Sir Charles Grandison: The Anglican Family and the Admirable Roman Catholic
Teri Doerksen, Mansfield University
Volume 15, no. 3-4, April-July 2003
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ABSTRACT
Religious difference and its import are discussed extensively in Samuel Richardson’s final novel, Sir Charles Grandison, and, in an extremely unusual move for an eighteenth-century English author, the novel presents Roman Catholic characters who are admirable and worthy of emulation in their own right … While critics have noted this feature of Richardson’s writing, they generally stress the anti-Catholicism that he does not display; as Sylvia Kasey Marks puts it: “Catholics, of course, were viewed unsympathetically in England. Nevertheless, there are no sneaking Jesuits or odd abbesses in Grandison.” Margaret Anne Doody suggests that the tolerance in Sir Charles Grandison is a natural extension of the elements of Catholic tradition incorporated into Clarissa: “His Anglicanism is not antipathetic to some elements of Catholicism (witness the elements of saint’s legend in Clarissa), and imaginatively he is surprisingly ready to sympathize and unwilling to condemn. We do not hear from him the fulminations against priestcraft, tyranny, absurdity, and tawdry ceremony which so readily emanate from the pens of Defoe or Charlotte Bronte.” Both critics focus on what is missing from Richardson’s presentation of Roman Catholicism, and the list is striking: condemnations, accusations, and stereotypes of the sort that these critics list are simply absent from the novel, except for a single reference, by Sir Charles’s somewhat laughable spinster aunt Eleanor, to “papistry” instead of the more respectful “Catholicism.”
Other ECF articles on the topic of “family” include:
If a man dared act for himself: Family Romance and Independence in Frances Burney’s Cecilia
by MEGAN WOODWORTH (ECF 22.2, Winter 2010)
L’Orphelin de la famille: Le Paradigme de l’enfant/manuscrit trouvé dans le roman français du XVIIIe siècle
by JAN HERMAN (ECF 17.3, April 2005)
Historicizing Domestic Relations: Sarah Scott’s Use of the “Household Family”
by ANN VAN SANT (ECF 17.3, April 2005)
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