The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Samuel Richardson · a novel in letters · seven volumes, issued in three instalments, December 1747, April 1748 and December 1748 · scored on the first edition, as most readers now meet it in Angus Ross’s Penguin text (1985), with the third edition of 1751 named as context only · read from knowledge; no text in hand, quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Tragic novel in letters; domestic novel, novel of seduction and narrative of holy dying in one work
Mythos
The persecuted virgin and her violator; the virgin martyr of the saints’ lives and Lucretia; the rake as a Satanic intelligence plotting a world; the earthly father who curses and the heavenly one she sets out for
Phase
From January to December of one year: the family’s pressure, the flight from the garden in April, the London trap, the rape in June, the long dying to September, and Lovelace’s death in December
Presentation
Fiction; letters, with a few editor’s notes and, at the close, a conclusion and postscript; four principal correspondents and many others, the same event often written twice
Register
From Clarissa’s grave, scrupulous periods and Anna Howe’s quick satire to Lovelace’s dazzling, self-delighting rhetoric, Leman’s misspellings, Lord M.’s proverbs and the devotional meditations of the last volumes
Scale
One household and its property, a rake’s aristocratic house, a London brothel and its women, the law as it touches a woman, and religion at full weight, about a million words
Governing Proposition
A young woman, pressed by her family to marry a man she cannot accept so that their estates may be consolidated, leaves her father’s garden in April with Robert Lovelace, is held in London by his deceits, is drugged and raped in June, and dies in September; in December he dies after a duel with Colonel Morden. The wager of the novel is that a woman’s will is her own against father, brother, suitor and rake alike, and that only letters written in the middle of events, by the victim and by the agent, can show a life being authored by others while she fights to author it herself.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Clarissa; or, the History of a Young Lady came out in seven volumes and three instalments: the first two volumes in December 1747, the third and fourth in April 1748, the fifth to the seventh in December 1748. It is a novel in letters, with a few editor’s notes and, at the close, a conclusion and a postscript, and by common reckoning it is the longest novel in the English canon, about a million words. The unit scored is the first edition, as most readers now meet it in Angus Ross’s Penguin text of 1985. Richardson cut and then restored; the third edition of 1751 brought back passages, added footnotes and a moral index, and that apparatus is named here and not charged.
Four correspondents carry it. Clarissa Harlowe writes to her friend Anna Howe; Robert Lovelace writes to his friend John Belford. Around them a crowd of others write too: the Harlowes, James, Arabella, the uncles, the mother; Solmes, the suitor; Hickman; Colonel Morden; Lovelace’s agent Joseph Leman, in a semi-literate hand; Lord M., in proverbs. The letters run from January to December of a single year. In April Clarissa leaves her father’s garden with Lovelace; in June she is raped; in September she dies; in December Lovelace dies after a duel with Morden.
The pairing is the book’s instrument. The same event is often written twice, by the one it is done to and by the one who does it, and the reader holds what neither writer can. Clarissa writes to Anna that she trusts a step; the next letter is Lovelace to Belford explaining how he arranged it. The letters are written, in Richardson’s phrase, to the moment, in the middle of events whose end the writer does not know, so that Clarissa reasons without a narrator’s hindsight and is judged by a future she cannot see. The title page calls its matter the concerns of private life, and the book holds to that measure for a million words.
Movement II
The first two volumes are a house closing. The Harlowes want Clarissa to marry Solmes so that estates can be consolidated and her brother James can be raised to a title. Her grandfather left her a bequest of her own, and that bequest is the wound the family cannot forgive. Letter after letter, the pressure is put on her by James, Arabella, the uncles, her mother and her father, and the book shows love, duty and religion spoken in a house whose real grammar is acquisition. Clarissa answers in grave, scrupulous periods that trace every motive, hers and theirs.
The slowness is required. The reader must feel the house close on her as she does, so that when the flight comes it seems both forced and chosen. Letters pass hidden in the garden wall; Anna Howe’s come in her quick satire. Elsewhere Lovelace writes to Belford, with his plays and Latin tags and coined words, and Leman, his agent, writes in his misspellings.
