#samuel richardson

[anghraine]

I should be working on my dissertation, and have been, but I thought it'd be fun (for me :P) to loop you all in somehow. Therefore I bring you a very silly poll!

*best means whatever it means to you; feel free to propagandize

**yes, I deliberately excluded Shakespeare (from the poll, not the dissertation, lol)

[philosophybitmaps]

[finalgirlfall]

How comes it to pass, that I cannot help being pleased with this virago's spirit, though I suffer by it? Had I her but here, I'd engage in a week's time to teach her submission without reserve. What pleasure should I have in breaking such a spirit! I should wish for her but for one month, in all, I think. She would be too tame and spiritless for me after that. How sweetly pretty to see the two lovely friends, when humbled and tame, both sitting in the darkest corner of a room, arm in arm, weeping and sobbing for each other!—And I their emperor, their then acknowledged emperor, reclined on a sophee, in the same room, Grand Signor-like, uncertain to which I should first throw out my handkerchief? (L198, robert lovelace to john belford)

[quotation--marks]

I am a whimsical creature: But the sun in his course is not more constant than I am steady in my friendships. And these communications on both sides will rivet us to each other, if you treat me not with reserve.

Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison

[cedarboots]

just finished clarissa. what on earth was that

[lizziestudieshistory]

24.03.2023 - I'm still having a crap time with my PGCE... So I'm giving myself a cosy Friday night with some books, knitting, candles, and hot chocolate... Only slight issue with this is Pamela is my main book at the moment because I'm trying it again and all the reasons why I DNFed it is coming back, so we'll see how this goes 😬

Currently reading: Pamela by Samuel Richardson; Fugitive Prince by Janny Wurts; The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

[fangirlinglikeabus]

anne brontë, agnes grey // samuel richardson, clarissa; or, the history of a young lady // agnes grey // clarissa // agnes grey

[postersbykeith]

[jujupepi]

A Pre-History of Fanfiction I: Disclaimer, Introduction, Pamela, & Gulliver's Travels

Disclaimer:

This was originally written as a script for a video essay, so you might find reference to this medium. I am releasing this in this format mainly to get myself more comfortable with showing my writing publicly. I am not a trained scholar or journalist. I research this using the wealth of wonderful fanmade blog and wikis as well as scholarly articles available on JSTOR. If you noticed any mistakes or can offer more context to what I'm saying, please let me know! I love this topic and always want to learn more.

Introduction & Definitions

I’m not going to start this with “fanfiction has been around since the dawn of time; if you think about it the greek myths are fanfic!” because you’ve heard it before and it doesn’t really help us. Instead, I want to talk about operating (loosely) within a fanfiction definition that I came up with arbitrarily: Fanfiction is print based fiction inspired by the characters, settings, or situations derived from copyrightable work. Special bonus for fiction based on works owned by a national or international media corporation. So we’ll be mostly focused on the pre-1980’s era before the internet! Or atleast, before normal people used the internet on a regular basis. 

That’s not to say any other definitions of fanfic aren’t valid; I’m just not using them for our purposes here. I’d also like to say that my scope is limited to fanworks created in the UK, USA, and Canada. 

If you do any amount of sleuthing on the early days of fanfic you will come across a common origin myth: fanfiction was created by housewives who watched Star Trek and then wrote Kirk/Spock slash for fan magazine (nicknamed fanzines or zine). This isn’t untrue but it doesn’t tell you the whole story. We’ll try to track the beginning of modern fanfiction from the birth of copyright in the 18th century to the death of the fanzine in the 80s and 90s. We’ll talk about who was writing it, the tv shows and books that inspired it,  the moral and legal paranoia surrounding it, and oh yeah, we’ll talk about The Gays™. 

Chapter 1: Earliest Examples

Printing, mass literacy, and the rise of the middle class had a huge impact on the reading habits of 18th century Britons. The novel as a medium was born at the beginning of this century. The novel became hugely popular especially among the middle class. 

