ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Samuel Richardson attends to the minute in his own art, and how apparently trivial details in the presentation of his writing can, like Patrick M'Donald's boots, become hugely significant and consequential. Richardson had been in the printing trade for eighteen years and had set up his own successful business by the time he started to write his first novel, Pamela, in late 1739. Richardson also marks quotations of various kinds with italics in the first edition of Pamela, which was dated 1741, but in fact published by Charles Rivington and John Osborn on 6 November 1740. Some of the italics which Richardson adds in this last revision of Pamela seem to have both a quotative and contrastive force. The practice of italicising proper names, apparent in all the editions of Pamela published in Richardson's lifetime, is dropped in this text, presumably in line with the standard printing conventions of the early nineteenth century.