In April she goes out through the garden door with Lovelace. The book keeps both truths of the step at once: she chose, and she was made to choose. The charge on these volumes stands: the family’s arguments are restated in near the same terms several times, and Anna’s quarrels with her mother and with Hickman run beyond what they bear. But the first trap is the house, and the house has to be long.
Movement III
In London the trap is made of small deceits, and the book lays each one. Lovelace lodges her at Mrs Sinclair’s; he produces a false Lady Betty and a false Miss Montague; there is a fire. He forges Anna’s letters, so that the correspondence that was Clarissa’s shelter becomes one of his instruments. The construction is exact: every device is assembled piece by piece and every device pays.
Lovelace is the book’s great voice and its great danger. His power is theatre, plotting and narration; he writes his plots as a dramatist writes his scenes, and the reader is made to enjoy him, the wit, the stage management, the self-delight, and then to see what the enjoyment served. The novel gives the mind of the predator in his own letters, with full charm, and that is its disclosure: the rake’s comedy is not relief from the tragedy but the tragedy’s engine.
In June she is drugged and raped. The victim does not narrate it, and the agent barely does. His letter to Belford breaks off in a few short sentences: “And now, Belford, I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives.” The gap where the act should be is the form of the violation, and the novel refuses every reading by which she shares in it. It is one of the coldest elevations in English prose, and it is written by the man who did it, to the friend who will gather the letters.
Movement IV
In the days after, Clarissa writes papers that are no longer letters. They are disordered; one of them is set across the page in fragments of verse. Here the book’s typography becomes its witness: a mind breaking is given in its own hand, and the scrupulous periods of the first volumes come apart on the page. Then the law touches her as it touches a woman: she is arrested for debt and held in a sponging house, and the question of prosecution is raised.
She writes a letter announcing that she is setting out for her father. Lovelace reads it as a promise of reconciliation with the Harlowes; it means heaven. The father who cursed her and the father she goes to are named by one word, and the archetype has entered the action itself. From here her dying is shaped as a martyrdom and an ascent, on the pattern of the virgin martyr of the saints’ lives and of Lucretia, and Lovelace stands against it as a Satanic intelligence, Miltonic in his self-regard, whose plots are his creation as Satan’s are.
She buys her coffin. Its lid is devised with emblems, and she uses it as her writing desk. It is grand and terrible, and it is the book’s own figure for itself: the last letters are written on the box that will hold their writer. Belford, who began as Lovelace’s confidant, changes register as he converts, and he will gather the letters. The charge here is the frame: the sanctity of the last volume is insisted on more than earned, and the death, so long prepared and so plainly holy, elevates less than its approaches.
Movement V
Clarissa dies in September. The book does not end with her. Its last volume distributes rewards and punishments at length: Mrs Sinclair dies of gangrene in a scene of physical horror; the women of the house and the accomplices come to their ends; Tomlinson has his; Belford completes his conversion; wills are read and letters opened after death. Here the inner law of the book shows a seam. A Providence the realist action had never needed lays a second law over the first, and the moral summings-up say what the letters had already shown.
In December Lovelace meets Colonel Morden in a duel and dies of it. His last words are “LET THIS EXPIATE!”, and they close the arc of a man who had plotted every scene but this one. Belford gathers the letters, Clarissa’s, Anna’s, Lovelace’s own, into the record that becomes the book. The form is the subject to the end: a contest over who authors a life closes with the life written, kept and handed on by someone else.
The ending was a choice against a public. Readers of the first instalments, friends and correspondents among them, pleaded for Lovelace’s reform and the marriage, and Richardson refused them, against his own success with Pamela and against the comic form the English novel was fixing; Tom Jones appeared in 1749. Europe answered. Diderot set the book beside Homer; Rousseau’s Julie took its form and its virtuous heroine; Laclos made its rake correspondents the whole of Les Liaisons dangereuses; and “a Lovelace” became the name of a type.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book is exposed to it. The design needs its slowness: the first two volumes, in which the Harlowes press Solmes on Clarissa letter after letter, must be long, so that the reader feels the house close on her as she does and her flight seems, when it comes, both forced and chosen. The London sequence is required for the same reason: the trap is made of small deceits, and each must be laid. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is restatement, not length: the family’s arguments put in near the same terms several times, Anna Howe’s quarrels with her mother and Hickman beyond what they bear, and the long posthumous volume of wills, meditations and the punishments of the minor wicked.
