STRANGE ANTICS
A History of Seduction
Clement Knox

Copyright

William Collins

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WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Clement Knox 2020

Cover image © Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510) Florentine School. The Birth of Venus, 1482. Oil on canvas, 1.72 x 2.78 m. Florence, The Uffizi Gallery. (Photo by Christophel Fine Art/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Clement Knox asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008285678

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780008285692

Version: 2019-12-13

Dedication

To My Parents

Epigraph

When we behold two males fighting for the possession of the female, or several male birds displaying their gorgeous plumage, and performing strange antics before an assembled body of females, we cannot doubt that, though led by instinct, they know what they are about, and consciously exert their mental and bodily powers.

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Chapter VIII

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

1: Rake Culture

2: The Transit of Venus

3: An Unsentimental Education

4: Circling Mary Shelley

5: Of Mann and Men

6: Blood Out

7: Seduction Remains

Afterword

Plate Section

List of Illustrations

Endnotes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

In 1873, a Georgia court heard the appeal of Myron Wood against his conviction in a seduction case involving Emma Chivers. Wood was a reverend, schoolmaster and Civil War veteran, a pillar of the community in Decatur, the seat of DeKalb County, north-east Georgia. Chivers was fifteen when she first met Wood, who was her teacher at school and her pastor at church. She was the daughter of a destitute widow, so poor that Wood took the family into his own home to help relieve their poverty. But Wood had other motives. His own wife was terminally ill and he seduced Chivers, promising her that he would marry her once his sick spouse died. Chivers trusted him, respected him, and probably somewhat feared him, and she submitted to his advances, the first time she had ever done so. A child was born, whereupon Wood went back on his word and denied all responsibility.

This was the background to Chivers’ initial, successful lawsuit. On appeal Wood adopted a new strategy. He did not deny that the affair had taken place, simply that Chivers was ineligible for protection under the seduction statute as she was a lascivious girl, sluttish, and primed for sin. Wood’s lawyers marshalled an array of witnesses willing to testify to Chivers’ low morals and lustful nature. The sins of the mother were visited upon the daughter. A spinster was found who claimed that Chivers’ mother was rumoured to have consorted with black men and may even have run a brothel in Atlanta. Classmates took to the stand. They revealed that Chivers was not in the habit of concealing her legs as a good Christian girl was expected to do. Some had seen her hug and kiss young men. Others noted her penchant for unfruitful fruit-picking expeditions with local boys. Was it not true, the counsel for the defence asked her, that she was known to go ‘blackberry hunting with young men and [bring] no blackberries back’?

The state supreme court sided with Wood. Emma Chivers, the justices ruled, was not a seducible woman.[1]

What happened in that Georgia courtroom 150 years ago was a waypoint in a social transformation whose consequences we all live with today. Before the Enlightement, the sexual existences of Europeans and North Americans were closely monitored. Sexuality was a public matter, subject to observation and discipline. Sexual freedoms were few and sexual protections were scarce. Today, almost the exact opposite is the case. We are striving towards a juncture where broad sexual freedoms for consenting adults will co-exist with substantive controls on the predatory protections for the vulnerable. How we got from then to now is in a large part the history of seduction. Almost all the reluctant concerns of that history were present in the case of Emma Chivers. To investigate seduction is to think about power, desire, race, class, agency and the law. Less visible but omnipresent – including in the Chivers’ case – is a question of storytelling. The history of seduction is about the sum of stories – in other words, of narrative.

Every aspect of human experience has its history; the problem is identifying how best to measure it. The unit of measurement for the history of seduction is that strange and powerful thing, the seduction narrative. The basic claim of this book is that the seduction narrative is a product of the modern world and serves as a vehicle for the exploration of modern values, modern experiences and modern concerns.

This is not to say that seduction never existed in fact or fiction before the onset of modernity. The moons of Jupiter are named for four of Zeus’s most celebrated seductions. The nymph Io he enshrouded in darkness and turned into a snow-white heifer to conceal her from his jealous wife. Callisto, the ‘Arcadian virgin [who] suddenly caught his fancy and fired his heart with a deep-felt passion’, he approached in the guise of her mistress, the goddess Diana, before taking her in his arms and revealing his true identity. To win the Phoenician princess Europa, he ‘discarded his mighty sceptre and clothed himself in the form of a bull’. Once he had lured her to sit on his back, he swam out to sea, taking her all the way to Crete where they eventually had three children together. To secure the Trojan youth Ganymede, he took the form of an enormous eagle, swooping down from the skies and carrying him away to Mount Olympus. All these stories are recorded in the Metamorphoses, written by the Roman poet Ovid, who is also famous for authoring the first-ever seduction manual, the Ars Amatoria, in the second century BC.

Ovid’s frank treatment of seduction scandalised the emperor Augustus and he was sent into exile on the Black Sea. Whatever tribulations he experienced in his own lifetime, however, Ovid’s legacy endured. In the pre-modern world he was the paradigmatic writer on seduction, name-checked by Chaucer and Shakespeare and avidly read by every educated young man. Indeed, Ovid’s influence was so great that it became an inspiration for perhaps the first proto-feminist analysis of seduction. Writing in the early fifteenth century, Christine de Pizan mocked the clerks who lived by Ovid’s sexual commandments while lamenting that the sexual culture his writings had helped forge made life impossible for women. For a beautiful woman to keep herself chaste, de Pizan wrote, is ‘like being in the midst of flames without getting burnt’ on account of her having ‘to fend off the attentions of young men and courtiers who are eager to have affairs’.[2]

Classical writers aside, the other major influence on how pre-moderns thought about seduction was Christianity. In the Christian tradition, the problem of seduction had begun not with Ovid but with Eve in the Garden of Eden. From the earliest days of the Christian faith, theologians had identified the first woman, Eve, and consequently all women, with lust. St Augustine had claimed that mankind’s original sin was the lustfulness uncovered in Eve after she ate the apple at the serpent’s urging. Augustine believed that the ‘legacy of Eve’ was the ‘sorrow she brought into the world’ through her discovery of her sexuality. As a result of this mythology, early Christian culture was astonishingly misogynistic. St Jerome was so aghast at the carnality he associated with women that he counselled chastity for men wherever possible. Indeed, he identified men with sexual restraint (with ‘the virtue of continence’), whereas women were marked with the ‘command to increase and multiply’ associated with the expulsion from Eden and with ‘the nakedness and the fig-leaves which speak of sexual passion’. The writer and apologist Tertullian described women as ‘each an Eve … You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree: you are the first deserter of divine law.’ For the eleventh-century Benedictine monk St Peter Damian, women were ‘bitches, sows, screech-owls, night owls, she-wolves, blood suckers … harlots, prostitutes, with your lascivious kisses, you wallowing places for fat pigs, couches for unclean spirits, demi-goddesses, sirens, witches’.[3]

The consequence of theological misogyny was a literary tradition in which the dominant seduction narrative was that of a woman seducing a man. In ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, this trope was mocked by the female narrator who describes how men, drunk on Ovid, Jerome, Tertullian and all the rest, have come to believe that women are intrinsically licentious and that they ‘cannot keep the vow of marriage’. When at the end of fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain discovers that the witch Morgan Le Fay has been toying with him throughout the tale, he gives vent to his frustrations concerning male powerlessness in the face of female manipulation:

But it’s no wonder a fool should lose his senses and be brought to his downfall through the wiles of women. For Adam in this world was misled by one, and Solomon by several, and Samson after him – Delilah was his ruin – and David afterwards, was blinded by Bathsheba and suffered much misery. Since all of these were deluded, it would be a fine thing to love them well without trusting, if a man could do it.[4]

Many of these concerns spilled over into the popular fear about witches. ‘All witchcraft comes from carnal lust,’ intoned the Malleus Maleficarum, the classic treatise on the subject, ‘which in women is insatiable.’[5]

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these attitudes began to soften. The continental tradition of courtliness popularised by writers like Baldassare Castiglione and Philip Sidney encouraged socialising among the sexes – at least at an elite level – and emphasised that courtship could be an aesthetic pleasure and not a moral hazard. This attitude is certainly in evidence in Shakespeare’s comedies, where the game of love is played out in an endless carnival of disguise, gender confusion and enchantment. In figures like Richard III, who seeks to seduce the widow Lady Anne, gloating that he will triumph though he has ‘nothing to back my suit at all, But the plain devil and dissembling looks’, Shakespeare also looks forward to more modern conceptions of the seduction narrative where men are predators and women are prey.

These precursors are interesting but they feel intellectually distant. The cause of that distance – and the reason that this book begins at the start of the eighteenth century and not before – is the Enlightenment. The seduction narrative was born out of a series of intellectual developments and value shifts that took place in this period.

In short, the seduction narrative was a byproduct of the rise of liberalism. The growing belief – that by 1800 had solidified into a consensus across much of Europe and North America – that individuals had the basic right to chose their husband or wife was one consequence of the widespread acceptance of liberal attitudes.

It was also the decisive development in the history of seduction because it raised a raft of issues. If marriage was now a private choice then individuals, especially women, had to be trusted to make their own decisions. But could they be trusted to make the right ones? What if they were deceived? If they were misled, were they owed any special sympathies or even particular legal protections? Conversely, if men were judged to have behaved in a deceptive or exploitative manner, how were they to be dealt with? Should they be punished? Should they be reformed? Or, as the hackneyed saying goes, is all fair in love and war? As we shall see, these questions occupied the attention of some of the most celebrated minds of the past. They still concern us now.

Underpinning all these debates is a more fundamental question. Are we rational decision-makers or flighty, manipulable creatures, subject to our passions? Whether reason or passion exerts greater sway on human decision-making was one of the foundational debates of the Enlightenment. And – in numerous variants – it is with us to this day.[6] The argument of this book is that this debate finds expression in the seduction narrative. Key to its expression is the fact that seduction narratives come in two forms. Each takes a different side of this debate. Each tells a complementary story about the modern world. In the classic seduction narrative – what me might call the ‘Villainous’ kind – the seducer uses guile, deception and mental games to overcome their target’s resistance. It implies a psychological vulnerability on the part of seduced – a fact reflected in etymology of the word: se + ducere, to lead away. Seduction assumes one person is manipulating another, leading them away from their true preferences. This was the basis for the crucial legal distinction between rape and seduction. Whereas rape was coercive, seduction admitted consent while assuming that consent had somehow been degraded by the techniques of the seducer. As one New York court put it in 1896: ‘to constitute seduction, the defendant must use insinuating arts to overcome the opposition of the seduced and must by wiles, without force, debauch her.’[7] In common law the classic example of seduction was a woman who agreed to sex after accepting a disingenuous marriage proposal. This, in the eyes of society and the law, was a species of fraud as consent had been obtained by a lie. Early nineteenth-century feminists campaigning for increased legal protections for women and girls understood the threat of seduction as being pervasive. In a pamphlet from 1910, one wrote that seduction – the ‘ultimate inferno’ – was brought about by the assault on the rational mind ‘by the toils of unreasoning and prejudiced ignorance.’[8] Nowadays the language used to describe such scenarios tends to focus on structures of power and patterns of grooming and assault.

The common feature is that the seduction narrative dramatises powerlessness. This is why, from Clarissa (1748) to Cruel Intentions (1999), the victims of seducers are portrayed as naive, unworldly women. This is not to say that there have been no seduction narratives that feature women seducing men – as we shall see, this has been a recurring counter-current from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first – simply that they rely on the premise that men are the powerless playthings of predatory, powerful women, a contention that has lacked credibility for almost all recorded history. This speaks to the political, feminist dimension of these seduction narratives. They tell a story about women’s place in society. They allegorise their oppression.

If the villainous seduction narrative dwells on psychological vulnerability, the other kind of seduction narrative focuses on the power of reason. Enlightenment philosophers believed that individuals were endowed with reason and could use it to make decisions in their own best interests. In one of the foundational manifestos of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers of the United States declared that among the ‘unalienable Rights’ of free men were ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’. The other kind of seduction narrative – the one which portrays the seducer as a hero, not a villain – is intensely interested in that pursuit.

Throughout this book we shall meet writers and intellectuals who believed that the rational pursuit of sexual pleasure was an endeavour characteristic to the enlightened individual. In England, one of the earliest champions of this position was the writer and dramatist Henry Fielding who considered men’s and women’s desires natural ‘and productive not only of corporeal delight, but of the most rational felicity’. In continental Europe, philosophers like Voltaire and Casanova argued much the same. Nor was it just men who trumpeted the virtues of sexual freedom. The pursuit of what she called ‘rational desires’ was central to the intellectual project of Mary Wollstonecraft. Among the Romantics, ‘free love’ was embraced in theory and practice by women such as Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont as much as it was by men like Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this view of human sexuality became basically unchallenged. From James Bond to Brigitte Bardot, seducers were celebrated in the culture as symbols of sexual freedom, free agents who had unburdened themselves of the irrational prejudices of custom, religion and taboo. In the twenty-first century the rise of algorithmic online dating represents the triumph of seduction as a logical exercise.

These rival traditions in the seduction narrative – reason versus passion; the seducer as hero versus the seducer as villain – coexist. They are, in fact, deeply intertwined. In the period of three centuries covered by this book, both kinds of narrative exist in every time and in every place that is studied. Indeed, the foundational conflict between reason and passion that is at the heart of this history is often found within seduction narratives themselves. For example, in the eighteenth-century novel The Man of Feeling, the seduced and betrayed Emily Atkins contrasts her passionate abandon with her seducer’s cold, calculating nature:

It was gratitude, it was pride, it was love! Love which had made too fatal a progress in my heart, before any declaration on his part should have warranted a return: but I interpreted every look of attention, every expression of compliment, to the passion I imagined him inspired with, and imputed to his sensibility that silence which was the effect of art and design.

This dynamic tension between reason and passion also accounts for another recurrent theme in this book: the use of hypnosis as a metaphor for seduction. As we shall see in the chapters on Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, hypnotism was a potent symbol of seduction, as it was a transitional psychological state that bridged the worlds of reason and passion. Seduction is bewildering, exciting and dangerous because it occupies this grey zone of agency.

It is for precisely the same reason that seduction has repeatedly been the subject of legal interest. As we shall see in the later chapters of this book, the legal principles that brought Emma Chivers to the courtroom in the 1870s were born of passionate public debates about the limits of rational sexual decision-making and consequently with the limits of consent.

Such tension creates paradoxes – contradictions that will surface again and again in this narrative. Those who believe that individuals are prone to violent passions and vulnerable to manipulation tend to argue for the creation of laws and rules that will try to rationally regulate sexual desire. As we shall see, the successful campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to bring about a body of law to regulate seduction mobilised these ‘villainous’ seduction narratives in order to achieve their goals. Out of the chaos of the passionate mind was born the need for a set of logical legal codes. Yet these supposedly rational laws were quickly revealed to be capricious themselves. As the example of Emma Chivers showed, far from being impartial, seduction laws were used to police arbitrary boundaries of class, race and gender.

