Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (5 page)

On the death of Martha in 1731, and that of the last of their surviving children, Richardson remarried in 1733. His second wife, Elizabeth, bore him five daughters and a son (who died in infancy). Like the first, it was a prudent match: she is described as ‘a plain and pleasant woman, with no pretensions to intellect or elegance’. In the same year as his second marriage, the first work Richardson is known to have written was published –
The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum
(1733). Richardson had, at the time, five apprentices living in his house – some of whom he was emotionally close to. His advice is sensible, informed, and expectedly severe on such delinquencies as drinking, theatres and wenching.

As the decade progressed, Richardson was an increasingly respected figure in the London book trade. His business received a boost with the commission to print the multi-volume
Journals of the House of Commons
. His personal health, however, deteriorated as his fortunes rose. There was a dangerous tendency to ‘Rotundity and Liquor’ and the early onset of what is now assumed to be Parkinson’s disease. By the age of fifty, Richardson is described by his biographers as ‘a comfortable family man who from very small beginnings had worked his way up in the world until he was one of the leading printers in London’. How, though, did he manage to become a leading novelist? How, even more surprisingly, did he inject himself into the psychology of a fifteen-year-old girl?

It may be that health was a factor. Writing in his closet was less arduous than
being in the workshop, whose smooth running he could delegate to an ‘overseer’. Sedentary work had its attractions for a corpulent inactive man with a tireless writing hand. Richardson himself offered two plausible explanations for
Pamela
. Some twenty years before, he had been told ‘about a virtuous serving maid who had married her master’. As Defoe’s
Moll Flanders
records, it was more usual for servant girls to be sexually abused by their masters. In this case, the girl had, unlike Moll, evaded ‘the snares laid for her virtue’ – and gone so far as to threaten drowning herself rather than part with her virginity.

It was, Richardson conceded, a ‘slight foundation’, but it was vivified, coincidentally, by something else. He had been ‘importuned’ by two fellow publishers (‘particular friends’) to write a ‘little book’ advising ‘young folks circumstanced as Pamela was’ (i.e. country servants) how to ‘indite’ well-mannered letters. He had in mind ‘handsome girls’ for whom the traditional ‘snares’ would be laid. An epistolary conduct book was what was intended. ‘Prudence’ was stressed on the title page. For his own amusement, initially, he began to write a novel, in letters, on the subject of a ‘handsome’ young servant girl. In a reminiscence to a friend he offered one of the few domestic glimpses posterity has of him. He had dashed off the first two volumes of what would become
Pamela
in the long dark evenings between November 1739 and January 1740, and ‘While I was writing the two volumes, my worthy-hearted wife, and the young lady who is with us, when I had read them some part of the story, which I had begun without their knowing it, used to come in to my little closet every night, with – “Have you any more of Pamela, Mr R.? We are come to hear a little more of Pamela,” &tc. This encouraged me to prosecute it.’

The plot of
Pamela
is somewhat sarcastically summarised by his biographers: ‘A virtuous servant girl rejects her master’s lewd advances and is kidnapped by him and confined in a lonely country house where she continues to fight him off until he is overcome by her virtue to the extent of proposing matrimony, which is instantly accepted.’ Improbable and banal as the plot was, the novel had genre-enlarging innovations – epistolary narration was one. The technique created immediacy – sometimes, however, with awkwardness. Just as Byron said that no man shaves himself during an earthquake so no young girl carries on writing a letter (even, nowadays, an email) as some ravishing Tarquin lunges at her breasts. Such unlikelihood jars in a postscript to Pamela’s opening letter to her parents:

I have been scared out of my senses; for just now, as I was folding up this letter in my late lady’s dressing-room, in comes my young master! Good sirs! how was I frightened! I went to hide the letter in my bosom; and he, seeing me tremble, said, smiling, To whom have you been writing, Pamela? – I said, in my confusion, Pray your honour forgive me! –

‘Just now’ strikes a false note. None the less there is a freshness and spontaneity in the narrative which still effervesces. It is heightened by a new kind of realism. Richardson presented himself anonymously as merely the ‘editor’ of actual letters, which are to be taken as ‘true’. The other revolutionary feature is inscribed on the novel’s title page:

Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded.

