Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson

Kathleen James-Cavan is an assistant professor and Graduate Chair of the
English Department at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the editor
of Sense and Sensibility.

Passion and Virtue is a collection of essays on Pamela, Clarissa, and
Sir Charles Grandison taken from the first 12 years of the periodical
Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

Textuality forms the core of the articles on Pamela. John Pierce shows
that Pamela’s increasingly sophisticated use of texts such as fables
and the Bible parallels her development. John Dussinger situates the
novel in contemporary debates about state censorship, concluding that
“Pamela’s triumphant virtue was no less than the power of the
written word over the presumptive aristocratic social hierarchy.”
Alberto Riviero problematizes the novel’s happy ending, observing that
it depends “on secrecy, on deceit, on a providential rewriting that
allows the seducer the pleasant exercise of pitying his victim.” Betty
Schellenberg’s essay on Pamela 2 explores Richardson’s attitude to
“faction.”

Four of the six essays on Clarissa concern the novel’s relation to
religious doctrine of the day. Jocelyn Harris reads the conflict between
Clarissa and Lovelace as one between Christian Platonism and Hobbism.
While Peggy Thompson views Clarissa’s status as a passive Christ
figure, Robert Erickson argues that the novel is a “radical
exploration and reworking of the main doctrines of Protestant
Christianity.” Margaret Ann Doody identifies two Gnostic influences on
Clarissa that illuminate Richardson’s moral vision. Rachel K. Carnell
and David P. Gunn deal with the novel’s bourgeois aspects.

The four essays on Sir Charles Grandison seek to counter its current
unpopularity. Juliet McMaster reads the novel with an “emphasis on the
women and the body” that balances the text’s moralizing. Lois Chaber
argues that “[a] problematic—even subversive—fictional
deployment” of Christian ideas lies beneath the novel’s “surface
pomposities.” Wendy Jones explains that through the problem of the
good man in love with two women, Richardson demonstrates the range of
“available modes of feeling,” with an emphasis on “sentimental
love.” In its search for the “language of nature” that
“encourages self-knowledge,” argues George Haggarty, the novel
mitigates the dangers of excessive interiority.

This handsome volume makes an important contribution to studies of the
novel in general and Richardson scholarship in particular.