Strange Antics

More prosaically, he had the deceptively challenging job of getting his character to Italy and back in a manner which made narrative sense. This perennial writer’s problem was compounded by his usual ill-health. He wrote miserably to Bradshaigh that ‘this is the worst of all my tasks, and what I most dreaded. Vast is the fabric; and here I am under a kind of necessity to grab it all, as I may say; to cut off, to connect; to rescind again, and reconnect.’

He persevered. By the summer of 1753 he had written much of the book and began to look ahead to publication.

Even in his own time, Grandison was not considered Richardson’s finest work. But whatever its literary shortcomings, it fascinates because it reveals what Richardson thought an ideal man should look like – how he should behave, how he should talk, even how he should dress. The composition of such a man caused him as much trouble as any other part of the book. He wrote in April 1750 of the ‘Difficulty of drawing a good Man, that the Ladies will not despise, and the Gentleman laugh at’. (He was, by the latter measure at least, not wholly successful. Colley Cibber laughed out loud when he was told that Grandison was a virgin upon marriage.) After three years of labour, the final product was a man worthy of the new English civilisation. Civility, manners, politeness – these are the words endlessly associated with Sir Charles Grandison. In an emblematic episode he talks the rakish Sir Hargrave Pollexfen – from whose clutches he has rescued Harriet Byron, his future wife – out of a duel. Grandison rejects duelling, as did many enlightened Englishmen, on the grounds that it was harmful to society and unbecoming of a man at ease with himself. Harriet understands his rejection of the feudal code of honour as a sign of his embrace of ‘goodness, piety, religion; and to every thing that is or ought to be sacred among men’.

Grandison has arrived at civility because he has allowed his coarse masculinity to be curbed by feminine delicacy. He is thoughtful, empathetic, in touch with his emotions. His admirers note his ‘feeling heart’ and his endless capacity to ‘speak feelingly’ on any number of issues. He is, in other words, the ideal male product of the feminine culture of sensibility. His adaptation to feminine mores does not, however, render him foppish, unmanly or – that fatal word – unsexed. Grandison is decisive, plain-speaking, a man of action. He has simply internalised the merits of sensibility to just the right degree. Richardson’s most well-travelled male character is consequently and paradoxically his most domestic one. ‘I live not to the world,’ he declares at one point, ‘I live to myself; to the monitor within me.’

What Richardson was trying to achieve with Grandison can be best understood by reference to what he was writing against. It is no coincidence that the composition of his third novel was almost exactly coextensive with his bitter campaign against Henry Fielding. The two men’s literary fortunes were intimately connected – Pamela had effectively launched Fielding’s career as a novelist by inspiring him to write Shamela and then Joseph Andrews – but their personalities were poles apart. Fielding was an Old Etonian, a master of Greek and Latin responsible for a suspiciously didactic translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, and a bawdy writer who had made his name as a Drury Lane playwright. Spendthrift, genial and subversive, Fielding was an habitué of the Covent Garden scene and embodied its easy values. In a curious echo of Richardson’s first novel, he had even married his former servant, Mary Daniel, following the death of his first wife. He was everything Richardson was not.

This did not necessarily mean that the two men were obliged to feud. After all, Fielding’s sister was close friends with Richardson, and Fielding’s glowing letter in praise of Clarissa could have been the start of an amicable correspondence. Richardson, however, chose to go to war. A year after Fielding wrote in admiration of Clarissa, Richardson savaged Fielding’s masterpiece Tom Jones in a long and invidious letter to Lady Bradshaigh:

Nothing but a shorter life than I wish him can hinder him from writing himself out of date. The Pamela, which he abused in his Shamela, taught him how to write to please, tho’ his manners are so different. Before his Joseph Andrews … the poor man wrote without being read, except when his Pasquins, &c, roused party attention and legislature at the same time.

Elsewhere in his correspondence he described Tom Jones as a ‘dissolute book’ and a ‘profligate performance’, and expressed satisfaction when he learnt it had been (temporarily, it transpired) banned in France. His friends rushed to confirm his opinions. Aaron Hill’s daughters referred to the book as a ‘rambling Collection of Waking Dreams’. David Graham wrote cloyingly that ‘they who can listen to the dissonant jingle of Tom Jones, wou’d for ever be deaf to the Music of your Charmer [Clarissa]’.

