‘Now for a Likeness to Illustrate the Surprising Scene’

Abstract You wonder Madam, that the same Hand which could draw a Pamela & Clarissa, could draw a Mr. B. & an odious Jewkes; a Lovelace, & a vile Sinclair—From the amiable Character of a good Person, it is not hard to draw a bad one. But tho I have had Ideas of this or that Person before me in parts no one Person Man or Woman sat before me for the Whole of any of my Pictures. Few of Richardson’s letters survive from the period when he was writing Pamela, but there is quite extensive correspondence covering the writing and revision of Clarissa, and the composition of Grandison. Passages in these letters, such as those cited above, are therefore the nearest approximation we have to an exposition of Richardson’s literary practice in his own words. It is clearly impossible to draw any conclusions about earlier letters that may have been lost, or how such letters might have differed from what survives, but when Richardson writes about the two later novels it is striking how often and how consistently he resorts to the vocabulary of painting and portraiture in describing his art. Again and again he explains to his correspondents how his characters are ‘drawn’ and his scenes ‘painted’, whether ‘in strong colours’ or with ‘soft and tender Pencillings’. Such a synaesthetic conceit was, of course, commonplace, and dates back as far as the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis, but Richardson takes the traditional analogy between painting and writing far further, making an explicit connection with contemporary portraiture. For Richardson the representation of character in the two later novels is made explicitly comparable to the process of taking a portrait likeness, when he uses the image of ‘a Model before [his] Eyes’ sitting for his picture, or the family group gathered together in a ‘busy Scene’ of ‘Domestic Happiness’. And his correspondents respond in the same terms. While Pamela is experienced verbally, as a text to be read, it is striking how often the special qualities of the following two novels are defi ned as the capacity to ‘turn readers into spectators’.5 Astraea and Minerva Hill extol ‘that never to be enough admired Power of natural Picture drawing’; and another anonymous correspondent praised the way the novelist has ‘drawn [Sir Charles Grandison’s] Picture in most beautiful colouring’; Aaron Hill takes the analogy even further, saying ‘there are many, many Qualities, wherein I wish I cou’d but never shall be able to resemble him!—One of them is, the strong, yet natural Easiness of those inimitable Paintings, so replete with Life that Any single Stroke effaced seems hazarding a kind of Murder’.