What did Clarissa Harlowe read?

Orla Smyth Books within Books. What did Clarissa Harlowe Read? A Note on the History of Reading Practices In: XVII-XVIII. Bulletin de la société d'études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. N°48, 1999. pp. 103121. Citer ce document / Cite this document : Smyth Orla. Books within Books. What did Clarissa Harlowe Read? A Note on the History of Reading Practices. In: XVII-XVIII. Bulletin de la société d'études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. N°48, 1999. pp. 103-121. doi : 10.3406/xvii.1999.1457 http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/xvii_0291-3798_1999_num_48_1_1457 BOOKS WITHIN BOOKS : WHAT DID CLARISSA HARLOWE READ ? A NOTE ON THE HISTORY OF READING PRACTICES1 Since Anna Barbauld pronounced Richardson "the father of the modern novel of the superiour pathetic kind" in 1804, the role of Richardson in diverting "the taste of the public into some new channel" has been actively debated.2 Thanks to recent interdisciplinary work focusing on the complex relations which link the socio-political discourse on sentiments theory to the literary vogue of sentimentalism, it is now possible to analyse Richardson's role in the history of the novel without becoming bogged down in endlessly cyclical debates on precedence and the relativity of evaluative criteria.3 In this context the meaningful questions turn on the significance of Richardson as a socio-cultural phenomenon, and the intellectual work now entails elucidating the historical stakes involved in the furore which greeted the publication of his novels. In a second time, and in the light of a clearer understanding of those midcentury events, it then becomes appropriate to examine the implications 1. 1 would like to thank Leland Deladurantaye (Cornell) and Jim Livesey (Trinity College, Dublin) for reading over this paper and for their helpful comments on the argument I am presenting. 2. Samuel Richardson, The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, Author of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. Selected from the Original Manuscripts, Bequeathed by Him to His Family, to Which Are Prefixed, A Biographical Account of That Author, and Observations on His Writings, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 6 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1804) 1: xi. 3. To list only the principal full-length studies: G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992); Louis I. Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1962); John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987); Ellis Markman, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996); John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986); Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993). 104 ORLA SMYTH of that historical moment for understanding prior and subsequent developments. Such, at any rate, is the reasoning which governs the discussion which follows. The sentimental vogue would reach its apogée in the 1760's. Although when Clarissa was published in the late 1740's the vogue had not yet reached its fever pitch, we now know that the publication of the novel was very nearly contemporaneous with the appearance of the word "sentiment" in adjectival form in English, hi a famous letter to Richardson of 1749, Lady Bradshaigh attests at once to the enormous vogue for the word and to the fact that it was a recent neologism.4 It is of course by no means coincidental that Lady Bradshaigh should have turned to Richardson for information concerning the proper meaning of the word: the publication of Clarissa in 1747-1748 sealed Richardson's reputation as an author, and the huge number of readers who had been entranced by the originality of Pamela went into tearful raptures over Clarissa. There is however a paradoxical aspect to the Clarissa phenomenon and that is the fact that while it enjoys, and has long enjoyed, a claim to being the sentimental Ur-text, the reading of it as such has never really "worked." While sentimental texts would be full of occasions for tearful readerly empathy, readers could feel good about generous commiseration with wretched virtue in distress, and it is clear also that many of Richardson's readers felt similarly uplifted.5 But Robert F. Brissenden, in an early text on sentimentalism, called attention to the lack of fit between the moral code on which such a reading apparently depends, and the actual story related. He argued that Clarissa should be 4. See Richardson, Correspondence 4: 282-83. The letter was written in 1749, the exact date is not given: "Pray Sir give me leave to ask you (I forgot it before) what, in your opinion, is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite, both in town and country? In letters and common conversation, I have asked several who make use of it and have generally received for answer, it is - it is - sentimental. Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word; but I am convinced a wrong interpretation is given, because it is impossible everything clever and agreeable can be so common as this word." 5. It is difficult to believe that there is not a hint of irony in Diderot's oft-quoted remarks in the "Éloge de Richardson," although the context doesn't encourage such a reading: "O Richardson! on prend, malgré qu'on en ait, un rôle dans tes ouvrages . . . Combien de fois ne me suis-je surpris, comme il est arrivé à des enfants qu'on avait menés aux spectacles pour la première fois, criant: Ne le croyez pas, il vous trompe . . . si vous allez là, vous êtes perdu. Mon âme était tenue dans une agitation perpétuelle. Combien j'étais bon! combien j'étais juste! que j'étais satisfait de moi! j'étais au sortir de ta lecture, ce qu'est un homme à la fin d'une journée qu'il a employée à faire le bien" (Œuvres complètes, éd. Jean Varloot, gen. éd. Herbert Dieckmann, Jacques Proust, and Jean Varloot, 25 vols. [Paris: Hermann, 1980] 13: 193). WHAT DID CLARISSA HARLOWE READ ? 