Richardson maintained a posture of carefully curated scorn towards Fielding over the next few years. He revelled in the dismal reception of Amelia (1751), joking sourly to Bradshaigh that had Fielding ‘been born in a stable, or been a runner at a sponging-house, we should have thought him a genius’ for composing such a book, ‘but it is beyond my conception, that a man of family, and who had some learning … should descend so excessively low.’[50] In ‘A Concluding Note By The EDITOR’, appended to Grandison, Richardson stated that his book was a riposte to the ‘many modern fictitious pieces in which authors have given success (and happiness, as it is called) to their heroes of vicious, if not of profligate, characters’. ‘The God of nature,’ he continued magniloquently, ‘intended not human nature for a vile and contemptible thing’, and so he had written the book to show ‘that characters may be good, without being unnatural’.

This was widely viewed as an attack on Fielding, who was by now near death – his body broken by gout, cirrhosis and other ailments, the fruits of a lifetime of hard living – and was obliged to leave England for Portugal in 1754 in a bid to improve his health. Fielding certainly regarded it as such. In his final work, Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, he referred to Grandison as a ‘tedious tale of a dull fellow’, going on to call out Richardson by name and mock his oft-proclaimed belief that novels existed to instruct and that entertainment was ‘but a secondary consideration in romances’.[51] He died shortly afterwards, but death brought him no respite. Thomas Edwards, a member of Richardson’s circle, wrote to him apropos of the Journal of his surprise that ‘a man who had led such a life as he had … should trifle in that manner when immediate death was before his eyes’.[52]

Richardson himself had the last word on their rivalry two years after Fielding’s passing. In a letter to Sarah Fielding, he declared her brother a ‘fine writer’ before stating that ‘His was but the knowledge of the outside of a clock-work machine, while your’s was that of all the finer springs and movements of the inside.’ Ostensibly Richardson was referring to the difference between Henry’s and Sarah’s writing. In reality he was describing the difference between Henry’s writing and his own. The literary difference matters because the opposition between Fielding’s fiction and Richardson’s is inextricable from Richardson’s conception of their opposition in moral outlook. Fielding’s characters go out into the world and find adventure; Richardson’s go out into the world and find disaster. The deep message of all Richardson’s writings is that everything would be good if women simply stayed at home. The internal nature of his writings – the endless inner monologues, the endless examination of selves, the endless, endless writing of letters in rooms – reflects his belief in the merits of domestic values, which are the values of delicate, domestic women. When women stray from this norm they meet with catastrophe. This is why Clarissa on her deathbed blames herself for what has happened. ‘Who was most to blame?’ she asks. ‘The brute, or the lady? The lady, surely! For what she did was out of nature, out of character, at least: what it did was in its own nature.’

Women can avoid seduction by staying at home as women should. Not only that, but by being totally domesticated, women can impart some of their domesticity to men, making them, like Sir Charles Grandison, men of feeling who will no longer contrive on women’s virtue. Adherence to the moral code of domesticity created an actual virtuous cycle, the cost of which – and it was a cost, in Richardson’s mind, well worth incurring – was that women had to retreat from the public world of men into the private world of the home.[53]

In praising Sarah Fielding for writing of the inside of human experience, Richardson was praising her for living up to this ideal of womanhood. This was in contrast to another group of women whom he judged to have abandoned their sex’s norms, both in writing and in life. In the same period that he was inveighing against Fielding he was also busy slandering the reputations of certain female writers whom he believed were a discredit to the virtues he espoused. Specifically he singled out Constantia Phillips, Lady Frances Vane and Laetitia Pilkington. In a 1750 letter to Sarah Chapone, he notoriously referred to the trio as ‘a Set of Wretches’, and compared them to a previous generation of female authors (such as Eliza Haywood and Aphra Behn) who had also incurred his displeasure. It was the role of virtuous women, he told Chapone, to write against ‘the same injured, disgraced, profaned Sex’. A few weeks later he repeated the message. ‘Ladies, as I have said, should antidote the Poison shed by the vile of their Sex.’[54]

