Samuel Johnson notably preferred Richardson to Henry Fielding, not only for morality but for subject and perception: "Characters of manners are very entertaining, but they are to be understood by a more superficial observer, than characters of nature, where a man must dive into the recesses of the human heart." Johnson told Boswell that "there was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dialplate." Richardson's study of "nature" was honored in an era philosophically concerned with the discovery of the nature of man.
The Richardsonian novel, observing at once the tempo of outer life and the flux of inner consciousness, begins a new tradition in English and Continental fiction. From it sprang the novels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as the works of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. Richardson's own novels are not superseded by those of his followers; he is one of the great novelists of the world. He might be called "the novelist's novelist"; his appeal to fellow writers of fiction can be attested in the twentieth century, in which Andre Gide and Angus Wilson have been among his admirers.
This is a free page. This page contains 185 words. This
biography contains 19,128 words (approx. 64 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Samuel Richardson Access Pass.