105 read not as a text on the value of moral sentiments, but rather as a plaintive lament on the failure of that current of thought. The virtue Clarissa Clarissa weak."6 symbolises becomes is, he says, a kind "spiritually of mournful triumphant dirge celebrating but materially the charms of a sentimental virtue which could have been the grounds for a harmonious society but which, beautiful but weak, was no match for the harsh and ugly reality of the world as we know it. John Mullan went one further and claimed that this critical stance was in fact typical of the majority of sentimental novels: "the universality of social understanding, which Hume's philosophy of human nature proposes is precisely what is questioned, and typically rejected, in the novel of sentiment."7 The sophistication of Mullan's argument derived from the fact that he was able to link the philosophical failure of the moral sentiments theory to the rise of the novel - the model of sympathetic interactivity that had failed as social theory could be salvaged or rather vicariously enjoyed on the axis reader/text. Novelists, says Mullan were "able to concede that habits of sociability were limited or exceptional, only surviving in a world in which fellow-feeling was rare and malevolence prevailed; but they were able to position each private reader as the exceptional connoisseur of commendable sympathies and to imply such a reader's understanding of the communication of sentiments and the special capacities of sensibility."8 Portraying the theory as inadequate at the level of narrative content, the novel could nonetheless draw upon and liberally exploit its themes, motifs, language and core concepts. Mullan's reading of this history is persuasive and the overall dynamics of the encounter between moral philosophy and the novel are rendered well in his account. It is clear, however, that the framework presents some not insignificant chronology problems. Mullan concentrates on the moral philosophy of Hume and Smith, but by the time of publication even of Clarissa (1748-1749), the only work of the moral sentiment theorists to have appeared in print, was Hume's very little-read Treatise of Human Nature (1739). The association of Richardson with the thought of the moral philosophers, even when including Shaftesbury, presents other not less considerable problems, notably with respect to the deeply secular stamp of that tradition. If those problems are not isolated problems, but bear in fact on the early history of the rise of the novel and on the host of other novelists writing in the early part of the century, there 6. Brissenden 129. 7. Mullan 56. 8. Mullan 13. 106 ORLA SMYTH would seem to be ample reason to look in further detail at what exactly is going on in Clarissa. There is hardly a more fitting emblem of the paradoxes of the written word, than Richardson the printer-cum-author feverishly engaged in revision after revision, the addition of notes, explanatory pamphlets, revised prefaces, post-faces and indices and the compilation of condensed résumés in the form of "Moral and Instructive Sentiments" all in a desperate attempt to control the meaning of his own authorial production.9 It is abundantly clear that the novel was, from the point of view of its author, massively subject to misreading; Richardson was dismayed by the incomprehension of his readers, and as tireless in his efforts to understand the source of the problem as he was relentless in his strategies to militate against it. The tendency is, of course, to focus on the deluded aspects of this forlorn contest, but it is also possible to interpret it in terms of a struggle between two discourses, each of them, in different ways capable of assigning value to literature. If this is the case, and if Richardson is firmly aligned with one of those discourses (that which, as the violence of the conflict suggests, is under siege) it seems likely that such a struggle would spill over into the body of the text itself. A closer reading of the texts which circulate in and around the text of Clarissa (Richardson's policy of strategic citation), in fact makes this clear. The number of texts cited directly and indirectly over the course of the long novel are legion. In a study which pre-dated, and is thus somewhat dated by, most of the important work on moral sentiments theory and the novel, Margaret Anne Doody drew attention the thematic significance of the numerous citations from Restoration theatre which occur in the novel - particularly the references to the plays of Lee and Dryden. It seems clear that Richardson modelled the letter exchanges between the rakes "upon the published letters of the Restoration rakes and wits, such as Rochester and Etherege."10 The question which had troubled some of Richardson's correspondents, that is to say how such a virtuous man could have dreamt up so much evil, finds here an at least partial response. But far more to the point is the explicit codification of 9. The full title of Richardson's condensed résumé of his books is A Collection of Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison (London, 1755). 10. Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974) 130. WHAT DID CLARISSA HARLOWE READ? 107 Restoration literature implied by its association with the character of Lovelace and his fellow rakes. That Richardson should have been hostile to the licentious drama of the Restoration comes as a surprise to no one, of course, but that he found a place for a critique of that literature and gave the subject thematic development within the novel is worthy of note. But before turning to the critique of literature it is worth examining some of the references to religious texts which punctuate the text - a citation practice which has for the main part escaped the notice of the critics. When Clarissa sends for money to Anna, she receives fifty guineas in the pages of Norris's Miscellanies. The Miscellanies, was a popular collection of poems by John Norris of Bemerton, an Anglican priest and philosopher known for his blend of Cambridge Platonism, and as the principal English exponent of the philosophy of Malebranche. He was also, and the fact would have appealed to Richardson as will become apparent, the author of a very popular response to Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious.11 The reference to Norris in fact sets the scene for the more detailed evocation of religious literature which takes place a few pages later when Clarissa arrives at Mrs Sinclair's. Despite Lovelace's careful stage-managing of events, Clarissa has not been entirely taken in by the brothel keeper and her minions who have been presented to her as a devout widow aunt and her nieces, and is becoming increasingly disturbed by the "freedoms" and general behaviour of Lovelace.12 Her disquiet, however, is in a measure relieved by the contents of the bookshelf she finds in her room: "I have turned over the books I have found in my closet," she says, "and am not a little pleased with them; and think the better of the people of the house for their sakes" (Clarissa 525). In total eight religious works are referred to: "Stanhope's Gospels; Sharp's, Tillotson's and South's Sermons; Nelson's Feastes and Fasts; a sacramental piece of the Bishop of Man, and another of Dr Gauden, Bishop of Exeter; and Inett's Devotions. " The authors figuring in the list fall into one of two pretty evenly represented categories - they are either High Church or Latitudinarian - and it might seem difficult to draw many doctrinal conclusions from a list which is, in terms of Protestant church history, finally quite heterogeneous. However, the most striking, 11. John Norris, An Account of Reason and Faith in relation to the Mysteries of Christianity (London, 1697). It seems to have been well-received, and had gone into thirteen editions by 1728. See DNB 41: 132-34. 12. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, 1747-48, ed. Angus Ross (Harmonds worth: Penguin, 1985) 525. 108 ORLA SMYTH because least banal, aspect of the list is the fairly generous representation of Latitudinarians, and most notable of all the inclusion of Tillotson, the leading Latitudinarian of his day.13 Readers of Richardson will be sensitive to the general conformity of Protestantism conceived along Latitudinarian lines with the general impression we get of the author's thought in reading his novels. An important aspect of that theological affiliation may, however, be less apparent to contemporary readers than it would have been to more astute readers of Richardson's time, and that is the significance of the Latitudinarian combat waged against Deism. The Latitudinarians can be distinguished, as they were by contemporaries, from their more orthodox High Church colleagues, by their latitude - a term which must be understood not as denoting general doctrinal leniency but rather as concerns the issues generating division within the ranks of Protestantism itself. Toleration, if the word is at all appropriate, derived its meaning as strategic necessity, and was inspired by the need to wage more effective war against the twin-headed monster of Deism and Roman Catholicism. Looking at the work of Richardson the printer, it becomes clear how much more than a luke-warm champion he was of this particular cause. In 1732 Richardson publishes John Conybeare's A Defence of Reveal'd Religion against the Conceptions of Tindal, and Patrick Delany's Revelation examin'd with Candour - both were responses to Tindal's Christianity as Old as Creation, and as such anti-Deist manifestos. He also publishes the writer of The Case of Reason; or, Natural Religion Fairly and Fully Stated in Answer to TindalVs Christianity as Old as Creation, and in 1735 he publishes the anonymous, and not flattering, account of The Religious, Rational and Moral Conduct of Matthew Tindal. In 1736 he publishes the work of a leading anti-Deist, Philip Skelton's Some Proposals for the Revival of Christianity and in 1749 Skelton's Ophiomaches; or, Deism Reveal'd.14 In 1756 he publishes John Leland's A View of the Principal Deistical Writers and finally, in the same year, the Supplement to the Deistical Writers and Peter Peckard's A Dissertation on Revelations }s 13. On Latitudinarianism, see Martin I. J. Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, ed. Richard H. Popkin and Lila Freedman (Leiden: Brill, 1992); and also W. M. Spellman's somewhat apologetic, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660-1700 (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993). 14. "Collins and Toland, Chubb and Shaftesbury are sharply dealt with," comments the DNB 52: 333-34. 15. In 1741 Richardson published Thomas Wilson's The Knowledge of Christianity Made Easy, Wilson was a friend and correspondent of John Leland whose principal anti- WHAT DID CLARISSA HARLOWE READ ? 109 While it is clear that it might often be dangerous policy to associate in any absolute way the views of a printer with the works printed on his premises, Richardson seems to have enjoyed considerable liberty of choice in this respect. As William Sale remarked in the 1930's, "while it would be absurd to contend that Richardson forthrightly espoused the position or the cause of every author for whom he printed ... it is difficult to find among the books that he printed any that were written in support of a position that he thoroughly repudiated."16 Sale was also led to remark the strong anti-Deist cast of Richardson the publisher: "A list could be made of the enemies of deism for whom Richardson printed, but one would look in vain to find a work of a professed deist that was printed by him."17 Richardson's correspondence testifies to his caution when it came to questions potentially divisive on the religious front, but he broke his rule of epistolary silence on such issues to recommend to a French correspondent the work of his friend Philip Skelton, Ophiomaches; or, Deism Revealed (1749).18 The fact that Richardson was a confirmed anti-Deist might be of limited historical interest were it not for the fact that it raises important questions concerning the early history of the novel and the role in its history of moral sentiments theory. For obvious chronological reasons, the study of Richardson in terms of moral sentiments theory has relied primarily on an affinity of ideas between the author and two of Adam Smith's most important precursors: Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, and David Hume.19 Both men play an important role in the eighteenth-century rehabilitation of non-rational or affective experience Deist writing, A View of the Principal Deistical Writers, was written as a series of letters to Wilson, and was published at Wilson's expense (DNB 62: 142). Richardson was also significantly involved in anti-Methodist printing - he published William Law's The Oxford Methodists and in 1740 William Bowman's The Imposture ofMethodism Display'd. 16. William Merritt Sale, Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographical Record ofHis Literary Careerwith Historical Notes (New Haven: Yale UP, 1936) 121. 17. Sale 121. 18. Richardson, Correspondence 5: 275 ("Have you seen two volumes, called Déisme Revealed, 'tis a well written piece, and much approved here. I think it is not harsh against the religion of France, but scourges our infidels, sceptics, deists, etc. as well by name as works; and may give you in France a good notion of many of our English writers of note"). 19. Shaftesbury had published A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm in 1708, his Inquiry Concerning Virtue in 1711, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times in 1711 and Second Characters in 1714 (see note below). David Hume had published his Essays, moral and political, vols. 1 and 2 in 1741 and 1742 respectively. And the third part appeared in Three Essays Moral and Political. Never before published. Which compleats [sic] the Former Edition, in 2 vols in 1748. He quietly published A Treatise of Human Nature in 1739-40. 