Samuel Richardson: riassunto

SAMUEL RICHARDSON RIASSUNTO

Richardson and the epistolary vogue
The son of a joiner, Samuel Richardson was born in 1689 in Derbyshire (although his family moved to London while he was still a child).

His father hoped Samuel would become a priest but the family lacked the means to educate him, so he became a printer's apprentice instead.  
Richardson did very well in the trade. He eventually bought his own business which became a highly respected press, printing (amongst other things) several daily newspapers and the Journals of the House of Commons. On the personal front, Richardson had married his employer's daughter, Martha Wilde, and they had six children. Alas, she and all their children died, and he married again. He had six children with Elizabeth Leake, and although two of them also died of childhood illness, four survived.

Defoe, Richardson e Fielding: riassunto in inglese

SAMUEL RICHARDSON VITA

In 1739 people from the book trade (apparently two friends of his called Rivington and Osborne) asked him to write a manual to advise people on the correct etiquette of letter writing. As he prepared the volume and thought about all the things to be considered in interpersonal communications and relationships, he began to somehow see a story emerge. While working on this volume he had the idea of using the epistolary technique to tell a story he had heard about the real case of a serving maid whose virtue had been unsuccessfully attacked by an unscrupulous man. In the form of letters and excerpts from a diary, Richardson wrote and published the first volumes of his first novel, “Pamela”, in 1740, with concluding parts appearing in 1741.  
Richardson published an even more popular second novel, “Clarissa”, in seven parts from 1747 to 1748. A third novel, “Sir Charles Grandison”, appeared in seven volumes from 1753 to 1754.  Samuel Richardson passed away on the 4th of July, 1761. 

SAMUEL RICHARDSON STYLE AND CHARACTERISATION

The moralising aim - All novels of Richardson reflect the characteristics of the Journal “The Spectator”: common sense, good manners and modesty. In fact there is a deep moralising tendency within Richardson’s novels, which reproduce the Puritan middle-class scheme of reward for virtue and punishment for sins.  
He avoided episodic plots by basing his novels on a single action, a courtship.
Characterisation - In Richardson’s work there is psychological analysis. In fact the reader is suited to share the states of mind and the vicissitudes of the events. There is also a sense of individual development within the story: characters are far from being static and the reader is almost a witness to their gradual development. Richardson’s heroines have much in common with each other: youth and charm, considerable self-will and knowledge, together with Christian piety.

The epistolary novel - An epistolary novel is a book written using a literary technique in which a novel is composed as a series of letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. The word “epistolary” comes from the word “epistles”, meaning letters.