The critical attacks on Pilkington and the others were premised on the same set of beliefs that inspired his attacks on Fielding. The adventurous spirit had to be stamped out. Literature must turn inwards, and so must women. It was the only way to save virtue from seduction and bring about the general reformation of men.[55]

***

Richardson’s moral system was by now heavily fortified and his faith in it unassailable. Even in his own lifetime, it was obvious that his ideas were growing in popularity. The values he evangelised in his books and private writings were increasingly the values of the ascendent middle classes. His novels were landmarks in the culture of sensibility and vital reference points for the resolutely dimorphic conception of gender roles that flowed from it. His was the vision of the proper sexual identities for men and women that would predominate in Britain until the end of the Victorian period. Nonetheless, it cannot be repeated often enough that for all its influence it was never an outlook without critics. Sexual ideology, like any ideology, is always a work in the making, an aspiration towards which we strive in a world marred by refusal, resistance and chaos. Richardson’s triumphal march through the drawing rooms of the English mind was resisted every step of the way by satirists, pamphleteers, and hacks eager to put his preening worldview in the Grub Street pillory.

One of the most substantive demolitions of Richardson’s oeuvre came in the spring of 1754, exactly halfway through the publication of Grandison. Written anonymously, but addressed directly to the author, Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela was a gloriously unrestrained assault on Richardson’s work and influence. Rambling, imprecise and unabashedly ad hominem (‘Your success has farther corrupted our taste’),[56] the Critical Remarks nevertheless score some direct hits upon the citadel of Richardson’s Weltanschauung. Women, he argues, are not the asexual figures that Richardson wishes them to be but individuals with the same range of desires, ambitions and appetites as men – and the same capacity for profligacy. ‘Every woman is at heart a rake,’ he writes, quoting Alexander Pope, and if they suppress their inner rake then they will seek to inhabit him vicariously.[57] This makes nonsense of Richardson’s claim that his books exist to instruct the youth in Christian morality. However he rationalised it to himself, Richardson’s focus exclusively on seduction resulted in novels that functioned to titillate rather than to castigate. His purported moral pedagogy was in practice a kind of primitive sexual education.

Approaching the apogee of his argument, the author continues with brilliant sarcasm that the literary preoccupation with matters of the heart popularised by Richardson would be more a spur to sexual activity than a bridle. A casual reader of the sentimental literature Richardson wrote himself and inspired in others

would be apt to imagine, that the propagation of the species was at a stand, and that, not to talk of marrying and giving in marriage, there was hardly any such thing as fornication going forward among us, and that therefore our publick-spirited penmen, to prevent the world from coming to an end, employ’d all their art and eloquence to keep people in remembrance, that they were composed of different sexes.[58]

Such work, he noted dryly, was not only antithetical to the propagation of virtue but served to compound the existing work of ‘provident nature’, who had already ‘implanted too many allurements, and has affixed too great a variety of pleasures to the intercourse between the sexes’.

The pamphlet, like so many others, made only a passing impression in Richardson’s world, arousing the righteous anger of his correspondents and occasioning a few harrumphs from the great man himself. Richardson had seen off far worse, and by this point, well into his seventh decade, he could afford a certain diffidence in the face of lowly attacks on his celebrated body of work.

By the mid-1750s Richardson had arrived at the apex of his career as a printer-writer. His private business was flourishing. He continued to invest in his site at Salisbury Court, and his printers were kept busy by lucrative government contracts as well as the steady work of printing his own writings. Success brought recognition within his profession. In 1753 he completed his decades-long ascent of the Stationers’ Company, when he was appointed Master of that body. Like Hogarth’s Good Apprentice, he had scaled the heights of his profession from base to summit. His parallel conquest of the London literary scene brought him into the innermost circle of the cultural elite, and won him the friendship of Hogarth himself, who occasionally attended the salons held at Richardson’s Fulham pile.

