The History of Sir Charles Grandison

Synopsis

As Clarissa had grown out of Pamela, so Sir Charles Grandison grew out of Clarissa. Richardson’s female friends would not rest satisfied with his portrait of a good woman; he must now give them a good man. Moreover, had not Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) insolently, and, as Richardson thought, most unfairly, encroached upon his own province of holding up examples and depicting heroes, and, immediately, found many readers for itself?


Sir Charles Grandison is a man of large fortune, of rank and of family, high in the opinion of all who know him, and discharging with the most punctilious accuracy his duties in every relation of life. The dilemma to which he is exposed is the doubt which of two beautiful and accomplished women, excellent in disposition and high in rank, both being devotedly attached to him, he shall be pleased to select for his bride.


The Author

Samuel Richardson was born in Derbyshire, in the year 1689. Having sustained severe losses in trade, the elder Richardson was unable to give his son Samuel more than a very ordinary education. Richardson was twice married; first to Allington Wilde, his master's daughter, and after her death, in 1731, to the sister of James Leake, bookseller.

He is best known for his three epistolary novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753).


Richardson’s realism is great in its handling of minute details, its imaginative power, its concatenation of events. Though the picturesque aspects of the world are hardly ever called up by him, the material circumstances of the drama in which his characters are engaged stand depicted with diligent fulness, and the inner incidents of the sentient, struggling soul have never been more graphically or abundantly narrated


Jane Austen loved in particular Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54). According to family tradition, Sir Charles Grandison was one of Jane Austen’s very favourite novels.  She read and re-read it many times.  Henry Austen wrote that “Richardson’s power of creating, and preserving the consistency of his characters, as particularly exemplified in “Sir Charles Grandison,” gratified the natural discrimination of her mind.