The novel leaves no space between the mind of the character and the mind of the reader making the medium uniquely suited to explore the interiority of a character. Though characters brought to life in the theater, Shakespeare’s Falstaff for one, were beloved, the particularities of the novel allow the reader to inhabit the inner life of a character in ways that hadn’t been possible before.

Thus begins an obsession over fictional characters in a way that is familiar to internet-users today. One of the earliest characters that inspired this kind of devotion was Lemuel Gulliver from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels published in 1976. If you’re unfamiliar, Gulliver’s Travels satirizes human nature while exploring a fantastical world of miniature people and other strange creatures. Not only did the audience get to experience Gulliver’s Travels through the narrator’s point of view, Swift himself implied an off-page life for Capt. Gulliver. He suggests other episodes in the Travels like “The Malingers” and the “Opinions of the Learned Men” which set fans’ minds ablaze with ideas. These inventive incidents created the ideal launching pad for other stories within this *ahem* shared universe. 

The first people to get in on the fun were members of Jonathan Swift’s writing group known as the Scriblerians. Together in May 1727, they published Several Copies of Verses Explanatory and Commendatory, a series of dramatic monologues by characters from Travels or who else might be believably part of that world. One of these characters was the hilariously named Titty Tit Esq, poet laureate of Lilliput who I only bring up because his name gives me joy. 

The most interesting of these poems, to me at least, is the lament of Gulliver’s wife Mary. She bemoans her husband’s absence and inadequacies. She implies that her husband might be more sexually suited for the stable boy than her. SLASH ALERT!

These verses are arguably fanfiction since they are stories about already established characters, settings, and situations not written by the original author but they are legitimized. Swift knew about these stories and they are included in most post-1727 versions of Gulliver’s Travels. Meaning that readers would have consumed these works together. The inclusions of these addendums muddle the canocity of what can be considered one of Gulliver’s Travels and what cannot. Contemporary picked up on this and went wild with the concept. 

Non-Scriblerians wrote Gulliver stories, too. One such appeared in Apple’s Original Weekly Journal wherein the author writes from Gulliver’s perspective, hinting at unsee and as of yet unimagined adventures. These Gulliver stories didn’t have to agree with each other either, they all represented possibilities within a fictional universe. Fans voraciously wrote and read Gulliver’s continuing tales. David Brewer says that these stories are not exhaustive in their explorations of Gulliver’s worlds but instead, “a bundle of possibilities held together by the magnetic field of a proper name (40)”. 

Another sensation in the 18th century was the novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson published in 1740. The novel was a huge success especially with men who had an affection and a sexual interest for the eponymous character. Pamela deals with the common 18th century themes of shifting social strata and rapidly evolving marriage norms. Pamela is a 15 year old girl with impoverished parents who works as a servant in the house of the wealthy Mr. B. Mr. B sexually harasses and attempts to rape Pamela, eventually kidnapping her. She virtuously fights off these attempts all the while writing to her parents about the tension she feels between her propriety and her desire to please her employee. Due to Pamela’s moral strength, Mr. B is reformed and asks her to marry him, which she accepts, launching herself from the lower class to the upper. The second volume deals with her negotiating her new place in society. 

I don’t need to tell you how messed up, creepy, and damaging the events in the novel are. It’s disgusting to me that the harassment of a working young girl is entertainment for so many adult men. BUUUUTTTT, it serves as an interesting case study in early fanfiction. 