James Boswell records a memorable incident at one such gathering in 1753. Over tea, Hogarth spoke approvingly to the room of George II’s recent decision to execute a Jacobite, Archibald Cameron, for his participation in the uprising of 1745.

While he was talking, he perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head, and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an ideot, whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson, as a very good man. To his great surprise, however, this figure stalked forwards to where he and Mr. Richardson were sitting, and all at once took up the argument, and burst out into an invective against George the Second, as one, who, upon all occasions was unrelenting and barbarous … he displayed such a power of eloquence, that Hogarth looked at him with astonishment, and actually imagined that this ideot had been at the moment inspired.[59]

The ‘ideot’ was in fact Samuel Johnson, who was a firm friend and prolific defender of Richardson’s literary project. Destined to become the majestic centre of English literary life, Richardson could not have wished to have a more prestigious critic in his corner. Their alliance blossomed. Johnson savaged Fielding; Richardson bailed Johnson out of debtors’ gaol. Friendships with such luminaries by this time came easily to Richardson. Hailed as the ‘great genius of Salisbury Court’,[60] he now handled correspondence with some of the great names of his age. His fame crossed borders and his fans travelled from far and wide to see him, including the German editor who travelled several hundred miles to kiss the inkwell that had given the world Clarissa. Richardson responded to his celebrity with the unembarrassed satisfaction that had won and would secure him the bitter resentment of his detractors. ‘Twenty years ago, I was the most obscure man in Great Britain,’ he crowed, ‘and now I am admitted to the company of the first characters in the kingdom.’[61]

Wealth, fame, and well-publicised moral positions brought Richardson in his final years into the budding world of Georgian philanthropy. Organised private charity was a relatively new phenomenon, but one that London’s fashionable classes took up with enthusiasm. The rapid growth in number and scale of charitable institutions in these years was fuelled by the same trends that drove the obsession with Richardson’s novels. The culture of sensibility had fostered an attitude of empathetic concern towards the poor and needy; the culture of moral reformation motivated moneyed (and concerned) elites to intervene in the lives of the working classes. The connection between moral panic and charitable sympathy was captured in the twin careers of William Wilberforce, whose anti-slavery campaign was premised on an identification with the suffering of others (the abolitionist slogan, ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’, could never have been arrived at without the advance work performed by the cult of sensibility), but who was also the founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, a resurrection of the extinct Societies for the Reformation of Manners that Richardson had grown up with in Tower Hamlets.

Some of the new charities focused on the first- or second-order consequences of sexual immorality, and unsurprisingly they found a willing patron in Samuel Richardson. His first foray into philanthropy was his association with Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital, to which he donated for several years and of which he became a governor in 1754. The Foundling Hospital was an orphanage that served to house and protect the unwanted offspring of fugitive sexual encounters. The children there were the bastard fruits of seduction, and some more cynical Londoners believed that the existence of such an institution would only encourage more fornication.[62]

The Foundling Hospital was an enormous success and became a model for all future philanthropic empires. It also indirectly inspired the birth of another charity that came to represent in bricks and mortar what Richardson’s novels had taught in paper and ink. In March 1751, Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler contained an article written by a pensive ‘Amicus’. On a recent walk the author had passed the Foundling Hospital, ‘which I surveyed with pleasure, till, by a natural train of sentiment, I began to reflect on the fate of the mothers’. Why, Amicus wondered, did society protect the vulnerable infants spawned by seduction while it did not move to protect women from the predations of exploitative men? Prostitution was visible all over the city and Amicus believed, like a growing number of educated Georgians, that each woman he saw working the streets in rags and misery was a victim of seduction ‘who, being forsaken by her betrayer, is reduced to the necessity of turning prostitute for bread’.[63] Prostitution was the consequence of circumstance, not of irretrievable individual corruption. Institutions existed to punish prostitutes, why did companion institutions not exist to reform them? The question was taken up the next month in The Gentleman’s Magazine, when ‘Sunderlandensis’ wrote a response piece which laid out how such an institution might be run, and upon what principles. He referred to the example of convents on the continent as an imperfect image (‘because they withdrew good people from general life’) of what the refuge might look like and stated that while the focus should be on actual sex workers, ‘the project could be extended to the seduced who had not yet become prostitutes’.[64]

These discussions in the press dovetailed with what Richardson had been saying for some years in both his novels and his private correspondence.[65] Grandison contained repeated disquisitions on the virtues of just such a proposed institution and made the same parallel to existing Catholic institutions.[66] As we have observed in his correspondence with Bradshaigh, Richardson had also internalised the equivalence between seduced women and established prostitutes.

