by Michael Smoker

Created on: September 09, 2010

Samuel Richardson was an 18th-century English epistolary novelist who is sometimes credited with having written the first true novel to come out of England. He spent nearly his whole life in the London area, growing up as the son of a joiner (a trade related to carpentry that no longer exists) and having a successful career as a printer before turning to writing novels at age 51. He was noted for his social conservatism and strong literary focus on traditional women, and for most of his life he was deeply enmeshed in politics.

Richardson was born on August 19, 1689 to a father who worked in the skilled trades. Little is known about his early life because records were not well kept and Richardson was always secretive about it. His family originally lived in London, but, because his father made a bad political alliance with the Duke of Monmouth, the family was forced to move to Derbyshire. Richardson attended a grammar school where it's likely that he was taught only reading and arithmetic. His father wanted him to become a clergyman, but the family didn't have the money to pay for school, so, in 1706, the 17-year-old Richardson became apprenticed to a printer.

Over the next few years, Richardson's printer career progressed, making him a master printer with his own shop and apprentices by 1719. He printed more than 2,000 individual works, including books, newspapers, and the official record of the House of Commons. His shop also printed the novels he eventually wrote. After his death, his lucrative printing business was inherited by a second nephew, who quickly ran it into the ground, so that it closed only a couple of years after Richardson died.

Richardson showed a talent for writing as early as age 11, when he began composing responses to love letters received by his female classmates. One letter he wrote on his own behalf at age 13 to a highly critical older woman won him some notoriety. As a novelist he favored the epistolary form, which is when a novel consists of a collection of letters. He wrote his first novel in 1740. The novel, called "Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded," won him a reputation as an exceptional writer. From then until his death 21 years later, he produced about a dozen works of book-length fiction and nonfiction, which were received with various levels of enthusiasm, but won him many friends in English political and literary circles.

Richardson was a staunch social conservative, and his writings reflect it. The protagonists of his novels, always female, tended to be women who were traditional in their outlook and behavior for the time, and in his nonfiction writings he extolled the preservation of traditional social morals. One of his earlier books touted the trades apprentice as the backbone of proper society.

Among Richardson's political friends were a Speaker of the House of Commons. Among his literary friends were the young Samuel Johnson, to whom Richardson gifted a large sum of money in response to a request to help pay off a debt.

Partly because of a strict vegetarian diet that consisted of eating small amounts of food and drinking too much water, Richardson developed neurological problems that would eventually kill him. In the last years of his life he was unable to read because of hand and head tremors. He died on July 4, 1761, in London.

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