Textual Revisions Enhance Richardson's Walking the Boards in "Clarissa"

Abstract

The modern English novel, though it has as its ancestry the whole of the literature of continental Europe, is indebted for its origin as a distinctly modern form to Samuel Richardson. Especially in his masterpiece, Clarissa, Richardson develops remarkably full psychological characterization in a dramatic plot which is so organically unified as to defy even the consideration that the scenes or reflections could be arranged in any other order. This paper will focus on the major textual revisions that Richardson made throughout his novel to improve the dramatic quality in general, while calling attention to revisions involving such specific dramatic devices as foreshadowing, stage business, and the soliloquy. The publication of the first edition of Clarissa in seven volumes was possible only after some deletions had been made and seveneighths of volume six and all of volume seven had been printed in small type.' The number of deletions made from the manuscript to keep the text within seven volumes is difficult to ascertain, and the problem is compounded by the addition of some two hundred pages to the eight-volume third edition, the major portion of which appears in a separately published volume, Letters and Passages Restored (1751), which was intended to bring the first and second editions up to date. In the following study, I will investigate the history of the major textual revisions of a dramatic nature which I have identified from