Wikipedia Deep Dive

Samuel Richardson

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The Accidental Inventor of the Novel

Samuel Richardson was fifty-one years old when he accidentally invented modern fiction.

He wasn't trying to. He was a printer—a successful one, with contracts from the House of Commons and a busy shop near Fleet Street. Two bookseller friends had asked him to write something practical: a collection of sample letters that country people could copy when they needed to write their own correspondence. Think of it as an eighteenth-century template pack for emails.

But while drafting letters about how young servant girls might fend off the advances of predatory employers, Richardson got carried away. The template letters became a story. The story became Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. And Pamela became, by some accounts, the first modern English novel—a book so popular it spawned parodies, unauthorized sequels, and a literary rivalry that would define the era.

The Boy Who Wrote Other People's Love Letters

Richardson was born in 1689, probably in Mackworth, Derbyshire, though he spent his life being cagey about exactly where. His family had once been comfortable—his father was a skilled joiner and draftsman who'd attracted the attention of the Duke of Monmouth. But the Duke's rebellion against the crown failed spectacularly in 1685, ending in the Duke's execution and the Richardson family's quiet exile from London.

They eventually returned, but the damage was done. The family had tumbled from "middling note" into poverty. Richardson's father wanted his son to become a clergyman but couldn't afford the education. So young Samuel was sent to Christ's Hospital grammar school, though apparently not to its more rigorous programs. One later account suggests he was "confined to the writing school, where all that was taught was writing and arithmetic."

What Richardson lacked in formal education, he made up for in compulsive letter-writing.

At age ten or eleven, he wrote a stern letter to a neighborhood woman in her fifties who had a habit of criticizing everyone around her. The letter adopted "the style and address of a person in years"—Richardson pretending to be an adult dispensing wisdom. His handwriting gave him away, and the woman complained to his mother. His mother's response was characteristically eighteenth-century: she scolded him for the presumption but praised his moral principles.

By thirteen, Richardson had become something like a professional romantic ghostwriter. The young women in his neighborhood would bring him their love letters to answer. He would draft replies on their behalf—sometimes encouraging, sometimes chiding, sometimes delivering outright rejections—all while observing how different the writers' true feelings were from what they wanted to say on paper. He later dismissed this early experience as merely pointing him toward understanding "the female heart," insisting he didn't truly understand women until decades later when writing Clarissa.

But those years of ventriloquizing other people's romantic correspondence clearly left a mark. Richardson's novels would all take the form of letters.

The Printer's Long Apprenticeship

At seventeen, Richardson was apprenticed to a printer named John Wilde. The arrangement was typical for the era: seven years of labor in exchange for learning the trade. Wilde ran his shop in Golden Lion Court on Aldersgate Street and had a reputation as the sort of master who "grudged every hour that tended not to his profit."

During this time, Richardson met a wealthy gentleman who recognized his writing talent and began corresponding with him. This was Richardson's one chance at patronage—the traditional path for aspiring writers in an era before royalties and literary agents. When the gentleman died a few years later, that door closed permanently.

Richardson responded by becoming exceptionally good at printing.

He worked his way up to compositor—the person who arranges the individual metal letters into words and pages—and then to corrector, responsible for catching errors before printing. By 1713, he'd left Wilde's shop to become "Overseer and Corrector of a Printing-Office," effectively running his own operation. By 1719, he'd taken the freedom of the City of London and opened a printing shop near Salisbury Court, close to Fleet Street.

In 1721, he married Martha Wilde, his former master's daughter. He later claimed it was a love match, though contemporaries suspected more practical motives. Either way, she moved into the printing shop that doubled as their home.

A Dangerous Commission

One of Richardson's first major contracts nearly ruined him.

In 1723, he began printing The True Briton, a twice-weekly political paper backed by Philip Wharton, the first Duke of Wharton. The paper was Jacobite—meaning it supported the exiled Stuart claim to the British throne against the ruling Hanoverian dynasty. This wasn't mere political disagreement; Jacobitism was effectively treason.