In A Series Of Familiar Letters From A Beautiful Young Damsel,

To Her Parents

Virtue is a word with Roman associations which is, historically, the exclusive property of the aristocrat. Damsels in distress in romance are not, before 1740, fifteen-year-old skivvies who empty the chamber pots and do the housework for their betters.
Pamela
is a revolutionary act of social redefinition.

Richardson published the work anonymously in 1740, intending that only six of his friends, at most, should be let in on the secret of his authorship. But it soon leaked out and enlarged his sphere of social contacts: he became acquainted with Hogarth (who went on to illustrate for him) and friendly with Dr Johnson. The latter admired him extravagantly as the antidote to Fielding. ‘Sir,’ he instructed a not entirely convinced Boswell, ‘there is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson’s than in all
Tom Jones
.’

Pamela
was hugely successful. Two moralistic sequels flopped, however, and for his next major novel Richardson struck out on new ground. At this point in his career he began, he believed, truly to understand the mind of woman.
Clarissa
was circulated in manuscript among friends. Among the more eminent was the poet Edward Young, who concurred with Johnson in believing that ‘this romance will probably do more good than a body of Divinity’. He approved the unhappy ending – others of Richardson’s confidential friends were less sure. There was a general uneasiness about length – he should ‘sweat’ or prune the work into something more manageable. This advice Richardson strenuously ignored – the seven volumes, published serially over 1747–8, come out at a million words.

Clarissa Harlowe is of higher social station than Pamela Andrews. The plot is, however, similar. The heroine’s virtue is under prolonged assault from Lovelace (a rake who seems to have wandered into fiction from the Restoration comedy of Wycherley). He, driven to an extremity of lechery, imprisons, drugs and rapes her. The violated Clarissa rejects his compensatory offer of marriage and dies – neglected, as she has been throughout, by her heartless family. Lovelace is killed in a duel by her cousin. Is this, the novel asks, a harlot’s progress (as her surname hints) or virtue indomitable?
Clarissa
is, as Dr Johnson proclaimed it, ‘a prodigious
work – formed on the stalest of all empty stories’. It had none of the ‘perverse and crooked Nature’ to be found in Fielding – who had formed his career in opposition to Richardson, first with
Shamela
, then
Joseph Andrews
and finally his masterpiece,
Tom Jones
. The Fielding objection sets up one of the principal dialectics in English fiction of the period. Is virtue something learned through experience and error, or an innate ‘innocence’, something to be ‘preserved’? Put another way, do you have to be bad before you can be good? And, if so, is bad bad?

Richardson wrote one more epistolary novel,
Sir Charles Grandison
, in which he took on the challenge of making a ‘good man’ – rather than a virtuous woman – his hero. The novel has its admirers: Jane Austen liked the consistency of the characterisation; John Ruskin testified that the novel had ‘a greater practical effect on me for good than anything I ever read in my life’. But these are minority views:
Sir Charles Grandison
is generally thought to confirm that Richardson’s greatest work is its immediate predecessor.

In his last years Richardson prospered as an author (he was hugely admired and translated on the Continent), as a popular moralist, and as a printer-publisher. His last years were passed among four daughters, with whom he had a dutiful if distant relationship, in a fine townhouse and a finer country villa at Parsons Green. Despite chronic infirmity he made his three score and ten, dying of a stroke.

Incest! With a mother!
Tom Jones

Over the centuries, accounts of Fielding’s life seemed as immutable as the inscription chiselled on his tombstone. Biographer after biographer came and (as one of them ruefully lamented) left the author of
Tom Jones
exactly where they found the author of
Tom Jones
. He was born, the eldest of seven children, in Somerset (young Tom Jones’s stamping ground). His father, Edmund Feilding (as, for snobbish reasons, he misspelled it) was a senior army officer, of incorrigibly wayward habits. His mother died when Henry was ten, and in his formative years he and his siblings were cared for by a doting aunt. On his wife’s death, Edmund promptly remarried a Catholic – to the fury of his rich and titled former in-laws. Legal disputes over
property and child custody ensued. Fielding qualifies as the first tug-of-love novelist in English literature. Edmund would eventually die in debtors’ prison. As with Dickens and the Marshalsea, it inspired some vivid scenes in the son’s later fiction. The maternal, and wholly respectable, grandmother, Lady Sarah Gould, eventually got charge of the children.

