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Richardson's Repetitions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Morris Golden*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Extract

A number of critics, most thoroughly A. D. McKillop in his excellent Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist, have commented on Richardson's tendency to repeat himself. Like other novelists of fairly limited experience (e.g., Jane Austen) or with a strongly intuitive way of perceiving the world (e.g., D. H. Lawrence), Richardson tended to use similar character types and involve them in similar situations, and this even more pervasively and significantly than has so far been noted.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1936, pp. 61, 127, 212.

2 Samuel Richardson, Pamela (London: J. M. Dent, 1914), ii, 440. In the absence of standard texts, I use the widely available Everyman editions of Pamela and Clarissa in this paper. Their occasional verbal inaccuracies do not affect my discussion.

3 Letters Written TO and FOR Particular Friends, on the most Important Occasions (London: C. Rivington, J. Osborn, J. Leake, 1741), Letter lxii, pp. 79–84.

4 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ed., The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (London: Richard Phillips, 1804), i, cxviii.

5 “The Naming of Characters in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding,” RES, xxv (1949), 333.

6 The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 3rd ed. (London: S. Richardson, 1754), iii, 3. Subsequent references to Grandison are to this edition.

7 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, Everyman ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1932), i, 408. Subsequent references to Clarissa are to this edition.

8 To Lady Bradshaigh, 12 November 1753, in Richardson's correspondence, Forster Collection of MSS, Vol. xi, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington.