Strange Antics

The titillation of these services drove the charity’s popularity and by the 1760s it was obliged to move to new lodgings. When it was finally completed, the new Magdalen Hospital, situated in Southwark, just south of the newly constructed Blackfriars Bridge, contained an expanded chapel that could seat five hundred visitors. Here, amid the modish crowds, in a room that smelled of warm bodies and cool stone, and which was brilliantly illuminated by the light that flowed in from the high windows, the Sunday visitor, with the sound of the preacher’s exhortations ringing in their ears, could ponder their own moral reckoning with the example of the penitents before them.[72] In the new design the penitents were placed in the gallery, behind a latticed screen, only the silhouettes of their straw hats and pigeon-grey bodices visible through the woodwork. Invisible and present; secluded and displayed; confined from sexual life but considered as objects of sexual warning. For most of the audience, sitting in the naves and aisles, they were a spectral presence, hovering above the action in the church, heard only when they sang. But some lucky visitors were seated across from them in the gallery and could observe them up close. Glimpsed through the grille, and separated by only a few inches of wood, penitent and tourist beheld each other at an intimate remove, like Clarissa and Lovelace at that crumbling wall, and animated by the same forbidden sexual thrill.[73]

Richardson did not live to observe the scene. On 1 July 1761, painter Joseph Highmore visited him at home in Fulham for tea. Highmore had painted a number of works inspired by Richardson’s books, including a celebrated series taken from Pamela and an iconic depiction of the moment Clarissa elopes with Lovelace. He had also been commissioned to do several portraits of Richardson, including one owned by Lady Bradshaigh that she hung in her closet, out of her husband’s sight. He was sitting by Richardson’s side when, while taking delivery of his third cup of tea, the author had a massive stroke ‘and immediately faltered in his speech, and from that time spoke no more articulately’.[74] Richardson’s condition rapidly declined and very soon he could no longer recognise his own family members. He died a few days later and was buried in St Bride’s on Fleet Street, only metres from his printing shop in Salisbury Court.

Richardson had always insisted on the indivisibility of his moral and literary projects. This is a union that has lost credibility in each successive generation since his death. He is the most consistently (and acceptably) loathed author in the canon, largely on account of his overweening commitment to using literature as a vehicle for moral instruction. Most of his critics accept a grudging acceptance of his literary contribution as the admission price to a general rubbishing of his work. If we consider that to treat his literary achievements and moral outlook separately might allow a clearer-eyed evaluation of both, then we must nonetheless recognise the major part he played in the development of modern literature. In England his influence was comprehensive, and remained so well into the nineteenth century. His celebration in France by Rousseau and Diderot made him one of the most-read foreign novelists of the pre-revolutionary period. It was in French translation that he was read by many Russians, including Alexander Pushkin. When Tatyana in Eugene Onegin goes to bed with a novel beneath her pillow and dreams the dream that is to become the whole of modern Russian literature, it is Richardson’s books she lays her head upon. Richardson was translated into Dutch, German, Danish and Italian in his lifetime. His novels circulated widely in the New World, and heavily influenced the first works of American literature. The size of his audience and the pleasure with which he was read were instrumental in popularising the novel as a format and introducing readers to the literary devices of modern fiction.

As for his moral project, Richardson stands at the head of one of the two great traditions in the history of seduction. One that worries; one that dwells on interiority; one that seeks redress for women and reformation for men. The subsequent chapters will show how, far from being particular to his time, Richardson’s concerns about seduction, and the language and perceptual framework he drew upon to articulate those concerns, have served subsequent generations well. Anyone who has ever understood seduction as a problem of power, or as a quandary concerning the limits of free will, or as a social scenario that illuminates the discrepancy in condition between men and women, or as a battleground for competing visions of how enlightened citizens should behave towards one another – anyone who has ever considered such questions has lingered a while in Richardson’s world. Seduction was a problem born of modernity, and Richardson was the first modern to recognise it as such.

Richardson’s view of seduction was the perfect foil to the other great tradition in its history. One which rejected the conception of seduction as a problem to be pathologised, but rejoiced in the possibilities for personal and philosophical emancipation that it harboured. By his death in 1761, Richardson missed by two years the arrival in London of the itinerant Venetian musician, conman and saloniste who exemplified this rival vision of what seduction could be.

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