Print, Proximity, and the Marketing of Richard Phillips: Mediating Richardson

In publishing the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (1804), the prominent London bookseller and manuscript collector Richard Phillips harnessed innovations in book production and advertising to the formation of a new literary and national-biographical canon. As print publication distanced readers from and thus complicated personalized access to texts or their writers, Phillips needed to find ways of mitigating some of these distancing effects by manipulating the very medium that introduced them. His answer was to construct himself as a bridge between Richardson, his letters, and their readers, by inserting himself into a voluminous apparatus of prefaces, appendixes, and images. Phillips thus offered his readers avenues of access to Richardson’s letters where those avenues were inescapably mediated by the letters’ transition from manuscript into print. The figure of Richard Phillips—autograph collector and enterprising bookseller—guaranteed that Richardson’s hand once wrote these letters and touched those pages. It was Phillips who stood as insurance for his readers’ abilities to invest effectively in their imaginative, intimate relationships with Richardson and his circle.