While the editors of this collection claim that Richardson has had a “secured” position in the English canon since “the publication of his novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded in 1740”, he was really stressed as a leader of the “novel” by Ian Watt’s novel “rise” theory; the conclusion that Richardson developed the novel genre has since been repeated by critical books like this one without proof of Richardson’s significance because they claim that his position has been beyond doubt since the beginning. In reality Pamela and Clarissa are epistles or collections of repetitive letters that are nauseating in their returns to the same expressions of yearnings to be married or for specific males that are attracting them. These do not represent what has become the formulaic structure of a “modern” novel, as very few novels utilize this letter format because these letters include openings, closings and other parts that have to repeat on nearly every page, making them extremely difficult for a reader interested in dramatic incident to read. Too many scholars of Richardson’s novels ignore these problems are respond to them with language that suggests they might never have actually read the texts they are putting on a pedestal. This general sense of cluelessness is reflected in this next bit of cover summary: “But how can that place best be described?” The editor has just stated that Richardson has a specific position in a narrow canon, so why does he or she feel the need to question what position he or she just referred to as a settled fact? If this editor was awake enough to cut this sentence out of the summary, much of the premise behind this book might also have been re-written. “Over the three centuries since embarking on his printing career the ‘divine’ novelist has been variously understood as moral crusader, advocate for women, pioneer of the realist novel and print innovator.” Giving Richardson the divinity title is one example of an over-inflation of his impact, while authors like Haywood is dismissed because of her gender. Religion really should be left out of these types of summaries, regardless of the rest. “[T]his new volume of essays identifies his centrality to the emergence of the novel, the self-help book, and the idea of the professional author, as well as his influence on the development of the modern English language, the capitalist economy, and gendered, medicalized, urban, and national identities.” Richardson created gender? Before Richardson there were no “professional” authors? These exaggerations are blatantly over-selling this author, as “one of English literature’s most celebrated novelists.” If anything, this is an example, of over-celebration of Richardson.
The parts of this book are on Richardson’s biography, critical reception, publishing, readership, genres, and society. Like the previous title in the set, this is a collection of essays by dozens of different writers: this spreads the responsibility for its errors across all of these collaborators, so it is more difficult for any critic to find fault with the whole. The chapter on “Critical Reception to 1900” should help to prove the premise. It begins by claiming that all of Richardson’s “novels were bestsellers” and that he had “admirers that included some of Britain’s and Europe’s most sophisticated readers” (64). Instead of offering sales numbers or examples of these admirers, the author, Brian Corman, then jumps into explaining the rivalry Richardson had with Fielding, without pointing to the satires Fielding and his sister wrote about Richardson. In fact, the response to Richardson after the release of Pamela was overwhelmingly negative with several satires coming from most of the establishment: this negativity is what made this work visible in critical spheres, rather than any admiration towards the work. I also recently reviewed an Oxford textbook that explained that very few novelists across the eighteenth century were “bestsellers” and neither Richardson nor Defoe made this list as their books released relatively few editions, whereas Haywood and Barker were indeed bestsellers as their novels went through significantly more printings; other bestsellers from this period are now completely unknown among critics. Without the statistics in this Oxford textbook, critics have been making the types of hyperbolic statements made in this chapter for a century, repeating each other without proof to substantiated these claims.
Most of these chapters are under ten pages, so the lack of space might be blamed for the lack of substantiating details. There are plenty of quotation marks, names and facts throughout these, but most of these restate old conclusions rather than finding anything new to say no the chosen topics. When they do venture into unique perspectives, they tend to digress into strangely nonsensical mixtures, like the chapter on “The Visual Arts” by Lynn Shepherd, who begins by comparing Richardson’s novels to theatrical dramas and paintings, disregarding the fact that they are relatively low on either drama or detailed aesthetic descriptions. Instead of looking at Richardson, Shepherd digresses thus: “Analogies between the ‘sister arts’ of literature and painting are as old as Horace’s famous dictum in his Ars poetica, ‘ut picture poesis’ (as is painting, so is poetry)…” (195). The quote is connecting poetry and painting, not “literature” and painting, and he is not calling them sister arts. If literature and painting are sisters, what art form can possible be further from them in relation? These types of digressions have been utilized for critics to sound smart since the Enlightenment or even since Horace first quoted himself in Greco-Roman times; however, today we have access to so many of these past critical mentions that I have been able to compare criticisms on a few of these topics, and it is amazing how critics repeat the same quotes or near-identical summaries across the centuries once the first critic writes a review summarizing a work. The topic of the essay might change, but these nonsense points about art sisterhoods echo regardless of what the essayist is supposed to be proving.
Young critics who read these types of compilations of nonsense are discouraged from the critical profession, concluding that it regurgitates very old ideas, instead of discovering new ideas. If new connections are made, they stretch reality and connect things that really cannot logically be connected. Meanwhile, new researchers who propose original findings, or even to reflect new published research by other scholars on these topics (i.e. the Oxford history) are rejected from joining these collaborative publishing-for-tenure enterprises. I hope this review discourages critics from allowing this type of corruption of scholarly endeavor to continue. I cannot recommend this book. There might be plenty of evidence and collected facts here, but the bias, and misinterpretations connecting them cannot be trusted by those who are looking for support for their own research.