110 ORLA SMYTH and both contest the Hobbesian (and later Mandevillian) models of competitive and essentially hostile social relations to theorise social being in terms of natural bonding. No recent study of Richardson in terms of the sentimental novel has omitted to cite Shaftesbury and Hume as significant to understanding the phenomenon of which he was ostensibly a part. To suppose an intellectual affiliation between Richardson and either of these thinkers presents, however, certain distinct problems. Recent scholarly work on Shaftesbury has tended to concentrate on his theorisation of sociability and on his influence on aesthetic thought. For contemporaries of Richardson, on the other hand, Shaftesbury was perhaps best known as a Deist.20 Critics have chosen to overlook the incongruity of associating Richardson with such a figure and have pounced instead on the significance of the fact that Richardson even refers to Shaftesbury. It is, of course, a relatively certain sign that Richardson has read Shaftesbury, but it seems highly questionable to suppose that it should be read as a sign of influence. Shaftesbury is evoked by Lovelace, or more accurately in the course of a letter, quite early on in the novel, in which Clarissa relates a discussion which took place between herself and Lovelace. The latter has declared his intention to reform and his belief that "a life of virtue can afford such pleasures [as] on reflexion . . . will be for ever blooming, for ever new!" {Clarissa 443). Clarissa has been unable to suppress a look of surprise bordering on incredulity, but Lovelace, anxious to bring home the point, summons to his aid the fact that, even in the wildest of his deviations, he has never gone so far as to cast aspersions upon religion: In the midst of my wild vagaries, said he, I have ever preserved a reverence for religion and for religious men. I always called another cause, when any of my libertine companions, in pursuance of Lord Shaftesbury's test (which is a part of the rake's creed and what I may call the whetstone of infidelity) endeavoured to turn the sacred subject into ridicule. On this very account I have been called by good men of the clergy, who nevertheless would have it that I was a practical rake, the decent rake: and indeed I had too much pride in my shame to disown the name. {Clarissa 443) 20. Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue in Two Discourses. (I: "Of Virtue and the Belief of a Deity"; H: "Of the Obligations and Virtue"); an unauthorised edition published by John Toland 1699. Reedited by David Walford, (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1977). For the complete works of Shaftesbury see the Standard Edition: Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings in English with German Translation, ed. and trans. Wolfram Benda, Gerd Hemmerich, and Ulrich Schlodbauer, 6 vols. (Stuttgart-BadCannstadt: Frommann-Holzbooge, 1981-). WHAT DID CLARISSA HARLOWE READ ? 1 11 The reference to Shaftesbury is not very exact, but it is entirely consistent with Richardson's thinking that the declared Deist should find himself associated with the very worst excesses of rakishness - depths of depravity to which even the demonic Lovelace would not sink.21 If Richardson had reason to be suspicious of a theory emerging as it did from such a source, he was not likely to be more enamoured of its principal exponent, his own contemporary, the philosopher David Hume, declared atheist. In the course of a correspondence with his friend the Reverend Mr. Peckard, and for whom he was printing the latest pious work, Richardson suggested that while he understood his reasons for using the term "impudent liar" to designate David Hume, he thought the term might perhaps not be quite appropriate in the writings of a "pious and Christian divine." He hastened to confirm however that he also considered him a very "mischievous" writer, and that, of course, he too'Very much dislike[d] Mr Hume" "for his attempts to sap the foundations of our common Christianity."22 If then finally we are driven to conclude that any straight-forward assimilation of Richardson with the main current of moral sentiments theory is, at the very least, problematic, the question remains as to what he was doing manipulating a language which could be so easily confounded with it. Put into a wider context the question bears on the rehabilitation of affectivity and its significance to understanding the rise of the novel. It is thus time to return to the Latitudinarians. Back in the 1930's, Ronald S. Crane wrote an important article on the intellectual origins of the vogue for sentimental novels.23 In that article he forcefully argued: [the] key to the popular triumph of 'sentimentalism' toward 1750 [was] to be sought not so much in the teaching of individual lay moralists after 1700 [such as Shaftesbury], as in the combined influence of numerous Anglican divines of the Latitudinarian traditionwho, from the Restoration onward into the eighteenth century, had preached to their congregations and, through their books, to the larger public, essentially the same ethics of benevolence, 'good nature' and 'tender sentimental feeling.'24 21. Shaftesbury was not an atheist but a Deist, but it is clear that from Richardson's perspective the two terms are, to all intents and purposes, synonymous. 22. Richardson, Correspondence 5: 109. 23. Ronald S. Crane "Suggestions toward a Genealogy of the 'Man of Feeling,'" ELH 1.3 (1934): 205-30. Rpt in Crane, The Idea of the Humanities (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1967). The fate of Crane's article has been a little strange, for while it is systematically cited, it has had very little influence on the leading interpretations of the history involved. 24. Crane 207-08. 112 ORLA SMYTH It is unnecessary here to go over that ground (it is clear that we can consider Richardson to have been well versed in that body of literature), what remains worth exploring are the consequences of situating Richardson, and, by implication, other novelists of the early decades, in a current of sentimental thought whose genealogy and teleology were religious and not secular. Martin C. Battestin is one of very few eighteenth-century scholars to have examined in detail the threat to Renaissance and Christian humanist aesthetic theory posed by modern epistemology and the consequences of that narrowly-missed crisis for Augustan theories of representation.25 The epistemological bases upon which Renaissance Neo-Platonist theories of imitation rested dissolved spontaneously in the context of Empiricist as indeed of Cartesian epistemology. Battestin calls attention to the ways in which this crisis was quickly defused as the poets and aestheticians of mid-seventeenth century seized the importance of the possibilities opened up by the Newtonian scientific validation of the ancient argument from design and the idea of world harmony. Battestin is doubtless right also when he argues that when Fielding and Sterne attempt to elevate the status of the novel, they are essentially attempting to incorporate the novel within the field of the newly-rehabilitated Christian humanist aesthetic theory.26 Nevertheless it is no accident that those attempts should have been, and should have been perceived as, only halfsuccessful rescue operations. While Newtonian science provided rich matter from which to theorise poetic, artistic and architectural regularities, it was unpropitious ground from which to launch a legitimating discourse for the amorphous novel. In fact it was quite another aspect of this intellectual development which proved determinant for the novel - for the novelists of the early part of the century and of whom Richardson is such a telling example. If the dissemination of Hobbesian Materialism and Lockean Empiricism 25. Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974). See in particular chapter one. 26. It is difficult however to concur with Battestin that "[b]efore mid-century, certainly, it was Newton, not Locke, who exerted the most profound influence upon contemporary thought, making empirically respectable the marriage between theology and aesthetics that had long obtained" (15). If the argument I am making is correct that the albeit mitigated rehabilitation of human nature as conceptualised in Latitudinarian thought generates a para-aesthetic discourse of its own, that discourse is itself, while not Lockean in terms of inspiration, nonetheless deeply responsive to his epistemology - the Latitutinarians, deeply "modern," thought within and in response to that epistemological framework. WHAT DID CLARISSA HARLOWE READ ? 113 threatened the Neo-Platonic bases of humanist aesthetic theory, a more immediate concern in the minds of contemporaries was the unconditional dénégation of "good" human nature - a principle of which the ethicoreligious consequences were intolerable. An unexpected repercussion or even backlash of this development was the increasing tendency in Protestant, and particularly Latitudinarian, circles to theorise in more benevolent terms the positive potential of human nature.27 For the novel, this shift in emphasis was decisive. Stigmatised from time immemorial for its tendency to arouse the passions, the intellectual and theological transvaluation of human nature,even if conditional (as in the theological sphere it very much was), invested the novel with a value inconceivable in any previous conceptual framework. By the time Richardson is codifying as diabolic the Restoration theatrical and literary tradition, that literature is living on in the after-life of a humanist discourse in which the term pleasure continued to function as a criterion of value. The least one can say is that, from the context in which Richardson is writing, such a situation is utterly foreign and alien. We are probably justified in saying that his incomprehension is total. It would be easy of course to point to his lack of a classical education, and that fact is surely not irrelevant, but it is also worth bearing in mind that a great number of novelists writing before Richardson, had been similarly excluded from that tradition. When Richardson launches a critique of literature, his own theory of the value of fictive representation is sufficiently coherent for him to be able to oppose two radically divergent conceptions of the value of literature. If we look again at the books which Clarissa is pleased to find on the bookshelf in Mrs Sinclair's we get an interesting picture of the corpus of texts which might find favour within the terms of the Richardsonian conception of literary value. Clarissa's attention is drawn first, of course, by the "devout books" which appear there, but she is also quite pleased with a second category of books, those "of a lighter turn," which are, she says, "not ill-chosen": 27. It might be objected that the Protestant rehabilitation of human nature should be conceived in more linear terms, and in terms of continuity with respect to Renaissance humanism. The theologians of Great Tew and their opposition to Calvinist predestination would be cited in this context - predating notably Hobbes. Recent scholarship is inclined to stress the specifically "modenTdimension of the Cambridge Platonists and their work as a response to Hobbesian mechanism, as well as their significant commitment to modern science. For the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rise of Voluntarism and its relation to mechanism, see James Tulr/s article, "Governing Conduct," Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988) 12-71. 114 ORLA SMYTH a Telemachus in French, another in English; Steele's, Rowe's and Shakespeare's plays; that genteel comedy of Mr Cibber, The Careless Husband, and others of the same author; Dryden's Miscellanies; the Tatlers, Spectators and Guardians, Pope's and Swift's and Addison's works. (Clarissa 526) It is no surprise to find Richardson's virtuous heroine advocating the reformed theatre of the post-Collier period - the exemplary drama which, without officially breaking with classical doctrine, effectively supplanted it and depended on evaluative criteria utterly foreign to that doctrine.28 The inclusion of Pope in the list of exemplary authors might well be interpreted as a somewhat tactical move, for while Pope was led to speak of Richardson in very favourable terms, the novelist was not generally inclined to return the favour.29 We can admire the fact that Pope did not . . 28. There is not the space here to enter into a detailed discussion of developments taking place in theatre - the important point is that "sentimentalisnï'is already influencing drama at the end of the seventeenth century. As Arthur H. Scouten remarks, both the witcomedy and tragedy of Restoration theatre espoused a pessimistic view of the nature of man and portrayed human relations as essentially hostile (The Restoration and 18th Century [Chicago: St. James P, 1985]). The association of the exemplary literature of the early eighteenth century with "sentimentalism" has been disputed (see, for example, Calhoun Winton, "Sentimentalism and Theater Reform in the Early Eighteenth Century," Quick Springs of Sense: Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Larry S. Champion [Athens: U of Georgia P, 1974]), but it is crucial to recognise the rising prominence of sentimental thought in fictive representation as a consequence of the legitimation crisis. The real form of the tension was already apparent in Colliers's Defence of the Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage . (1699). Although Collier generally invokes the authority of the classical tradition in support of his essentially religious and moral critique of contemporary theatre, it is clear