SAMUEL RICHARDSON
(1689-1761)
Richardson came to fiction by an unpredictable route. He was a self-educated London tradesman with little practical knowledge of what would have been called at the time ¡polite' society or of 'elegant' literature. He had been apprenticed at the age of 16 to a printer and had risen, by a steady application worthy of Hogarth's industrious apprentice, to two successive marriages to the daughters of former employers and, in 1753, to the Mastership of the Stationers' Company. he confessed in later life that as a boy he had stolen times for the improvement of his mind 'from the hours of Rest and Recreation' granted by a master who grudged them to him. He also took care to buy his own candles 'that I might not in the most trifling instance make my master a sufferer'. If his disclosure sounds more than a little Heepish, his claim to have been in correspondence with a gentleman, greatly his superior in degree, 'and ample of Fortunes, who had he lived, intended high things for me', offers clues as to the nature of Richardson's later fascination with class.
In no sense, however, is he a asocial or moral iconoclast. As a printer and publisher I73os he had been instrumental in the reissue of several of Defoe's works, but his own first publication The Apprentice's Vade Mecum or Young Man's Pocket Companion of 1733 is little more than a handbook of ethics for the aspirant lower middle class.