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George Sherburn, ed.,Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady, by Samuel Richardson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 494.
One can demonstrate this assertion by noticing the other elements of Richardson's art which Sherburn also refuses to accept: he excises the various death scenes which, as Margaret Doody has so convincingly demonstrated inA Natural Passion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 151–87, are taken almost unchanged from Prostestant didactic literature. Sherburn also reduces the letters of this epistolary novel to the bare bones of plot, thus eliminating all traces of the letter-writing manual or conduct book which taint the novel's aesthetic purity.
Plucknett claims that the civil war of the seventeenth century “made clear issue between tradition, common law and the medieval view [that the King was under God and the law] on the one hand and, on the other, the newer idea of statecraft, absolutism and a supreme royal equity.” The former set of values triumphed. Cf. T.F.T. Plucknett,Concise History of the Common Law, 5th ed. (London: Butterworth, 1956), 283; cited in Peter Stein, “Common Law,” in Volume 2 of theDictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Scribner, 1973), 691–96 at 695.
E.P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?”,Social History 3 (1978), 133–65 at 144.
A.S. Turberville,English Men and Manners in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 8.
Sir William Blackstone,An Analysis of the Laws of England, 5th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1762), xxvii.
Sir Robert Chambers,A Course of Lectures on the English Law, 1767–73, vol. 1, ed. Thomas H. Curley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 83–4.
Roberta Kevelson, “Prolegomena to a Comparative Legal Semiotic”, inFrontiers in Semiotics, ed. John Deely, Brooke Williams, and Felicia E. Kruse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 191–198 at 194.
Mikhail Bakhtin,The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 262–263.
Irwin R. Titunik, “M.M. Baxtin (The Baxtin School) and Soviet Semiotics”,Dispositio I/3 (1976), 327–38 at 329.
John Brewer and John Styles,An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 12–13.
Charles A. Knight, “The Function of Wills in Richardson'sClarissa”,Texas Studies in Language and Literature 11 (1969), 1183–90 at 1190.
Ibid., at 1188.
Jocelyn Harris,Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 92–93. The quotation which characterizes Clarissa's view of the law is taken from John Locke'sOf Civil Government (1690), Chapter 6, paragraph 57.
Samuel Richardson,Clarissa, Or, the History of a Young Lady, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 122. This is the so-called Shakespeare Head edition in eight volumes, based upon Richardson's third edition, in which Lovelace's important rape/trial fantasy appeared. Further references will be given in the text, with roman numerals for volume, arabic numerals for page number.
“Illocutionary,” a term coined by J.L. Austin, refers to those speech acts which are the “performance of an actin saying something as opposed to performance of an actof saying something” (How to Do Things With Words [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975], 99). An example is Clarissa's forgiving Lovelace for his crimes. In the case of a will, “I hereby bequeath...” would seem to be in nature an illocutionary act, yet in fact is a perlocutionary act, where the success depends not only upon proper conditions and performance by the spaker, but also upon proper interpretation and reaction by the reader. The perlocutionary force of the statements in a will depend upon perception, interpretation, and obedience by others besides the speaker or writer.
Margaret Doody,A Natural Passion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 123.
John P. Zomchick, “Tame Spirits, Brave Fellows, and the Web of Law: Robert Lovelace's Legalistic Conscience”,Journal of English Literary History 53 (Spring 1986), 99–120 at 116.
A parallel to Lovelace's dispensation is found in the fifth of William Hogarth's series of eight engravings,The Rake's Progress (1739). In the background of Rakewell's wedding to a rich spinster we can make out his former lover Sarah Young holding his illegitimate daughter, while Mrs. Young objects vociferously to the marriage. They are being silenced by the sacristan.
Zomchick,supra n. 19, “ at 109.
Select Trials for Murder, Robbery, Burglary, Rapes, Sodomy, Coining, Forgery, Pyracy, and Other Offences and Misdemeanours, at the Sessions-house in the Old Bailey, to Which are Added Genuine Accounts of the Lives, Exploits, Behaviour, Confessions, and Dying-Speeches, of the Most Notorious Convicts, from the Year 1720 to this time, vol. 2 (London: G. Strahan, 1742), 319.
Select Trials, vol. 1, 345.
Lincoln Faller,Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Susan Brownmiller,Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), 16.
“The disparity of both languages, their impenetrability to each other, have been stressed by a few journalists. (...) Their remarks show that there is no need to imagine mysterious barriers, Kafka-like misunderstandings. No: syntax, vocabulary, most of the elementary, analytical materials of language grope blindly without ever touching, but no one has any qualms about it. (...) These are in actual fact two particular uses of language which confront each other. But one of them has honours, law and force on its side.” — Roland Barthes,Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 54–55; trans. Annette Lavers,Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), 44–45.
This was one of several suggestions by Richardson's friend Aaron Hill. See Ben D. Kimpel and Duncan Eaves, “The Composition ofClarissa and Its Revision Before Publication”,Publications of the Modern Language Association 83 (1968), 416–28 at 422.
Stanley Fish, “Working on the Chain Gang: Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism,”Critical Inquiry 9/1 (Sept. 1982), 201–16 at 201.
Terry Castle,Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's Clarissa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 132–33.
The French translation ofClarissa comments subtly on this question. J. B. Suard, who restored the lost passages to later editions of Prévost's translation, has translated the coda as a legal forgiveness: “Cependant, pour montrer que je meurs dans une parfaite charité envers tout le monde, je déclare que je pardonne absolument et sans réserve à M. Lovelace les torts qu'il m'a faits” (Lettres angloises, ou Histoire de Miss Clarisse Harlove, augmentée de l'Eloge de RICHARDSON, des lettres posthumes & du Testament de CLARISSE, vol.24 of theŒuvres choisies de l'abbé Prévost [Amsterdam & Paris: n.p., 1784], 649.) The redundancy of “absolument et sans réserve” marks a legal phrase.
Cf. James Boyd White,When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); andHeracles' Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); and Milner S. Ball,Lying Down Together: Law, Metaphor and Theology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
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Beebee, T.O. Doing Clarissa's will: Samuel Richardson's legal genres. Int J Semiot Law 2, 159–182 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02053532
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02053532