Samuel Richardson(1689–1761)

Samuel Richardson was born at Mackworth in Derbyshire on 19 August 1689, third of nine children of Samuel Richardson the elder, a joiner of Mackworth, and Elizabeth (surname Whilbye, possibly). The family moved to London in or about 1700 on Samuel the elder's pursuit of better trade-work prospects; the boy was schooled briefly at Christ's Hospital in the City and was apprenticed at thirteen, on 1 July 1706, to the printer John Wilde at the Stationer's Hall premises on the south side of St Paul's Churchyard, on a standard seven-year indenture. The apprenticeship was the foundational training of his career. He served the seven years to 1713 under Wilde and a further two as a journeyman in Wilde's shop, was admitted as a freeman of the Stationers' Company in 1715 at the age of twenty-five, married Wilde's daughter Martha in 1721, and on Wilde's death in 1722 took over the management of the printing house in his own name on a mortgage of the equipment.

The press at the premises on Salisbury Square, off the south side of Fleet Street, ran for the next thirty-nine years. The Richardson printing house under his management was, by the early 1740s, one of the largest and most reliable printers in London, producing the official parliamentary *Journals of the House of Commons* under government contract, the *Daily Gazetteer* newspaper for the Walpole-Pelham ministries, the standard editions of Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Roger L'Estrange, and a long backlist of religious-instructional pamphlets and conduct-books for the Church-of-England establishment market. He took on his nephew William and a succession of working apprentices through the period and ran the business as a competent commercial enterprise of the post-Augustan London publishing trade. He was, by 1740, fifty-one years old and was the senior commercial printer of the Fleet Street area, and was wholly unknown as a writer of any description.

*Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded* came out of a commercial commission. Two London booksellers, the brothers John Osborn and Charles Rivington, had asked him in 1739 to produce a instructional volume of model letters for young people to copy as templates for the standard correspondence of working life (letters of application, letters of condolence, letters of business). He had begun working on it through the spring of 1740 and had drifted, in the writing, into a sequence of letters between a fifteen-year-old servant girl named Pamela Andrews and her parents that ran as a continuous narrative of the servant girl's resistance to the sexual advances of her young master Mr B. By June 1740 he had a hundred and fifty thousand words of continuous epistolary narrative on his hands; he showed it to the booksellers; they recognised that the commercial proposition had become a novel and not a letter-template volume; they paid him for the new arrangement. *Pamela* came out at his own press in November 1740 in two anonymous octavo volumes at a price of six shillings the set. It was the publishing event of the eighteenth-century English novel and effectively founded the form.

The novel sold five editions across 1741. It was translated into French, German and Italian by the end of 1745. It produced a continuous public-controversy literature of anti-Pamela pamphlets attacking the moral and literary register of the original (Henry Fielding's *Shamela* in April 1741 and the subsequent *Joseph Andrews* in 1742 ran the comic-novel parodies). And it gave the English novel the model of the epistolary form (the principle that a long-form prose narrative could be carried entirely in a sequence of private letters from inside the consciousness of the characters, and that the reader-narrator relationship of the form was qualitatively different from the third-person-narrative omniscient register the previous English literary prose had been built on). The follow-up *Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady* came out in seven volumes across the years 1747 and 1748, a million words of epistolary novel on the Harlowe family's destruction of the young Clarissa Harlowe by the libertine Robert Lovelace, and is, by every subsequent serious assessment, the foundational masterpiece of the English novel of the eighteenth century, the longest novel in the English language, and the source-text from which the entire psychological-novel tradition of Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, James and the twentieth-century interior-monologue novel descends.

*The History of Sir Charles Grandison* (1753-54), the third and last of the novels, sealed the trio. He continued running the printing house at Salisbury Square through the 1750s and ran a circle of mostly-women correspondents (Hester Mulso, Sarah Fielding, Lady Bradshaigh, Catherine Talbot) on the long working letters that have become, in subsequent editions, the standard apparatus of his biographical paragraph. The marriage to Martha had produced six children, of whom only one survived to adulthood; he married Elizabeth Leake at his second marriage in 1733 (Martha had died of post-childbed complications in 1731) and the second marriage produced six daughters of whom four survived him. He died of an apoplectic stroke at the country house he had bought at Parsons Green, Fulham, on 4 July 1761, seventy-one years old, and is buried in the small parish church of St Bride's, Fleet Street, two hundred yards from the press he had run for thirty-nine years. The Richardson name in its English-side catalogue is the patronymic of Richard, the Norman royal name of three medieval English kings compressed into the standard *-son* northern English genitive; he carried it from a Derbyshire joiner's family into the foundation of the English novel form alongside Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe.