塞缪尔·理查森

塞缪尔·理查森（Samuel Richardson，1689年8月19日—1761年7月4日）是英国的一名作家及印刷商。理查森出生于一个细木工匠家庭，自幼清贫，中学毕业后就到伦敦当印刷工学徒，后来更深得老板器重，将女儿嫁了给他，使理查森继承了印刷厂，其后更担任了众议院院刊发行人、书业公会理事长及王室印刷代理人。理查森与第一任妻子生了五个儿子，与第二任妻子再婚时又生了四个女儿。

理查森的作家路较迟起步，至理查森51岁时才发表第一部小说《帕梅拉》，1748年第二部小说《克拉丽莎》问世，最后一部小说《查尔斯·格兰迪森爵士的历史》出版。理查森生平只出版了三部小说，不过三部小说都是相当成功的作品。《克拉丽莎》是过百万字的书信体悲剧式小说，在1747年底至1748年底分卷出版，当时读者如痴如醉，纷纷去信理查森请求改写故事的结局。此书在小说史上是承先启后的里程碑，史家克里斯托弗·希尔称它是“最伟大的小说之一”，也有学者称此书“把个人主义发挥到悲剧的极端”。

Samuel Richardson (baptised 19 August 1689 – 4 July 1761) was an English writer and printer known for three epistolary novels: Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). He printed almost 500 works, including journals and magazines, working periodically with the London bookseller Andrew Millar.

Richardson had been apprenticed to the printer John Wilde, whose daughter Martha he eventually married. All six of their children died in infancy or childbirth, with Martha herself dying in childbirth in 1731. In 1733, he married Elizabeth Leake, daughter of printer John Leake. Together they had six more children, of whom four daughters reached adulthood.

Richardson penned his first novel, Pamela, at the age of 51 and was an instant success. Leading acquaintances included Samuel Johnson and Sarah Fielding, the physician and Behmenist George Cheyne, and the theologian and writer William Law, whose books he printed. At Law's request, Richardson printed some poems by John Byrom. In literature, he rivalled Henry Fielding; the two responded to each other's literary styles.

Biography

Richardson, one of nine children, was probably born in 1689 in Mackworth, Derbyshire, to Samuel and Elizabeth Richardson. It is unsure where in Derbyshire he was born because Richardson always concealed the location, but it has recently been discovered that Richardson probably lived in poverty as a child. The older Richardson was, according to the younger:

a very honest man, descended of a family of middling note, in the country of Surrey, but which having for several generations a large number of children, the not large possessions were split and divided, so that he and his brothers were put to trades; and the sisters were married to tradesmen.

His mother, according to Richardson, "was also a good woman, of a family not ungenteel; but whose father and mother died in her infancy, within half-an-hour of each other, in the London pestilence of 1665".

The trade his father pursued was that of a joiner (a type of carpenter, but Richardson explains that it was "then more distinct from that of a carpenter than now it is with us"). In describing his father's occupation, Richardson stated that "he was a good draughtsman and understood architecture", and it was suggested by Samuel Richardson's son-in-law that the senior Richardson was a cabinetmaker and an exporter of mahogany while working at Aldersgate-street. The abilities and position of his father brought him to the attention of James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth. However, as Richardson claims, this was to Richardson senior's "great detriment" because of the failure of the Monmouth Rebellion, which ended in the death of Scott in 1685. After Scott's death, the elder Richardson was forced to abandon his business in London and live a modest life in Derbyshire.

Early life

The Richardsons were not exiled forever from London; they eventually returned, and young Richardson was educated at Christ's Hospital grammar school. The extent that he was educated at the school is uncertain, and Leigh Hunt wrote years later:

It is a fact not generally known that Richardson... received what education he had (which was very little, and did not go beyond English) at Christ's Hospital. It may be wondered how he could come no better taught from a school which had sent forth so many good scholars; but in his time, and indeed till very lately, that foundation was divided into several schools, none of which partook of the lessons of the others; and Richardson, agreeably to his father's intention of bringing him up to trade, was most probably confined to the writing school, where all that was taught was writing and arithmetic.

However, this conflicts with Richardson's nephew's account that "'it is certain that [Richardson] was never sent to a more respectable seminary' than 'a private grammar school' located in Derbyshire".