that such authority has only complementary or even strategic value - should conflict emerge between religious authorities and the privileged theorists of classical theatre, there is little doubt as to which side should be attributed greater weight: "And when Revelation says one thing, and Paganism another, how are we to determine? Is not an Apostle's Testimony more cogent than that of a Philosopher, and the New Testament above all the Rules of Aristotle and Horace?" (9). Although for considerable time to come lip-service will occasionally be paid to classicism, the demands being placed on theatre, as on novelistic representation, were only with great difficulty made seem to coincide with classical criteria. Notable among the divergences between the two discourses was the place of pleasure: responding to Congreve's defence of theatre in which he had invoked pleasure as a ground of comedy, Collier was quick to point out that such a value was of an entirely secondary order: "I can't but take notice of [Congreve's] saying, that the business of Comedy is to delight, as well as instruct: If he means as much, by as well, he is mistaken. For Delight is but the secondary End of Comedy, as I have prov'd at large" (9) (italics in the original). 29. Pope is cited in Barbauld's edition of Richardson's correspondence: "it was in the power of Richardson alone, to teach us at once esteem and detestation; to make virtuous resentment overpower all the benevolence which wit and elegance and courage, naturally excite; and to loose at last the hero in the villain (Correspondence 1: cviii). Aaron Hill wrote WHAT DID CLARISSA HARLOWE READ ? 115 dismiss out of hand a novel that was written in terms of a conception of literature so utterly foreign from his own, but it is not difficult to see that in reality a chasm separated the literary universes of the two men. The fact that Richardson had only disobliging words for his fellow novelists Fielding and Sterne is well-known, and it is of course possible to attribute such bad grace to a writer's pique - it probably makes more sense however to recognise real incomprehension on the part of Richardson. If Richardson felt that the literary value of the writings of Sarah Fielding surpassed that of her brother's, it is because those novels corresponded far more faithfully to his understanding of the value of fictional representation.30 What then was that conception of literature, and what was its importance in terms of the rise of the novel? So deeply entrenched was the tendency to dismiss eighteenth-century "moralism" as a misunderstanding of literary value, that it is only recently and in the context of work on sentimentalism that we are beginning to understand the intellectual history of that development. The concentration of scholarship on mid-century events presents however certain problems. As Crane so persuasively demonstrated, the principal themes and principles associated with the leading moral sentiment theorists were to be found, minus a little philosophical rigour, in the enormous body of religious literature to Richardson: "it gives me no surprise to find you thinking he was in the wane of his popularity. It arose, originally but from meditated little personal assiduities, and a certain bladdery swell of management; He did not blush to have the cunning to blow himself up by help of dull, unconscious instruments whenever he would seem to sail as if his own wind moved him" {Correspondence 1: 105). Richardson responded that "Mr Pope's ... genius is not native nor inventive; it is a verbal flexibility of expressiveness, that now and then throws such light on his couplets; He can add a door or a window to another man's house; but he would build very badly on a new plan, or model of his own disposition. He must have something to lean against or would not move without falling. His imagination therefore is weak and defective" (1: 110). Toward the end of Clarissa, Richardson allows himself to compare favourably his own description of Mrs Sinclair's death, with a similar death scene in Swift: "Whoever has seen Dean Swift's Lady's Dressing Room will think this description of Mr Belford not only more natural but more decent painting as well as better justified by the design, and by the use that may be made of it" {Clarissa 1388). 30. There is a great deal more that could be said on the Richardson's policy of strategic citation in Clarissa, notably on the way in which classical literature gets figured in that novel (on the whole, not favourably, of course). Richardson's relation to Dryden is also complex, a fact which bears necessarily on Dryden's conversion to Catholicism. The passage to The History of Sir Charles Grandison is also doubtless deeply instructive on the shift that is taking place. But this paper is already long, and that work must be left for another day. 116 ORLA SMYTH coming from the pens of the Latitudinarian divines, and that alreday in the XVIIth century. Literary historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have long been aware of the extent of the stigma attached to the novel. The principal charge laid to the account of the novel, as indeed of all literature, but most especially the novel, was the pernicious arousing of the passions. We know also the long history of the Horacian principle of instructing with pleasure, a line of defence which remained persistently fragile. What remains in need of greater critical understanding is the significance of the mid-seventeenth century theological shift of emphasis whereby theology encounters in mirrorimage its own time-honoured stance on the irredeemable depravity of human nature, and recoils in horror. The U-turn is only partial of course and there is no question of abandoning the principle of human fallennes, but Protestant theologians, and particularly those identified by contemporaries as Latitudinarian, begin theorising the positive potential of human nature in ways that are markedly new. When Richardson and other early eighteenth-century writers, and most notably Addison, intone with conviction a worn-out saw of aesthetic theory, they are responding to a theological context which has endowed that axiom with unprecedented cogency. One of the most important consequences of a oetter understanding of the religious, as opposed to secular, nature of the sentimental language Richardson draws on, is that it illuminates the nature of the relation obtaining between moral sentiments theory and the novel. That relation has for too long been described in terms of reflection, as if the novel drew on social theory for thematic inspiration - in fact the history of the novel was intimately tied to that of the conceptual rehabilitation of human nature, and that for reasons which bore in the first instance on its own status as fictional representation. It was only in a logical second time that the socio-political dimensions of that rehabilitation - the current of thought we designate by the term moral sentiments - came in contact with the related discourse which the novel had already made its own,and that encounter was celebrated in a deluge of sentimental novels in the 1760's. That those two discourses, despite apparent affinity, were not reducible one to the other, is abundantly illustrated in Richardson's perplexed skirmishes with his all-too-many "misreaders." Several important indices of Richardson's real conceptual allegiances can be quickly identified. There is, first of all, his continued recourse to the textual metaphor reinforcing the opposition between authorial means and ends: that of the WHAT DID CLARISSA HARLOWE READ ? 