ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the novels of the most widely-admired epistolary novelist in the English language, Samuel Richardson. More than any other writer in this study, his epistolary style has been characterised as spontaneous and ‘to the moment’. Critics have often suggested that his letter-writers record what is passing through their minds at the time of writing. Yet the tension discussed in the first chapter between a present, narrating self and a past, experiencing self is vital in Richardson’s novels. His narrators explore what Dorrit Cohn calls ‘their own past inner lives’ (1978: 14) far more often than they have been given credit for. In her account of the rise of the ‘consciousness novel’ Monika Fludernik notes that ‘the work of Richardson, especially Clarissa (1747-48), earns pride of place’ (1996b: 170), and that this novel provides some of the first examples of first-person free indirect thought, since in Clarissa’s letters ‘the perplexities of the experiencing self are elaborated in unprecedented detail’ (171). Yet this chapter demonstrates that these perplexities are in fact explored more fully in Richardson’s neglected third novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54), as well as revisions he made to his first, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1741). In these texts in particular Richardson’s letter-writers allow full expression to the past thoughts and feelings of their experiencing selves.