The True Briton attacked the government relentlessly and was eventually shut down for "common libels." Richardson's name appeared nowhere on the publication, allowing him to escape prosecution. But the Duke of Wharton made a lasting impression. A notorious libertine and rake, Wharton would become one of Richardson's models for Lovelace, the villain of Clarissa—a character who would become English literature's most compelling portrayal of charming, intelligent evil.

Richardson's business survived. He took on apprentices, built connections, and befriended Arthur Onslow, who would become Speaker of the House of Commons. That friendship proved crucial: in 1733, Onslow helped Richardson secure a contract to print the Journals of the House of Commons. The twenty-six volumes of parliamentary proceedings transformed Richardson from a working printer into a prosperous one.

Death Upon Death

Richardson's personal life during these years was defined by tragedy.

He and Martha had six children in ten years of marriage. Three sons were named Samuel in succession—each dying in infancy before the next was born and given the same name. Martha herself died in childbirth on January 23, 1731. The last Samuel, born before her death, survived until 1732 before succumbing to illness.

By thirty-four, Richardson had lost his wife and all six children.

Two years later, he married Elizabeth Leake, daughter of a fellow printer. They would have six more children. This time, four daughters survived to adulthood: Mary, Martha, Anne, and Sarah. But another son, also named Samuel, was born in 1739 and died in 1740.

Richardson never wrote directly about these losses. But his novels are saturated with death, illness, and the fragility of life—particularly Clarissa, whose heroine's extended, spiritually triumphant dying takes up nearly a quarter of what is already the longest novel in the English language.

The Apprentice's Handbook and What It Reveals

In 1733, the same year he landed the House of Commons contract, Richardson wrote a strange little book called The Apprentice's Vade Mecum. A "vade mecum" is a handbook you carry with you—literally, in Latin, "go with me."

The book urged young apprentices to be diligent, self-denying, and morally upright. It condemned the popular entertainments of the day: theaters, taverns, and gambling. It argued that apprentices were the key to moral improvement in society—not because they were especially prone to vice, but because they were more likely to actually improve than their wealthier social betters.

This is an odd thing for a successful businessman to believe. It's even odder when you remember that Richardson himself had been an apprentice, had worked his way up through exactly this system, and was now wealthy enough to lease a house in Fulham. The book reveals something essential about Richardson's worldview: he genuinely believed that virtue could be taught, that stories about good behavior could make people behave better, and that the middle and working classes were the audience most worth addressing.

This conviction would shape everything he wrote afterward.

Pamela's Explosion

By 1738, Richardson's printing business was thriving. He was printing the Daily Journal and the Daily Gazetteer. He had a comfortable home in Fulham. He was nearly fifty.

Then Charles Rivington and John Osborn asked him to write that collection of sample letters.

Richardson started work on November 10, 1739. His wife and her friends became so engrossed in the emerging story of Pamela Andrews—a servant girl whose employer tries to seduce her, and who maintains her virtue through hundreds of pages of attempted corruption—that Richardson abandoned the letter manual entirely. He finished Pamela on January 10, 1740, after just two months of writing.

The book was published on November 6, 1740. It became a sensation.

Clergy recommended it from pulpits. Readers demanded to know if Pamela was a real person. Merchandisers produced Pamela-themed fans, paintings, and waxworks. It was, as we might say now, the first viral novel.

It was also immediately controversial.

The Anti-Pamelas

The problem with Pamela was that her virtue seemed calculating. She resists her employer's advances, and as a reward, he marries her—raising her from servant to lady of the house. Critics read this as a how-to guide for social climbing through strategic chastity: hold out long enough and you'll get a ring.

Henry Fielding, then a struggling playwright, published Shamela in 1741—a brutal parody in which the heroine's virtue is entirely pretended, a calculated performance to trap a gullible rich man into marriage. The full title gives the flavor: An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, in which, the many notorious Falsehoods and Misrepresentations of a Book called Pamela, Are exposed and refuted.

Fielding followed this with Joseph Andrews, a comic novel featuring Pamela's brother—who must defend his own chastity against the advances of a lustful noblewoman. Where Richardson was earnest, Fielding was satirical. Where Richardson wrote long, Fielding wrote brisk. Where Richardson's characters analyzed their feelings in endless letters, Fielding's narrator stood outside the action and commented sardonically.

