The plot of Pamela is somewhat sarcastically summarised by his biographers: ‘A virtuous servant girl rejects her master’s lewd advances and is kidnapped by him and confined in a lonely country house where she continues to fight him off until he is overcome by her virtue to the extent of proposing matrimony, which is instantly accepted.’ Improbable and banal as the plot was, the novel had genre-enlarging innovations – epistolary narration was one. The technique created immediacy – sometimes, however, with awkwardness. Just as Byron said that no man shaves himself during an earthquake so no young girl carries on writing a letter (even, nowadays, an email) as some ravishing Tarquin lunges at her breasts. Such unlikelihood jars in a postscript to Pamela’s opening letter to her parents:
I have been scared out of my senses; for just now, as I was folding up this letter in my late lady’s dressing-room, in comes my young master! Good sirs! how was I frightened! I went to hide the letter in my bosom; and he, seeing me tremble, said, smiling, To whom have you been writing, Pamela? – I said, in my confusion, Pray your honour forgive me! –
‘Just now’ strikes a false note. None the less there is a freshness and spontaneity in the narrative which still effervesces. It is heightened by a new kind of realism. Richardson presented himself anonymously as merely the ‘editor’ of actual letters, which are to be taken as ‘true’. The other revolutionary feature is inscribed on the novel’s title page:
Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded.
In A Series Of Familiar Letters From A Beautiful Young Damsel,
To Her Parents
Virtue is a word with Roman associations which is, historically, the exclusive property of the aristocrat. Damsels in distress in romance are not, before 1740, fifteen-year-old skivvies who empty the chamber pots and do the housework for their betters. Pamela is a revolutionary act of social redefinition.
Richardson published the work anonymously in 1740, intending that only six of his friends, at most, should be let in on the secret of his authorship. But it soon leaked out and enlarged his sphere of social contacts: he became acquainted with Hogarth (who went on to illustrate for him) and friendly with Dr Johnson. The latter admired him extravagantly as the antidote to Fielding. ‘Sir,’ he instructed a not entirely convinced Boswell, ‘there is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson’s than in all Tom Jones.’
Pamela was hugely successful. Two moralistic sequels flopped, however, and for his next major novel Richardson struck out on new ground. At this point in his career he began, he believed, truly to understand the mind of woman. Clarissa was circulated in manuscript among friends. Among the more eminent was the poet Edward Young, who concurred with Johnson in believing that ‘this romance will probably do more good than a body of Divinity’. He approved the unhappy ending – others of Richardson’s confidential friends were less sure. There was a general uneasiness about length – he should ‘sweat’ or prune the work into something more manageable. This advice Richardson strenuously ignored – the seven volumes, published serially over 1747–8, come out at a million words.
Clarissa Harlowe is of higher social station than Pamela Andrews. The plot is, however, similar. The heroine’s virtue is under prolonged assault from Lovelace (a rake who seems to have wandered into fiction from the Restoration comedy of Wycherley). He, driven to an extremity of lechery, imprisons, drugs and rapes her. The violated Clarissa rejects his compensatory offer of marriage and dies – neglected, as she has been throughout, by her heartless family. Lovelace is killed in a duel by her cousin. Is this, the novel asks, a harlot’s progress (as her surname hints) or virtue indomitable? Clarissa is, as Dr Johnson proclaimed it, ‘a prodigious work – formed on the stalest of all empty stories’. It had none of the ‘perverse and crooked Nature’ to be found in Fielding – who had formed his career in opposition to Richardson, first with Shamela, then Joseph Andrews and finally his masterpiece, Tom Jones. The Fielding objection sets up one of the principal dialectics in English fiction of the period. Is virtue something learned through experience and error, or an innate ‘innocence’, something to be ‘preserved’? Put another way, do you have to be bad before you can be good? And, if so, is bad bad?
