4. Mid-century novel. Sentimentalism.

Sentimentalism emerged in England in the mid- to late eighteenth century. It reflected a similar trend in continental literature at the time. Literary sentimentalism or "sensibility" prioritized feeling. It developed primarily as a middle-class phenomenon. It reflected the emphasis on compassion or feeling as a desirable character trait in the appearing middle class. In England by the 1770s the rise of sensibility was also linked to a growing concern for the suffering of others. This was reflected in the antislavery movement, concerns about child labor, and the campaigns for better hospitals, prison reform, and charity schools.

The word "sentimental" is first known to have appeared in print in English in the 1740s. Becoming almost immediately popular, the term was used to describe the emotional state of a sensitive and "genteel" person, and sentiment began to play an important role in literature. Among the earliest British novelists that proclaimed the rise of sentimentalism was. Samuel Richardson. S. Richardson’s contribution to the development of the novel lies in his attention to his character’s psychological profiles.

S. Richardson (1689-1761)

Born in 1689 in Mackworth, Derbyshire, Samuel Richardson was the son of a carpenter and had little formal education. Although his parents hoped he would enter the priesthood, financial troubles forced him to find paid work in the printing business. Richardson joined the trade as an apprentice in 1706, and set up his own printing shop thirteen years later. He printed several periodicals, most of which were political in nature.

Richardson’s first novel was written almost by accident. As a printer, Richardson was asked to construct a set of “familiar letters,” models to help country people write to their families.

Richardson provided ideal letters of consolation, excuses for not lending money, formal recommendations for chambermaids, but among them he included some letters from a servant girl to her parents, asking what she should do when faced with her master’s sexual advances. Richardson’s friends enjoyed this plot and asked for more of it. Richardson based the novel on an account of real-life events in which a serving maid resists the amorous advances of her employer. He published Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded in 1740. The novel was an instant sensation.

It was written in epistolary form. This form was already popular in France but Richardson took it to new heights. Pamela’s letters are private and immediate and a reader of them becomes an intruder into her confessions. The epistolary form presented Pamela’s first-person jottings directly to the reader. Richardson explored the psychological dimension of characters and showed a deep insight into the working of the heart. Richardson’s objects in writing Pamela were moral instruction and commercial success. Richardson felt that the best vehicle for a moral lesson was an exemplary character; he also felt that the most effective presentation of an exemplary character was a realistic presentation. It evoked the reader’s sympathy and identification.

In 1742 Richardson published a second part to Pamela. The heroine is displayed as a perfect wife and mother, who writes long letters of advice on moral, domestic and general subjects.

By the summer of 1742 Richardson had begun work on what was to become his masterpiece. Richardson’s second novel Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady was published in 1747-1748. Although he had finished the first version of the novel by 1744, he continued to revise it for several years. It tells the storey of a well-bred young lady who, against the advice of her family, elopes with an unscrupulous dishonest man. He holds her prisoner and rapes her. When she realizes she has made a mistake she distances herself from her persecutor and dies alone in shame and grief. The massive work, which stands as one of the longest novels in the English language, contains 547 letters, most written by the heroine, Clarissa Harlowe, her friend, Anna Howe, the dashing villain, Lovelace, and his confidant, John Belford. While almost all of the letters in Pamela are written by Pamela, four principal writers in Clarissa provide a more complex plot. Richardson also set out to raise the social level of his story. Instead of the voice of a servant girl, he adopts the language of the upper classes. He takes his goal of moralizing through entertainment further than he had in Pamela. Clarissa is less of a conduct book. It is a Christian parable (притча). Clarissa dies a Christian death, having rediscovered the meaning of her sufferings. She is the first great bourgeois heroine.

For his third and final novel Richardson chose a male protagonist. Sir Charles Grandison was published in 1753–1754. It has proved much less influential over time than either Pamela or Clarissa. The novel tells the storey of Sir Charles, who is torn by his love for a beautiful English woman, Harriet Byron, and an Italian noble lady, Clementina Porretta. Charles is saved from his dilemma when at the last minute Catholic Clementina refuses to marry a Protestant. Richardson's History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-1754), marks a significant departure from his earlier works.

Richardson died in 1761 in London, leaving a bold mark on the British novel and on European culture as well.