John A. Dussinger - Böcker

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.

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), renowned master printer and celebrated English novelist, wrote hundreds of letters during his lifetime. The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson is the first complete edition of these letters. This volume contains his correspondences, many published for the first time, with three very different young women, all seeking to find their voice within family and society while corresponding with a celebrated author and moralist. Sarah Wescomb and Frances Grainger, two young, unmarried correspondents, sought paternal advice from the middle-aged author and in the process contested stances taken in his novels. Laetitia Pilkington, an accused adulteress, offers poignant glimpses into an impoverished woman's struggles to survive in Grub Street. The scholarly apparatus in this volume provides ample information about these three women's lives and their milieu, giving fascinating insights into eighteenth-century English social and literary history.

During the first two decades of his career, Richardson’s role as printer was hardly limited to setting the type for the periodicals that issued from his shop. Perhaps the most glaring evidence of his intervention in producing text is the fact that both The True Briton (1723-24) and The Weekly Miscellany (1732-41) just happen to have letters supposedly from women who protest the legal restraints against their participation in the public sphere. Neither the Duke of Wharton, the owner of The True Briton, nor William Webster, the desperately impecunious producer of The Weekly Miscellany, launched their journals with the objective of advancing radical views about political equality for women. But almost inadvertently this middle-aged, rotund printer at Salisbury Court was quietly feminizing journalism. After his first experiments in Wharton’s anti-Walpole journal he developed his satiric powers in the Miscellany by creating not only his own feisty counterpart to Pope’s coquette Belinda but even partnering with Sarah Chapone’s subversive Delia. As an outlier in what was perceived to be a corrupt, predatory political world, Richardson readily assumed a female voice to express his resistance.