Conversely, the ‘Heroic’ seduction narrative uses the claim of rationality to advance a culture of sensual revelry. From the hedonism of Enlightenment London, Paris and Venice, to the free love doctrines of the Romantics, to the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s, sexual rationalism has been used to justify a culture of pleasure, permissiveness and emotional authenticity. Yet time and again, the promise of sexual freedom in theory has run up against the problem of sexual freedom in practice. The dream of emotional authenticity underpinned by a model of rational decision-making has all too often led to a reality of sexual exploitation motivated by an unfeeling transactionalism that conceals itself within a masque of sexual liberation. At the height of the sexual revolution, Germaine Greer observed as much when she wrote in The Female Eunuch that ‘sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearteningly than ever before’.[9]

These paradoxes, these brawling contradictions, are the engine of this book. But what follows is not an attempt to endlessly restate the arguments made above. These are intended to function only as the poles, pegs and guy ropes that give structure to the marquee of the book. Crowded under the canopy are a dozen or so major figures, and a selection of minor figures, through whose lives and relationships and writings the history of seduction will be explored.

1
RAKE CULTURE

He could not fidget – as a man well might, standing in the dock of the Old Bailey charged with a capital offence – because his thumbs were bound together with twine. This seemed to be the end of the road for Colonel Francis Charteris. After a long and infamous career as Britain’s most notorious rake, Charteris, now in his late sixties, stood accused of the rape of his former maidservant Anne Bond. Standing before a judge and jury in February 1730 he had little hope of obtaining an acquittal. He was one of London’s most renowned sexual predators, so detested for his lechery and his abusive methods that his house in Hanover Square had been attacked on more than one occasion by angry mobs. He had only managed to have annulled a previous conviction for rape through generous bribery (what was then known as a ‘Golden Nol. Pros.’). His trial took place amid a blizzard of Grub Street pamphlets that chronicled his misdeeds, real and fictional, and denounced him as ‘the Rape-Master-General of Great Britain’. In taverns, coffee-houses and salons throughout the capital the most scandalous rumours were spread about him, including allegations that he had raped his own grandmother.[1]

When Charteris was duly found guilty the courtroom erupted in cheers. A few days later he was summoned to the same place for sentencing. Dressed in a cavalry officer’s uniform, attended to by a brace of footmen, he was sentenced to hang at Tyburn along with nine other common criminals brought before the magistrate in the same session. His carriage back to Newgate Prison was followed by a large crowd of happy Londoners, eager to advertise and celebrate the imminent demise of the nation’s most prolific and unprincipled sexual adventurer. ‘The most popular Whore-master in the three Kingdoms’, as one contemporary account had it, ‘said to have lured as many Women into his toils as would set up a Sultan’.[2]

***

Charteris had been born in Edinburgh at some point in the 1660s. His father was a wealthy landowner in Dumfriesshire and the Charterises were a family with ancient ties to the Scottish aristocratic elite. His youth was almost exactly coterminous with the reign of the restored Charles II, the Merry Monarch, whose priapic rule signalled a dramatic end to Cromwell’s Puritan Protectorate. The libidinism of Charles’s court was without parallel in English history. The king very much led by example. ‘His scepter and his prick are of a length,’ the Earl of Rochester reported, ‘And she may sway the one who plays with th’ other.’ St James’s was a long way from the Charteris family seat in Amisfield. Nevertheless, the cyprian spirit of the age made itself felt on the young man and would find morbid expression in him in his later years.

Charteris’s devilish ways first became a matter of public record in the 1690s, when he joined the army of the Duke of Marlborough in Flanders. It is unclear how much, if any, combat Charteris saw. What is known is that he soon became a figure of general loathing for his ill-treatment of his brother officers. Charteris had become an inveterate card cheat as well as a ruthless loan shark. It seems as though he used his skills in one arena to create customers for the other. These demoralising activities, combined with various unspecified abuses of the local population, secured his expulsion from the army twice, the second occasion shortly before the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. Thereupon Charteris returned to Scotland where he paid his way back into the army, came into his inheritance following his father’s death, and, to general amazement, managed to marry. The details of this union, like so much about his earlier life, are unknown, but it yielded a daughter, Janet Charteris, who would later do no service to the cause of British women through her loyalty to her villainous father.

Rich and married, Charteris now embarked on a phenomenal spree. He invested his income at the card table, where he systematically bilked the Scottish elite of their wealth. The master of the marked card and the loaded die, he had soon multiplied his net worth. On one particularly scandalous occasion he managed to inveigle his way into the Edinburgh salon of the Duchess of Queensberry and, with the aid of a strategically situated mirror, rob his hostess blind during a card game in her own drawing room. (This enraged her husband the Duke so much that he lobbied Parliament to change the law concerning the amount of money one could wager while gaming.)

This incident and many others like it served to make Charteris persona non grata in Scottish society. But ostracism could little restrain a man with Charteris’s capacity for roguery, nor did it hinder the indulgence of his other appetites: women and property. Acquiring the latter was fairly straightforward. As for the former, Charteris used money, force and fraud to obtain sex, travelling far and wide to do so. His preference was for working-class women, ‘strong, lusty, fresh Country Wenches’, one account records, ‘of the first Size, their B–tt–cks as hard as Cheshire Cheeses, that should make a Dint in a Wooden Chair and work like a Parish Engine at a Conflagration’. The accumulation of a substantial property portfolio created the need for large permanent staffs upon whom Charteris could prey. In 1713 he purchased Hornby Lodge in Lancashire, a place which became host to any number of proto-Sadean scenes as Charteris remodelled the house for his own debauched purposes – including the installation of secret passages that led to trapdoors in the servants’ bedrooms – and then sent his agents out into the neighbouring countryside to find victims for his orgies. Soon the residents of the surrounding villages knew better than to send their wives and daughters to work for Charteris, and his panders had to search further afield for suitable targets.

On one famous occasion, Charteris’s valet John Gourley found a girl looking for work as a maidservant, but willing only to enter the service of either an unmarried woman or a widow. Gourley lured her to Hornby Hall on the promise of work with his benign and virtuous mistress. Upon arrival she was told her potential new employer would interview her from her bed. Halfway through the conversation, her would-be mistress sprang from beneath the covers and disrobed to reveal the degenerate form of Francis Charteris, struggling to free himself from his disguise. He presently tried to seduce the shocked girl and, when that failed, drew a pistol and demanded sex. She pretended to comply, but when Charteris laid down the gun in readiness for his ministrations, she seized it, turned it upon her attacker and ‘swore by all that was sacred, she would discharge it into his Body, if he did not return instantly to his Bed’. Charteris obliged and the girl was able to make her way safely out of the building, gun in hand.[3]

The great number of properties Charteris owned necessitated a considerable amount of travel between them, and it was during these sojourns that much of his most despicable business was carried on. On one such occasion Charteris was travelling between Musselburgh and Edinburgh when he came across a solitary woman carrying a sack of corn. Charteris solicited her, and when she refused both his advances and his money, he raped her at pistol point. Afterwards, having escaped, she told her husband, who sought personal revenge, and when that was not forthcoming, legal redress. Charteris’s customary attempts to bribe his way out of trouble failed, and an Edinburgh court summoned him to appear before it charged with rape. Fearing that justice would be done, Charteris fled south to England and made his way to London.

***

London in the early eighteenth century, according to one jaundiced contemporary, was

like the Ocean, that receives the muddy and dirty Brooks, as well as the clear and rapid Rivers, swallows up all the Scum and Filth, not only of our own, but of other Countries: Wagons, Coaches, and Carrivans; Pack-Horses, Ships, and Wooden-Shoes; French, Dutch, German, and Italian tattered Garments, being constantly emptying and discharging themselves into this Reservoir, or Common-Sewer of the World.[4]

With a population of over half a million it was the largest city in Europe and the largest conurbation by far in the United Kingdom, accounting for a tenth of the total population and dwarfing the next largest city, Bristol, which was home to a mere 30,000 people.

London was dirty, crowded and dangerous. There were innumerable ways to die. Highwaymen worked the roads between the built-up centre and the nearby villages and market towns of Kensington, Camberwell, Hampstead and Islington. Swords were worn in public and used in street fights, tavern brawls, and confrontations in the theatre. Smallpox was the terror of every citizen; the sexually indulgent, or even just the unlucky, faced an agonising death from the venereal diseases that claimed several thousand lives each year. The poor died of gin-drinking and starvation and upon the ravenous scaffolds at Tyburn. The old wooden houses in Covent Garden and Drury Lane came cheap – as little as twopence a night – but collapsed with regularity and were at perpetual risk of fire. ‘Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire,’ Samuel Johnson wrote in London, a poem:

And now a rabble rages, now a fire;

Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,

And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;

Here falling houses thunder on your head,

And here a female atheist talks you dead.

The city’s capacity to kill was offset by the enormous quantity of sexual activity going on among its populace. To read the London press of the day is to enter a world that seems exclusively populated by coquettes, coxcombs, cuckolds and prudes engaged in a permanent carnival of amorous intrigue. ‘I confess,’ wrote one despairing Londoner to a country friend, ‘if you have a Design to make your self a good Proficient in the Arts of Whoring, and Drunkenness, or to understand exactly the Methods of Debauchery and Profaneness, this is indeed the Place of the World.’[5] Sexual profligacy was then the fashion and the men of London competed with one another to prove their seductive powers. The mania for sexual adventure and amorous expertise found innumerable means of expression. A whole new vocabulary sprang to life to describe the mores of the day. Seemingly every man aspired ‘to keep cully’, the more prodigious being known as ‘Whore-mongers’; for those with limited resources a couple of shillings could afford a visit to a ‘Vaulting School’ kept by an ‘Abbess’ or ‘Mother’, though doing so brought with it the risk of contracting the ‘Drury-Lane Ague’ or the ‘Covent Garden Gout’. Among the Quality, ‘Whoring, Drinking and Gaming, are reckon’d among the Qualifications of a fine Gentleman’. These well-born, moneyed sybarites were the rakes who, either as individuals or gathered together in clubs – the Mohocks, the Hell-Fire Club, and many more – roved the city searching for trouble and pleasure. One ballad recorded in print in 1719 records the sexual escapades of these leisured men:

But the Town’s his Seraglio, and still he lives free;

Sometimes she’s a Lady, but as he must range,

Black Betty, or Oyster Moll serve for a Change:

As he varies his Sports his whole Life is a Feast,

He thinks him that is soberest is most like a Beast:

All Houses of Pleasure, breaks Windows and Doors,

Kicks Bullies and Cullies, then lies with their Whores:

Rare work for the Surgeon and Midwife he makes,

What Life can Compare with the jolly Town-Rakes.

Such behaviour was by no means limited to the wealthy elite. Scandalised observers recorded the democratic nature of the phenomenon. One complained of the ‘Suburbs gallant Fop that takes delight in Roaring, / He spends his time in Huffing, Swearing, Drinking, and in Whoring’. A Portuguese visitor singled out for criticism the legal clerks who ‘are under no manner of government; before their times are half out, they set up for gentlemen; they dress, they drink, they game, frequent the playhouses, and intrigue with the women’. In London, even the humblest apprentice could don his finest clothes and go to the theatre or to the Vauxhall Leisure Gardens for a shilling and mingle, unobserved, with other young men and women looking for adventure. For this was not a man’s world. Women were active and perceptive participants in the London frolics. There were, in the first instance, the thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of active sex workers: ‘The Sisterhood of Nightingale-lane, Ratcliff-high-way, Tower-Ditch, Rose-mary-lane, Hatton-Wall, Saffron-hill, Wetstone’s-Park, Lutener’s-lane’, the women of Bankside, known as the Stewes Bank for its great quantities of prostitution, and, of course, the wealth of formal, informal and opportunistic sex work going on in amid the storied ‘Hundreds of Drury Lane’ – the vast and murky warren of back alleys, dim courtyards and precarious tenements that ran between Drury Lane and the Piazza of Covent Garden. These women were understood to be tempters as much as temptations, and it became almost a matter of form to warn young men to steer well clear of their siren call:

Of Drury’s mazy courts, and dark abodes,

The harlot’s guileful paths, who nightly stand,

Where Katherine-street descends into the Strand .

Say, vagrant Muse, their wiles and subtil arts,

To lure the strangers unsuspecting hearts;

So shall our youth on healthful sinews tread,

And city cheeks grow warm with rural red.

Prostitution was not then understood in the same clear terms as it is now. Language was used loosely, and who or what was a ‘whore’ and what their motives were at any one moment was always in flux. James Boswell recorded that he picked up two girls in Covent Garden with nothing more than the promise of ‘a glass of wine and my company’. Even the hardened regulars of the trade understood their position as being essentially a gamble on social mobility, preferable to a lifetime as a domestic servant. Jacob Ilive, confined in Clerkenwell Prison, vividly recalled the imprisoned prostitutes trading stories of jaunts down to Bath, nights out at the theatre, and days out at the races with their ‘Gallants’, as they beat hemp together.

To be sure, the opportunities for social mobility on offer for those who chose a life as a courtesan operated at the vertiginous extremes – but there were those who made it. Lavinia Fenton, the first woman to play the female lead in The Beggar’s Opera, wound up as the Duchess of Bolton. Fanny Murray came to London after being seduced by the Duke of Marlborough’s grandson and worked her way up from Covent Garden to be the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich before ending up happily married to the actor David Ross. In the next generation, Soho native Kitty Fisher became one of the most famous women in the country, charming her way to the top through a deft manipulation of men, the media, and her own potent sexual allure. These are just some of the most famous examples. That the average female Londoner could be just as sexually adventurous as any man was attested to by the immense literature in which worries were expressed about the morality of modern women. One pamphleteer complained in the 1730s that women were running riot ‘on account of the promiscuous liberty allowed both Sexes’ and that consequently even ‘the best Husbands are often hornified, as well as bad ones’. The spectre of the seductress loomed large in the consciences of god-fearing Englishmen:

’tis a deplorable Truth, that our young ladies … are wise, and more, knowing in the Arts of Coquetry, Galantry [sic], and others Matters relating to the Differences of Sexes, &c. before they come to be Twenty, than our Great-Grandmothers were all their lives.[6]

More equanimous observers of the London scene agreed with the famous and oft-repeated lines from Alexander Pope’s Moral Essays: ‘Men, some to Bus’ness, some to Pleasure take; / But ev’ry Woman is at heart a Rake.’

It was into this world that Francis Charteris entered at some time around 1720, living at first in Poland Street, Soho, before moving to Great George Street, near Hanover Square, by 1729. He was soon immersed in the sexual demi-monde of Georgian London. With the help of his faithful deputy, John Gourley, and the assistance of the West End’s many bawds and procuresses – Mother Needham of Park Place, St James’s, emerged as his preferred intermediary – Charteris was soon well supplied with women. His methods remained much the same as they had in the provinces. In 1724 Isabella Cranston applied for poor relief in St Margaret’s Parish, Westminster, following her seduction by Charteris. She reported that she had been ruined by him after she was lured to the house of one Mrs Jolly in Suffolk Street under the promise of domestic service. Many more girls would share Cranston’s fate.