The Richardson-Fielding rivalry became one of the defining conflicts of eighteenth-century literature. They represented genuinely different theories of what fiction should do: Richardson believed novels should provide models for behavior, while Fielding believed they should expose human nature in all its absurdity. Both approaches would shape the novel for centuries.

Other anti-Pamelas proliferated. Eliza Haywood wrote The Anti-Pamela. John Kelly wrote Pamela's Conduct in High Life. Anonymous authors produced Pamela in High Life and The Life of Pamela. Richardson had created something so culturally potent that it generated an entire counter-literature.

The Complete Letter-Writer (Reluctantly)

Richardson did eventually finish the letter-writing manual that had inspired Pamela. It was published with the magnificently eighteenth-century title: Letters written to and for particular Friends, on the most important Occasions. Directing not only the requisite Style and Forms to be observed in writing Familiar Letters; but how to think and act justly and prudently, in the common Concerns of Human Life.

The book contained sample letters for various occasions, along with moral lessons and practical advice. It went through six editions during Richardson's lifetime. He hated it.

"This volume of letters is not worthy of your perusal," he told a friend. The letters were "intended for the lower classes of people"—a remark that reveals both Richardson's literary ambitions and his snobbery about the manual that had accidentally launched his real career.

What Richardson Understood

Richardson's success wasn't accidental, even if his path to it was. He understood something that would take other writers decades to figure out: readers wanted to feel like they were inside someone else's head.

The epistolary form—a novel made entirely of letters—was perfect for this. Letters are intimate. They reveal the writer's thoughts in real time, before the writer knows how events will turn out. They allow for misunderstanding and dramatic irony: the reader can see what the letter-writer cannot. They create suspense naturally, because each letter ends without resolution.

Richardson also understood that morality could be interesting. His novels aren't subtle. They announce their moral purposes in their subtitles: Virtue Rewarded, The History of a Young Lady. But within those simple frameworks, he created psychological complexity that still reads as modern. Pamela's virtue might be rewarded, but her letters reveal genuine fear, genuine confusion, genuine desire. Clarissa's virtue is punished—she's drugged and raped by Lovelace—but her response, a long preparation for death that transforms tragedy into spiritual triumph, is rendered with such intensity that Samuel Johnson called her death "the most tragic scene in any of the English novels."

The Printer Who Became a Novelist

Richardson remained a printer throughout his literary career. He never stopped running his shop, never stopped taking apprentices, never stopped producing the journals and pamphlets and parliamentary records that had made his living. His correspondence reveals a man constantly juggling business concerns with literary ambitions.

His circle included Samuel Johnson, the towering literary figure of the age. It included Sarah Fielding, Henry's sister, who was a novelist in her own right and who managed to be friends with Richardson despite his rivalry with her brother. It included George Cheyne, a physician and follower of the German mystic Jakob Böhme. It included William Law, a theologian whose devotional works Richardson printed.

These friendships reveal Richardson's range of interests and his hunger for intellectual connection. He was a self-educated man surrounded by university graduates, a tradesman among gentlemen, a popular novelist who craved serious literary respect.

Why This Matters

Richardson matters because he figured out how to make the novel do something new. Before Pamela, English prose fiction mostly meant adventure stories, satirical allegories, or scandalous memoirs. Richardson invented the psychological novel—fiction that takes place primarily inside its characters' heads, that treats inner life as worthy of the same attention previously reserved for external events.

He also invented the reading public as we know it. Pamela's success proved that middle-class readers—not aristocratic patrons, not literary clubs, but ordinary people buying books—could support a writer's career. Richardson wrote for this audience deliberately, addressing their concerns, reflecting their values, speaking in language they could understand.

The fact that he was fifty-one when he started, that he'd spent three decades as a printer before writing a word of fiction, that his breakthrough came from a failed reference book—all of this suggests something encouraging. Careers don't have to follow predictable paths. Expertise in one field can translate unexpectedly into another. Sometimes the most important work comes from people who were supposedly doing something else.

Richardson died on July 4, 1761, at seventy-one. He'd published three novels in his last two decades: Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. Together they run to several million words. They were translated across Europe, imitated everywhere, and argued about for generations. Not bad for a man who'd only meant to write a letter-writing manual.