Samuel Richardson (1689 - 1761)

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Samuel Richardson (August 19, 1689 – July 4, 1761) was a major 18th century writer best known for his three epistolary novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753).

Richardson had been an established printer and publisher for most of his life when, at the age of 51, he wrote his first novel — and immediately became one of the most popular and admired writers of his time.

Richardson was born in 1689 in Mackworth, Derbyshire. His mother, Elizabeth, was a woman “not ungenteel” and his father (another Samuel) was a joiner from Surrey, described by his son as “of middling note." As a boy apprenticed in a printer’s shop, this author earned the nickname “Gravity” and “Serious,” apropos of his later novels. At the age of seventeen, in 1706, Richardson was forced to begin a seven-year apprenticeship under John Wilde as a printer, an employment that Richardson felt would “gratify my thirst for reading”. By 1715, he had become a freeman of the Stationer's Company and citizen of London, and six or seven years after the expiration of his apprenticeship set up his own business as a printer, eventually settling in Salisbury Court.

In 1721 Richardson married Martha Wilde, the daughter of his former employer. His wife died on 23rd January 1731, following the deaths of five of their six children. The last child survived its mother by only two years. In 1733, following the death of this child, Richardson remarried. His second wife Elizabeth was also a daughter of a former employer, John Leake. Together they had six children (five daughters and one son). Four of their daughters reached adulthood and survived their father.

In 1733 he wrote The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum, urging young men like himself to be diligent and self-denying. Written in response to the “epidemick Evils of the present Age”, the text is best known for its condemnation of popular forms of entertainment including theatres, taverns and gambling. The manual targets the apprentice as the focal point for the moral improvement of society, not because he is most susceptible to vice, but because, Richardson suggests, he is more responsive to moral improvement than his social betters.
Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady — Volume 1
Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady — Volume 2
Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady — Volume 3
Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady — Volume 4
Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady — Volume 5
Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady — Volume 6
Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady — Volume 7
Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady — Volume 8
Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady — Volume 9
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
Pamela (Vol. II.)
The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7)

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