Strange Antics

Despoiled but not ruined, Clarissa is transformed by Lovelace’s rape into a martyr for virtue. She spends the rest of the novel dying, and in the process of her death becomes a kind of secular saint whose example illuminates the lives of those around her and succeeds in bringing about the reformation of Lovelace’s best friend and fellow voluptuary, Jack Belford, who records her death and eulogises her ‘unblemished virtue, exemplary piety, sweetness of manners, discreet generosity, and true christian charity: and these all set off by the most graceful modesty and humility; yet on all proper occasions, manifesting a noble presence of mind, and true magnanimity: so that she may be said to have been not only an ornament to her sex, but to human nature’. Lovelace himself is driven close to madness when he realises what he has wrought. He flees to Italy, where he is tracked down by one of Clarissa’s relations and slain in a duel.

Clarissa’s darker turn is legitimised by the relative social parity that exists between the Lovelaces and the Harlowes. The families are not perfectly equal – the Lovelaces are nobles and the Harlowes are not – but they are close enough in wealth and lifestyle to remove from the novel the tawdry class drama that underpins Pamela. Richardson was now free to explore the topic of seduction with more nuance. Lovelace and Clarissa are, in terms of breeding, education and social sophistication, peers. The drama of her seduction is not therefore one of power but of free will – a fact that Richardson helpfully (if somewhat elliptically) alludes to in the preface to the novel. There he writes that the goal of his novel is twofold, ‘to caution parents against the undue exertion of their natural authority over their children in the great article of marriage: and children against preferring a man of pleasure to a man of probity, upon that too commonly received notion, that a reformed rake makes the best husband’.

The Harlowes’ refusal to allow their daughter to marry a man of her choosing has channelled her towards Lovelace, a man she would have safely avoided if left to her own devices.[28] Once in his hands, her capacity to act rationally for her own benefit is further compromised by a social belief that a woman’s mission is to rescue and reform wayward libertines. One of the many threads of Clarissa is the heroine’s internal debate as to if and how Lovelace can be reformed. In Clarissa’s mind, the prospect that Lovelace ‘might be reclaimed by a woman of virtue and prudence’ becomes her ‘secret pleasure’, a moral adventure analogous to the sexual adventure of seduction that Lovelace is bent on. For his part, Lovelace recognises from the outset that fostering the illusion that Clarissa’s benign presence is bringing about his reformation is the key to winning her trust, her love and, finally, her body. ‘Reformation shall be my stalking-horse,’ he gloats to Belford. Again, Clarissa’s free will has been imperilled by the false belief that her mission as a woman is to edify dissolute men.[29]

The roots of this belief were tangled up with one of the core concerns of the English Enlightenment. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke had asserted that at birth the mind was like an empty room. His mission was to discover how it came to be furnished. The answer, he believed, lay ‘in one word, from EXPERIENCE’. He continued:

All our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking.[30]

The key word is ‘sensible’. Man was endowed with ‘sensibility’ – the capacity to perceive the world which, through cultivation, education and moral effort, could be expanded into a larger project of empathy, intellectual refinement and social sophistication. At a physiological level, Locke and his disciples (including Richardson’s friend and client Dr George Cheyne) believed that sensibility operated through the nervous system. Medical research seemed to have demonstrated that women had more sensitive nervous systems and so had an innately superior capacity for sensibility compared to men. In a complete reversal of the ancient Christian belief that identified women with carnality, chaos and nature, the Georgians now understood women as the agents of a process of moral and social amelioration. Men were cast as coarse and brutish, and those denied regular contact with women (sailors, scholars, back-country squires) were deemed doubly so.[31] Men were encouraged to socialise with women in the hope that women’s natural delicacy would rub off on them.[32] This so-called ‘Cult of Sensibility’ encouraged just the kind of risky heterosocial behaviour that could trap women like Clarissa Harlowe in perilous situations. Moreover, women with a surfeit of sensibility – as was thought to be rife among the educated middle and upper classes – were vulnerable to manipulation. Locke had warned in his Essay that humans were readily fooled by rhetoric and counselled that eloquent words ‘are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment’.[33]