Score: 7.7 / 10
What the book brings into the open is articulated, and it holds. The family as an engine of property: the Harlowes want Clarissa married to Solmes so that estates can be consolidated and James raised to a title, and her grandfather’s bequest to her is the wound they cannot forgive; love, duty and religion are spoken in a house whose real grammar is acquisition. Consent: whether a woman’s will is her own, answered against father, brother, suitor and rake alike; the rape is committed on a drugged woman, and the novel refuses every reading by which she shares in it. And the mind of the predator, given in his own letters with full charm. Held off the top because the didactic frame states some of what the action shows.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Height is real and gathers in the second half. Lovelace’s letter after the rape breaks off in a few short sentences, “And now, Belford, I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives.”, one of the coldest elevations in English prose. The papers Clarissa writes in the days after, disordered, one set across the page in fragments of verse, give a mind breaking in its own hand. Her purchase of her coffin, its lid devised with emblems, and its use as her writing desk, is grand and terrible; Mrs Sinclair’s death is physical horror. Held below the top because the first two volumes are pressure rather than height, and Clarissa’s death, so long prepared and so plainly holy, elevates less than its approaches.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked. The persecuted virgin and her violator are old patterns, the virgin martyr of the saints’ lives and the story of Lucretia, and Richardson makes them load-bearing: Clarissa’s long dying is shaped as a martyrdom and an ascent, and Lovelace is drawn as a Satanic intelligence, with Miltonic grandeur in his self-regard and plots that are his creation as Satan’s are. Her letter of a journey to her father, which Lovelace reads as a promise of reconciliation and which means heaven, puts the archetype into the action: the father who cursed her and the heavenly one share one word. And the book made a type: “a Lovelace” became the century’s name for the seducer. Held below 9.0 because the sanctity of the last volume is insisted on more than earned.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is the letter fiction of the seventeenth century, the Lettres portugaises and Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister, the conduct book, the devotional literature of holy dying, and Richardson’s own Pamela (1740), which made the epistolary novel popular and ended in a rewarded marriage. The swerve is in three things: many correspondents, so that one event is written by victim and by agent; a scale no novel had attempted for the private life of one household; and a tragic end. Readers of the first instalments pleaded for Lovelace’s reform and the marriage, and Richardson refused, against his public, his own success and the comic form the English novel was then fixing. Held below 9.0 because the form was already his; the departure was in its use.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The letters are written to the moment, in Richardson’s phrase, in the middle of events whose end the writer cannot see; so Clarissa reasons about her choices without a narrator’s hindsight, and the reader watches her judged by a future she does not have. The double correspondence is the instrument: Clarissa writes to Anna that she trusts a step, and the next letter is Lovelace to Belford explaining how he arranged it. Letters are objects in the plot, hidden in the garden wall, intercepted, forged, copied, kept, and at last gathered by Belford into the record that is the book. The rape is not narrated by its victim; its gap, then the broken papers, is the form of the violation. Held a little off the top in economy.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The book has demonstrably kept yielding. Its century read it as a conduct book and a sentimental tragedy; Diderot read it as a revelation of the human heart; the nineteenth century largely left it to abridgement; the twentieth reopened it from every side. Within a few years around 1980 it carried William Warner’s Reading Clarissa (1979), Terry Castle’s Clarissa’s Ciphers (1982) and Terry Eagleton’s The Rape of Clarissa (1982), each finding a different book: two interpreters struggling over meaning, a woman unable to make her signs read, the bourgeois family and sexual politics. Feminist criticism keeps finding new things in it about consent and testimony, and whom to believe and how a letter means are never closed. Charged a little, because some of the yield is the critics’ ingenuity on a plain surface.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is the European novel of the eighteenth century. The force: Clarissa showed that the novel could be a tragedy of the inner life at epic length, and that the letter could give consciousness from inside without a narrator. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Diderot’s Éloge de Richardson (1762) set it beside Homer; Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) takes its form and its virtuous heroine; Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) takes its rake correspondents and makes them the whole book; Sade’s Justine reads as its inversion; Goethe’s Werther owes its epistolary inwardness to the line it began; Austen’s novels of a young woman’s choice of husband descend from Richardson; and Fielding wrote to praise the fifth volume. Held below the top because the English line soon turned to Fielding’s and Sterne’s narrators.