One victim who departed from the typical profile was a young widow in Marylebone whom Charteris wooed while in disguise as a foreign nobleman. Thus compromised, she found herself extorted out of her jewels, causing her such torment in the process that she went mad and had to be committed to an asylum. On another occasion Charteris was drawn to an actress at Lincoln’s Inn Theatre. After the performance ended he found her backstage and, when his advances failed, raped her at pistol point in the green room, while four of his lackeys guarded the door with their swords drawn. Some of his more egregious transgressions – such as this assault at the theatre – did not go unanswered and Charteris was regularly obliged to bribe victims, judges and husbands to forget about his crimes. But for the most part justice was not forthcoming.[7]

Then came Anne Bond. Tricked into working for ‘Colonel Harvey’ of Hanover Square, Bond was raped by Charteris, then beaten by his servants and thrown out onto the street. She found a friend, one Mrs Parsons, and together they went to court to file a suit against Charteris. A Middlesex jury agreed to indict the Colonel – a fact made retrospectively inevitable when it emerged that Charteris had once attempted to seduce the sister of one of the jurors – and in a matter of months he had been sentenced to hang.

Charteris’s life was saved through the intervention of his daughter Janet. In 1720 she had married the eldest son of the Earl of Wemyss, a prominent Scottish peer. George II relied upon such men to keep the peace in Scotland, where the prospect of Jacobite rebellion still lurked just beneath the surface of daily life. When Janet, operating through influential Scottish intermediaries in London, sought her scoundrel father’s pardon, the king had little choice but to comply. In April 1730, a pardon was issued through the Privy Council and Charteris was released from Newgate. He was obliged to pay damages to Anne Bond and, all told, the price of his freedom was £15,000 – an immense amount for the time. But freedom did not buy security. London was no longer safe for him. In a reversal of his previous fortunes, he now fled up north – doubtless encouraged in his decision when he was pulled from his carriage and beaten by an angry mob as he swept through Chelsea.[8] He was now an old and ravaged man, and he died two years later in Edinburgh. His estate was valued at a plum[9] (or two, depending on whether one believed his lawyers or his Grub Street obituarists), the awesome gains of a lifetime of fraud, larceny and extortion. He left the bulk of his estate to his grandson, the future 7th Earl of Wemyss, whose grateful descendants have borne the name of Charteris ever since.[10]

His burial in Edinburgh was as turbulent as his life. Enraged crowds repeatedly attacked the constables present to keep the peace in an attempt to seize and destroy the body. They failed to do so, but succeeded in pelting the service from afar, and so Colonel Francis Charteris’s coffin was lowered into the ground accompanied by a hail of dead dogs, dead cats, living cats and offal.

Charteris’s was a uniquely eighteenth-century life. His was the era of the rake, and he was the rake nonpareil. His ignominious achievements in the field secured him lasting recognition as the great sexual villain of his time. He passed directly from life into art. Alexander Pope paired him with the Devil in the third of his Moral Essays (1733); Jonathan Swift did likewise on more than one occasion. Charteris, his henchman Gourley, and his bawd of choice, Mother Needham, all appear together in the first plate of William Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress, the phenomenally popular 1732 series of etchings that made the young artist’s name. Most significantly, Charteris, the class of rakes he exemplified, and the problem he posed to women, morals and society found their clearest and most enduring expression in a trilogy of books by a man who, more than any other individual, codified and popularised the modern concern with seduction: Samuel Richardson.

***

William Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress (1732). Colonel Francis Charteris and his henchman, John Gourley, lurk in the background on the right.

Samuel Richardson was born in 1689, on the marches of two worlds. The year before his birth the Dutch king, William of Orange and his English wife, Mary Stuart, had been invited to take the throne from Mary’s father, James II, in the so-called Glorious Revolution. This bloodless handover of power was accompanied by a new constitutional settlement embodied by two Acts of Parliament instituted in the year of Richardson’s birth. The Bill of Rights codified the rights and liberties of English subjects and confirmed Parliament’s sovereignty; the Act of Toleration granted religious freedom to dissenting Protestants (though to no Catholics), so ending the attempt to impose religious uniformity on the nation from above. In the spirit of the new, liberty-infused age, the Printing Act was allowed to lapse in 1695, bringing an end to pre-publication censorship; marking England’s arrival as a pragmatic, mercantile power, the Bank of England was established in 1694. These bureaucratic landmarks were not intended to transform the moral worlds of regular English men and women, but the second-order effect of the upheavals of the late seventeenth century was to inaugurate a revolution in social conduct and sexual attitudes. The celebration of individual political liberty opened the door to libertinism. The toleration of religious minorities implied a willingness to turn a blind eye to private peccadilloes. A Swiss visitor in the early eighteenth century was in awe, like so many continental visitors, of English freedoms, but appalled at the permissiveness unleashed thereby in society at large. ‘They cherish their liberty to such an extent,’ he wrote, ‘that they often let both their religious opinions and their morals degenerate into licentiousness … Debauch runs riot with an unblushing countenance.’[11]

In one of the few extant autobiographical accounts of his early life, Richardson made a conscious effort to link his own family to the events of 1688. His father was a humble London joiner who, he claimed, enjoyed the patronage of the Duke of Monmouth. In 1685 Monmouth staged an ill-fated uprising against the rule of James II. When it failed, Richardson’s father, in his son’s telling, ‘thought proper, on the Decollation of the first-named unhappy Nobleman, to quit his London Business & to retire to Derbyshire; tho’ to his great Detriment; & there I, & three other Children out of Nine, were born’. Richardson Sr, however, was on the right side of history. After the Glorious Revolution he and his family returned to London and had his remaining sons baptised in his native parish of St Botolph’s, Aldgate. At first the family lived in Tower Hill, a poor neighbourhood just outside the eastern limit of the City of London, on a street called Mouse Alley that sat in the shadow of the Tower of London, connecting the city’s commercial centre to the docks. Later the family would move a short distance north, to Rosemary Lane just inside the City. In neither location were the family considered rich, or even prosperous, but in both the young Richardson would have been exposed to the hectic realities of daily life in the capital.

Given his silence about his youth it is hard to accurately reconstruct what Richardson absorbed from the city in these years. One likes to think that as a child he would have been privileged to live so close to the Tower of London, known then not just for its prison but for the menagerie of exotic animals – including a famous pride of lions – that were kept on public display in its precincts. More prosaically, it seems likely that Richardson’s lifelong fascination with clothing and the details of fashionable dress must have begun in the thronged streets of the City where the parvenu ‘Cits’ (the merchants and tradesmen made good) mixed with apprentices, journeymen, foreign businessmen, off-duty servants, clerks, molls, vendors and pedlars eager to display themselves and their finery. The City was still a distinct entity from Westminster and had its own fashions, typically more democratic (some would say garish) than those prevailing in the haughtier neighbourhoods that surrounded St James’s. The ‘mix’d Crouds of saucy Fops and City Gentry’ that thrived in the streets of Richardson’s childhood were ripe targets for social satire.

The vibrancy of London life attracted the concern of moralists as well as the condescension of snobs. The neighbourhoods around the Tower, the aptly named Tower Hamlets, were the epicentre of the movement to transform English manners. The freedoms enshrined in the post-1688 settlement were extended only grudgingly to the common people. The recognition that the state could no longer prescribe moral and religious conformity from the top down was balanced by a countervailing belief that individuals were amenable to suasion, instruction and shame from the bottom up. Encouraged by Queen Mary, citizens in Tower Hamlets set up a Society for the Reformation of Manners in 1690 to suppress brothels and to stymie immoral behaviour in their community. Over a dozen companion societies were active elsewhere in the city by the mid-1690s, and they would remain features of London life until the 1730s, when they finally abandoned their Sisyphean task. Even if their mission was ultimately in vain, the attempt at moral reformation made a great impression on Richardson. The animating ideal of the societies – the notion that individuals were moral agents susceptible to reason, whose better impulses could be cultivated by instruction and example – was to shape his entire worldview.

One of the first glimpses we get of the young Richardson is his admission that as a teenager he sent anonymous letters to dissipated members of his community urging them to reform their ways. This was an early manifestation of his lifelong love of letter writing. A shy boy, Richardson immersed himself in books and was known in his neighbourhood for his literary abilities. His bashfulness and his way with words made him a favourite of the local women, who had him read to them while they sat at their needlework and, later, recruited him to help manage their correspondence with their suitors:

I was not more than thirteen when three of these young women, unknown to each other, having an high opinion of my taciturnity, revealed to me their love secrets, in order to induce me to give them copies to write after, or correct, for answers to their lovers letters: Nor did any of them ever know, that I was the secretary to the others. I have been directed to chide, and even repulse, when an offence was either taken or given, at the very time that the heart of the chider or repulser was open before me, overflowing with esteem and affection; and the fair Repulser dreading to be taken at her Word; directing this word, or that expression, to be softened or changed. One, highly gratified with her lover’s fervor, and vows of everlasting love, has said, when I have asked her direction: ‘I cannot tell what to write; But (her heart on her lips) you cannot write too kindly.’ All her fear only, that she should incur slight for her kindness.

Better training for an epistolary novelist can scarcely be imagined.

Richardson’s obvious intelligence and eagerness to learn put him on the path to train as a clergyman, and one can glimpse an alternative reality where he joined the ranks of the great Georgian scribbler-divines: Jonathan Swift, Lawrence Sterne and Charles Churchill. But this would have required a university education, and his family’s poverty precluded that eventuality. Unable to afford an education, in July 1706 Richardson was bound as an apprentice to John Wilde, a London printer. At any one time London had a floating population of around ten thousand apprentices, paying their dues in trades as diverse as tweezer-making, bridle-cutting and calico-printing. Bound to their respective masters for seven years and taken into their homes and families to live, work and learn, apprentices – aside from actual criminals – constituted the most suspect of London’s demographics. ‘The Blood runs warm in their young veins,’ a commentator observed in one of the innumerable tracts decrying the moral threat posed by these rampant young men, ‘against this Evil the young Apprentice must exert all the Force of Reason, Interest, and Religion.’ Morality and the urges of young manhood aside, apprentices were trapped in an economic bind: they vastly outnumbered their masters. In the printing industry there were only a hundred or so master printers, each employing at any one time between four and ten apprentices on top of a regular staff of journeymen printers. With only faint prospects of ever matching their employers’ prosperity, the loyalty of apprentices to their masters and their commitment to society as a whole was always contingent. The vast cultural effort that went into preaching to apprentices on matters of morals, manners and work ethic was symptomatic of this fear of a social group not yet integrated into the order of things. In this respect, male apprentices were the counterparts to that other group that the Georgians worried so much about: young, single women.

The most enduring artefact of this culture of suspicion towards apprentices is William Hogarth’s great cycle of etchings, Industry and Idleness. It depicts the divergent life paths of two apprentices bound at the same time to a single London weaver. The Good Apprentice, Francis Goodchild, works hard, goes to church, marries the master’s daughter, and so inherits his business, ending up a prosperous merchant who in the final scene parades through London in a carriage having recently been made Lord Mayor. The Bad Apprentice, Thomas Idle, shirks his duties as an employee and a Christian, finally running away to sea before returning to London to whore and carouse and, ultimately, commit murder, for which he is hanged at Tyburn in the penultimate plate.

Samuel Richardson was ever the Good Apprentice. ‘I served a seven diligent years to it, to a master who grudged every hour to me,’ he recalled of his apprenticeship. ‘I took care, that even my candle was of my own purchasing, that I might not in the most trifling instance make my master a sufferer (and who used to call me The Pillar of his House).’

His apprenticeship to Wilde ended in July 1713. Two years later he became a freeman of the Stationers’ Company. Moving from printer to printer, Richardson accrued experience as an overseer, compositor and corrector while searching for a patron. One of the printers he worked for was John Leake, and when Leake died in 1720 he took over his printing business in Salisbury Court, off Fleet Street. A year later, in 1721, he married his former master John Wilde’s daughter, Martha. Now thirty-two, Richardson was finally established as a husband and businessman.

Salisbury Court was to be the base of Richardson’s operations for the next four decades. Situated between Fleet Street and the Thames, the business was at almost the exact midway point between the old centre of London around St Paul’s, and the fashionable purlieus of St James’s. His immediate world was bounded to the west by the Temple Bar, the gateway that marked the boundary between Fleet Street and the Strand, between London and Westminster, and whose elaborate façade was, as occasion required, decorated with the heads of Jacobite traitors. To the east, Fleet Street was separated from Ludgate Hill and the City proper by Fleet Ditch and the New Canal, the artificial tributaries that drained much of the human and industrial effluvium of the City into the Thames, and whose stench did little to hinder the brisk business done at the countless stalls selling fresh oysters that lined their banks.[12] In between these limits thrived a neighbourhood of tailors, lawyers, clerks, doctors and tavern-owners. There were also a significant number of printers and booksellers.[13] Conveniently for Richardson, Salisbury Court was equidistant between the booksellers of west London, like Andrew Millar, the greatest literary deal-maker of the day, based on the Strand, and those in the east, on and about Paternoster Row, such as Richardson’s great friends and boosters Charles Rivington and John Osborn.

Richardson’s timing was as propitious as his location. England in the 1720s was on the verge of a great explosion of printing activity. Literacy rates were approximately 60 per cent for men and 40 per cent for women. Rising education standards combined with economic prosperity and, for the most part, social stability created a ready market for the printed word. On the supply side, a bare minimum of government intervention in printing, improving legal protections for intellectual property, and an efficient postal service, all nourished the growth of the industry. Printers were kept busy by the three thousand unique titles being published each year by the 1740s – two-thirds of which were printed in London – and by the dozens of daily, weekly or thrice-weekly newspapers, journals and gossip sheets, not to mention the sleet of Grub Street pamphleteering that rained down continuously upon the capital.

Richardson’s first big break in business came in 1733 when he was awarded a contract to print bills for the House of Commons. A decade later he won a second, considerably more lucrative contract to print the journals of the House of Commons. In between these two coups he continued to accumulate experience and trust in the book trade, his presses at Salisbury Court producing respectable tomes on history, geography, and various religious and moral matters. He engaged through his publications with some of the great intellectual debates and problems of the English Enlightenment. His presses took both sides of the fractious public discussion over Deism and demonstrated, through works like Daniel Defoe’s Religious Courtship, an emergent interest in problems of love, romance and marriage. Many of his publications, such as the Weekly Miscellany and the Daily Journal, were fantastically dull, and his authors were little better. They did however provide Richardson with entrées into literary London – the author Aaron Hill became his great friend and supporter – and his correspondence with other, lesser figures provides us with crucial insights into his life in this period. In the mid-1730s he became a friend and correspondent with Dr George Cheyne, a quack doctor and nutritionist from Bath whose books on dieting and nutrition Richardson published.[14]

It is largely through his letters with Cheyne that we get our first idea of what Richardson may have looked like. Cheyne, who had been extraordinarily fat, detailed his obesity and its consequences in horrifying detail in his letters to Richardson (he wrote on one occasion of his ‘putrified overgrown body … regularly the gout all over six months of the year, perpetual [retching], anxiety, giddiness, fitts and startings. Vomits were my only relief’), while extolling the merits of his ‘strict milk, seed, and vegetable diet’ and ‘the necessity of frequent gentle vomits that cleanse the glands’. Richardson, it emerges, was himself sorely in need of this course of treatment. Cheyne berated him for his girth and prolific appetite, and his cowed friend agreed to slim down, thereafter boasting of his progress in his letters. By the time the first images of Richardson emerge in the 1740s we see a man with a pink, round, complacent face – like a gammon steak – and a simple white wig, who, if not vastly overweight, generously fills his breeches.