In the next generation, David Hume embellished the quandary. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) he famously claimed that each individual’s experience of life was ‘but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’. Reality was chaos. Resorting to reason was no guarantee, for it was ‘and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’. Passions were primary to reason, in Hume’s view, but they too could be ‘founded on false suppositions’ and so lead to fallacious beliefs and foolish actions. Locke and Hume moved our understanding of what guides human action away from old, inflexible theological categories of good and evil, sin and virtue, and towards a highly subjective, highly unstable vision of how humans interact with their environment and with one another. The explosion of seduction narratives in the same period situated sexual conflict within that new perceptual framework – and none did so with more care and psychological realism than Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.[34]

Seduction fascinates because it dramatises the conflict between reason and passion. Clarissa keenly feels within her the tussle between these rival forces. She proudly claims the ‘right to a heart’ – the freedom to feel and to love – while equally stating her pride in her powers of reason and perception. Her best friend and endlessly entertaining correspondent Anne Howe observes from afar the exact same contest, writing suggestively of how the ‘throbs and the glows’ of passion contrive to weaken women’s resolve in the face of hardened seducers ‘practised in deceit’. The philosophical opposition between logic and emotion is brilliantly illustrated in a small but revealing episode that occurs while Clarissa is still held hostage at her parents’ home. As they will not allow her to communicate with Lovelace, he has organised a dead drop at a wall at the end of the garden where the two can deliver and retrieve the letters they write to one another. One morning she goes to the wall with a letter for Lovelace. No sooner has she left it in the designated place than she changes her mind and decides she would rather not send the letter after all. She returns to the wall, but her note is no longer there:

How diligent is this man! It is plain he was in waiting: for I had walked but a few paces, after I had deposited it, when, my heart misgiving me, I returned, to have taken it back, in order to reconsider it as I walked, and whether I should or should not let it go. But I found it gone.

In all probability, there was but a brick wall, of a few inches thick, between Mr. Lovelace and me, at the very time I put the letter under the brick![35]

Clarissa’s internal conflict between the diktats of reason and the urgings of an illicit desire are temporarily displaced by the erotic thrill of recognising that exactly the same drama is playing out within Lovelace, too. His eagerness to propel their romance onwards has led him to lurk behind a crumbling country wall, metres from a family who openly despise him and now only inches from the woman he lusts after. The vignette at the wall encapsulates the sexual danger that is the appeal and the peril of seduction. The contest between wooer and wooed, seducer and seduced, is in its preliminaries an attempt by each to assert emotional control over the other. Even in the eighteenth century men had no universal advantage in this game. Anne Howe, for instance, delights in toying with her male suitors. ‘Our courtship-days, they say, are our best days,’ she writes to Clarissa. ‘To see how familiar these men-wretches grow upon a smile, what an awe they are struck into when we frown; who would not make them stand off? Who would not enjoy a power, that is to be short-lived?’

Clarissa’s deepening tragedy is the realisation that she has emphatically lost this contest to Lovelace. She comes to realise that her own delicacy – her heightened sensibility – has led her into disaster. She fluctuates between emotional states, arrives at and discards any number of ‘logical’ conclusions, and is confused by competing passions towards her tormentor. Her own unstable personality – a word Richardson was the first to use in its modern sense in the novel that bore her name – is her greatest enemy. ‘What strange imperfect beings!’ she writes to Anne. ‘But self here, which is at the bottom of all we do, and of all we wish, is the grand misleader.’

