Sir Charles Grandison: Richardson on Body and Character
Juliet McMaster, University of Alberta
Volume 1, no. 2, January 1989
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In the long battle over Samuel Richardson’s reputation and the quality of his novels, the moralizing in them has been constantly attacked and justified. And the reputation of Sir Charles Grandison, in particular, fluctuates according to this argument, since it is the most overtly moral of the novels, with the least in the way of compensating sensational action. Richardson himself, of course, would have us believe that the “moral” is what really counts, while the “fable” is there only as a regrettably necessary sugaring of the pill. His work is “designed to inculcate upon the human mind, under the guise of an amusement, the great lessons of Christianity,” and the story “was to be looked upon as the vehicle only to the instruction. “The most dedicated fans of his own day may have professed a willingness to dispense with the fable and swallow the moral unsugared: Lady Echlin … claimed she was ‘better pleased with musty morals than a pretty love-story.”‘ But the modern reader, with less patience for the aesthetic of moralizing, has much ado to rescue the pearl of drama from the clammy oyster of didacticism … finding Grandison not so much a surprisingly boring novel as a surprisingly interesting conduct book.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Samuel Richardson” include:
Richardson’s Hands
by JAMES ROBERT WOOD (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
A Case for Hard-heartedness: Clarissa, Indifferency, Impersonality
by WENDY ANNE LEE (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
“Glorious Perverseness”: Stoic Pride and Domestic Heroism in Richardson’s Novels
by ANNA DETERS (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
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