Clarissa concluded

As observed at reference 2j, this is a very good novel. But it is a novel which depends on its plausibility for various things – which are no longer true. First, that there are people about with time, energy and inclination to write lots of letters to each other. Second, that there are people about that take their duties as children and wives very seriously. Third, that there are people about that take their duties to their (Christian) Lord very seriously. Against which background, it is still OK for Richardson to take the occasional pop at the pious and at parsons. Four, that gentlemen still take their honour very seriously and still fight duels.

At first the letters were just  a vehicle for the story, some of them being written in dialogue form. But they fairly quickly become part of the story in their own right. Some of them are written in code, some of them are sent and delivered clandestinely and some are intercepted. Quite often they are copied and shared. But there are a great many of them and we have to suspend disbelief about the amount of time spent by the protagonists in writing letters, in scratching out letters with a quill pen, even in this pre-television time.

The letters are mostly quite readable: shifts in vocabulary and usage in the intervening 250 years – written nearer a good deal nearer Shakespeare’s time than our own – have not made them inaccessible. Although I did worry from time to time about misunderstanding what had been written.

The book revolves about an experienced rake, Robert Lovelace, trying to have his way with – and perhaps marry – the young and beautiful Clarissa Harlowe. Both are rich. Both are popular and successful, albeit in rather different ways. Both end up dead. The action of the book occupies less than a year.

The book depends on the possibility of rich people abusing the use of marriage licenses to evade the custom that people – in particular their wards and children – should exchange their marriage vows voluntarily, in public. Reform followed soon after.

Odds and ends

Much use of the Bible, of the poets of the day and of classical poets as a source for quotes for the occasion, particularly unhappy occasions. 

Between gentlemen of fashion, to break one’s word or to have one’s word doubted was a serious matter. Serious enough for a duel. But lying to a woman, perhaps in the course of a seduction, was OK. As the saying goes, all was fair in love and war. While breaking one’s word about an engagement could lead to suit for breach of promise.

Death was a lot nearer in the 18th century than it is now. Death came to plenty of people whom we would regard as young – sometimes with torments and anguish. So perhaps not so strange that people spent more time on it – more time on how to go about it, in the way of Clarissa, who spent a lot of her time on it in her closing weeks  – than we do.

Well connected people must collect a lot of expensive memorial rings if Clarissa’s will is anything to go by. The form for superior people was to send their goldsmith around to the executor of the dear departed to get something sorted out.

Clarissa might be very pious and very keen to behave well, but that does not exclude association at one remove with smugglers, through her special friend Miss. Howe. While one of Lovelace’s crew gets killed in a skirmish with the customs’ dragoons. Or at least he dies of wounds before he can be tried and hung. While Miss. Howe is allowed to talk of spending her Thursday mornings on charitable works as one of her better amusements. Perhaps I am not making enough allowance here for shifts in vocabulary since the book was written.

Clarissa also likes to spend a great deal of money on clothes and jewels. No shrinking violet in that department. Enough that she can get by for a while by selling some of them.

Duels were more or less illegal and were conducted in private, but duelling was a public business to the extent that if person A did something which was deemed to impugn the honour of person B, the public behaviour of A and B towards each other also touched on their honour. Was A hiding from B? Was he making himself accessible to a challenge, as was proper and manly? Was B failing to challenge A? And lots of decent men died because they did not feel able to decline a challenge from a master at arms.

A moral tale in that most of the bad people either die or go on to have bad lives. One of the bad girls, for example, dies of the side effects of something taken for venereal disease. 

After I had finished the book, I was given a recording of an anthem by Orlando Gibbons, using text from Psalm 39. The anthem might have been written more than a hundred years before the book was set, but the text was just the sort of thing that Clarissa might have meditated on and sought consolation in. The text supplied with the recording is not quite that given above, but it is near enough. I am reminded of what we have lost by moving on from the Bible – not that I am inclined to move back, or suggesting that we should move back.

Entymological matters

Lovelace is a suggestive name for a fashionable rake. While Clarissa is very close to being the feminine nominative superlative for the Latin ‘clarus’: clear, bright, shining or famous. But the nearest OED comes is ‘clarissimmo’, once a form of address for important Venetian noblemen.

I was reminded that stupor and stupid are related. A fact confirmed by OED, although stupefy and variations were omitted. Littré does not make the connection, although all the stupefy words are present. So perhaps they came to us, quite recently, from the French.

And a use of prude made me think that prude and prudence were related. But OED suggests that any relationship, if present at all, is distant.

Conclusions

A good read. I wonder if and when I will have another go.

PS: following Webster’s, Word prefers entomological to entymological, although it seems that the latter is the usual spelling here in the UK. Presumably part of the US spelling reform movement – for a while led by the Simplified Spelling Board – in the first part of the twentieth century.

References

Reference 1: Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life. And Particularly Shewing, the Distresses that May Attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, In Relation to Marriage – Samuel Richardson – 1748.

Reference 2a: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=clarissa [the whole lot and more].

Reference 2b: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/clarissa.html [7th April].

Reference 2c: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/pre-possession.html [14th April].

Reference 2d: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/05/clarissa.html [2nd May].

Reference 2e: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/correspondance.html [9th June].

Reference 2f: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-hunt-for-two-seas.html [11th June].

Reference 2g: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/clarissa.html [12th July].

Reference 2h: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/acceleration.html [14th July].

Reference 2i: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/some-important-news-about-clarissa.html [18th July].

Reference 2j: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/clarissa-complete.html [30th July].

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clandestine_Marriages_Act_1753.