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Biography of Samuel RichardsonName: Samuel RichardsonBirth Date: July 31, 1689 Death Date: July 4, 1761 Place of Birth: Derbyshire, England Nationality: English Gender: Male Occupations: novelist Samuel Richardson The English novelist Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) brought dramatic intensity and psychological insight to the epistolary novel.Fiction, including the novel told in letters, had become popular in England before Samuel Richardson's time, but he was the first English novelist to have the leisure to perfect the form in which he chose to work. Daniel Defoe's travel adventures and pseudobiographies contain gripping individual episodes and an astonishing realism, but they lack, finally, the structural unity and cohesiveness characteristic of Richardson's lengthy novels. Unlike his great contemporary Henry Fielding, who satirized every echelon of English society in such panoramic novels as Tom Jones, Richardson chose to focus his attention on the limited problems of marriage and of the heart, matters to be treated with seriousness. In so doing, however, he also provided his readers with an unparalleled study of the social and economic forces that were bringing the rising, wealthy English merchant class …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…on July 4, 1761. Further Reading The major biography is T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson (1971). Important studies of Richardson include Alan D. McKillop, Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (1936); William M. Sale, Samuel Richardson, Master Printer (1950); Morris Golden, Richardson's Characters (1963); and Ira Konigsberg, Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel (1968). Also useful are the chapters on Richardson in Alan D. McKillop, The Early Masters of English Fiction (1956); Ian P. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957); and Robert A. Donovan, The Shaping Vision: Imagination in the English Novel from Defoe to Dickens (1966). Recommended for general historical and social background are Louis Kronenberger, Kings and Desperate Men: Life in Eighteenth-Century England (1942); J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (1951); and A. R. Humphreys, The Augustan World: Life and Letters in Eighteenth-Century England (1954).Thomson, Clara Linklater, Samuel Richardson: a biographical and critical study, Philadelphia: R. West, 1977. |