Lovelace has no such problems. A cold logician, totally amoral, utterly without sensibility (‘What sensibilities must thou have suppressed!’ Clarissa exclaims at one point), he expertly stage-manages his shifting personae and her corresponding responses to them. ‘Ovid was not a greater master of metamorphoses than thy friend,’ he boasts to Jack Belford, his confederate. Lovelace does not in the end succeed in technically seducing Clarissa – hence his need to resort to rape. Richardson, however, did succeed in articulating the dilemma at the heart of all post-Enlightenment seduction narratives. An examination of constellations of power in society at large can only go so far in explaining interactions among individuals. More pertinent, and infinitely more ambiguous, is the struggle between reason and passion that rages within and between each of us. These are finally questions of free will and its limits, questions which go unresolved from generation to generation even if each has its own prescriptions. Richardson’s remedy was invariably some mixture of reformation for men and sequestration for women, as well as the generous admonition that all readers concerned for the virtue of the young ought to purchase his book, which had been written ‘to warn the inconsiderate and thoughtless of one of the sex against the base arts and designs of specious contrivers of the other’.

***

Debut authors write in obscurity, untroubled by public interest; successful ones have to perform their duties in the spotlight, burdened by expectation. After the astounding success of Pamela, Clarissa was written under fierce scrutiny. Richardson’s exertions were made all the more trying by the book’s protracted gestation and long birth. Clarissa was begun shortly after the final editions of Pamela were released into the world. It was largely finished by the end of 1746, but even before the final manuscript was completed suggestions and complaints were pouring in from his various correspondents, many of whom demanded to see the proofs of the work he was labouring on. Consequently, well before the publication of the first two volumes in December 1747, Richardson was already being harried by critics. The interludes between the release of the third and fourth volumes in April 1748 and the fifth, sixth and seventh in December of the same year provided yet more opportunities for a now enlarged critical community to probe his plot, his characters and his parable. Rarely has an author had to defend a work before and during publication with such energy.

Given its now canonical position in English literature, it is easy to forget that Clarissa never sold as well as Pamela. It did, however, spark debate of equal intensity to its forebear and won Richardson new respect from the literary community. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had damned Pamela as cheap trash fit only for her scullery maids, recorded how she ‘eagerly read’ Clarissa, sobbing over it, and felt transported by his art back to her own courting days.[36] Henry Fielding, who had gleefully mocked Pamela, was another convert to Richardson’s work, writing at some length to him of his own emotional reactions to the novel, praising Richardson’s artistry and moral force, before concluding warmly: ‘I heartily wish you Success. That I sincerely think you in the highest manner deserve it.’[37] Edward Young, a literary taste-maker almost as esteemed as Johnson, declared that the book’s power confirmed the arrival of the novelist as an arbiter of moral norms and that ‘the Bench of Bishops might go to School to the Writer of a Romance’.[38] Richardson had accomplished in Clarissa what he had not with Pamela: he had become a writer’s writer.

Few, then, doubted Richardson’s achievement. What was endlessly debated was his characters and the moral message they presented. Many questioned the need for Clarissa to die and interceded on her behalf. When Colley Cibber, an early reader of the manuscript, learnt from Laetitia Pilkington that Richardson had decided Clarissa was to perish at the novel’s end, he could not contain his outrage:

My heart suffers as strongly for her as if word was brought to me that his house was on fire, and himself, his wife, and little ones, likely to perish in the flame. I cannot bear it! had Lovelace ten thousands souls and bodies, I could wish to see them all tortured, stretched on the rack: no punishment can be too bad for him … When I told him she must die, he said ‘G—d d—n him, if she should.’[39]

Others took the opposite tack and chose to blame Clarissa’s behaviour for her demise. Richardson displayed rare genius when, having received in the same mailbag one letter declaring Clarissa a prude and another a coquette, he replied by sending each correspondent the other’s argument.[40]

Inevitably, much of the criticism focused on the character of Lovelace. As early as the autumn of 1746, when the novel was still circulating among a coterie of close friends, Richardson was having to defend his depiction of Lovelace to Aaron Hill, who thought it unrealistic that a character so evidently wicked would be able to ensnare the saintly Clarissa Harlowe. In a robust defence of his creative decisions, Richardson claimed that he had made Lovelace as dislikeable as possible to ensure that he did not inadvertently appear attractive in the eyes of impressionable young ladies. ‘I once read to a young Lady part of his Character,’ he explained to Hill, ‘and then to his End; and upon her pitying him … I made him still more and more odious.’[41] Richardson was wise to stress the cruelty of his creation. Lovelace is easily the most enticing of his characters, something that was both a triumph and a quandary. Richardson was alive to accusations that he was of the devil’s party without knowing it. This was one of the lessons learnt from the moral clamour surrounding Pamela. He sought to make Lovelace irredeemable and consequently impossible to love.

