Grandison | 27 July 2008

At the city library a couple of Fridays ago, I picked up the first of three books of Sir Charles Grandison, the 1754 seven-volume epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson. My intention was to have a look at it to see if I was really interested in all 1500 pages of the thing — because after the occasional tediousness of Pamela, I did have my doubts — rather than to actually start it.* I should know myself better by now — I have been enjoying it from the first letter, and started the second book this weekend. I’m even trying to figure out just how impossible it would be to buy the whole Oxford edition for myself. But I’ve heard that a new four-book edition is in the works (the notes on the current edition are only a little bit helpful, so that’s good news), so perhaps I’ll wait.

There are occasional author-approved goings-on and pronouncements that make me bite my lip in these modern times and wonder that I can enjoy a book that is so accepting of the period’s social norms and expectations (mainly concerning women). Contrary to the notion that a book of this length and age and assumptions would be work to get through, it feels like something of a guilty pleasure to me, because my conscience doesn’t think I should be enjoying such things.

Richardson took a lot of flack over all his novels for not having every minute detail of his heroines’ letters, actions, and feelings up to par with the idealistic virtuous expectations of the time. Sir Charles seems to be a culmination of all that he learned from criticism of Pamela and Clarissa, and so far the extremes of virtue have been piled high, and I can’t imagine how many more good and generous things our hero and heroine could have left to do.

One of my attractions to Richardson is his connection to Jane Austen, as one of her early influences, along with Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth (and of course others). They wrote conduct literature, in which the main character(s) are too perfect to possibly be real, or even to identify with at times, although women of the day were supposed to take them as role models. Austen’s juvenalia is also extra-realistic, but in an opposite way, as a vicious, violent, and hilarious reaction to their work. In adulthood, she (compromised? settled?) wrote realistically, with flawed protagonists who are sometimes able to correct their errors but can’t promise to be perfect ever after.

Although I genuinely have a good time reading his novels (as well as Burney’s and Edgeworth’s), I read them in part to understand what Austen was reacting to and moving away from. I think she respected them (in spite of what her juvenalia might suggest) but chose her own way. I read them for the quasi-guilty pleasure of the plots, the language, the virtue on display, and with relief that society has chosen another way since then.

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