Now a child of privilege, Henry was sent to Eton, aged twelve. There he made friends who would later serve him as patrons. The school also gave him a grounding in classical literature. On leaving school in 1724, Fielding drifted to London, where he received instruction in lower forms of literature – notably that spawned around Drury Lane. Headstrong by nature, in 1725 Henry attempted the abduction of a cousin, Sarah Andrews (who had recently come into a fortune). It led to trouble with the local constabulary and – more profitably – the core episode in
Tom Jones
. He was encouraged to write by, among others, his distant cousin, Lady Wortley Montagu (he satirised many things in British society – but never bluestockings). His first attempt at a stage play, in 1728, flopped. The same year he went to study at the University of Leiden where he immersed himself in books and ran up debts – the pattern of his life. He returned after a year and threw himself again into writing for the theatre. His great success was the burlesque,
The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great
. Witty mockery was to be Fielding’s stock-in-trade.

In 1734 Fielding married well and set up with his wife Charlotte as a retired gentleman in Dorset. But he ran through her money in a year and then, inevitably, it was back to London where he became the manager and chief playwright at the New Theatre in the Haymarket. One of his satires on Walpole’s government provoked the 1737 Licensing Act (effectively state censorship – of Henry Fielding, principally). He had satirised himself out of his job.

Aged thirty, he enrolled at Middle Temple to read for the bar, writing all the while savagely anti-Jacobite pieces for the nearby Fleet Street paper,
The Champion
. Fielding qualified as a barrister in 1740 but years of drinking had caught up with him and he was physically disabled by gout. But he could still read and write. He read Richardson’s 1740 bestseller,
Pamela
, and wrote the burlesque
Shamela Andrews
(anonymously published in 1741). It evolved into his first proper novel,
Joseph Andrews
(1742). Anti-Richardsonism was the foundation of all his later work: Fielding always needed something to kick against.

Fielding’s mood was darkened, and his writing halted, by the premature death of his wife in 1744. Three years later, to his friends’ dismay, he married his wife’s former maid – six months pregnant as she lumbered up the aisle. Thanks to one of his Etonian patrons, he was appointed JP for Westminster in 1748. Gouty he might be, but he could still sit on a bench. He was a vigorous, commonsensical and
notably unvenal jurist. He brought in important reforms in London policing and, had he never published a line of fiction, would be remembered for this side of his career. There were, however, areas in which common sense (as he saw it) was in short supply. In 1749 he published his vast anti-Richardsoniad,
Tom Jones
. In it, he expressed his moral conviction that virtue was earned through experience of life, not something clamped between a maiden’s thighs. He would write one other novel –
Amelia
– a more sentimental work, named after his favourite daughter and, supposedly, a memorial (in the portrayal of the heroine) of his dead wife. In 1752, crippled with multiple ailments, Fielding sailed to Portugal in search of health. He died in Lisbon, leaving a typically jaundiced journal of the trip behind him. He was a man who could even make comedy out of his own terminal decay.

Such was the outline of the standard biographies until 1989, when Martin and Ruth Battestin published their massive
Henry Fielding: A Life
. In addition to new circumstantial material (Ruth was a trained historical archivist), the Battestins adopted the more daring techniques of psychobiography. Twelve-year-old Henry’s recorded act of spitting in servants’ faces, for example, was mulled over as ‘a clue to the deepest sources of both his personality and his wilful behaviour’. Deepest? Even deeper clues, however, were detected in the sleeping arrangements Henry and his sister Sarah shared in the Gould establishment. The children slept in the same bed; there were accusations of unspecified ‘indecent actions’. Building on this, and such anthropological evidence as Lawrence Stone’s that incest was common in the eighteenth century, the Battestins levelled the explosive charge against the two children. Moreover, they suggest, the ‘Dreadful Sin’ had a formative effect on the later imaginative writing they both produced. Incest, of course, is a subplot in
Joseph Andrews
and in
Tom Jones
– where, for a longish section of the novel, the reader is given to believe that the hero has committed the sin of Nero with his mother. We shall never know. And, for a certainty, Fielding would mock us unmercifully for wanting to know.