In 1758 discussion gave way to action. That year the Magdalen House was established in Whitechapel, east London, and accepted its first eight women, or penitents, as they were known. Richardson was soon involved as a donor and later as a governor. In 1759 he offered up his printer’s in Salisbury Court to produce The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House, a book of narrative lives of certain penitents published with the end of attracting favourable publicity to the new institution. Richardson was doubtful that the book would sell but printed it anyway. ‘It must appear,’ he declared, ‘for Virtues sake.’

The Magdalen Hospital in St George’s Fields, Southwark, circa 1798.

The Magdalen House, like many London charities, was open to the public at certain times each week. Just as fashionable citizens went to the Foundling Hospital to see the orphans baptised, and to Bedlam to gawp at the insane, they went to observe the fallen women on their rocky road to reformation. On Sundays, the Magdalen’s chapel was open for paying visitors for both the morning and the evening services. These became some of the most sought-after attractions in London, and tickets for them circulated at wildly inflated prices on the secondary market. The evening services, which for the first eighteen years of the institution’s life showcased the florid preaching style of the notorious Reverend William Dodd, were a particular draw.[67] Richardson never went, but Bradshaigh did and wrote to him of her impressions: ‘I was charm’d and mov’d with their behaviour, with their preachers, excellent, proper [illegible] drops of pleasing tears, glad I was, that you and your delicate nerves were at home. In short, I was in Love with the whole management, and regularity of the place, and I must observe, the psalm-singing was the sweetest of melody.’[68]

Bradshaigh took from her visit to the Magdalen the same lessons that she had taken from Richardson’s novels. For her, the chapel of the Magdalen House was a place where Richardson’s themes of seduction, abandonment, reclamation and repentance were acted out in real time. The place was a monument to and a buttress for the feminine values of delicacy and sensibility.[69] Her tears were appropriately shed.

Richardson’s novels were torn between the rival impulses of moral instruction and prurient entertainment. So too were the services at the Magdalen. When the decidedly more rakish Horace Walpole visited in January 1760 (in a party of four coaches which contained, inter alia, Prince Edward, George II’s brother), he provided a vivid account of the scene within the chapel:

At the west end were enclosed the sisterhood, above an hundred and thirty, all in grayish brown stuffs, broad handkerchiefs, and flat straw hats, with a blue riband, pulled quite over their faces. As soon as we entered the chapel, the organ played, and the Magdalens sung a hymn in parts; you cannot imagine how well. The chapel was dressed with orange and myrtle, and there wanted nothing but a little incense to drive away the devil – or to invite him. Prayers then began, psalms, and a sermon: the latter by a young clergyman, one Dodd, who contributed to the Popish idea one had imbibed, by haranguing entirely in the French style, and very eloquently and touchingly. He apostrophized the lost sheep, who sobbed and cried from their souls …[70]

Afterwards the party went on a tour of the refectory where the Magdalens ate, hatless. ‘A few were handsome,’ Walpole noted, ‘I was struck and pleased with the modesty of two of them, who swooned away with the confusion of being stared at.’ His account reveals what was driving the great demand for tickets to such occasions. The Magdalen became a safari of seduction, where the rich and powerful could go and gaze upon the sullied but virtuous poor, striving so publicly for society’s forgiveness. Georgian churches were one of the few places where unmarried women were regularly displayed. Places of worship became spaces of desire.[71] The Magdalen chapel, where the drama of seduction was performed for a paying audience of notables, was perhaps the most erotically charged religious space in the country.