Before I read Clarissa I was nobody: Aspirational reading and Samuel Richardson's great novel

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2003 by Pascoe, Judith

When I first came across Richardson's eighteenth-century blockbuster, I was standing in a campus bookstore in Philadelphia in the late 1980s. I had just enrolled in graduate school, chiefly as a dodge. My escape was from a high school classroom in Chesapeake, Virginia, or, to be more accurate, from a hallway lined with classrooms through which I pushed a cart loaded with Bunsen burners and test-tube holders. As an itinerant science teacher, I rattled my tinker's cart of lab supplies into the classrooms of teachers who were standing duty in the lunchroom or dropping cigarette ash on vocabulary quizzes in the faculty lounge. The me that stood in the bookstore in Philadelphia was ecstatic at having managed to swap my lab cart for a book satchel. Farewell to the boy who called me "Miss Tabasco"; adieu to the girl who carved initials into her forearm; good riddance to adolescent Sturm und Drang-I had achieved the cool remove of higher learning.

The bookstore was crowded, and I snatched paperbacks with abandon, working my way down the shelf of books earmarked for the seminar in which I had enrolled. Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, The Man of Feeling-I was grabbing without paying much attention. A month before, I had received a notice from the course instructor who advised students to begin reading in advance, an admonition I took as seriously as a professional weight lifter would heed a warning about the strenuousness of beachball aerobics. Reading was my leisure activity; I had no fear of being left behind.

The last item on the shelf was a book with the size and heft of a two-pound sack of flour, a Penguin Classics edition suffering from elephantiasis. I dropped my other books and started pawing through the one thousand five hundred thirty-four pages of Angus Ross's magisterial but reasonably priced edition of Clarissa. I knelt in the aisle and marveled at the weight of this book. The back cover boiled Richardson's novel down to a one-sentence plot summary, as if to rebuff the casual reader by denying the pleasure of surprise. Gazing into Richardson's novel, I saw myself as a creature deluded by false confidence, and my eyes had trouble focusing on the 10-point print. I reassembled my gathered pyramid of books and proceeded to the checkout line with Clarissa serving as the monumental foundation stone. Then, a chastened being, I began my new intellectual career.

The Penguin paperback edition of Clarissa represents a grand experiment in book production, a test to see how many pages can be glued to a thin cardboard spine. There are bigger paperback books-the greater Orlando phone book springs to mind-but no other paperback novel has such a commanding shelf presence. On its spine, the Penguin Clarissa showcases a smaller version of the front cover art-a miniature version of Joseph Highmore's portrait of Clarissa's family. Unlike most book spine art, which tends to zoom in on the most alluring detail of the full frontal art work in a thumbnail square, the spinal Highmore provides a wider-angle view than the portrait's book front rendition. The Harlowe family cowers before the villainous Lovelace on both front and spine, but in the smaller version Clarissa's dress-which is of the voluminous hip-extending style that makes a woman look like she is transporting a sofa-billows out to its full extent.

But even the estimable Penguin edition does not encompass all of Clarissa, just all of the first edition. When I first read Clarissa as a graduate student, I went rummaging around in the dustier shelving reaches of a university library in order to find the section of Clarissa to which Angus Ross tantalizingly alludes while explaining why he chose to republish the first edition of Clarissa instead of the third edition in which Richardson strove to temper the appeal of his villain Lovelace and to enhance the sanctity of Clarissa so that readers would stop moaning about the two not winding up married. If I am to find fault with Angus Ross-and I do this hesitantly and deferentially-it is not because he crammed seven or eight svelte volumes into one corpulent book, since in so doing he made Clarissa available to the masses. No, the only reason I find fault with the Penguin edition is because Ross was too much of a purist: he reproduced the first edition, he said, because it is "appreciably shorter, often livelier" and because "to a large extent the added material seems relatively inert."

Inert? When I first read Clarissa as a graduate student, nothing could have seemed less inert than Letter 208. Letter 208, my first favorite letter, is arguably the most lurid letter in the novel since it contains Lovelace's outrageous flight of malevolent fancy against Clarissa's best friend Anna Howe. Lovelace plans for his coterie of rakes to carry out a triple rape of Anna Howe, her mother, and their maidservant during a voyage to the Isle of Wight. To his friend Belford, Lovelace writes:

I know it will be hard weather: I know it will: And before there can be the least suspicion of the matter, we shall be in sight of Guernsey, Jersey, Dieppe, Cherbourg, or any-whither on the French coast that it shall please us to agree with the winds to blow us: And then, securing the footman, and the women being separated, one of us, according to lots that may be cast, shall overcome, either by persuasion or force, the maid-servant: That will be no hard task; and she is a likely wench [I have seen her often]: One, Mrs. Howe; nor can there be much difficulty there; for she is full of health and life, and has been long a Widow: Another [That, says the princely Lion, must be I!] the saucy Daughter; who will be too much frighted to make great resistance [ Violent spirits, in that Sex, are seldom true spirits-'Tis but where they can-] : And after beating about the coast for three or four days for recreation's sake, and to make sure work, and till we see our sullen birds begin to eat and sip, we will set them all ashore where it will be most convenient; sell the vessel. . . and pursue our travels, and tarry abroad till all is hushed up.