117 sugared pill.31 The discourse of the "good heart" and fine "sensibility," which will in later novels structure the moral scheme, is here designed to function within, and finally in subservience to, a stringently religious ethic, deeply "rationalist" in emphasis.32 Another significant indicator of this point of variance is the importance accorded at a thematic level to "conscience" - Richardson's deep commitment, from an ethical point of view, to the integrity of the individual human will.33 But the most eloquent illustration of the incompatibility of the premisses underlying the allegorical and the sentimental text, authorial means becoming readerly ends, takes place in the correspondence. Clarissa we know appeared in serial publication, and Richardson was kept abreast of reader response by means of his network of concerned correspondents. Advance copies frequently found their way to these privileged interlocutors, and Richardson was not above sending out teasing hints about the future course of the action - playing God, as one of his correspondents complained to another. When, early on his writing career, Richardson received a letter from readers desiring an introduction to Pamela, he suspected someone might be pulling his leg, but by the time he was engaged in administering the fate of his next heroine, Richardson was well used to, and seemed to be enjoying, his role as Pygmalion. Most of the conflict of those exchanges was, from Richardson's perspective, only apparent - debates concerning the moral value of the respective characters and their actions were the sign not of failed authorial purpose but, on the contrary, its successful achievement Richardson's ideal reader was s/he who had passed from seductive engagement with the text to rational discussion of the ethical implications of conduct. Nevertheless, not all of the conflict between Richardson and his readers could be subsumed under the heading of fruitful discussion, and these latter encounters were the symptoms of a discord that was quite as real as it was apparent. It was in those exchanges that the fundamental irreconcilability of a secular with a religious moral scheme made themselves manifest. The form of this disagreement became discernible in two debates that were generated by the serial publication of Clarissa. We are going to look 31. As Richardson put it in a letter to Lady Echlin: "Instruction, Madam, is the pill; amusement is the gilding" {Correspondence 5: 60). 32. For the "rationalism" of the leading Latitudinarians, see chapters five and six of Griffin's study. 33. See in particular Tony Tanner's article, "The Triumph of the Will," Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979) 100-12. 118 ORLA SMYTH at that debate as it materialised between Richardson and one of his readers, but we have ample illustration both from the correspondence and from the magazines, that such was the extent of discussion of the novel, that we have every reason to consider it a public debate.34 From the very beginning of her career, and such was the fate that was being meted out to her, Clarissa was never in need of readers earnestly pleading for clemency, but of all her misfortunes none could of course rival that of her rape and that of her death, and of all her defenders none was more spirited than Lady Bradshaigh. At the early stages of their correspondence, and still in the guise of an anonymous but concerned reader, Lady Bradshaigh seems to have thought she could negotiate a kind of compromise solution with the hard-hearted author inflicting such unthinkable hardship on his virtuous heroine. She was, she says, and under duress, willing to concede the possibility of making the heroine die, but under no circumstances could she possibly consent to having her raped. Rallying to her aid the support of Mr Cibber she presented her request in no uncertain terms: But now, Sir, I must fairly own with Mr. Cibber I cannot bear the thought of the lady's person being contaminated. If she must die; if her heart must break for being so deceived, let her make a triumphant exit, arrayed in white-robed purity . . . Spare her virgin purity, dear Sir spare it! Consider if this wounds both Mr Cibber and me (who neither of us set up for immaculate chastity) what must it do with those who possess that inestimable treasure? {Correspondence 2: 130-31) This was only the beginning of a long series of letters in which Lady Bradshaigh patiently discussed the various pros and cons of the situation and, carefully framing her case in terms of the known disposition of her antagonist, summed up such a battery of arguments as she clearly felt were bound to sway even the most the recaltritant of opponents. She was to be little pleased by the results of all her pains: O Sir I have been prevailed upon to read a part of your story, that I thought would have torn my heart in a thousand pieces. You have drawn a villain above nature; and you make that villain a sensible man, with many good qualities, and you have declared him not an unbeliever; Indeed, Sir, I am more out of conceit with your scheme than ever; it must do harm, indeed it must . . . Dear Sir if it be possible - yet, recall the dreadful sentence, bring it as near as you please but prevent it. Do, dear Sir, it is too shocking and barbarous a story for publication; I wish I 34. See Robert Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962). WHAT DID CLARISSA HARLOWE READ ? 