David E. Shuttleton – författare

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), among the most important and influential English novelists, was also a prolific letter writer. Beyond its extraordinary range, his correspondence holds special interest as that of a practising epistolary novelist, who thought long and hard about the letter as a form. The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson is the first complete edition of his letters. The present volume contains his correspondences with Dr George Cheyne and Thomas Edwards, linked not only by their pronounced medical content but also by their generally unguarded character. An early admirer of Richardson's Pamela (1740-41), Cheyne elicits some of the novelist's most significant statements concerning his own literary practice and tastes. Edwards, an astute literary critic as well as notable sonneteer, draws Richardson into expressing some remarkable insights as a close reader of poetry and prose.

Smallpox was a much feared disease until modern times, responsible for many deaths worldwide and reaching epidemic proportions amongst the British population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This book is a substantial critical study of the literary representation of the disease and its victims between the Restoration and the development of inoculation against smallpox around 1800. David Shuttleton draws upon a wide range of canonical texts including works by Dryden, Johnson, Steele, Goldsmith and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the latter having experimented with vaccination against smallpox. He reads these texts alongside medical treatises and the rare, but moving writings of smallpox survivors, showing how medical and imaginative writers developed a shared tradition of figurative tropes, myths and metaphors. This fascinating study uncovers the cultural impact of smallpox, and the different ways writers found to come to terms with the terror of disease and death.