He did not succeed. In October 1748, while he prepared for the publication of the final three volumes, he received a remarkable letter from a female fan, who signed off as Belfour, a play on his fictional Jack Belford. After explaining at length why she believed the author should spare Clarissa, his anonymous correspondent made a frank declaration of interest in his great villain:

… if I was to die for it, I cannot help being fond of Lovelace. A sad dog! Why would you make him so wicked, and yet so agreeable? He says, sometime or other he designs being a good man, from which words I have great hopes; and, in excuse for my liking him, I must say, I have made him so, up to my own heart’s wish; a faultless husband have I made him, even without danger of a relapse. A foolish rake may die one; but a sensible rake must reform, at least in the hands of a sensible author it ought to be so, and will I hope.[42]

The letter continued in this vein, by turns chiding and winsome, before concluding with the promise of a curse on the author should he see fit to deny his characters a happy ending. ‘Now,’ she concluded, ‘make Lovelace and Clarissa unhappy if you dare.’

This was the beginning of a brilliant friendship. Richardson would respond and respond again, and his correspondence with ‘Belfour’ would turn into a friendship that lasted until the end of his life. For close to two years he and his circle would refer to this unnamed correspondent as his ‘Incognita’. Her real name was Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh, the leisured wife of baronet (and fellow Richardson enthusiast) Sir Roger Bradshaigh. Richardson was almost sixty; Bradshaigh was in her mid-thirties. He would not know her true identity until February 1850, a full eighteen months after their first exchange of letters, and then only through the indiscretion of his friend, the artist Joseph Highmore. They met for the first time in Birdcage Walk, St James’s, a few weeks after her unveiling, but this was one of relatively few meetings given the length and depth of their relationship. Theirs would never be a friendship of shared experience. Like his characters, they consumed themselves in writing to one another and those first, crucial exchanges focused on the person of Lovelace.[43]

Richardson maintained to Bradshaigh that his fictional villain had to be an incurable case in order to prevent him becoming an excuse for male abandonment in the real world. If Clarissa had reformed Lovelace after all his wickedness, Richardson reasoned, then what would the lesson be to the everyday rake of Georgian England? He would conclude, Richardson reasoned, entering deftly into the mind of the debauchees he impersonated so well, that ‘I [might] pass the Flower and Prime of my Youth, informing and pursuing the most insidious Enterprizes … As many of the Daughters and Sisters of worthy Families, as I can seduce, may I seduce, Scores perhaps in different Climates – And on their Weakness build my profligate Notions of the whole Sex.’

Such a view was the logical outcome of giving Lovelace an opportunity to atone. Clarissa’s death was not Richardson’s punishment of her, but her punishment of him and her parents. ‘Whence my double Moral,’ he finished grandly, ‘extending to tyranical [sic] Parents, as well as to Profligate Men; and laying down from her the Duty of Children, and that whether Parents do theirs or not.’[44]

Shortly afterwards, Richardson sent Bradshaigh an advance copy of the fifth volume, which contained the infamous scene where Lovelace rapes Clarissa in Hampstead. The reading of it shook Bradshaigh’s perception of Lovelace (‘You have drawn a villain above nature,’ she wrote) but did not break it. ‘Blot out but one night, and the villainous laudanum, and all may be well again.’[45] By now the book was only weeks away from publication, and her prayers fell on ears deafened by the clatter of printers at work. At the beginning of the New Year she wrote again, shortly after reading the final volumes, ‘You will hardly believe what Pains I have taken to reconcile myself to the Death of Clarissa, and to your Catastrophe.’ She then proceeded to give a dramatic account of her reading of the last moments of Clarissa’s life:

Had you seen me, I surely should have moved your Pity, When alone in Agonies would I lay down the Book, take it up again, walk about the Room, let fall a Flood of Tears, wipe my Eyes, read again, perhaps not three Lines, throw away Book crying out Excuse me good Mr. Richardson, I cannot go on.

