Richardson’s wit and ability to conceive characters who feel “natural”—as he rather immodestly put it in the book’s original introduction—enable the novel to outpace his own didactic intentions, to become something far more lifelike and original than a morality tale. But “Pamela” is, at bottom, a Cinderella story, and so Mr. B eventually proposes marriage to his former maid. Pamela is transported with joy that he is willing to “stoop” so low, but what’s good for the character is less good for the reader. With a story to tell, Richardson the writer of instructional material was distracted, but when the conflict is resolved, about halfway through, we enter a narrative dead zone in which the author’s more irksome qualities come to the fore. Mr. B becomes a mouthpiece through which Richardson delivers life lessons (for example, that a woman ought not grow “careless in her dress” after marriage). Lest we forget that Pamela’s happiness is due to her exemplary virtue, we watch as she is embraced, one after another, by all the neighboring gentry as “an ornament to our sex,” “a worthy pattern for all the young ladies in the county,” “the flower of their neighborhood,” etc.—a tedious procession of praise that starts to undermine the good will we felt for Pamela when her circumstances were less prosperous. The novel closes with a last word from our zealous author, who briefly tears off his epistolary robes to list the various moral teachings the book contains, in case we somehow missed them.

“Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter Writing” (Cambridge), a new book by Louise Curran, who teaches at Oxford, looks for fresh insight into this perplexing author and his milieu by scouring his correspondence. The premise is an intriguing one. As the English canon’s best-known writer of epistolary novels, Richardson would seem likely to be a noteworthy letter writer in private life.

It turns out he isn’t. An 1804 piece in the Edinburgh Review that assessed the first published edition of Richardson’s letters had it that “they consist almost entirely of compliments and minute criticisms on his novels, a detail of his ailments and domestic concerns . . . the whole so loaded with gross and reciprocal flattery, as to be ridiculous at the outset, and disgusting in the repetition.” Little unearthed in Curran’s sober, academic study contradicts this characterization. Skeptics of literary biography have long held that everything worth knowing about a novelist is evident in the work itself. Richardson’s correspondence constitutes strong supporting evidence for this proposition.

If, for example, Richardson’s aim in “Pamela,” with the surfeit of overblown compliments bestowed on her, was to guarantee that readers knew exactly what they were supposed to think of his heroine, he also sought by the same method to insure that readers thought highly of the work itself. For the second edition of “Pamela,” as Curran notes, he took the unusual step of including as an introduction twenty-four pages of fawning letters he received about the book. “There was never Sublimity so lastingly felt, as in PAMELA,” reads one, by Richardson’s friend Aaron Hill (one of five from Hill that were included). Not surprisingly, these “greasy compliments,” as one clergyman described them, didn’t go over well with everyone. Fielding took a potshot by beginning “Shamela” with several made-up letters composed in much the same style: “How happy would it be for Mankind, if all other Books were burnt, that we might do nothing but read thee all Day, and dream of thee all Night.”

Richardson’s life might be divided into two phases: before “Pamela” and after. About the former period, relatively little is known—he appears to have destroyed most of his letters from these days. We know he married the daughter of his former employer in 1721, the same year he set up his own printing shop. All six of their children died in infancy or early childhood; his wife died young as well. He was remarried the next year, once again to a woman from a family with whom he had long-standing business ties. Both were sound alliances in a worldly sense, but Richardson appears to have been relatively happy in each of his marriages, although the first was characterized primarily by grief over the loss of so many children. To friends and business associates, including struggling writers, he was frequently generous, more generous than unalloyed prudence or the burgher work ethic that he embodied might lead us to expect. His strict middle-class morality may seem uninspired, but, as his biographers T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel have pointed out, he doesn’t appear to have been petty or hypocritical.

After “Pamela,” the once obscure businessman became conscious of himself as a public figure. He cultivated epistolary relationships with a coterie of admirers, many of whom were women—several, he bragged to a friend, were women “of Condition”—and he began to preserve his correspondence with an eye to future publication. Over the years, this deferential circle of correspondents became his most important sounding board. (After his death, Samuel Johnson quipped that Richardson “died merely for want of change among his flatterers.”) When Aaron Hill, the author of those glowing letters about “Pamela,” delicately suggested ways to shorten “Clarissa,” Richardson responded first defensively and then with what appears to have been aggrieved silence; his favored correspondents presumably learned over time not to repeat Hill’s error. Richardson’s letters, like his heavily internal novels, rarely engaged with events in the outside world or even with books aside from his own. He claimed not to have read “Tom Jones,” although in deriding its “bad Tendency” to members of his set he demonstrated a suspiciously detailed knowledge of its contents.

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It’s surprising enough that this touchy, straitlaced, and rather narrow man wrote a novel like “Pamela,” in which he deftly inhabited the turbulent emotional life of a teen-age girl. Even more surprising is the fact that he went on to write “Clarissa.” “Pamela” is, for the first half, a crisp, shrewd delight of a romantic comedy. But “Clarissa” is of a different order. Johnson called it “the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart.” Even Fielding admired it.

Richardson has a habit of putting his heroines in harrowing binds, and “Clarissa” is no exception. At the novel’s outset, eighteen-year-old Clarissa Harlowe’s family is pressuring her to marry for money. The Harlowes believe that, if she doesn’t marry the wealthy but unappealing Solmes, she will run off with the “too-agreeable rake” Lovelace. Clarissa insists that she will give up Lovelace if her parents will let her remain single. It’s a testament to Lovelace’s perceived desirability that absolutely no one seems to feel she will hold up her end of this bargain. A standoff ensues, in which, to prevent her from eloping with the “whoremonger,” her family keeps a close watch over her. Her only outlet is writing long letters to her friend Anna Howe. Their ongoing correspondence is one major portion of “Clarissa.” Another consists of letters between Lovelace and his confidant, Belford.

What separates the novel’s setup from the gothic melodrama that emerged later is how well it’s constructed. Each of the Harlowes has his or her own reasons for wanting Clarissa to marry Solmes; their distinct personalities operate on Clarissa and on one another in a way that’s both operatic and in keeping with how families work. Then, there is Clarissa herself. “So much wit, so much beauty, such a lively manner, and such exceeding quickness and penetration!” Lovelace writes. A more sophisticated model of virtue than Pamela, Clarissa is philosophical in an old-fashioned sense, teasing out maxims about human nature from everyday observation. For her, morality begins with the attempt to remove the taint of self-interest from her judgments. She wouldn’t, she writes to Anna, be pleased with herself “if I should judge of the merits of others as they were kind to me. . . . For is not this to suppose myself ever in the right; and all who do not act as I would have them act, perpetually in the wrong?” If she’s a bit of a Goody Two-Shoes, most of us are, like Lovelace, inclined to forgive her. She’s too fair-minded, too impressive in her repartee, too rigorously self-critical (“Is not vanity, or secret love of praise, a principal motive with me at the bottom?”), and too uniformly kind for us to hold her over-earnestness too much against her.