Richardson wrote one more epistolary novel, Sir Charles Grandison, in which he took on the challenge of making a ‘good man’ – rather than a virtuous woman – his hero. The novel has its admirers: Jane Austen liked the consistency of the characterisation; John Ruskin testified that the novel had ‘a greater practical effect on me for good than anything I ever read in my life’. But these are minority views: Sir Charles Grandison is generally thought to confirm that Richardson’s greatest work is its immediate predecessor.
In his last years Richardson prospered as an author (he was hugely admired and translated on the Continent), as a popular moralist, and as a printer-publisher. His last years were passed among four daughters, with whom he had a dutiful if distant relationship, in a fine townhouse and a finer country villa at Parsons Green. Despite chronic infirmity he made his three score and ten, dying of a stroke.
FN
Samuel Richardson
MRT
Clarissa
Biog
T. C. D. Eaves and B. D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (1971)
5. Henry Fielding 1707–1754
Incest! With a mother! Tom Jones
Over the centuries, accounts of Fielding’s life seemed as immutable as the inscription chiselled on his tombstone. Biographer after biographer came and (as one of them ruefully lamented) left the author of Tom Jones exactly where they found the author of Tom Jones. He was born, the eldest of seven children, in Somerset (young Tom Jones’s stamping ground). His father, Edmund Feilding (as, for snobbish reasons, he misspelled it) was a senior army officer, of incorrigibly wayward habits. His mother died when Henry was ten, and in his formative years he and his siblings were cared for by a doting aunt. On his wife’s death, Edmund promptly remarried a Catholic – to the fury of his rich and titled former in-laws. Legal disputes over property and child custody ensued. Fielding qualifies as the first tug-of-love novelist in English literature. Edmund would eventually die in debtors’ prison. As with Dickens and the Marshalsea, it inspired some vivid scenes in the son’s later fiction. The maternal, and wholly respectable, grandmother, Lady Sarah Gould, eventually got charge of the children.
Now a child of privilege, Henry was sent to Eton, aged twelve. There he made friends who would later serve him as patrons. The school also gave him a grounding in classical literature. On leaving school in 1724, Fielding drifted to London, where he received instruction in lower forms of literature – notably that spawned around Drury Lane. Headstrong by nature, in 1725 Henry attempted the abduction of a cousin, Sarah Andrews (who had recently come into a fortune). It led to trouble with the local constabulary and – more profitably – the core episode in Tom Jones. He was encouraged to write by, among others, his distant cousin, Lady Wortley Montagu (he satirised many things in British society – but never bluestockings). His first attempt at a stage play, in 1728, flopped. The same year he went to study at the University of Leiden where he immersed himself in books and ran up debts – the pattern of his life. He returned after a year and threw himself again into writing for the theatre. His great success was the burlesque, The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great. Witty mockery was to be Fielding’s stock-in-trade.
In 1734 Fielding married well and set up with his wife Charlotte as a retired gentleman in Dorset. But he ran through her money in a year and then, inevitably, it was back to London where he became the manager and chief playwright at the New Theatre in the Haymarket. One of his satires on Walpole’s government provoked the 1737 Licensing Act (effectively state censorship – of Henry Fielding, principally). He had satirised himself out of his job.
Aged thirty, he enrolled at Middle Temple to read for the bar, writing all the while savagely anti-Jacobite pieces for the nearby Fleet Street paper, The Champion. Fielding quali
fied as a barrister in 1740 but years of drinking had caught up with him and he was physically disabled by gout. But he could still read and write. He read Richardson’s 1740 bestseller, Pamela, and wrote the burlesque Shamela Andrews (anonymously published in 1741). It evolved into his first proper novel, Joseph Andrews (1742). Anti-Richardsonism was the foundation of all his later work: Fielding always needed something to kick against.
