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 p