Richardson's Contribution to Novel

Richardson was a self mage man who started life with a few advantages and his achievement was distinguishes. He wrote three novels Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison. All the three are epistolary novels. “Though he did not invent the form, Richardson did invent the novel of common life, eschewing the improbable and the marvelous.” He gave his readers sentiment enough to please the most emotional to them.  His deliberate, minute, detailed method enabled him to gave the utmost effect to this sentiment note. Richardson’s method was cumulative. For example, in Pamela, each letter is rather more harrowing than the one preceding. In Clarissa, each scene is more poignant until the climax is reached.

Richardson builds up his characters step by step touch by touch and they gradually assume stereoscopic substantiality. We gather information from their own speeches and action. Richardson is not our first novelist of character but our first novelist of feminine characters. He is the first to make novels effective and popular. Richardson not only took himself seriously as a novelist and classed his fictions with such books as Taylor’s Holy Living and The whole Duty of Man but was esteemed by the most of his contemporaries, as a profound teacher.

The morality of Richardson was the morality of his age. He is regarded as the first novelist to show the real and vital knowledge of the human heart, its perversities and contradictions—the first analyze the woman’s point of view and the man who did that deserve some measure of praise from prosperity.