ABSTRACT
Samuel Richardson was 'so shocked at the idea of a mere Mr Richardson hanging in company with persons of quality that he had a star and blue ribbon added to the picture and turned into a portrait of Sir Robert Walpole'. Richardson came from a London family, though for some reason his father, a joiner, had moved temporarily to Derbyshire at the time of his birth: the boy was brought up in the city and educated fairly scantily. Richardson emphasizes the need to cultivate ingratiating manners in a way which has led some readers to think of the far from bourgeois Lord Chesterfield. The most irritating aspect of the situation is that Richardson's programmatic design, 'to draw a good man', obliges him to downgrade a far more interesting character, Harriet Byron, for the sake of fustian silverfork inventions. Richardson's own career was uneventful in outward terms, and meagre in emotional sustenance.
