Sir Charles Grandison

Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) was an English printer and novelist who pioneered the epistolary form and reshaped European fiction. Apprenticed to a London printer at seventeen, he built a successful business before turning to literature at fifty. His first novel, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), caused a sensation with its intimate portrayal of a servant girl resisting her master's advances, told entirely through letters. Its successor, Clarissa (1748), is often regarded as the greatest English novel of the eighteenth century — a tragic, psychologically penetrating work spanning over a million words. Richardson's final novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753), offered a portrait of the ideal gentleman. His technique of writing "to the moment" influenced writers across Europe, from Rousseau to Goethe, and his exploration of female consciousness opened paths that fiction is still travelling today.