Richardson’s struggles with his weight may have concealed a deeper personal torment. He was frequently ill throughout this period and at times hinted at psychological and physical exhaustion. Overwork likely accounted for some of this, but he was also haunted by familial tragedy. His marriage to Martha had produced six children – including three Samuels – none of whom survived infancy. Martha herself died in January 1731; four months later their last surviving daughter died too.[15] The next year he married Elizabeth Leake, the daughter of his former employer. Their marriage produced four daughters, Mary (Polly), Martha (Patty), Anne (Nancy) and Sarah (Sally), all born between 1735 and 1740. Richardson never had the son he hoped for, and it is quite possible that the profusion of women in his life sharpened his interest in the dynamics of courtship.

Richardson’s failure to produce a male heir indirectly led to his first outing as an author. In the summer of 1732 he engaged as his apprentice his nephew Thomas Verren Richardson, perhaps with the intention one day of handing his business over to him. Worried for the young man’s morals, Richardson took the occasion of Thomas’s apprenticeship to set down his own thoughts on how an apprentice should conduct himself. The result was The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum, printed from his own press in 1733. In its tone, content and rambling form, the Vade Mecum did but little depart from the conventions of the instruction manual. Beginning with the customary decrying of ‘the degeneracy of the times, and the profaneness and immorality, and even the open infidelity that is everywhere propagated with impunity’, it proceeded through a standard list of moral threats (women, the theatre, the tavern) that the pious apprentice would have to circumvent in the city. One of the few moments in which Richardson reveals his considerable descriptive powers comes during a critique of modern fashions, which he considered ‘one of the epidemick evils of the present age’, an especial threat to the young apprentice as it ‘lifts up the young man’s mind far above his condition’. What follows is an inadvertently hilarious description of the various modish affectations in dress that Richardson had observed in the streets of London (‘fine wrought buckles, near as big as those of a coach-horse, covering his instep and half his foot’), before ending with a prayer that the ‘ingenious Mr. Hogarth would finish the portrait’ and ‘shame such Foplings into Reformation’. There is a hard edge to Richardson’s criticism of such pretensions. The dangers of material ambition haunt all his novels. The idea that status could be purchased rather than earned through moral example was repugnant to him, and he saw in that notion’s prevalence the route by which men would be made work-shy and women would be sexually ruined.

The Vade Mecum never sold much, despite being supported by his bookseller friends and celebrated in various magazines and journals that Richardson had a hand in. But his book’s commercial failure figured little in his larger fortunes. Richardson was prospering by this point and in 1738 he began to rent a country home in Fulham, a pile with three floors, a cellar, and a garden with a grotto. While he retained his quarters in Salisbury Court, Richardson now had the perfect writer’s retreat in the countryside just west of London. No sooner had he taken up the lease than he was approached by his bookseller associates Rivington and Osborn with a commission to write a book of familiar letters. The concept – which conformed to a longstanding arrangement – was a book of letters sent from various stock characters (Mother to Daughter, Master to Servant, etc.) that doubled as a guide to letter writing and an exercise in moral instruction. Richardson agreed and set to work on these letters, to be written ‘in a common style’ for the use of rural readers. The first couple he wrote were ‘letters to instruct handsome girls, who were obliged to go out to service, as we phrase it, how to avoid the snares that might be laid against their virtue’. In the writing, Richardson recalled a story he had been told decades before. It was about a beautiful girl from a respectable but financially ruined family who was obliged as a teenager to go into the service of an aristocratic household. She faithfully served her mistress until she died and she was inherited into the service of her libertine son,

who, on her lady’s death, attempted, by all manner of temptations and devices, to seduce her. That she had recourse to as many innocent stratagems to escape the snares laid for her virtue; once, however, in despair, having been near drowning; that at last, her noble resistance, watchfulness, and excellent qualities, subdued him, and he thought fit to make her his wife, that she behaved herself with so much dignity, sweetness, and humility, that she made herself beloved of every body, and even by her relations, who, at first despised her; and now had the blessings both of rich and poor, and the love of her husband.

In a fit of inspiration Richardson laid aside the first project and began writing at speed. The product, finished in January 1740 after fewer than three months’ labour, was a novel, Pamela.

***

The basic narrative of Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded departs little from Richardson’s account of its supposed real-life model. Pamela Andrews is the beautiful, virtuous, literate girl from a recently impoverished family who is taken into the service of wealthy landowners. When her kindly mistress dies, Pamela’s services are assumed by the woman’s libertine son, Mr B—, who proceeds avidly to pursue her. His predations drive her to the point of suicide. Finally, Mr B— comes to recognise Pamela’s great moral character and, inspired by her example, undergoes a moral reformation. Thus transformed, he asks her to marry him and she, ludicrously, accepts.

The plot of Pamela needs no embellishment – it does, indeed, resist it – but the novel’s place in the history of seduction is better grasped with some additional context. First, Pamela helpfully demonstrates what kind of behaviour constituted ‘seduction’ at the dawn of the modern age. The first half of the book consists of Mr B—’s escalating attempts to claim his servant’s body. Initially, his actions are relatively innocent. He gives her books, clothes and other small objects; he offers her additional sums of money to send home to her poor parents; he showers her with attention above and beyond what her lowly status in his household warrants; he flirts with her in private. When these gambits fail, Mr B— becomes more aggressive: he kisses her against her will; he gropes her bosom; he harangues her as a ‘sauce-box’, a ‘bold-face’, an ‘artful young baggage’, a ‘little slut [with] the power of witchcraft’. Her resistance holds and his methods become truly Charterisian.[16] He hides in her room at night and surprises her while she sleeps. He kidnaps her and takes her to a private home where Mrs Jewkes, a London procuress, endeavours to corrupt her. Disguised as an elderly female servant, Mr B— enters the room Mrs Jewkes and Pamela share and tries to ravish her while his bawd holds her down. His rape frustrated (when Pamela faints, Mr B— desists), he tries to arrange a sham marriage in order to trick her into believing that they can now legitimately have sex.[17] This too, fails, and in a final throw of the dice Mr B— offers her a contract to become his kept mistress in exchange for 500 guineas, property in Kent, the use of all his servants, and ‘two diamond rings, and two pair of ear-rings, and a diamond necklace’.

The variety, ingenuity and rapacity of Mr B—’s attempts on her leave Pamela rightfully despondent. ‘This plot is laid too deep,’ she laments at one point, ‘and has been too long hatching, to be baffled, I fear.’ It is also clear, though, that such behaviour was tolerated if not celebrated as appropriate for a well-born man to undertake in pursuit of a comely woman from a lower social class. Mr B— approaches but never crosses the line of actual rape, which was a capital offence, albeit a rarely prosecuted one. As such, all his behaviour up to that point falls within the capacious eighteenth-century definition of ‘seduction’.

In this context it is remarkable that Pamela is able to hold out at all. The forces of English society are arrayed against her and yet still she, a simple serving girl, is able to maintain her resolve. What guides her is a monomaniacal interest in maintaining her chastity, a duty buttressed by her parents in their letters to her. In their correspondence they impress upon her the impassable divide between the world of material wealth and that of priceless moral precepts. When they learn early on of Mr B—’s favours to her, they immediately warn her to be on her guard against him and remind her of the immeasurable value of ‘that jewel, your virtue, which no riches, nor favour, nor any thing in this life, can make up to you’. Her parents ask her not only that she return to them to live in honest poverty rather than risk her virtue, but further that she prefer death to the loss of her chastity.

Pamela completely internalises these ideas. When Mr B— first kisses her and fondles her breasts, she writes that she ‘would have given my life for a farthing’ rather than succumb to his advances. There is an abiding significance to her refusal to sell or exchange her chastity. In an avowedly commercial age which celebrated and encouraged material wealth and accumulation, Pamela makes the claim that her virtue exists on a plane apart from the market economy. In the founding text of the modern literature of seduction, Richardson – no critic of the capitalist ethos – declares that questions of sex will not be subsumed into the rising tide of mercantile morality. The seduction narrative becomes the place where older Christian values survive the otherwise general triumph of the new values of the market and the merchant. There is a trap here, too. The elevation of virtue heightens the drama of its menace by a seducer. Things placed on pedestals have a tendency to fall from them, and the higher the column, the more devastating the impact. The counterpoint to the celebration of virtue was the loathing of its loss. ‘Moral’ men were equally comfortable venerating the virtuous and slandering the fallen. ‘A Woman discarded of Modesty,’ one book of manners advised, ‘ought to be gaz’d upon as a Monster.’[18] Another author observed that if any man of worth and substance were to learn that the object of his affections had been previously seduced, then she would undergo an immediate and irreversible transformation: ‘her beauty fades in his eyes, her wit becomes nauseous, and her air disagreeable’.[19] Consequently, virtue was a tightrope that all chaste women walked, ever aware of the chasm all about them. Henry Fielding’s Amelia would later decry the bind in which the cult of virtue put women. ‘Let her remember,’ she tells her innocent female reader, that ‘she walks on a precipice, and the bottomless pit is to receive her if she slips; nay, if she makes but one false step.’[20]

Richardson was well aware of the public fascination with the drama of that false step. From the outset he made it clear that his aim was to bait the hook of moral instruction with the worm of titillation.[21] He could not know how successful that formula would be. The first hint of his imminent success came from his wife. She read his proofs as he wrote them, and after a few weeks’ work on Pamela she would come to his study each evening and ask, ‘Have you any more Pamela, Mr. R.?’

It emerged upon publication that Mrs Richardson was not alone in her hunger for more of Pamela Andrews. First published in November 1740, Pamela went through an astonishing five editions in ten months. French and Italian translations were rapidly commissioned and were circulating on the continent within two years of the English publication.[22] In London, Horace Walpole recorded that ‘the late singular novel is the universal, and only theme – Pamela is like snow, she covers every thing with her whiteness’.

An engraving from a scene in Pamela, where Mr B— ambushes the titular heroine in the night

Pamela was originally published anonymously and as a nominally ‘true’ story. Only years later would Richardson coyly list himself as the ‘editor’ of the work. A mere handful of close friends knew that he was the author, though word soon spread through gossipy literary London. The rest of the public had to content themselves with open letters to the author published in magazines and periodicals or directed to the book’s printer – who was, naturally enough, Richardson himself.

Whether he was named or unnamed, the rapturous reception of Pamela propelled Richardson to the front line of English literary life. His friends, perhaps predictably, showered superlatives on his novel, and their letters to him strain the norms of acceptable flattery. More revealing of the general adulation that the book received was the praise that ordinary people, either unknown to Richardson or ignorant of his identity as the author, laid upon Pamela. Clergymen wrote that his book would do more good for national morals than any number of sermons; writer and editor Ralph Courteville declared that ‘if all the Books in England were to be burnt, this Book, next to the Bible, ought to be preserved’. Members of the public told how the novel had inspired them to seek the reformation of the rakes among their acquaintances, some even claiming success in the endeavour. Theatrical adaptations were written and performed; Hogarth, who a few years before had been praised by Richardson from afar, was commissioned to create a series of etchings depicting scenes from the novel.[23] Pamela was a cultural event that touched all classes. London society ladies proudly displayed their copies in public, while the villagers of Slough gathered at the blacksmith to hear the book read aloud and ran off to ring the church bells when their heroine finally married Mr B—.

Literary success seldom comes without controversy; Pamela bred critics as well as fans. These critics can be loosely divided into satirists and moralists. The former consisted of the writers, critics and readers who were sceptical of Pamela’s claim to realism. They saw in Pamela’s rise from servant to lady of the manor a tale of canny social climbing, not the triumph of morality. Surely, they argued, if moral values were distinct from, and superior to, material values then rewarding the first with the second – which was what the book’s subtitle seemed to celebrate – made nonsense of the novel’s value system. The result was a chorus of scabrous criticism emanating from the capital’s pleasure districts. In June 1741 Eliza Haywood, the best-selling female novelist of the age, published Anti-Pamela; or Feign’d Innocence Detected, which recounted in the original’s epistolary format the rapid social ascent of Syrena Tricksy. Haywood’s work came a few months after a more complete parody of Richardson’s moralising: Henry Fielding’s Shamela, whose anti-heroine is a courtesan on the make until she realises she can dupe Mr Booby into marriage instead. ‘I thought once of making a little fortune by my person,’ she writes to her bawdy mother. ‘I now intend to make a great one by my vartue.’

Shamela and Anti-Pamela are but two examples among many. The satirical attacks on Pamela probed the holes in Richardson’s worldview. They also demonstrated how opposing views of morality could cohabit in the same period. Richardson’s morality, as we shall see, may have been ascendent but it still had to contend with the more permissive attitudes of Fielding and Haywood and their Covent Garden milieu. Any one sexual ideology rarely attains hegemonic status. The question is not which one triumphs but who attains cultural top billing. The rivalry between Pamela and Shamela is not simply an episode from English literary history but a permanent feature of the history of seduction.

As a printer and a longstanding participant in the London literary scene, Richardson could not have been surprised by the satirical attacks that came his way. Friends wrote to console him of the barbs hurled his way – the ever-faithful Aaron Hill prayed that some higher power might ‘Deliver Pamela from these cold Killers, who assume a Merit in destroying her!’[24] – Richardson’s occupation of the moral high ground was, however, impregnable and he could readily shrug off such attacks. More worrying were the criticisms of his work that came from fellow moralists. In works like Pamela Censur’d and The Virgin in Eden, Richardson was attacked by conservatives for writing little better than pornography. Pamela, they argued (and not without reason), was needlessly salacious and possessed of a wholly perverse moral lesson. It would doubtless corrupt more youths than it would save. They scorned the notion that this was suitable reading material for their daughters. The anonymous author of Pamela Censur’d went further, declaring that Pamela functioned as incitement to seduction:

The Advances are regular, and the amorous Conflicts so agreeably and warmly depicted, that the young Gentleman Reader will at the best be tempted to rehearse some of the same Scenes with some Pamela or other in the Family, and the Modest Young Lady can never read the Description of Naked Breasts being run over with the Hand, and Kisses given with such Eagerness that they cling to the Lips; but her own soft Breasts must heave at the Idea and secretly sigh for the same Pressure; what then can she do when she comes to the closer Struggles of the Bed, where the tender Virgin lies panting and exposed, if not to the last Conquest … at least to all the Liberties which ungoverned Hands of a determined Lover must be supposed to take?[25]

The passage inadvertently demonstrates the author’s own criticism of Pamela. Writing about seduction, even for moral or instructive purposes, brings with it the unavoidable risk that the realistic portrayal of sexual collision will tip into salaciousness and pornography. The charge stung Richardson and he quietly modified the text in response to such criticisms.[26]

The controversies surrounding Pamela add to the sense that if Richardson’s work cannot be confirmed as the first novel of the English language, then its publication must surely be considered the first great literary event in the history of the form. Its local and international popularity; the fervid debates it triggered; the parodies it spawned; the conversations and correspondences it informed; the sheer quantity of copies it sold: all militate towards the view that this was the moment when the Western world fell in love with the novel. Richardson courted his readers no less assiduously than Mr B— pursued Pamela, and in so doing acknowledged how the strategies of fiction mimicked the stratagems of the seducer. The novelist spins fictions to win an audience just as the seducer contrives to win his intended – and with much the same artistry. Richardson seems to nod to this symbiosis between real and fictional worlds in a brilliant passage put into the unlikely mouth of Mr B— shortly before he marries Pamela. Seeing his fiancée writing away, he expresses an interest in reading her letters and journals, and puns upon the similarities between reading, writing and courting:

I long to see the particulars of your plot, and your disappointment, where your papers leave off: for you have so beautiful a manner, that it is partly that, and partly my love for you, that has made me desirous of reading all you write; though a great deal of it is against myself; for which you must expect to suffer a little: and as I have furnished you with the subject, I have a title to see the fruits of your pen.

