Barbauld’s Richardson and the Canonization of Personal Character

Abstract

In The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (1804), Anna Barbauld assured readers that the novelist’s personal character (as displayed in his letters) corresponded to his authorial moral character (as inferred through his novels) in order to present him as an appropriate father of the modern British novel—a process I call the canonization of personal character. Barbauld’s editorial work presented Richardson as a benevolent patriarchal figure whose moral authority over the domestic life of his extended family guaranteed the morality of his novels and personal character alike. As my study of Richardson’s correspondence with Sarah Wescomb shows, Barbauld’s interventions muted challenges to Richardson’s authority on questions of paternal control and filial obedience. Life writing, textual criticism, and literary history intertwined so intimately in Barbauld’s treatment that they mutually constituted and sustained each other. Her contributions to the elevation and institution of novels as national genre in the Correspondence and The British Novelists (1810) should therefore be read alongside her canonization of Richardson as the first properly moral, modern novelist.