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Survival of about 278 years, weighed on form, presence and surface. The form is whole: the text survives in Richardson’s own editions, with no question of loss, and is fully legible. Presence was enormous in its century across Europe, in English and in French in Prévost’s translation; then it thinned through the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, when the book was read chiefly in abridgement or not at all. Since the 1980s its presence has been real and largely academic, with one television adaptation, the BBC’s of 1991. The surface (the marriage settlement, the arrest for debt, the sponging house) is fixed to its moment, yet the book is read for what those things pressed on. It stands at 9.0 for the long neglect and the academic reading.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Richardson’s English. The command is of voices: Clarissa’s grave, scrupulous periods, tracing every motive; Anna Howe’s quick satire; Lovelace’s dazzling, self-delighting rhetoric, with its plays, Latin tags and coined words; Belford’s change of register as he converts; Leman’s misspellings; Lord M.’s proverbs; the uncles’ bluster. The construction is exact: the London trap is assembled piece by piece, and every device pays. The broken papers are typographical invention. Three charges hold the axis: the sentence is often slack, and the same reasoning is turned over again; the voices, distinct in manner, share the author’s taste for moral analysis, so that everyone argues at length; and the editor’s frame is heavy. A great maker of situations and voices, a lesser maker of sentences.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Lovelace’s comic, theatrical letters, with their rake’s wit and stage plots, and Clarissa’s dying meditations, devotional and grave. They obey one law. Every act in the book is written, every letter is a will exercised on another, and every plot, the family’s, Lovelace’s and Clarissa’s own towards death, is a contest over who authors a life. Lovelace’s comedy is part of the tragedy, not relief from it. The fault is at the end: the punishments of the minor wicked, Mrs Sinclair’s gangrene and death and the ends of the women and accomplices, follow a law of Providence the realist action had not needed, and Belford’s tidy conversion and the moral summings-up lay a second law over the first.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Held in one structure: consciousness, minutely; the family as household, money and law, in the settlement, the grandfather’s will and the father’s curse; class, between the new-rich Harlowes and Lovelace’s aristocratic house; the law as it touches a woman, in the arrest for debt, the sponging house and the question of prosecution; London’s underworld, the brothel and its women; religion and the sacred, at full weight in the last volumes; sexuality and power. Not held: labour, the state and politics, war, the natural order; country and city are rooms more than worlds. A world of private life at the greatest depth, by design, as the title page announces. Held below the top because it holds fewer orders of reality, however deeply it holds them.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment and The Living Form at 9.2, then The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 9.1. A disclosure of the family as an engine of property and of consent as a woman’s last possession, made in the action against the book’s own pious frame; a form of letters written to the moment, by victim and by agent, in which the gaps are the knowledge; near three centuries of readings that keep finding another book; and a reach through Diderot, Rousseau and Laclos to the European novel.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.7: the slow closing of the trap is required, but the family’s arguments are restated, Anna’s quarrels run long, and the posthumous volume distributes rewards and punishments at length. Next above it, The Made at 8.5, a great maker of situations and voices and a lesser maker of sentences, slack and argued over again, under a heavy editor’s frame; then The Sublime and The Encompassed at 8.6, for two volumes of pressure rather than height and a private world that leaves out labour, the state and war.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5, by two tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.7, The Made at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by four tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa; or, the History of a Young Lady, scored as the first edition: seven volumes, issued in three instalments, volumes I and II in December 1747, III and IV in April 1748, V to VII in December 1748, as most readers now meet it in Angus Ross’s Penguin text (1985). The third edition (1751), with Richardson’s restored passages, added footnotes and moral index, is named as context only, and its apparatus is not charged. The work is in English, so no translation is in question. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file; the novel is quoted only where its words are certain, briefly: the close of Lovelace’s letter after the rape and his last words in the duel. Letters are not cited by number. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the novel’s exact length in words, the number of its letters, the words of Clarissa’s letter about her journey to her father, and a remark of Johnson’s recorded by Boswell.