The passage could act as epigraph for Pamela’s enduring cultural resonance. Its publication was the moment that the fiction of seduction affirmed the seduction of fiction.

***

Before the publication of Pamela, Richardson was prospering; after it he was on his way to being rich. In Georgian England, wealth brought with it obligations to the poor and needy in one’s extended social group, and a man in or above Richardson’s position could expect a steady stream of petitioners and supplicants to make their way to his door. Early in 1743, one such indigent was directed to his offices at Salisbury Court by one of his clients, Dr Patrick Delany, an Irish cleric. Her name was Laetitia Pilkington and her life and career captured some of the vagaries of womanhood at the dawn of the modern age.

Born Laetitia van Lewen in either Cork or Dublin around 1710, Pilkington was the daughter of a Dutch doctor and an Irish Protestant mother. After a bookish childhood in Dublin, she was married in her mid-teens to Matthew Pilkington, a young clergyman with literary ambitions. Their courtship had been defined by mutual dissimulation as to the wealth and status of each family on the part of Matthew and Mr and Mrs van Lewen, and an understandable naivety, not to mention powerlessness, on that of Laetitia, matched by her husband-to-be’s cynical persistence in an affair of the heart that would not long detain him. The newlyweds’ precarious prospects were reflected in the material belongings he brought to their new home: a harpsichord, a cat and an owl, which ‘were all his worldly goods’ at the age of twenty-five. Both Pilkingtons sought literary recognition, a fact that might have given them common cause and certainly gave them social access – Jonathan Swift became a great friend to the couple and an enthusiastic supporter of Matthew’s work – but it also seems to have driven a wedge between them, largely on account of Matthew’s vanity. Pilkington would later write, apropos of literary jealousy,

And if a man cannot bear his friend should write, much less can he endure it in his wife; it seems to set them too much upon a level with our lords and masters; and this I take to be the true reason why even men of sense discountenance learning in women, and commonly choose for mates the most illiterate and stupid of the sex, and then bless their stars their wife is not a wit. But if a remark be true which I have somewhere read, that a foolish woman never brought forth a wise son, I think the gentlemen should have some regard to the intellects of those they espouse.

Her husband’s true feelings towards her were revealed in 1732 when he obtained a year’s posting in London, to be supplemented by a commission from Swift to act as his agent in the capital.[27] Laetitia was desperate to accompany him, but that September, as Matthew prepared to leave, he told her quite frankly that ‘he did not want such an Incumbrance as a Wife, that he did not intend to pass there for a married Man, and that in short he could not taste any Pleasure where I was’. Laetitia was shocked; this admission was only the beginning of her marital woes.

Soon after his arrival in London, Matthew began neglecting his clerical duties and instead devoted himself to the pleasures of the West End. In Covent Garden he went to the theatre daily after work and spent the night carousing with the fast set. Among his new rakish acquaintances was James Worsdale, a painter, poet, musician, wit and libertine with at least four illegitimate children, possessed of an immense and indefatigable charm, and who moved easily among the liberal-living aristocracy. Pilkington was soon to know all about Worsdale’s charms. In 1733 she joined her husband in London, where she found him immersed in the nightlife: drinking, attending the theatre, and in hot pursuit of a Drury Lane actress (one Mrs Heron). ‘I thought this but an odd manner of Life for a Clergyman,’ she recalled. Matthew was by now convinced that he had to rid himself of the burden of a wife and set about trying to lure Laetitia into adultery. His first port of call, Worsdale, soon set about seducing his friend’s wife. ‘He did everything in his power to afford and encourage an amour between his friend and me,’ Pilkington wrote of her husband. Matthew’s efforts included the organisation of a romantic weekend trip to Windsor, the party consisting solely of Laetitia and Worsdale. After fending off her companion’s hands for much of the coach ride there, Pilkington then had to barricade herself in the hotel bedroom at night in order to keep her suitor out. The evening’s shenanigans made for a frosty morning’s sightseeing. She made it back to London assailed but unconquered.

Pilkington was as frank as any of her female contemporaries about the existence of her own desires, and used the language and literary stylings of moral outrage more as a satirical device than as an actual expression of her private beliefs. She wanted love; she wanted intimacy. As an educated woman she knew that the costs of seeking either were infinitely greater than those faced by men. She was instantly aware that her husband’s inducements to adultery could be lethal to her life fortunes. Women lost more in sexual adventure than men. They risked pregnancy and death and, at a minimum, pariahdom. ‘’Tis play to you, ’tis but death to us,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had said of seduction. This double standard was embedded in the law. Male infidelity within marriage was not apt cause for divorce; female infidelity was – and Matthew Pilkington well knew it.

At the end of 1733 the unhappy couple returned to Dublin. They were joined there by Worsdale, who became a leading figure in the Dublin Hell-Fire Club, an outfit that far exceeded its English model in its transgressions. Its members dined at a table with a seat left spare for the devil. Their mascot was a black cat who was served first at supper. Their womanising, drinking, and harassment of the subject local population soon passed into lore. As a divine, Matthew could not easily associate himself with such a group and had to content himself on its fringes. But he remained committed to losing his wife. Laetitia had to fend off the advances of a young poet named William Hammond, from whom she later extracted the following confession:

Mr Pilkington described you to me, as a Lady very liberal of your Favours, and begged I would be so kind as to make him a Cuckold, so that he might be able to prove it, in order to [get] a Separation from you; promising to give me Time and Opportunity for it: he assur’d me, it would be no difficult Task; that I need but throw myself at your Feet, whine out some tragedy, and you would quickly yield.

After several years of such antics, Pilkington was by 1737 understandably fed up with her husband’s behaviour and admitted in her poems that she considered herself free of her marital vows. That summer she fell in love with a young surgeon named Robert Adair. An affair began, and at some point later in the year the two were disturbed in bed by Matthew, with posse concomitant, who having finally succeeded in proving his wife’s infidelity broke out the wine, toasted their freedom, and kicked her out of the house at two in the morning. A divorce was granted by a Dublin court in February 1738; Adair vanished from her life soon afterwards. Unmarried, unsupported, and terrifyingly free, Pilkington made her way back to London at the end of the year.

Her journey to London was a taste of things to come. On the crossing from Ireland a wealthy rake propositioned her to be his kept woman. She refused. In the stagecoach from Chester to London a Welsh parson bought her food and then ‘began to offer a little more of his civility than I was willing to accept of’. Spurned but not embittered, he ‘made me a present of a ginger-bread-nut, curiously wrapped up in white paper’. The scene so amused their fellow passengers that they invited her to dine with them at a tavern in Barnet. There another man swooped down upon her, insisting that this ‘little Hibernian nymph should dine with him’, regaling her with tales of his wealth while she ate. She finally made it to London with three guineas to her name.

There her chief patron and support was Colley Cibber, actor and poet laureate, who set her up as the in-house wit and writer for the moneyed men of White’s, the exclusive club (originally a coffee-house) in St James’s. Pilkington lived for a period directly opposite the site, and played host to its members who came to enjoy her humour, partake of her conversation, or have her write love letters or political pamphlets on their behalf. This in turn funded her own literary outings, including the 1739 poem ‘The Statues: or, The Trial of Constancy. A Tale for the Ladies’. Here she bemoaned the ‘changeful’ male sex, who

in perfidy delight,

Despise perfection, and fair virtue slight;

False, fickle, base, tyrannick, and unkind,

Whose hearts nor vows can chain, nor honour bind,

Mad to possess, by passion blindly led,

And then as mad, to stain the nuptial bed.

For all the outward glamour, Pilkington still existed from commission to commission and was always only a misstep from calamity. The crisis came in 1742, when an unscrupulous landlady lured her into accepting a trifling loan – forty shillings – and then had her arrested for debt. In October she began a three-month stint at the Marshalsea prison, where the costs of survival only exacerbated her financial crisis. Half-starved, she wrote to everyone and anyone for help. Cibber secured a guinea each from sixteen dukes. Her Irish acquaintance Dr Delany sent her twelve guineas, to be collected from his printer, Samuel Richardson of Salisbury Court.

Shortly after her release, Pilkington presented herself with some trepidation at the home and office of the author of the ‘incomparable Pamela’ – a work she had read and admired. She was impressed by Richardson’s obvious wealth (his house, she reported, was ‘of a very grand outward appearance’) and his unfailing generosity. Richardson introduced her to his wife and children and invited her to stay for lunch and dinner. That evening he gave her the twelve guineas from Delany, as well as two of his own, and sent on her way with an encouragement to write to him. This she did, though only her portion of the correspondence survives.

Over the next few years, Pilkington would continue to experience setbacks and would return again and again to Richardson’s generosity. When she needed a letter of credit to establish a print and pamphlet store she wrote to him. When her store was robbed and her home burgled, and her daughter Betty arrived on her doorstep penniless and heavily pregnant, Richardson sent money, linen and clothing. When her prodigal son appeared home from sea in rags, Richardson sent money to clothe him. When, at length, she decided to return to Ireland in 1747, once more it was Richardson who conveyed the money to make her final departure from London possible.

Richardson was a great collector of women – and of their stories, which he needed as the raw material for his books. In supporting Pilkington he was doing his duty as a man of wealth and Christian charity, but he was also accessing a world he would otherwise have known next to nothing about. But the literary transaction – though he did not know it – went both ways. For, back in Dublin, Pilkington did something both very innovative and very much of her time: she wrote her autobiography. The Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, published in three volumes from 1748, first in Dublin and then in London, was Pilkington’s magnum opus, the work that, after a lifetime of impoverished scribbling, made her famous and financially stable.

The tone and style of the Memoirs is Swiftian but the content is Richardsonian. Pilkington’s life in her telling was one long battle against the cruelties of a male world, made manifest time and again in the licence men displayed towards her body. She had seen ‘the world from the palace to the prison’ and the one constant was male rapacity to women. Clergymen were ‘generally the first seducers of innocence’; one swinish aristocrat she met had ‘devoted himself entirely to Belial’ and then had ‘the cruelty to attempt his virgin daughters’; the rakes of White’s boasted to her of their conquests of girls’ chastity (‘a loss,’ she knew, ‘never to be retrieved’), while some lived lives of Caligulan debauch, like her acquaintance and client General Ligonier, who kept four adolescent mistresses in a single house in Mayfair. At the end of it all, women were discarded by their exploiters and shunned by wider society. The injustice was outrageous, Pilkington declared:

Of all things in nature, I most wonder why men should be severe in their censures on our sex, for a failure in point of chastity: is it not monstrous that our seducers should be our accusers? Will they not employ fraud, nay, often force to gain us? What various arts, what stratagems, what wiles will they use for our destruction? But that once accomplished, every opprobrious term with which our language so plentifully abounds, shall be bestowed on us, even by the very villains who have wronged us.

Pilkington was far from alone in her diagnosis. The middle of the century saw an explosion in women’s writing, and a recurring theme was the sexual wrongs women endured at the hands of licentious men. Memoirs that told of women’s real-life struggles, like Teresia Constantia Phillips’ Apology (1748) and the eponymous The Narrative of the Life of Charlotte Charke (1755) by the daughter of Colley Cibber, met with enormous public success. In 1744 veteran female writer Eliza Haywood established The Female Spectator, the first publication of its kind aimed at and written by women, and one whose early issues consisted almost entirely of tales of sexual entrapment. Many of the new female writers were friends, correspondents or clients of Samuel Richardson. His long-standing correspondent Sarah Chapone wrote a proto-feminist critique of English marital laws. His printers produced some of the later editions of Charlotte Lennox’s brilliant burlesque of sentimental culture, The Female Quixote (1752), and supported satirical essayist Jane Collier’s work from the outset. His dear friend Sarah Fielding (sister of Henry) published a long essay on his own work, and he encouraged and mentored a raft of aspiring female writers through his prodigious daily regimen of letter writing.

The 1740s and 1750s were a period when women discovered and rejoiced in what Thomas Seward (himself the father of a prominent female belle-lettrist, Anne Seward), in 1748, called ‘the female right to literature’ in a poem of the same name. Male writers and moralists understood the right of women to enter the literary space as of a piece with the expanding work of Enlightenment and as a hallmark of England’s generous and far-sighted civilisation. The new chorus of female voices, and the tales of suffering and adversity they related, also inspired a revolution in sexual ideology. For centuries it had been taken for granted that men were morally superior to women. The Bible and the church fathers had said as much. In eighteenth-century England the exact reverse came to be widely believed: namely, that women were morally superior and that men were vicious, predatory and lustful.

Seduction narratives proselytised this new paradigm. Richardson had done his part with Pamela, but the long war to change perceptions and win new sympathy and respect for women could not have been won without the legion of new female voices. Male control of the cultural means of production, Samuel Johnson wrote in a typically perspicacious Rambler essay in 1750, had been a constant since antiquity, and as a consequence ‘the reproach of making the world miserable has been always thrown upon the women’. But that stranglehold had now been broken. ‘The pleas of the ladies appeal to passions of more forcible operation than the reverence of antiquity,’ he wrote, and they were likely to win the day, he concluded, for ‘they have stronger arguments’.

***

The arrival in some numbers of female writers with lived experience of womanhood might have been Richardson’s cue to leave the literary field to those who knew better than he whereof they wrote. This, however, was not Richardson’s way. No sooner had the final revisions to Pamela been completed than he plunged into a new and more ambitious work, ultimately published in instalments between 1747 and 1748 as Clarissa: or, the History of a Young Lady.