…

[My husband] Seeing me so moved, he beg’d for God’s Sake I would read no more, kindly threatened to take the Book from me, but upon my pleading my Promise, suffered me to go on. That promise is now fulfilled, and am thankful the heavy Task is over, tho’ the Effects are not … My Spirits are strangely seized, my Sleep is disturbed, waking in the Night I burst into a Passion of crying, so I did at Breakfast this Morning, and just now again. God be merciful to me, what can it mean?

It meant that she was proving her sensibility, her delicacy, her worthiness as a woman fit to inhabit Richardson’s worlds – fictional, moral and material. The letter signalled her submission, both to Richardson’s fictional designs and to the exigencies of his moral outlook. No more would she champion Lovelace. Instead, Bradshaigh would go out of her way to demonstrate to Richardson how his art had transformed her own life. One sign of this came near the end of 1749, when she related how she had set out on an adventure of moral redemption of her own. She had come to know of a Cornish girl in her neighbourhood who, having been ‘artfully seduced, and ruined’ by her brother-in-law, was now shunned by her family and the wider community; he had gone unpunished. Having learnt of the sorry case, and inspired by the morals contained within Richardson’s fiction, Bradshaigh determined to do something about it. She set about finding her ward honourable employment among good Christians, and harboured hopes for her long-term reclamation despite the loss of her virtue. Richardson encouraged her in these efforts, and joined her in execrating ‘the inhospitable wretch, who could ensnare and ruin so young a creature’.[46]

Bradshaigh and Richardson both used the same word to describe this young woman: ‘Magdalen’. Taken from the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene, a Magdalen was literally a reformed prostitute, but more generally a fallen but meritorious woman, like Bradshaigh’s ‘poor unfortunate’ – or, indeed, Richardson’s Clarissa – who had at no point actually prostituted herself but was no longer a virgin. The conflation of the two meanings in a single word is revealing. In stating an equivalence between former sex workers and unchaste women, moralists like Richardson and Bradshaigh merged economies of virtue with economies of value.[47] By drawing a parallel between the condition of prostitutes and the condition of seduced women they were identifying a community of women that shared a common feature: exploitation by men. This was one (of many) necessary and important precursor to recognising women as a group who needed special protections. It was a prototypical example of the feminist tactic of consciousness-raising. Though, as with many moral messages of the pre-feminist era, it cut both ways. If prostitutes were like seduced women, then seduced women were like prostitutes. The campaigning language of rescue and reform doubled as a device to police and constrain the behaviour of unmarried young women.

The example of the Magdalen shows how Richardson’s fiction altered the lives of his readers. This was as he intended. Less predictable and, as it turned out, less palatable to Richardson was the influence his readers would have on his fictional output. Bradshaigh had been urging him to write another novel from the very beginning of their correspondence. In November 1749, he gave the first hint of what his new project might look like. Noting somewhat coolly ‘the warm solicitude you so repeatedly express for my resuming my pen with a view to publication’, he alluded in passing to the notion that he should write about ‘a good man – a man who needs not repentance’, before seeming to dismiss the idea and move on to other matters. His impetuous correspondent seized on these crumbs in her next letter, reminding Richardson what a service he would be performing for the cause of male reformation and noting in addition that his pursuit of such a project would ‘let me have to brag, that I was instrumental in persuading you to do it’.[48]

By March the following year, Richardson had committed to the new book, which would in time become his third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4). As with Clarissa, his work would be hurried along by the exhortations of his correspondents in England, but also of those in France and Germany. Richardson needed their support, for the novel did not come easily to him.[49] He complicated his own work by setting a decent portion of the action overseas, in Italy, where his titular hero goes to pay court to Clementina della Poretta in Bologna. Richardson had, of course, never left the British Isles, and in the preceding decades had barely travelled beyond a five-mile radius. He compensated for his total ignorance of Italy through diligent research and consultation with those who had travelled there – but the fundamental issue remained.