theocentrism of, 24–8, 114, 123–34, 148–54 Masham, D armaris, 29 Maslen, K eith, 31 Maunder, S amuel, 69 Mendilow, A .A ., 9–10 Millar, A ndrew, 13–14 Milton, John, 114, 151, 154 Molyneux, William, 25, 129 Montagu, E lizabeth, 127 Montagu, L ady Mary Wortley, 101–3 Moore, E dward, 151 More, Henry, 16, 24, 129 Muirhead, John H., 55 Mulso, Hester, 5, 11, 36, 58–9, 63–4 Myers, S ylvia Marcstark, 78, 81, 85, 98–100 N eedler, Henry, 27–8 N ew, Melvyn, 7, 9, 18, 20 N orris, John and A stell, 30–31, 48, 67–9, 82–5, 104–9 attention, philosophical importance of, 54–5 Clarissa, referenced in; see R ichardson, S amuel, subheading Clarissa contemporary popularity, 14–18

169 D r. N orris, mistaken for, 28 the Fall, impressions of, 43 immortality of the soul, 148–54 and intellectual women, 28–31 and L ocke, 14, 20–23, 38, 44, 48–50, 52–5, 61–2, 73–5 and Malebranche, 23–8, 114, 123–34, 148 mind-body connection, 48 as poet and theologian, 19–20, 73–4 and practical atheism, 139–44 Richardson, referenced by; see R ichardson, S amuel subjective and objective truth, 52–4 theological intermediary between L ocke and L aw, 72–5

O utler, A lbert C., 125–6 Pateman, Carol, 63–4 Paul, S t., 47–8, 54, 121–5, 146 Peckard, Peter, 113 Perry, Ruth, 19, 30, 68–9, 78, 85–8, 92, 95, 97–8, 102, 108 Plato, 23, 44, 48, 54, 127, 146 Poovey, Mary, 49 Pope, A lexander, 134 Richardson, L eslie, 93, 107–8 Richardson, S amuel appeals for attentive readings of Clarissa, 55–60 A pprentice’s Vade Mecum (1733), 33, 73 Clarissa. Or, The history of a young lady (1747–48) Carter’s “O de to Wisdom” included in, 79–82 composition of, 1–5 death, Clarissa’s, 104–9 and feminism, 88–109 G od, present or absent, 111–14 Grandison, compared to, 58–61 Meditations, Clarissa’s, 130–33 N orris, references to, 15, 18–19, 52, 74–5, 84–5, 104–9, 122–4, 139–40, 148–54 Pamela, compared to, 114–16 providence and free will, 116–22 reason and religion, 69–75

170

R eason and R eligion in Clarissa religious beliefs, L ovelace’s, 135–54 senses, Clarissa’s spiritual brand of, 38–50 signification, 50–62 single life, Clarissa’s desire for, 93–7 S ocrates, references to, 49, 144–7 soul, immortality of, 144–54 theological import, Richardson’s claims of, 10–12 A Collection of Moral S entiments (1755), 33, 58 and feminism, 62–9, 86–100, 103–9 “Hints of Prefaces for Clarissa”, 42 The history of S ir Charles Grandison (1753–54), 1, 11, 29, 33, 34, 52, 58–61, 70, 89, 94, 102–4 The Infidel Convicted, or, a brief defence of the Christian R evelation [anonymous], 72–3 and intellectual women, 77–86, 97–8, 100–101 L etter of 12 May 1733 to The Weekly Miscellany [anonymous], 72–3 L ocke, references to, 33–4, 63, 68–9, 71–4 L ockean tendencies ascribed to him, 34–8 L ovelace, refuses to make an atheist, 135–44 and Malebranchean theocentrism, 113–14, 121–34, 147–54 Meditations Collected from the S acred Books (1750), 46, 130–32, 148–9 N orris, references to, 14–15, 18–19, 30–31, 52, 73–5, 80–86, 117, 122–4, 132–33, 139–40, 149–50 Pamela, or, virtue rewarded (1740), 1, 3, 58, 61, 70, 86, 90, 94, 114–16, 153 Pamela, Part II (1741), 1, 33, 58, 68, 73–4, 89 political views, ambiguity of, 62–9 as printer of newspapers, 31, 62 religious views, 12–14, 69–75, 130, 144–7 rhetorical flexibility, 12, 72–5, 81–2, 114 and single women, 90–104 thoughts on death, 12–14

Rogers, K atherine, 88–9 Ross, Ian Campbell, 7 Rowe, E lizabeth, 68, 79, 81 Rudolph, E rwin, 125 S abor, Peter, 1 S argeant, John, 24 S chellenberg, Betty, 98–9 S cheuermann, Mona, 97 S chochet, G ordon, 38 S ell, A lan, 70, 75, 129 S haftesbury, A nthony A shley Cooper, 3rd E arl O f, 44 S huttleton, D avid, 47 S mith, R., 136–7 S ocrates, 49, 144–7, 151 S pack, Patricia Meyer, 108, 143, 147 S pencer, Jane, 65 S pringborg, Patricia, 20, 30, 63–4, 69, 87–8, 90, 92 S print, John, 86 S quadrito, K athleen, 67 S tenton, D oris Mary, 28 S tephanson, Raymond, 47–8 S terne, L aurence, 5–10, 18, 26 S tevenson, John A llen, 42, 104–5 Stillingfleet, Edward, Bishop of Worcester, 38, 148 S tinstra, Johannes, 2, 12 S tuber, Florian, 37, 88, 109, 111–14, 118–19 S wift, Jonathan, 130, 141, 145 Talbot, Catherine, 17, 79, 85, 99–100, 146 Taylor, E . D erek, 15, 20, 30, 48, 65, 109 Thomas, E lizabeth, 29, 105 Thompson, Helen, 66 Todd, Janet, 85, 105, 107 Turner, James G rantham, 42 Upham, A .H., 30 Van S ant, A nn Jessie, 41 Vesey, E lizabeth, 127 Vickery, A manda, 98 Walker, A . K eith, 17, 125, 129 Walker, Robert G ., 148 Warburton, William, 26, 127, 145–6

Index Warner, William Beatty, 50 Watson, Richard A ., 124 Watt, Ian, 34–5 Weinbrot, Howard, 88, 106, 150 Wescomb, S arah, 81–2 Wesley, John and L ocke, 74–5, 125–6 and Malebranche, 27, 114, 125–6 and N orris, 16–17, 27, 74–5 and L aw, 71, 74–5

Williamson, John, 77 Wilt, Judith, 42 Wolff, Cynthia, 138 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 64–6, 98 Y olton, John W., 24, 75, 148 Y oung, B.W., 38 Y oung, E dward, 2, 13, 59, 126–7 Zias, Heather, 62, 154

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