Clarissa and Pamela have much in common. Richardson claimed that his second novel was based on the same real-life tale of seduction that had inspired Pamela. Their basic literary and dramatic structures are very similar. Both are epistolary novels. Both involve pursuit, abduction, deception and assault on the part of their male characters, and virtue, eloquence and sublime forbearance on the part of their female ones. Where they part ways is in their endings. Pamela, for all its moralising, is essentially a comedy that concludes, in the Shakespearean mode, in marriage. Clarissa is a tragedy that ends in the death of its titular heroine. These conflicting finales reveal a major departure in Richardson’s moral message. As explained by its subtitle, the story of Pamela Andrews is one of virtue rewarded. The humble servant is elevated in stature and ultimately in station by her unerring commitment to her moral principles. In practical terms Mr B—’s attempted ‘seduction’ of Pamela amounts to little more than severe workplace harassment. The disparity in power between seducer and seduced is so great as to deny the novel any great psychological depth. Richardson’s decision to have Pamela end with Mr B—’s moral reformation and his marriage was probably necessary to make the book at all readable. If Pamela had ended with Mr B—’s rape of his servant and her subsequent death, then his novel would have been little more than an exercise in literary sadism.

Rape and death, however, are exactly what befall the heroine of his second novel. The first quarter of Clarissa follows Clarissa Harlowe’s desperate attempts to avoid marrying Roger Solmes, a doltish local squire, whom her family insist she wed for his money. Her steadfast refusal to marry a man she loathes drives her into the arms of Robert Lovelace, a rakish aristocrat with designs on her heart and body. Lovelace engineers her escape from the Harlowe home and then sets about his epic attempt on her virtue. His pursuit ends neither with her capitulation nor in his reformation. Instead, after close to a million words of text, Lovelace transports Clarissa to a Hampstead bordello where he drugs and rapes her.

Despoiled but not ruined, Clarissa is transformed by Lovelace’s rape into a martyr for virtue. She spends the rest of the novel dying, and in the process of her death becomes a kind of secular saint whose example illuminates the lives of those around her and succeeds in bringing about the reformation of Lovelace’s best friend and fellow voluptuary, Jack Belford, who records her death and eulogises her ‘unblemished virtue, exemplary piety, sweetness of manners, discreet generosity, and true christian charity: and these all set off by the most graceful modesty and humility; yet on all proper occasions, manifesting a noble presence of mind, and true magnanimity: so that she may be said to have been not only an ornament to her sex, but to human nature’. Lovelace himself is driven close to madness when he realises what he has wrought. He flees to Italy, where he is tracked down by one of Clarissa’s relations and slain in a duel.

Clarissa’s darker turn is legitimised by the relative social parity that exists between the Lovelaces and the Harlowes. The families are not perfectly equal – the Lovelaces are nobles and the Harlowes are not – but they are close enough in wealth and lifestyle to remove from the novel the tawdry class drama that underpins Pamela. Richardson was now free to explore the topic of seduction with more nuance. Lovelace and Clarissa are, in terms of breeding, education and social sophistication, peers. The drama of her seduction is not therefore one of power but of free will – a fact that Richardson helpfully (if somewhat elliptically) alludes to in the preface to the novel. There he writes that the goal of his novel is twofold, ‘to caution parents against the undue exertion of their natural authority over their children in the great article of marriage: and children against preferring a man of pleasure to a man of probity, upon that too commonly received notion, that a reformed rake makes the best husband’.

The Harlowes’ refusal to allow their daughter to marry a man of her choosing has channelled her towards Lovelace, a man she would have safely avoided if left to her own devices.[28] Once in his hands, her capacity to act rationally for her own benefit is further compromised by a social belief that a woman’s mission is to rescue and reform wayward libertines. One of the many threads of Clarissa is the heroine’s internal debate as to if and how Lovelace can be reformed. In Clarissa’s mind, the prospect that Lovelace ‘might be reclaimed by a woman of virtue and prudence’ becomes her ‘secret pleasure’, a moral adventure analogous to the sexual adventure of seduction that Lovelace is bent on. For his part, Lovelace recognises from the outset that fostering the illusion that Clarissa’s benign presence is bringing about his reformation is the key to winning her trust, her love and, finally, her body. ‘Reformation shall be my stalking-horse,’ he gloats to Belford. Again, Clarissa’s free will has been imperilled by the false belief that her mission as a woman is to edify dissolute men.[29]

The roots of this belief were tangled up with one of the core concerns of the English Enlightenment. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke had asserted that at birth the mind was like an empty room. His mission was to discover how it came to be furnished. The answer, he believed, lay ‘in one word, from EXPERIENCE’. He continued:

All our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking.[30]

The key word is ‘sensible’. Man was endowed with ‘sensibility’ – the capacity to perceive the world which, through cultivation, education and moral effort, could be expanded into a larger project of empathy, intellectual refinement and social sophistication. At a physiological level, Locke and his disciples (including Richardson’s friend and client Dr George Cheyne) believed that sensibility operated through the nervous system. Medical research seemed to have demonstrated that women had more sensitive nervous systems and so had an innately superior capacity for sensibility compared to men. In a complete reversal of the ancient Christian belief that identified women with carnality, chaos and nature, the Georgians now understood women as the agents of a process of moral and social amelioration. Men were cast as coarse and brutish, and those denied regular contact with women (sailors, scholars, back-country squires) were deemed doubly so.[31] Men were encouraged to socialise with women in the hope that women’s natural delicacy would rub off on them.[32] This so-called ‘Cult of Sensibility’ encouraged just the kind of risky heterosocial behaviour that could trap women like Clarissa Harlowe in perilous situations. Moreover, women with a surfeit of sensibility – as was thought to be rife among the educated middle and upper classes – were vulnerable to manipulation. Locke had warned in his Essay that humans were readily fooled by rhetoric and counselled that eloquent words ‘are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment’.[33]

In the next generation, David Hume embellished the quandary. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) he famously claimed that each individual’s experience of life was ‘but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’. Reality was chaos. Resorting to reason was no guarantee, for it was ‘and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’. Passions were primary to reason, in Hume’s view, but they too could be ‘founded on false suppositions’ and so lead to fallacious beliefs and foolish actions. Locke and Hume moved our understanding of what guides human action away from old, inflexible theological categories of good and evil, sin and virtue, and towards a highly subjective, highly unstable vision of how humans interact with their environment and with one another. The explosion of seduction narratives in the same period situated sexual conflict within that new perceptual framework – and none did so with more care and psychological realism than Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.[34]

Seduction fascinates because it dramatises the conflict between reason and passion. Clarissa keenly feels within her the tussle between these rival forces. She proudly claims the ‘right to a heart’ – the freedom to feel and to love – while equally stating her pride in her powers of reason and perception. Her best friend and endlessly entertaining correspondent Anne Howe observes from afar the exact same contest, writing suggestively of how the ‘throbs and the glows’ of passion contrive to weaken women’s resolve in the face of hardened seducers ‘practised in deceit’. The philosophical opposition between logic and emotion is brilliantly illustrated in a small but revealing episode that occurs while Clarissa is still held hostage at her parents’ home. As they will not allow her to communicate with Lovelace, he has organised a dead drop at a wall at the end of the garden where the two can deliver and retrieve the letters they write to one another. One morning she goes to the wall with a letter for Lovelace. No sooner has she left it in the designated place than she changes her mind and decides she would rather not send the letter after all. She returns to the wall, but her note is no longer there:

How diligent is this man! It is plain he was in waiting: for I had walked but a few paces, after I had deposited it, when, my heart misgiving me, I returned, to have taken it back, in order to reconsider it as I walked, and whether I should or should not let it go. But I found it gone.

In all probability, there was but a brick wall, of a few inches thick, between Mr. Lovelace and me, at the very time I put the letter under the brick![35]

Clarissa’s internal conflict between the diktats of reason and the urgings of an illicit desire are temporarily displaced by the erotic thrill of recognising that exactly the same drama is playing out within Lovelace, too. His eagerness to propel their romance onwards has led him to lurk behind a crumbling country wall, metres from a family who openly despise him and now only inches from the woman he lusts after. The vignette at the wall encapsulates the sexual danger that is the appeal and the peril of seduction. The contest between wooer and wooed, seducer and seduced, is in its preliminaries an attempt by each to assert emotional control over the other. Even in the eighteenth century men had no universal advantage in this game. Anne Howe, for instance, delights in toying with her male suitors. ‘Our courtship-days, they say, are our best days,’ she writes to Clarissa. ‘To see how familiar these men-wretches grow upon a smile, what an awe they are struck into when we frown; who would not make them stand off? Who would not enjoy a power, that is to be short-lived?’

Clarissa’s deepening tragedy is the realisation that she has emphatically lost this contest to Lovelace. She comes to realise that her own delicacy – her heightened sensibility – has led her into disaster. She fluctuates between emotional states, arrives at and discards any number of ‘logical’ conclusions, and is confused by competing passions towards her tormentor. Her own unstable personality – a word Richardson was the first to use in its modern sense in the novel that bore her name – is her greatest enemy. ‘What strange imperfect beings!’ she writes to Anne. ‘But self here, which is at the bottom of all we do, and of all we wish, is the grand misleader.’

Lovelace has no such problems. A cold logician, totally amoral, utterly without sensibility (‘What sensibilities must thou have suppressed!’ Clarissa exclaims at one point), he expertly stage-manages his shifting personae and her corresponding responses to them. ‘Ovid was not a greater master of metamorphoses than thy friend,’ he boasts to Jack Belford, his confederate. Lovelace does not in the end succeed in technically seducing Clarissa – hence his need to resort to rape. Richardson, however, did succeed in articulating the dilemma at the heart of all post-Enlightenment seduction narratives. An examination of constellations of power in society at large can only go so far in explaining interactions among individuals. More pertinent, and infinitely more ambiguous, is the struggle between reason and passion that rages within and between each of us. These are finally questions of free will and its limits, questions which go unresolved from generation to generation even if each has its own prescriptions. Richardson’s remedy was invariably some mixture of reformation for men and sequestration for women, as well as the generous admonition that all readers concerned for the virtue of the young ought to purchase his book, which had been written ‘to warn the inconsiderate and thoughtless of one of the sex against the base arts and designs of specious contrivers of the other’.

***

Debut authors write in obscurity, untroubled by public interest; successful ones have to perform their duties in the spotlight, burdened by expectation. After the astounding success of Pamela, Clarissa was written under fierce scrutiny. Richardson’s exertions were made all the more trying by the book’s protracted gestation and long birth. Clarissa was begun shortly after the final editions of Pamela were released into the world. It was largely finished by the end of 1746, but even before the final manuscript was completed suggestions and complaints were pouring in from his various correspondents, many of whom demanded to see the proofs of the work he was labouring on. Consequently, well before the publication of the first two volumes in December 1747, Richardson was already being harried by critics. The interludes between the release of the third and fourth volumes in April 1748 and the fifth, sixth and seventh in December of the same year provided yet more opportunities for a now enlarged critical community to probe his plot, his characters and his parable. Rarely has an author had to defend a work before and during publication with such energy.

Given its now canonical position in English literature, it is easy to forget that Clarissa never sold as well as Pamela. It did, however, spark debate of equal intensity to its forebear and won Richardson new respect from the literary community. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had damned Pamela as cheap trash fit only for her scullery maids, recorded how she ‘eagerly read’ Clarissa, sobbing over it, and felt transported by his art back to her own courting days.[36] Henry Fielding, who had gleefully mocked Pamela, was another convert to Richardson’s work, writing at some length to him of his own emotional reactions to the novel, praising Richardson’s artistry and moral force, before concluding warmly: ‘I heartily wish you Success. That I sincerely think you in the highest manner deserve it.’[37] Edward Young, a literary taste-maker almost as esteemed as Johnson, declared that the book’s power confirmed the arrival of the novelist as an arbiter of moral norms and that ‘the Bench of Bishops might go to School to the Writer of a Romance’.[38] Richardson had accomplished in Clarissa what he had not with Pamela: he had become a writer’s writer.

Few, then, doubted Richardson’s achievement. What was endlessly debated was his characters and the moral message they presented. Many questioned the need for Clarissa to die and interceded on her behalf. When Colley Cibber, an early reader of the manuscript, learnt from Laetitia Pilkington that Richardson had decided Clarissa was to perish at the novel’s end, he could not contain his outrage:

My heart suffers as strongly for her as if word was brought to me that his house was on fire, and himself, his wife, and little ones, likely to perish in the flame. I cannot bear it! had Lovelace ten thousands souls and bodies, I could wish to see them all tortured, stretched on the rack: no punishment can be too bad for him … When I told him she must die, he said ‘G—d d—n him, if she should.’[39]

Others took the opposite tack and chose to blame Clarissa’s behaviour for her demise. Richardson displayed rare genius when, having received in the same mailbag one letter declaring Clarissa a prude and another a coquette, he replied by sending each correspondent the other’s argument.[40]

Inevitably, much of the criticism focused on the character of Lovelace. As early as the autumn of 1746, when the novel was still circulating among a coterie of close friends, Richardson was having to defend his depiction of Lovelace to Aaron Hill, who thought it unrealistic that a character so evidently wicked would be able to ensnare the saintly Clarissa Harlowe. In a robust defence of his creative decisions, Richardson claimed that he had made Lovelace as dislikeable as possible to ensure that he did not inadvertently appear attractive in the eyes of impressionable young ladies. ‘I once read to a young Lady part of his Character,’ he explained to Hill, ‘and then to his End; and upon her pitying him … I made him still more and more odious.’[41] Richardson was wise to stress the cruelty of his creation. Lovelace is easily the most enticing of his characters, something that was both a triumph and a quandary. Richardson was alive to accusations that he was of the devil’s party without knowing it. This was one of the lessons learnt from the moral clamour surrounding Pamela. He sought to make Lovelace irredeemable and consequently impossible to love.

He did not succeed. In October 1748, while he prepared for the publication of the final three volumes, he received a remarkable letter from a female fan, who signed off as Belfour, a play on his fictional Jack Belford. After explaining at length why she believed the author should spare Clarissa, his anonymous correspondent made a frank declaration of interest in his great villain:

… if I was to die for it, I cannot help being fond of Lovelace. A sad dog! Why would you make him so wicked, and yet so agreeable? He says, sometime or other he designs being a good man, from which words I have great hopes; and, in excuse for my liking him, I must say, I have made him so, up to my own heart’s wish; a faultless husband have I made him, even without danger of a relapse. A foolish rake may die one; but a sensible rake must reform, at least in the hands of a sensible author it ought to be so, and will I hope.[42]

The letter continued in this vein, by turns chiding and winsome, before concluding with the promise of a curse on the author should he see fit to deny his characters a happy ending. ‘Now,’ she concluded, ‘make Lovelace and Clarissa unhappy if you dare.’