Fielding’s mood was darkened, and his writing halted, by the premature death of his wife in 1744. Three years later, to his friends’ dismay, he married his wife’s former maid – six months pregnant as she lumbered up the aisle. Thanks to one of his Etonian patrons, he was appointed JP for Westminster in 1748. Gouty he might be, but he could still sit on a bench. He was a vigorous, commonsensical and notably unvenal jurist. He brought in important reforms in London policing and, had he never published a line of fiction, would be remembered for this side of his career. There were, however, areas in which common sense (as he saw it) was in short supply. In 1749 he published his vast anti-Richardsoniad, Tom Jones. In it, he expressed his moral conviction that virtue was earned through experience of life, not something clamped between a maiden’s thighs. He would write one other novel – Amelia – a more sentimental work, named after his favourite daughter and, supposedly, a memorial (in the portrayal of the heroine) of his dead wife. In 1752, crippled with multiple ailments, Fielding sailed to Portugal in search of health. He died in Lisbon, leaving a typically jaundiced journal of the trip behind him. He was a man who could even make comedy out of his own terminal decay.
Such was the outline of the standard biographies until 1989, when Martin and Ruth Battestin published their massive Henry Fielding: A Life. In addition to new circumstantial material (Ruth was a trained historical archivist), the Battestins adopted the more daring techniques of psychobiography. Twelve-year-old Henry’s recorded act of spitting in servants’ faces, for example, was mulled over as ‘a clue to the deepest sources of both his personality and his wilful behaviour’. Deepest? Even deeper clues, however, were detected in the sleeping arrangements Henry and his sister Sarah shared in the Gould establishment. The children slept in the same bed; there were accusations of unspecified ‘indecent actions’. Building on this, and such anthropological evidence as Lawrence Stone’s that incest was common in the eighteenth century, the Battestins levelled the explosive charge against the two children. Moreover, they suggest, the ‘Dreadful Sin’ had a formative effect on the later imaginative writing they both produced. Incest, of course, is a subplot in Joseph Andrews and in Tom Jones – where, for a longish section of the novel, the reader is given to believe that the hero has committed the sin of Nero with his mother. We shall never know. And, for a certainty, Fielding would mock us unmercifully for wanting to know.
FN
Henry Fielding
MRT
Tom Jones
Biog
M. C. Battestin and R. R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (1989)
6. Samuel Johnson 1709–1784
Fielding being mentioned, Johnson exclaimed, ‘he was a blockhead … What I mean by his being a blockhead is that he was a barren rascal.’ BOSWELL. ‘Will you not allow, Sir, that he draws very natural pictures of human life?’ JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, it is of very low life.’
Johnson believed, as he instructed Boswell, that ‘nobody could furnish the life of a man but those who had eat and drank and lived in social intercourse about him’. Here, therefore, is Boswell describing his subject at table:
His looks seemed riveted to his plate; nor would he, unless when in very high company, say one word, or even pay the least attention to what was said by others, till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible.
On the matter of ‘social intercourse’ (or the other kind), his first biographers (Boswell, Hawkins, Thrale) were privy to things which even Johnson would have wanted to keep hidden. Nor were they averse to pulling the curtain for a discreet peek at his dark side. Mrs Thrale, for example, disclosed to posterity a ‘secret far dearer to him than his life’: namely Johnson’s attachment to ‘fetters and handcuffs’. It may have been a penchant for BDSM (modern critics have had a fine time with that hypothesis).
Many biographies of Johnson have been written since Boswell’s. The narrative grips from the opening scenes: an ungainly, half-blind, nine-year-old lad – born into a dull town of dull parents – randomly takes up a volume of Hamlet while sitting in the basement kitchen. The words on the page induce a hallucinatory vision of Elsinore and ghosts. He throws down the book, and rushes into the street outside, ‘that he might see people about him’. An author is born. The dull town was Lichfield. Dr Johnson is still the biggest thing to happen there. He lived his early life over the bookshop his father ran (hence access to Hamlet). Books were, however, not selling well and the family struggled. A late-in-life, unwanted child (his mother was forty at the time of his birth) did not help the Johnson finances. Infant Sam contracted scrofula, a disfiguring condition, as ugly as its name. He is also suspected of having suffered from Tourette’s syndrome. Throughout life he twitched and was prone to blurt out in conversation – typically (as above) with the aggressive prefix ‘Sir!’ His eyesight was so defective that he was at risk of setting his wig on fire from leaning too close to the candle, as he read by night. And he was probably alcoholic.
