Catherine Talbot Translates Samuel Richardson: Bridging Social Networks and Media Cultures in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Literary scholars generally classify Catherine Talbot (1721–70) as a Bluestocking, a regrettably silent one who refused to allow publication of her writings during her lifetime. Her primary identity is more accurately viewed as grounded in the dense, socially conservative network formed by her ecclesiastical household and the elite scribal coterie centred on her friends Jemima Grey and Philip Yorke. From this position, Talbot acts as a bridge figure who, motivated by distaste for the dissipation of fashionable society, takes risks in establishing links between her world and the print projects of reformist writer Samuel Richardson. Talbot’s journals and correspondence demonstrate these mediations, from the time of her discovery of Elizabeth Carter’s “Ode to Wisdom” in Clarissa (1747–48) through to her interventions in the reception of Sir Charles Grandison in her social sphere. Talbot’s story offers a model for reading the active interface between media and social systems in her day.