This was the beginning of a brilliant friendship. Richardson would respond and respond again, and his correspondence with ‘Belfour’ would turn into a friendship that lasted until the end of his life. For close to two years he and his circle would refer to this unnamed correspondent as his ‘Incognita’. Her real name was Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh, the leisured wife of baronet (and fellow Richardson enthusiast) Sir Roger Bradshaigh. Richardson was almost sixty; Bradshaigh was in her mid-thirties. He would not know her true identity until February 1850, a full eighteen months after their first exchange of letters, and then only through the indiscretion of his friend, the artist Joseph Highmore. They met for the first time in Birdcage Walk, St James’s, a few weeks after her unveiling, but this was one of relatively few meetings given the length and depth of their relationship. Theirs would never be a friendship of shared experience. Like his characters, they consumed themselves in writing to one another and those first, crucial exchanges focused on the person of Lovelace.[43]

Richardson maintained to Bradshaigh that his fictional villain had to be an incurable case in order to prevent him becoming an excuse for male abandonment in the real world. If Clarissa had reformed Lovelace after all his wickedness, Richardson reasoned, then what would the lesson be to the everyday rake of Georgian England? He would conclude, Richardson reasoned, entering deftly into the mind of the debauchees he impersonated so well, that ‘I [might] pass the Flower and Prime of my Youth, informing and pursuing the most insidious Enterprizes … As many of the Daughters and Sisters of worthy Families, as I can seduce, may I seduce, Scores perhaps in different Climates – And on their Weakness build my profligate Notions of the whole Sex.’

Such a view was the logical outcome of giving Lovelace an opportunity to atone. Clarissa’s death was not Richardson’s punishment of her, but her punishment of him and her parents. ‘Whence my double Moral,’ he finished grandly, ‘extending to tyranical [sic] Parents, as well as to Profligate Men; and laying down from her the Duty of Children, and that whether Parents do theirs or not.’[44]

Shortly afterwards, Richardson sent Bradshaigh an advance copy of the fifth volume, which contained the infamous scene where Lovelace rapes Clarissa in Hampstead. The reading of it shook Bradshaigh’s perception of Lovelace (‘You have drawn a villain above nature,’ she wrote) but did not break it. ‘Blot out but one night, and the villainous laudanum, and all may be well again.’[45] By now the book was only weeks away from publication, and her prayers fell on ears deafened by the clatter of printers at work. At the beginning of the New Year she wrote again, shortly after reading the final volumes, ‘You will hardly believe what Pains I have taken to reconcile myself to the Death of Clarissa, and to your Catastrophe.’ She then proceeded to give a dramatic account of her reading of the last moments of Clarissa’s life:

Had you seen me, I surely should have moved your Pity, When alone in Agonies would I lay down the Book, take it up again, walk about the Room, let fall a Flood of Tears, wipe my Eyes, read again, perhaps not three Lines, throw away Book crying out Excuse me good Mr. Richardson, I cannot go on.

…

[My husband] Seeing me so moved, he beg’d for God’s Sake I would read no more, kindly threatened to take the Book from me, but upon my pleading my Promise, suffered me to go on. That promise is now fulfilled, and am thankful the heavy Task is over, tho’ the Effects are not … My Spirits are strangely seized, my Sleep is disturbed, waking in the Night I burst into a Passion of crying, so I did at Breakfast this Morning, and just now again. God be merciful to me, what can it mean?

It meant that she was proving her sensibility, her delicacy, her worthiness as a woman fit to inhabit Richardson’s worlds – fictional, moral and material. The letter signalled her submission, both to Richardson’s fictional designs and to the exigencies of his moral outlook. No more would she champion Lovelace. Instead, Bradshaigh would go out of her way to demonstrate to Richardson how his art had transformed her own life. One sign of this came near the end of 1749, when she related how she had set out on an adventure of moral redemption of her own. She had come to know of a Cornish girl in her neighbourhood who, having been ‘artfully seduced, and ruined’ by her brother-in-law, was now shunned by her family and the wider community; he had gone unpunished. Having learnt of the sorry case, and inspired by the morals contained within Richardson’s fiction, Bradshaigh determined to do something about it. She set about finding her ward honourable employment among good Christians, and harboured hopes for her long-term reclamation despite the loss of her virtue. Richardson encouraged her in these efforts, and joined her in execrating ‘the inhospitable wretch, who could ensnare and ruin so young a creature’.[46]

Bradshaigh and Richardson both used the same word to describe this young woman: ‘Magdalen’. Taken from the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene, a Magdalen was literally a reformed prostitute, but more generally a fallen but meritorious woman, like Bradshaigh’s ‘poor unfortunate’ – or, indeed, Richardson’s Clarissa – who had at no point actually prostituted herself but was no longer a virgin. The conflation of the two meanings in a single word is revealing. In stating an equivalence between former sex workers and unchaste women, moralists like Richardson and Bradshaigh merged economies of virtue with economies of value.[47] By drawing a parallel between the condition of prostitutes and the condition of seduced women they were identifying a community of women that shared a common feature: exploitation by men. This was one (of many) necessary and important precursor to recognising women as a group who needed special protections. It was a prototypical example of the feminist tactic of consciousness-raising. Though, as with many moral messages of the pre-feminist era, it cut both ways. If prostitutes were like seduced women, then seduced women were like prostitutes. The campaigning language of rescue and reform doubled as a device to police and constrain the behaviour of unmarried young women.

The example of the Magdalen shows how Richardson’s fiction altered the lives of his readers. This was as he intended. Less predictable and, as it turned out, less palatable to Richardson was the influence his readers would have on his fictional output. Bradshaigh had been urging him to write another novel from the very beginning of their correspondence. In November 1749, he gave the first hint of what his new project might look like. Noting somewhat coolly ‘the warm solicitude you so repeatedly express for my resuming my pen with a view to publication’, he alluded in passing to the notion that he should write about ‘a good man – a man who needs not repentance’, before seeming to dismiss the idea and move on to other matters. His impetuous correspondent seized on these crumbs in her next letter, reminding Richardson what a service he would be performing for the cause of male reformation and noting in addition that his pursuit of such a project would ‘let me have to brag, that I was instrumental in persuading you to do it’.[48]

By March the following year, Richardson had committed to the new book, which would in time become his third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4). As with Clarissa, his work would be hurried along by the exhortations of his correspondents in England, but also of those in France and Germany. Richardson needed their support, for the novel did not come easily to him.[49] He complicated his own work by setting a decent portion of the action overseas, in Italy, where his titular hero goes to pay court to Clementina della Poretta in Bologna. Richardson had, of course, never left the British Isles, and in the preceding decades had barely travelled beyond a five-mile radius. He compensated for his total ignorance of Italy through diligent research and consultation with those who had travelled there – but the fundamental issue remained.

More prosaically, he had the deceptively challenging job of getting his character to Italy and back in a manner which made narrative sense. This perennial writer’s problem was compounded by his usual ill-health. He wrote miserably to Bradshaigh that ‘this is the worst of all my tasks, and what I most dreaded. Vast is the fabric; and here I am under a kind of necessity to grab it all, as I may say; to cut off, to connect; to rescind again, and reconnect.’

He persevered. By the summer of 1753 he had written much of the book and began to look ahead to publication.

Even in his own time, Grandison was not considered Richardson’s finest work. But whatever its literary shortcomings, it fascinates because it reveals what Richardson thought an ideal man should look like – how he should behave, how he should talk, even how he should dress. The composition of such a man caused him as much trouble as any other part of the book. He wrote in April 1750 of the ‘Difficulty of drawing a good Man, that the Ladies will not despise, and the Gentleman laugh at’. (He was, by the latter measure at least, not wholly successful. Colley Cibber laughed out loud when he was told that Grandison was a virgin upon marriage.) After three years of labour, the final product was a man worthy of the new English civilisation. Civility, manners, politeness – these are the words endlessly associated with Sir Charles Grandison. In an emblematic episode he talks the rakish Sir Hargrave Pollexfen – from whose clutches he has rescued Harriet Byron, his future wife – out of a duel. Grandison rejects duelling, as did many enlightened Englishmen, on the grounds that it was harmful to society and unbecoming of a man at ease with himself. Harriet understands his rejection of the feudal code of honour as a sign of his embrace of ‘goodness, piety, religion; and to every thing that is or ought to be sacred among men’.

Grandison has arrived at civility because he has allowed his coarse masculinity to be curbed by feminine delicacy. He is thoughtful, empathetic, in touch with his emotions. His admirers note his ‘feeling heart’ and his endless capacity to ‘speak feelingly’ on any number of issues. He is, in other words, the ideal male product of the feminine culture of sensibility. His adaptation to feminine mores does not, however, render him foppish, unmanly or – that fatal word – unsexed. Grandison is decisive, plain-speaking, a man of action. He has simply internalised the merits of sensibility to just the right degree. Richardson’s most well-travelled male character is consequently and paradoxically his most domestic one. ‘I live not to the world,’ he declares at one point, ‘I live to myself; to the monitor within me.’

What Richardson was trying to achieve with Grandison can be best understood by reference to what he was writing against. It is no coincidence that the composition of his third novel was almost exactly coextensive with his bitter campaign against Henry Fielding. The two men’s literary fortunes were intimately connected – Pamela had effectively launched Fielding’s career as a novelist by inspiring him to write Shamela and then Joseph Andrews – but their personalities were poles apart. Fielding was an Old Etonian, a master of Greek and Latin responsible for a suspiciously didactic translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, and a bawdy writer who had made his name as a Drury Lane playwright. Spendthrift, genial and subversive, Fielding was an habitué of the Covent Garden scene and embodied its easy values. In a curious echo of Richardson’s first novel, he had even married his former servant, Mary Daniel, following the death of his first wife. He was everything Richardson was not.

This did not necessarily mean that the two men were obliged to feud. After all, Fielding’s sister was close friends with Richardson, and Fielding’s glowing letter in praise of Clarissa could have been the start of an amicable correspondence. Richardson, however, chose to go to war. A year after Fielding wrote in admiration of Clarissa, Richardson savaged Fielding’s masterpiece Tom Jones in a long and invidious letter to Lady Bradshaigh:

Nothing but a shorter life than I wish him can hinder him from writing himself out of date. The Pamela, which he abused in his Shamela, taught him how to write to please, tho’ his manners are so different. Before his Joseph Andrews … the poor man wrote without being read, except when his Pasquins, &c, roused party attention and legislature at the same time.

Elsewhere in his correspondence he described Tom Jones as a ‘dissolute book’ and a ‘profligate performance’, and expressed satisfaction when he learnt it had been (temporarily, it transpired) banned in France. His friends rushed to confirm his opinions. Aaron Hill’s daughters referred to the book as a ‘rambling Collection of Waking Dreams’. David Graham wrote cloyingly that ‘they who can listen to the dissonant jingle of Tom Jones, wou’d for ever be deaf to the Music of your Charmer [Clarissa]’.

Richardson maintained a posture of carefully curated scorn towards Fielding over the next few years. He revelled in the dismal reception of Amelia (1751), joking sourly to Bradshaigh that had Fielding ‘been born in a stable, or been a runner at a sponging-house, we should have thought him a genius’ for composing such a book, ‘but it is beyond my conception, that a man of family, and who had some learning … should descend so excessively low.’[50] In ‘A Concluding Note By The EDITOR’, appended to Grandison, Richardson stated that his book was a riposte to the ‘many modern fictitious pieces in which authors have given success (and happiness, as it is called) to their heroes of vicious, if not of profligate, characters’. ‘The God of nature,’ he continued magniloquently, ‘intended not human nature for a vile and contemptible thing’, and so he had written the book to show ‘that characters may be good, without being unnatural’.

This was widely viewed as an attack on Fielding, who was by now near death – his body broken by gout, cirrhosis and other ailments, the fruits of a lifetime of hard living – and was obliged to leave England for Portugal in 1754 in a bid to improve his health. Fielding certainly regarded it as such. In his final work, Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, he referred to Grandison as a ‘tedious tale of a dull fellow’, going on to call out Richardson by name and mock his oft-proclaimed belief that novels existed to instruct and that entertainment was ‘but a secondary consideration in romances’.[51] He died shortly afterwards, but death brought him no respite. Thomas Edwards, a member of Richardson’s circle, wrote to him apropos of the Journal of his surprise that ‘a man who had led such a life as he had … should trifle in that manner when immediate death was before his eyes’.[52]

Richardson himself had the last word on their rivalry two years after Fielding’s passing. In a letter to Sarah Fielding, he declared her brother a ‘fine writer’ before stating that ‘His was but the knowledge of the outside of a clock-work machine, while your’s was that of all the finer springs and movements of the inside.’ Ostensibly Richardson was referring to the difference between Henry’s and Sarah’s writing. In reality he was describing the difference between Henry’s writing and his own. The literary difference matters because the opposition between Fielding’s fiction and Richardson’s is inextricable from Richardson’s conception of their opposition in moral outlook. Fielding’s characters go out into the world and find adventure; Richardson’s go out into the world and find disaster. The deep message of all Richardson’s writings is that everything would be good if women simply stayed at home. The internal nature of his writings – the endless inner monologues, the endless examination of selves, the endless, endless writing of letters in rooms – reflects his belief in the merits of domestic values, which are the values of delicate, domestic women. When women stray from this norm they meet with catastrophe. This is why Clarissa on her deathbed blames herself for what has happened. ‘Who was most to blame?’ she asks. ‘The brute, or the lady? The lady, surely! For what she did was out of nature, out of character, at least: what it did was in its own nature.’

Women can avoid seduction by staying at home as women should. Not only that, but by being totally domesticated, women can impart some of their domesticity to men, making them, like Sir Charles Grandison, men of feeling who will no longer contrive on women’s virtue. Adherence to the moral code of domesticity created an actual virtuous cycle, the cost of which – and it was a cost, in Richardson’s mind, well worth incurring – was that women had to retreat from the public world of men into the private world of the home.[53]

In praising Sarah Fielding for writing of the inside of human experience, Richardson was praising her for living up to this ideal of womanhood. This was in contrast to another group of women whom he judged to have abandoned their sex’s norms, both in writing and in life. In the same period that he was inveighing against Fielding he was also busy slandering the reputations of certain female writers whom he believed were a discredit to the virtues he espoused. Specifically he singled out Constantia Phillips, Lady Frances Vane and Laetitia Pilkington. In a 1750 letter to Sarah Chapone, he notoriously referred to the trio as ‘a Set of Wretches’, and compared them to a previous generation of female authors (such as Eliza Haywood and Aphra Behn) who had also incurred his displeasure. It was the role of virtuous women, he told Chapone, to write against ‘the same injured, disgraced, profaned Sex’. A few weeks later he repeated the message. ‘Ladies, as I have said, should antidote the Poison shed by the vile of their Sex.’[54]

The critical attacks on Pilkington and the others were premised on the same set of beliefs that inspired his attacks on Fielding. The adventurous spirit had to be stamped out. Literature must turn inwards, and so must women. It was the only way to save virtue from seduction and bring about the general reformation of men.[55]

***

Richardson’s moral system was by now heavily fortified and his faith in it unassailable. Even in his own lifetime, it was obvious that his ideas were growing in popularity. The values he evangelised in his books and private writings were increasingly the values of the ascendent middle classes. His novels were landmarks in the culture of sensibility and vital reference points for the resolutely dimorphic conception of gender roles that flowed from it. His was the vision of the proper sexual identities for men and women that would predominate in Britain until the end of the Victorian period. Nonetheless, it cannot be repeated often enough that for all its influence it was never an outlook without critics. Sexual ideology, like any ideology, is always a work in the making, an aspiration towards which we strive in a world marred by refusal, resistance and chaos. Richardson’s triumphal march through the drawing rooms of the English mind was resisted every step of the way by satirists, pamphleteers, and hacks eager to put his preening worldview in the Grub Street pillory.