There was, however, nothing wrong with the Johnson brain. Prodigiously precocious (he was reciting the New Testament at three, translating from the classics at six), he had a sound grammar-school education. It seemed he might be destined – despite his manifest gifts – to follow his father into the book trade. But an unexpected legacy enabled him to go to Oxford. The money ran out, however, and he was obliged to leave without a degree (a doctorate would come, honoris causa, fifty years later). His subsequent career is legendary: marriage (probably sexless) to a widow, ‘Tetty’, twenty-one years his senior with money and three children; a spectacularly failed attempt to set up a school (with Tetty’s money) which recruited all of three pupils. Finally, with one of those three pupils – David Garrick, no less – Johnson set out on the road to London. Ahead, after years of struggle and authorial humiliation, lay the Dictionary, The Lives of the Poets, the greatest moral poem in the language (The Vanity of Human Wishes), and installation as the ‘Great Cham’ – the country’s (some would say English literature’s) presiding man of letters and arbiter of literary taste.
Johnson was also, in one of his minor parts, a novelist. In 1759 his ninety-year-old mother was dying; his father had gone to his reward in 1731. To cover the expense of his mother’s last days, Johnson wrote, in the evenings of one week, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. It is a mixture of thinly applied oriental setting (drawn from travel books) and heavy moral dogmatising, as English as suet pudding (drawn from the fifty-year-old author’s life experiences). The ingénu hero leaves the comfort of his palace in Ethiopia to range the world, seeking the secret of a happy life. He is accompanied by his sister and a philosopher, Imlac (alias Samuel Johnson). There is, Rasselas discovers, no happiness to be found. Life is, as Johnson said elsewhere, a condition in which much is to be endured and little enjoyed. ‘Patience is all’ – Christian patience, that is (not for Johnson Voltaire’s objectionably Gallic heathen quietism, with that stuff about cultivating your garden). Few novelists, one imagines, could produce the statutory happy-ever-after with the ‘Dead March’ from Saul droning, incessantly, in their ears and their mother’s corpse genteelly decomposing at the undertaker’s.
Rasselas is no page-turner – sermons on the human condition seldom are. But it brought Johnson £100 and £25 for a prompt second edition. In terms of hourly rate, for a week’s scribbling it was the best money of his writing career. None but a blockhead, Johnson said, writes for anything but money. Fifty such princely tales a year (giving himself a
fortnight’s annual holiday) would have yielded the sum of £6,250: a princely sum. But having no more parents to inter, he wrote no more fiction. The fact was, Johnson regarded such work as unworthy. The novel, as a form, was merely words written on the passing waves of public fancy. He rejoiced to concur with the common reader, but was disinclined to pander to that reader’s taste for ‘delight’. He registered the existence and popularity of the genre in his 1750 Rambler essay on the novel (in which he patented the compound ‘modern fiction’), but his personal view is summed up in his uncompromising dismissal of Sterne’s great novel: ‘Nothing odd will do long – Tristram Shandy did not last.’ The Johnsonian stricture is heard throughout the genre’s history. In James Fitzjames Stephen’s verdict on Oliver Twist, for example: ‘All very well, but damned low.’ And, of course, ephemeral, unlasting – unlike dictionaries.
It would be a century and a half before Henry James would, with the help of his advanced coadjutors in the genre, make the English novel ‘discutable’. The author of The Lives of the Poets would have scorned the worthwhileness of any such project for novelists.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 4