Clarissa

Abstract

Samuel Johnson thought that ‘if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself’. We should ‘read him for the sentiment’, Johnson said, ‘and consider the story as only giving occasion for the sentiment’.¹ He saw Richardson’s novels as denying the reader the conventional pleasures of narrative, but focusing his or her attention — apparently — on characters’ feelings. Richardson seemed to have substituted a sentimental complexity for the complexities of a narrative chain. Johnson, of course, saw Richardson primarily as a sentimentalist, and made large claims for Richardson’s knowledge of ‘the human heart’.² So did many of Richardson’s other admirers, from Madame de Staël to Diderot and de Sade.³ Modern critics have tended to follow them, at least, in describing Richardson as a sentimental novelist.⁴