Governing by “Persuasion” not “Force”: Fiction + Nonfiction = Power in Richardson’s Letters Written to and for Particular Friends on the Most Important Occasions

In his Preface to Letters Written to and for Particular Friends on the Most Important Occasions, Richardson sets readers up for the intensely focused power dynamics at play throughout his How to Write Business Letters for Dummies pseudo-eighteenth-century equivalent. Though some letters are akin to what we “nowadays” would think of as “Business Letters,” Richardson’s business-letter exemplars occur between relatives such as, “From an Uncle to a Nephew, on his keeping bad Company, bad Hours, &c. in his Apprenticeship” or “To a Father, against putting a Youth of but moderate Parts to a Profession that requires more extensive Abilities” (326), denoting the inherited aspects of business at this time. Simultaneously, variations on “business” and economic concerns of Empire, infuse these letters with their relevancy and impact to Richardson’s readers, or rather users, of his manual, as well as for the British community and Empire at large. On a (very) micro scale, sometimes of just a few lines, these letters, taken together, paint a picture of the expanding empire through the domestic space. A potential suitor who writes “to a Father, desiring Leave to address his Daughter” is labeled as a “young Man in Business”; it’s not only a “young Man” writing but specifically one “in Business,” thus denoting both his class (past and present) and his (future) monetary prospects. And this power dynamic, between the requestor—the person desiring some thing, opportunity, behavior, or benefit resultant from their writing—and the fictional audience.

With regard to the letter’s audience, a father, and the letter’s writer, a would-be suitor, it is easy to forget while in the process of reading this manual that they are fictions invented by Richardson. This is in part because the writer of the letter is both fictional and nonfictional, in multiple layers of meaning. The writer, the “young Man in business,” is fictional (not only is he fictional, but further he is a fictional character, which idea I will expand on momentarily). This “particular” “young Man in business” is both the fictional writer of this letter for a fictional situation and also in a very real sense he is the nonfictional, real-life audience Richardson is aiming for. A flesh-and-blood “young Man in business”—both a particular one and one among several “young men in business”—would pick up this letter-writing manual and use it to construct a “real”-life letter to a “real”-life potential father-in-law. Thus, these letter-exemplars Richardson constructs, unite past, present, and future, and turn the past productive in the present (tense) for the future. One of the goals for these letters, as outlined in the Preface, is that they “may serve for Rules to THINK and Act by, as well as Forms to WRITE after” (324). Thus, the audience may take these letters and use them to “THINK” and “WRITE”—in case readers were wondering, these verbs are in all-caps, to show how important the link between “thinking” and “writing” is. Further, their being in all-caps betrays the control-freak nature of Richardson-as-writer; he thinks, he writes; then commands the audience to think and write via his prescriptions. Richardson would rather like himself and his audience to “govern by Persuasion than Force,” as is evidenced in the tone and content of the letters which follow as well as is explicitly stated in italics for emphasis in the Preface (324), which will be short because Richardson states he “is no Friend to long prefaces.” (Future Richardson, ahem, Clarissa’s editor, should read this preface. However, as the Cambridge Companion editors point out in their preface, by the time Richardson became the “editor” of Clarissa he no longer wanted to associate his name with the Letters to and for Particular Friends and stated to a higher-ranking male that it was not worth his time.) 

These discourses between Particular Friends are pulled from nonfictional particulars in examples Richardson claims really happened (i.e., the famous maid-servant letter-discourse between a maid servant, her master and her parents that spurned Pamela) and rendered into nameless, place-less (same as he did in Pamela, i.e., Mr. B–) characters. In this way, Richardson blends the Fielding-esque “flat” character with what would become known, in 1950s+ literary criticism at least, as the Richardsonian “round” character (see: Watt, Rise of the Novel and Lynch, Economy of Character). That these fictional writers in a nonfictional letter-writing manual can even be referred to as “characters” demonstrates the remarkable power behind the Letters Written to and for Particular Friends on the Most Important Occasions. The story begins in the very title: though the title’s primary focus is on the “Letters”—which is the subject of the title—the “who” and the “when” of the story to unfold are identified: these letters circulate not only between “Friends” but “Particular Friends”; they are not on just any occasion but on “the Most Important Occasions” (emphasis added). They are both characters and exhibit how to have, or at least display, character: “CHARACTER” along with “NATURE, PROPRIETY, … PLAIN SENSE, and GENERAL USE” are the “chief Objective of the Author’s Attention”; by READING Richardson’s letter then WRITING using it and the thoughts generated by it, one can achieve or build one’s “CHARACTER.” A Lovelace-esque villain is later painted as hoping to have “Power” to “sink” women “into the Characters” (note the plural) “of the most Credulous and Foolish of their Sex. Thus, “Character” is a positive goal to strive for while “sinking” “into the Characters” is a negative, to be avoided by reading these letters and thus becoming aware of the “snares” that can be laid to “sink” one from the realm of the individual as having character into the multitude of stock, Fielding esque characters ripe for social ridicule and its resultant demise, both in terms of economics and reputation (which, especially for women, are one in the same).  

Richardson is not writing to Nobody (i.e., Gallagher’s seminal claim of female authors in Nobody’s Story); he is writing to particular Somebodies. “Particularly,” Richardson writes (emphasis on the “particular”), he “has endeavored to point out the Duty of a Servant, not a Slave; the Duty of a Master, not a Tyrant; that of the Parent, not as a Person morose and sour, and hard to be pleased; but mild, indulgent, kind, and such as one would rather govern by Persuasion than Force” (324). The parallel constructions of “Servant” and “Slave” with the implied, but not explicitly mentioned, children of “theParent” and the “not” “a Person morose and sour” is striking. While Servants are not Slaves, and Parents are not Persons morose and sour, the object of the parent, the child, is implied and wrapped up in the Slave-Master discourse/dynamic. In this way, the Letters to and for Particular Friends on the Most Important Occasions can and should be read for their power-dynamics and economics as well as the propriety exhibited, and what that propriety has to say about the expanding Empire, through the domestic by uniting particulars with the generalized, fiction and nonfiction, to create discourse that generates “thinking” and “writing” of both particular people and the masses, England as a particularized whole. 

Note

All page numbers refer to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson I: Early Works, forthcoming.