Like Twilight and Nightlight or Lord of the Rings and Bored of the Rings, Pamela inspired it’s own parody novel named An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews or Shamela written by Henry Fielding in 1741. The novel imagines Pamela not as a docile servant girl but as a scheming daughter of a prostitute who entraps her employer. The novel was a success and Fielding went on to write Joseph Andrews in 1742, lampooning the idea of a male Pamela figure. Like in Stephanie Meyer’s Life and Death and endless fanfic, Joseph gives us our first taste of genderswap fiction. In an Anne Rice-ian move, Richardson rejected Fielding's works calling them “lewd and ungenerous engraftment of both Paemla and his Property (Brewer 121)”

The off-page lives of these characters don’t stop at Fielding's novel however. Samuel Richardson’s correspondence is full of asking fans for ideas on the proposed next Pamela column. Readers like Aaron Hill showed an ownership over character that echoes to this day. Hill wrote to Richardson that he shouldn’t make an illustrated edition of Pamela since Hill’s visual conception of the character and Richardson’s are different. Richardson describes Pamela as quite slim, but Hill thinks of her as ‘plump.’ 

Reader George Cheyne wrote a long list of incidents for the next edition mostly about medical emergencies. This is notable because Cheyne himself was a physician. These grown men projected so much of their own lives onto this fictional teenage girl. Pamela was ubiquitous because of “the collective mass of appropriations made by the individual reader (Brewer).” This meaning, fans could take Richardon’s Pamela and create her in their own image. 

Pamela, both the novel and character, had a massive following but it all centered around Richardson. Though Richardson asked fans for ideas, he ignored their contributions entirely. Fan didn’t correspond with each other but instead with Richardson directly. This is a huge difference from fandom later on that largely ignores the creator. 

I posit that it was the rise of the novel as a medium that allowed for fanfiction to emerge as a fan activity. The immediacy of the character’s interiority is not a function of any other artistic medium but the novel. This led to readers inhabiting the mind of their beloved characters and imaging an off-page life for them. These 18th century reading trends served as the starting point for modern fanfiction.

[a-soul-with-no-king]

“Yet, why should I say, Pardon me? When your concerns are my concerns? When your honour is my honour? When I love you, as never woman loved another?”

Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson (Letter 1: “MISS ANNA HOWE TO MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE”)

[page-28]

Cleaning bookshelves

Volumes 1 & 2

[taradactyls]

I think the one I see this most strongly with is Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson.

It's hard to read in the modern day. Pamela is a servant girl who spends a lot of time trying not to be raped by her employer, who eventually kidnaps her, and the only other woman in a position to aid her actively helps the attempted rapist to assault her in various ways. At one point she holds Pamela down in bed so it can happen (apparently the woman is this awful because she's an atheist). At another time the employer actively says that he would've continued and actually raped her if she kept fighting him, it was only because Pamela fainted that he stopped the attempt. She woke up from that attempt with her stays (underwear) cut up.

Pamela ends up marrying this man, after realising she has fallen in love with him, who is then 'reformed' by her 'goodness.'

It's meant to be a happy and uplifting tale. Obviously, to us, it's more of a horror story.

We see the victim blame in 'if you'd kept fighting you would've been raped' and also know that being unconscious actually makes you more at risk, and understand that a woman who eventually gave in to her master's advances is not any less 'good' for fearing being violently raped (or worse) if she continued protesting. We are less likely to believe people can be so entirely reformed by the 'virtue' of others, and see a man who would take advantage of power dynamics like that as bad even if he wasn't so aggressive in his advances. There are no real consequences for his crimes and continued harassment of a FIFTEEN YEAR OLD in his employ and who had zero protection or options. It's just all round horrid to our modern eyes.

But in many ways it was actually progressive for the time.

Pamela is a servant who ends the book married (not mistress to) a gentleman with an estate and eventually being accepted and adored by the land owning class. This is a rise of a magnitude far higher than Elizabeth marrying Mr Darcy, Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, or even Cinderella as she was highborn, and was really making the case that servant women could and do have as much inherent worth as gentlewomen by birth. For how classist 1740 England was, that's a controversial take.

And though it's considered a backwards view now, this was the first novel/work which was really reaching out to lower-class women and saying 'your virtue is worth as much as upper-class women.' I dislike the whole concept of sexual virtue and disagree that Pamela's virtue would be lost through rape, but the point remains that this book was making a case for greater equality between classes in a time where the ruling class relied on being considered naturally better by birth and chosen by god to rule. The novel was criticised for exactly this.