One of the most substantive demolitions of Richardson’s oeuvre came in the spring of 1754, exactly halfway through the publication of Grandison. Written anonymously, but addressed directly to the author, Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela was a gloriously unrestrained assault on Richardson’s work and influence. Rambling, imprecise and unabashedly ad hominem (‘Your success has farther corrupted our taste’),[56] the Critical Remarks nevertheless score some direct hits upon the citadel of Richardson’s Weltanschauung. Women, he argues, are not the asexual figures that Richardson wishes them to be but individuals with the same range of desires, ambitions and appetites as men – and the same capacity for profligacy. ‘Every woman is at heart a rake,’ he writes, quoting Alexander Pope, and if they suppress their inner rake then they will seek to inhabit him vicariously.[57] This makes nonsense of Richardson’s claim that his books exist to instruct the youth in Christian morality. However he rationalised it to himself, Richardson’s focus exclusively on seduction resulted in novels that functioned to titillate rather than to castigate. His purported moral pedagogy was in practice a kind of primitive sexual education.

Approaching the apogee of his argument, the author continues with brilliant sarcasm that the literary preoccupation with matters of the heart popularised by Richardson would be more a spur to sexual activity than a bridle. A casual reader of the sentimental literature Richardson wrote himself and inspired in others

would be apt to imagine, that the propagation of the species was at a stand, and that, not to talk of marrying and giving in marriage, there was hardly any such thing as fornication going forward among us, and that therefore our publick-spirited penmen, to prevent the world from coming to an end, employ’d all their art and eloquence to keep people in remembrance, that they were composed of different sexes.[58]

Such work, he noted dryly, was not only antithetical to the propagation of virtue but served to compound the existing work of ‘provident nature’, who had already ‘implanted too many allurements, and has affixed too great a variety of pleasures to the intercourse between the sexes’.

The pamphlet, like so many others, made only a passing impression in Richardson’s world, arousing the righteous anger of his correspondents and occasioning a few harrumphs from the great man himself. Richardson had seen off far worse, and by this point, well into his seventh decade, he could afford a certain diffidence in the face of lowly attacks on his celebrated body of work.

By the mid-1750s Richardson had arrived at the apex of his career as a printer-writer. His private business was flourishing. He continued to invest in his site at Salisbury Court, and his printers were kept busy by lucrative government contracts as well as the steady work of printing his own writings. Success brought recognition within his profession. In 1753 he completed his decades-long ascent of the Stationers’ Company, when he was appointed Master of that body. Like Hogarth’s Good Apprentice, he had scaled the heights of his profession from base to summit. His parallel conquest of the London literary scene brought him into the innermost circle of the cultural elite, and won him the friendship of Hogarth himself, who occasionally attended the salons held at Richardson’s Fulham pile.

James Boswell records a memorable incident at one such gathering in 1753. Over tea, Hogarth spoke approvingly to the room of George II’s recent decision to execute a Jacobite, Archibald Cameron, for his participation in the uprising of 1745.

While he was talking, he perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head, and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an ideot, whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson, as a very good man. To his great surprise, however, this figure stalked forwards to where he and Mr. Richardson were sitting, and all at once took up the argument, and burst out into an invective against George the Second, as one, who, upon all occasions was unrelenting and barbarous … he displayed such a power of eloquence, that Hogarth looked at him with astonishment, and actually imagined that this ideot had been at the moment inspired.[59]

The ‘ideot’ was in fact Samuel Johnson, who was a firm friend and prolific defender of Richardson’s literary project. Destined to become the majestic centre of English literary life, Richardson could not have wished to have a more prestigious critic in his corner. Their alliance blossomed. Johnson savaged Fielding; Richardson bailed Johnson out of debtors’ gaol. Friendships with such luminaries by this time came easily to Richardson. Hailed as the ‘great genius of Salisbury Court’,[60] he now handled correspondence with some of the great names of his age. His fame crossed borders and his fans travelled from far and wide to see him, including the German editor who travelled several hundred miles to kiss the inkwell that had given the world Clarissa. Richardson responded to his celebrity with the unembarrassed satisfaction that had won and would secure him the bitter resentment of his detractors. ‘Twenty years ago, I was the most obscure man in Great Britain,’ he crowed, ‘and now I am admitted to the company of the first characters in the kingdom.’[61]

Wealth, fame, and well-publicised moral positions brought Richardson in his final years into the budding world of Georgian philanthropy. Organised private charity was a relatively new phenomenon, but one that London’s fashionable classes took up with enthusiasm. The rapid growth in number and scale of charitable institutions in these years was fuelled by the same trends that drove the obsession with Richardson’s novels. The culture of sensibility had fostered an attitude of empathetic concern towards the poor and needy; the culture of moral reformation motivated moneyed (and concerned) elites to intervene in the lives of the working classes. The connection between moral panic and charitable sympathy was captured in the twin careers of William Wilberforce, whose anti-slavery campaign was premised on an identification with the suffering of others (the abolitionist slogan, ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’, could never have been arrived at without the advance work performed by the cult of sensibility), but who was also the founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, a resurrection of the extinct Societies for the Reformation of Manners that Richardson had grown up with in Tower Hamlets.

Some of the new charities focused on the first- or second-order consequences of sexual immorality, and unsurprisingly they found a willing patron in Samuel Richardson. His first foray into philanthropy was his association with Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital, to which he donated for several years and of which he became a governor in 1754. The Foundling Hospital was an orphanage that served to house and protect the unwanted offspring of fugitive sexual encounters. The children there were the bastard fruits of seduction, and some more cynical Londoners believed that the existence of such an institution would only encourage more fornication.[62]

The Foundling Hospital was an enormous success and became a model for all future philanthropic empires. It also indirectly inspired the birth of another charity that came to represent in bricks and mortar what Richardson’s novels had taught in paper and ink. In March 1751, Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler contained an article written by a pensive ‘Amicus’. On a recent walk the author had passed the Foundling Hospital, ‘which I surveyed with pleasure, till, by a natural train of sentiment, I began to reflect on the fate of the mothers’. Why, Amicus wondered, did society protect the vulnerable infants spawned by seduction while it did not move to protect women from the predations of exploitative men? Prostitution was visible all over the city and Amicus believed, like a growing number of educated Georgians, that each woman he saw working the streets in rags and misery was a victim of seduction ‘who, being forsaken by her betrayer, is reduced to the necessity of turning prostitute for bread’.[63] Prostitution was the consequence of circumstance, not of irretrievable individual corruption. Institutions existed to punish prostitutes, why did companion institutions not exist to reform them? The question was taken up the next month in The Gentleman’s Magazine, when ‘Sunderlandensis’ wrote a response piece which laid out how such an institution might be run, and upon what principles. He referred to the example of convents on the continent as an imperfect image (‘because they withdrew good people from general life’) of what the refuge might look like and stated that while the focus should be on actual sex workers, ‘the project could be extended to the seduced who had not yet become prostitutes’.[64]

These discussions in the press dovetailed with what Richardson had been saying for some years in both his novels and his private correspondence.[65] Grandison contained repeated disquisitions on the virtues of just such a proposed institution and made the same parallel to existing Catholic institutions.[66] As we have observed in his correspondence with Bradshaigh, Richardson had also internalised the equivalence between seduced women and established prostitutes.

In 1758 discussion gave way to action. That year the Magdalen House was established in Whitechapel, east London, and accepted its first eight women, or penitents, as they were known. Richardson was soon involved as a donor and later as a governor. In 1759 he offered up his printer’s in Salisbury Court to produce The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House, a book of narrative lives of certain penitents published with the end of attracting favourable publicity to the new institution. Richardson was doubtful that the book would sell but printed it anyway. ‘It must appear,’ he declared, ‘for Virtues sake.’

The Magdalen Hospital in St George’s Fields, Southwark, circa 1798.

The Magdalen House, like many London charities, was open to the public at certain times each week. Just as fashionable citizens went to the Foundling Hospital to see the orphans baptised, and to Bedlam to gawp at the insane, they went to observe the fallen women on their rocky road to reformation. On Sundays, the Magdalen’s chapel was open for paying visitors for both the morning and the evening services. These became some of the most sought-after attractions in London, and tickets for them circulated at wildly inflated prices on the secondary market. The evening services, which for the first eighteen years of the institution’s life showcased the florid preaching style of the notorious Reverend William Dodd, were a particular draw.[67] Richardson never went, but Bradshaigh did and wrote to him of her impressions: ‘I was charm’d and mov’d with their behaviour, with their preachers, excellent, proper [illegible] drops of pleasing tears, glad I was, that you and your delicate nerves were at home. In short, I was in Love with the whole management, and regularity of the place, and I must observe, the psalm-singing was the sweetest of melody.’[68]

Bradshaigh took from her visit to the Magdalen the same lessons that she had taken from Richardson’s novels. For her, the chapel of the Magdalen House was a place where Richardson’s themes of seduction, abandonment, reclamation and repentance were acted out in real time. The place was a monument to and a buttress for the feminine values of delicacy and sensibility.[69] Her tears were appropriately shed.

Richardson’s novels were torn between the rival impulses of moral instruction and prurient entertainment. So too were the services at the Magdalen. When the decidedly more rakish Horace Walpole visited in January 1760 (in a party of four coaches which contained, inter alia, Prince Edward, George II’s brother), he provided a vivid account of the scene within the chapel:

At the west end were enclosed the sisterhood, above an hundred and thirty, all in grayish brown stuffs, broad handkerchiefs, and flat straw hats, with a blue riband, pulled quite over their faces. As soon as we entered the chapel, the organ played, and the Magdalens sung a hymn in parts; you cannot imagine how well. The chapel was dressed with orange and myrtle, and there wanted nothing but a little incense to drive away the devil – or to invite him. Prayers then began, psalms, and a sermon: the latter by a young clergyman, one Dodd, who contributed to the Popish idea one had imbibed, by haranguing entirely in the French style, and very eloquently and touchingly. He apostrophized the lost sheep, who sobbed and cried from their souls …[70]

Afterwards the party went on a tour of the refectory where the Magdalens ate, hatless. ‘A few were handsome,’ Walpole noted, ‘I was struck and pleased with the modesty of two of them, who swooned away with the confusion of being stared at.’ His account reveals what was driving the great demand for tickets to such occasions. The Magdalen became a safari of seduction, where the rich and powerful could go and gaze upon the sullied but virtuous poor, striving so publicly for society’s forgiveness. Georgian churches were one of the few places where unmarried women were regularly displayed. Places of worship became spaces of desire.[71] The Magdalen chapel, where the drama of seduction was performed for a paying audience of notables, was perhaps the most erotically charged religious space in the country.

The titillation of these services drove the charity’s popularity and by the 1760s it was obliged to move to new lodgings. When it was finally completed, the new Magdalen Hospital, situated in Southwark, just south of the newly constructed Blackfriars Bridge, contained an expanded chapel that could seat five hundred visitors. Here, amid the modish crowds, in a room that smelled of warm bodies and cool stone, and which was brilliantly illuminated by the light that flowed in from the high windows, the Sunday visitor, with the sound of the preacher’s exhortations ringing in their ears, could ponder their own moral reckoning with the example of the penitents before them.[72] In the new design the penitents were placed in the gallery, behind a latticed screen, only the silhouettes of their straw hats and pigeon-grey bodices visible through the woodwork. Invisible and present; secluded and displayed; confined from sexual life but considered as objects of sexual warning. For most of the audience, sitting in the naves and aisles, they were a spectral presence, hovering above the action in the church, heard only when they sang. But some lucky visitors were seated across from them in the gallery and could observe them up close. Glimpsed through the grille, and separated by only a few inches of wood, penitent and tourist beheld each other at an intimate remove, like Clarissa and Lovelace at that crumbling wall, and animated by the same forbidden sexual thrill.[73]

Richardson did not live to observe the scene. On 1 July 1761, painter Joseph Highmore visited him at home in Fulham for tea. Highmore had painted a number of works inspired by Richardson’s books, including a celebrated series taken from Pamela and an iconic depiction of the moment Clarissa elopes with Lovelace. He had also been commissioned to do several portraits of Richardson, including one owned by Lady Bradshaigh that she hung in her closet, out of her husband’s sight. He was sitting by Richardson’s side when, while taking delivery of his third cup of tea, the author had a massive stroke ‘and immediately faltered in his speech, and from that time spoke no more articulately’.[74] Richardson’s condition rapidly declined and very soon he could no longer recognise his own family members. He died a few days later and was buried in St Bride’s on Fleet Street, only metres from his printing shop in Salisbury Court.

Richardson had always insisted on the indivisibility of his moral and literary projects. This is a union that has lost credibility in each successive generation since his death. He is the most consistently (and acceptably) loathed author in the canon, largely on account of his overweening commitment to using literature as a vehicle for moral instruction. Most of his critics accept a grudging acceptance of his literary contribution as the admission price to a general rubbishing of his work. If we consider that to treat his literary achievements and moral outlook separately might allow a clearer-eyed evaluation of both, then we must nonetheless recognise the major part he played in the development of modern literature. In England his influence was comprehensive, and remained so well into the nineteenth century. His celebration in France by Rousseau and Diderot made him one of the most-read foreign novelists of the pre-revolutionary period. It was in French translation that he was read by many Russians, including Alexander Pushkin. When Tatyana in Eugene Onegin goes to bed with a novel beneath her pillow and dreams the dream that is to become the whole of modern Russian literature, it is Richardson’s books she lays her head upon. Richardson was translated into Dutch, German, Danish and Italian in his lifetime. His novels circulated widely in the New World, and heavily influenced the first works of American literature. The size of his audience and the pleasure with which he was read were instrumental in popularising the novel as a format and introducing readers to the literary devices of modern fiction.

As for his moral project, Richardson stands at the head of one of the two great traditions in the history of seduction. One that worries; one that dwells on interiority; one that seeks redress for women and reformation for men. The subsequent chapters will show how, far from being particular to his time, Richardson’s concerns about seduction, and the language and perceptual framework he drew upon to articulate those concerns, have served subsequent generations well. Anyone who has ever understood seduction as a problem of power, or as a quandary concerning the limits of free will, or as a social scenario that illuminates the discrepancy in condition between men and women, or as a battleground for competing visions of how enlightened citizens should behave towards one another – anyone who has ever considered such questions has lingered a while in Richardson’s world. Seduction was a problem born of modernity, and Richardson was the first modern to recognise it as such.

Richardson’s view of seduction was the perfect foil to the other great tradition in its history. One which rejected the conception of seduction as a problem to be pathologised, but rejoiced in the possibilities for personal and philosophical emancipation that it harboured. By his death in 1761, Richardson missed by two years the arrival in London of the itinerant Venetian musician, conman and saloniste who exemplified this rival vision of what seduction could be.

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