119 could not think of it. Blot out but one night, and the villainous laudanum, and all may be well again. She finished her letter "as mad as the poor injured Clarissa," pronouncing the final threat "[I] am afraid I cannot help hating you, if you alter not your scheme" {Correspondence 4: 201). Despite her declared intention of leaving the rest of the book unread, and various pleas to Richardson to stop sending the volumes, Lady Bradshaigh continued reading, and, as time went by, and with equal vehemence, pleaded in turn "some more years of happiness in this world" for the heroine, and reform and marriage for Lovelace. Having lost every battle in turn, Lady Bradshaigh finally confided to the author that their points of view were utterly irreconcilable and she went off to write herself an ending to the novel more in conformity with her own taste and beliefs. While the appeals for leniency launched by Lady Bradshaigh had been ingenious in their variety, the rejoinders of Richardson were singular for their sameness - he was writing a religious novel and the plan of his novel was in all respects in conformity with that "system": A writer who follows nature, and pretends to keep the Christian system in his eye, cannot make a heaven in this world for his favourites, or represent this life otherwise than as a state of probation. Clarissa, I once more aver, could not be rewarded in this world. To have given her reward here, as in a happy marriage, would have been as if a poet had placed his catastrophe in the third act of his play, when the audience, were obliged to expect no more; what greater moral proof can be given of a world after this, for the rewarding of suffering virtue, and for the punishing of oppressive vice, than the inequalities in the distribution of rewards and punishments here below. {Correspondence 4: 225)35 35. Richardson repeated this argument in a variety of places, but notably in the postscript to the second edition: it was a work, he said, "designed to inculcate upon the human mind, under the guise of an amusement, the great lessons of Christianity, in an age like the present; which seem to expect from the poets and dramatic writers (that is to say, from the authors of works of invention) that they should make it one of their principal rules to propagate another sort of dispensation, under the name of poetical justice, than that with which God by Revelation teaches us he has thought fit to exercise mankind; whom, placing here only in state of probation, he hath so intermingled good and evil as to necessitate them to look forward for a more equal distribution of both. The history or rather the dramatic narrative of CLARISSA, is formed on this religious plan" {Clarissa 1495). In Nicholas Rowe and the Christian Tragedy (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1977), J. Douglas Canfield argued that distributive justice was an innovation at the end of the seventeenth century (see chapter one, "Prolegomena: The Ambitious Stepmother, 'Poetical Justice1 and the 'Trial of Man"1 [13-44]). If such is the case, it provides interesting support of the argument I am presenting. Canfield provides an extensive bibliography of related 120 ORLA SMYTH The confusion had of course been general, and Lady Bradshaigh was far from being alone in her failure to understand the text she was reading. If Hume has a role here, and he does, it is because Richardson has had the time to take the measure of the Humean challenge to religious moral categories, and is determined to give it the lie: the grounding of a moral order in the subjective responses of individual human beings is, as Richardson knows, tantamount to no moral "order" at all. Refusing to give such a "reading" purchase, Clarissa must suffer and she must die. It is precisely the very incommensurability that severs the world of human experience from that of divine being that guarantees the inviolability of that order - it is, in Richardson's words, its greatest "moral proof"36 The point seemed infuriatingly difficult to bring home, and Richardson had just set out on his work of revision and indexing and summarising and explaining. But he never took the measure of his real opponent, the historical development which meant that the affective language he had chosen to exploit was in the process of generating a socio-political coherence of its own. In 1759 Adam Smith was to publish his Theory of Moral Sentiments, and it was around that text that all subsequent exploration of the political implications of moral sentiment theory would turn.37 That secular morality would rapidly subsume and substitute itself for the Christian system for which Clarissa was, finally, a long and unknowing swansong. But the very movement which dislocated that text from its underpinning, and which was to guarantee it generations of misreaders, was to be the same as that which finally endowed literature with meaning and value in modern civil society. In the same year as he published his Theory, Smith was delivering his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to the students primary and secondary sources. In Rhetorics of Order/Ordering Rhetorics in English Neoclassical Literature (ed. Canfield and Paul Hunter [Newark: U of Delaware P, 1989]) Canfield further discussed the implications of "poetical injustice" (see "Poetical Injustice in Some Neglected Masterpieces of Restoration Drama" [23-45]). 36. The term moral here has to be understood in in terms of "modern epistemology" as endorsed by the Latitudinarian theologians, see John G. A. Pocock's article in Lund 3353. 37. In France, it was notably Condorcefs daughter, Sophie de Grouchy, who undertook the translation: Théorie des sentiments moraux (Paris, [l'an VI] 1795). I am deeply indebted to Jim Livesey for these remarks, and for pointing out to me the necessity of signalling Adam Smith as the crucial turning-point in the development I am analysing. His forthcoming book From Virtue to Happiness; Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Harvard UP) will, among other things, elucidate the implications of this intellectual trajectory for France. WHAT DID CLARISSA HARLOWE READ? 121 of the University of Glasgow, the "first significant university programme devoted to the analysis of English literary discourse."38 This is the context in which literature, and the novel in particular, will finally find its niche, a place of its own among the newly-emergent "human sciences." We are still in the process of unravelling the implications of this development for our own understanding of literature, but in this paper I have been looking at the early stages of this history, when a body of literature conceived of itself in terms of another legitimating discourse for fiction - one which was grounded in the rehabilitation of affectivity generated in, and determined by, a religious framework. Orla SMYTH Université de Rouen 38. See Robert Crawford, éd., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998); and in particular the article by Ian Duncan: "Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson and the institutions of English" (37-54). An up-to-date bibliography on the subject can be gleaned from the footnotes to the articles in that collection.