Not only that, but by promoting virginity, he was also championing a woman's right to say no. Pamela's ability and decision to refuse is upheld both positively and as what should have been the final word. The male main character only becomes a 'good' person once he truly understands and respects that. An idea only becomes outdated once the societal framework supporting the status quo has changed, and Samuel Richardson was writing in a time where a servant girl (or any woman really, for instance marital rape wouldn't become a crime for another 250 years) who refused her master's advances would have little recourse or sympathy if he didn't respect that no. This novel was telling all those girls your sexual autonomy is worth fighting for... you're worth fighting for.

And, though we see that Pamela's abuser essentially gets what he wanted and gets off scot-free (an illness and a change of heart isn't going to fly with a judge, you douche), it was revolutionary for the time in that it's told from the victim's perspective as a horrible series of events. These acts, many of which were common place and not illegal (some even actively considered romantic) at the time, was a criticism of many masculine behaviours and championed the woman's/victim's perspective. It drew attention to what we now consider domestic violence and abuse of power. Though we might argue about his methods (a minority of contemporary readers viewed the novel as salacious because of the inclusion of the assault scenes) the author's intent was to actively give moral instruction into proper domestic behaviour. Which, aside from 'sexually assaulting your employees is bad' does also include less radical and actively harmful views such as 'be loyal and loving to your employers no matter what.' Historical novels are a mixed bag like that, but he was still advocating for mutual social contracts towards each other, and rejecting the idea that the rich men who ruled the world could do whatever they wanted. He was speaking for the powerless against those in power.

I'll probably never read the book again, it was too uncomfortable for me, but without an understanding of the time it was written it would feel like gratuitous assault and a glorification of abusive relationships, when really, it was the exact opposite. We're just lucky enough to live in a society where many of his arguments have been accepted both socially and legally for so long that it's hard to imagine a case ever needed to be made in their favour.

tbh nothing frustrates me more then when people brush off classics like pride and prejudice or jane eyre because they don’t fit into today’s modern standards of feminism and social justice etc.

remember that these novels were published in the 19th century. and that some of the things that were written in these books may seem trivial to us today but would have absolutely fucking shook readers in the victorian era

like,,,,,elizabeth rejecting mr collins because she doesn’t love him even though it would have been considered her duty in her family to marry him? or jane eyre not agreeing to marry mr rochester unless it was on her own terms? hell even anne brontë wrote a lesser known novel about a wife leaving her abusive husband with her five year old son to live a better life?? do y’all realize how unheard of that would be in the 1800′s?? where women were considered more of a commodity than actual human beings??

even though they might not be up to todays standards of modern feminism and romance, they were still HUGE building blocks for equality for that time period. so if you’re a reader who says to themselves ‘I read classics with modern standards applied and I can’t get past that’ then you are most likely going to be disappointed when reading classics and not fully understand their significance to that time period 

[finalgirlfall]

You pity her mother!—So don't I!—I pity nobody that puts it out of their power to show maternal love and humanity, in order to patch up for themselves a precarious and sorry quiet, which every blast of wind shall disturb! I hate tyrants in every form and shape. But paternal and maternal tyrants are the worst of all, for they can have no bowels. (L181, anna howe to judith norton)

[quotation--marks]

If ever I should be persuaded to have him, I shall watch how the imperative husband comes upon him; how the obsequious lover goes off; in short, how he ASCENDS, and how I DESCEND, in the matrimonial wheel, never to take my turn again, but by fits and starts, like the feeble struggles of a sinking state for its dying liberty.

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady

[snailurefailure]

I love how sassy Mr. B looks in this one Pamela illustration

[virgoantendencies7]

“Woman is the glory of all created existence:—But you, madam, are more than woman!”

—Sir Charles Grandison to Harriet Byron (Miss Byron to Miss Selby [Letter XVII, vol. III, p. 92], SIR CHARLES GRANDISON by Samuel Richardson)