ABSTRACT
Samuel Richardson, successful printer, voluminous novelist, and irrepressible correspondent, makes scattered references to John Locke, empiricist philosopher, Whig theorist, and latitudinarian apologist, in works and letters. Samuel Richardson was, in short, very much a man of his age–perhaps quintessentially so, as Terry Eagleton has suggested. The line of feminism to which Richardson subscribed in Clarissa, in other words, was decidedly not part of the liberal-contractual tradition to which feminism tends to trace its roots. Indeed, even aside from the indications that Clarissa owes much to Maiy Astell as a model, Richardson and Astell would belong together, if only for the similar set of problems they have presented modern feminist scholarship. Even as Richardson stressed in the preface to The Infidel Convicted Locke's potential as a foil to freethinkers, after all, his support was tempered by awareness that "sceptics" had used Locke's system for their own principles.
