Samuel Richardson(1689–1761)

Samuel Richardson was born at Mackworth in Derbyshire on 19 August 1689, third of nine children of a joiner. The family moved to London about 1700; the boy was apprenticed at thirteen to the printer John Wilde, served his seven years, was admitted a freeman of the Stationers' Company in 1715, and on Wilde's death in 1722 took over the printing house in his own name.

The press off Fleet Street ran for thirty-nine years. Under Richardson it became one of the largest and most reliable in London, printing the official Journals of the House of Commons under government contract and a long list of standard editions. By 1740 he was the senior commercial printer of the Fleet Street area, and wholly unknown as a writer.

Pamela came out of a commission. Two booksellers had asked him for a volume of model letters; in the writing he drifted into a continuous epistolary narrative of a servant girl's resistance to her master, and by mid-1740 had a novel on his hands. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded was published at his own press in November 1740 and was the publishing event of the eighteenth-century English novel, effectively founding the form.

It sold five editions across 1741 and was translated into French, German and Italian by 1745. It gave the English novel the model of the epistolary form, the long narrative carried entirely from inside the characters' consciousness. The follow-up, Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady, came out in seven volumes in 1747 and 1748: a million words, the longest novel in the English language and, by every serious assessment, the foundational masterpiece of the eighteenth-century English novel, the source-text from which the psychological-novel tradition of Austen, the Brontës, Eliot and James descends.

The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753 and 1754) sealed the trio. He continued running the press through the 1750s, was Master of the Stationers' Company in 1754, and kept up a long circle of literary correspondents. He died at Parsons Green, Fulham, on 4 July 1761, seventy-one years old, and is buried at St Bride's, Fleet Street, two hundred yards from the press he had run for thirty-nine years. The Richardson name, the patronymic of Richard compressed into the northern genitive, he carried from a Derbyshire joiner's family into the foundation of the English novel alongside Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe.