How to Read Clarissa by Samuel Richardson: A Literary Guide

[00:00:00]samuel richardson's clarissa is one of the most important and influential novels in the history of literature its importance actually cannot be overemphasized published from 1747 to 1748 spanning 1500 pages and clocking in at almost a million words clarissa is a long novel it's a daunting novel and it's a difficult novel however i would protest that clarissa's difficulties lie primarily in one's initial acquaintance with the work breaking into clarissa for the first time requires some specific mindsets some new paradigms and today we will discuss what they are we'll talk about recommended reading pace we'll talk about the themes and preoccupations and what you should look out for and like the first readers you will soon find that the only difficulty with clarissa comes in putting it down the difficulties of clarissa are certainly not insurmountable and the view from the summit is very much worth the climb keeping with the mounting climbing analogy i do like to think of different great works of literature as mountain ranges anybody who has climbed mountains knows that every range is different you have your mount everest you have your kilimanjaros and you have everything in between and with the mountain range of clarissa the ascent is most certainly brutal it's exhausting it's gut wrenching and heartbreaking but you will find after you have reached the sublime summit you will find that this is a journey that you will want to take many more times over the course of your life as a work of literature clarissa ranks up there with don quixote and the plays of william shakespeare for just how incredibly influential it is but it is unfortunately underread today which is a shame because i strongly believe that any good deep reading program benefits enormously from having clarissa as one of its foundational reads why read samuel richardson today well because in a sense we already do we today read richardsonian protagonists without even realizing it we take for granted the narrative devices that he pioneered and the narrative devices that his works paved the way to a deep reading of clarissa in addition to being rewarding in and of itself opens up a greater vein of appreciation for every other work of literature you will come across whether we're talking about modernist works from the likes of james joyce and virginia woolf or whether we're talking about meeting the heroines in the novels of jane austen and george eliot samuel richardson's clarissa will be like a light illuminating every other great work of literature you endeavor to deep read now before we dive into the specific tips let's talk warnings we have two warnings first things first spoilers now we will not be spoiling clarissa i will be making every effort to keep the secrets in the novel indeed so far as they are secrets i'll be trying to preserve the surprises i will be doing that in this video and i will continue to do that throughout the hardcore literature guided reading lecture series and i will be staying away from the ending and how things go having said that there is one main thing that happens in clarissa and we'll speak about this because for a very long book there's not a lot that happens there's a central action and pages and pages and pages and pages are given over to rumination that's one of the challenges we will discuss but there is a central action in clarissa that is really the crux of the book even readers coming to clarissa for the first time today are unlikely to be able to stay away from this plot point in my opinion it's not a spoiler it's what the book is all about and it is the response to this event and it's the build up to this event that concerns the characters and concerns the readers one might even go so far as to say that clarissa cannot really be spoiled dr samuel johnson might have thought so because he claimed that you do not read clarissa for the story you read it for the sentiment but we will be keeping what happens largely a surprise but we may need to mention this plot point which leads me on to my next warning which is a trigger warning of sorts i don't give a lot of these i think this may be my third one and i'm aware that a lot of people aren't a fan of these because they feel them to be a little bit overused but i also think with the subject matter at the heart of clarissa that it's worth putting out a little warning so i believe it pertinent to say that clarissa deals with themes of sexual assault that some readers might find distressing and clarissa is a distressing book it's more distressing the further into it you get but it's also incredibly sublime and most certainly a literary mounting that is well worth scaling now let's dive into the first tip that i would like to give you something to keep in mind as you breach clarissa the first thing that makes clarissa so extraordinarily important and influential is samuel richardson's exploration of character the characters in this novel have intense inwardness they have a consciousness all their own or a consciousness that we take to be the consciousness of real people people who live and breathe people whose concerns are as real if not more real than our own now why is this important well in witness first announced itself significantly in literature in the plays of william shakespeare that isn't to say that pre shakespeare we didn't have incredibly resonant vivid entertaining and affecting characters one needs only to look to chaucer one of shakespeare's influences to see that that is most certainly the case but with shakespeare we have characters who hear themselves they catch themselves in the act of thinking they hear themselves but perhaps they do not hear others and they change because of what they hear of themselves they're thinking essentially we only need to look to a character like full staff in the henry the fourth place for example full staff being one of the four inexhaustible shakespearean personages according to ac bradley we have full staff we have cleopatra we have hamlet and we have iago to seemingly possess a consciousness all their own that would have been extraordinary contemporary with shakespeare we have cervantes and don quixote and cervantes gifts us two friends who talk to each other think and do hear each other and change because of their conversations with one another and we change too so around the turn of the 17th century we have some extraordinary things happening we have these inexhaustible shakespearean personages we can add perhaps another dozen shakespearean characters who are almost inexhaustible and we can also look to an expansive cast of minor characters who all possess their own individual distinct voices and then we have night errand and squire who genuinely talk to each other and change because of their conversations with one another now when it comes to samuel richardson this inwardness is taken to the next level and with samuel richardson we have the first writer or at least the first significant instance of inwardness in the novel form why we might ask well we only need to look to the form the shape that the novel takes the structure it's epistlery the novel is comprised of letters back and forth between friends we'll talk about that more in a moment but the letter writing exchange offers us for the first time in history a significant glimpse into the inner life of these characters who feel like real people as readers we constantly need to navigate and figure out the truth we are reading between the lines we're trying to figure out what's not being said in these letters and throughout the novel we are constantly discovering things that the characters themselves haven't professed the epistlery is a confessional form and yet they still hold things back or they view things in a certain way because indeed truth the world is subjective and inflected by our own perspective so the extraordinary thing is we're watching these intensely real people talk to one another and maybe we discover things about these people that even they do not know we become convinced of who they are who they're writing to the world in which they live which feels incredibly rich and lived in and by extension we become more convinced by the reality of our own experience the inwardness of clarissa would make possible many of literature's greatest heroines just two examples from the books we're studying in the book club manifestations of female individualism are george eliot's dorothea brook from middlemarch and jane austen's and elliot from persuasion now the next most important tip that i would like to offer you is for you to attempt to connect with the first reader because in doing so we are able to contextualize we are able to place the novel historically and we are better able to get a deep understanding and appreciation of its significance connects with the first reader of clarissa what would this book which many readers today complain is too long it's boring nothing happens what would this book have meant to the first reader the best parallel we can draw is with our soap operas clarissa was very much the soap opera of its day it was bingeable tv serial essentially terry eagleton in his study on the english novel puts it perfectly and he draws the parallel between clarissa and harry potter eagleton writes the modern equivalent of clarissa would not be mrs dalloway but harry potter richardson's characters became public property and household names swooned over reviled dramatized pirated turned into bawdy rhymes quoted in the salons and solemnly commended from the pulpit like the harry potter phenomenon they were multimedia affairs converted into plays operas spoofs wax works domestic commodities the story of clarissa is quite simply and succinctly described and you'll note that it is very much the stuff of soap opera simply put we have this young girl this 19 year old girl called clarissa harlow who has been named as heir to her grandfather's estate in his will clarissa's family want her to marry an odious man called mr soames she absolutely does not want to marry this mr sones and whilst this is going on we also have this libertine figure and we'll talk about what a libertine is in a moment this libertine figure called mr lovelace robert lovelace and clarissa's family do not think much of lovelace to put it lightly in fact they absolutely despise lovelace and they really do not want clarissa being seduced by lovelace they do not want her to fall under his sway and be corrupted this was a very popular storyline at the time the reading public absolutely devoured stories of virtuous women paragons of virtue coming up against a seducer figure who is trying to undo them again we'll talk about that more in a moment so clarissa's family keep pressuring her to marry this mr soames and much to their outrage their pressure has the opposite effects and she runs away with lovelace so you can see this is a very soap opera and this story kept the reading public hooked honestly to simply say that clarissa was the harry potter of its day or was like a soap opera doesn't actually get us close enough to that first reader what was it really like being a reader in the mid-18th century well first of all it's important to emphasize that life was dull life was incredibly boring beyond our abilities to comprehend it was so incredibly dull on a rainy day like today one didn't have many options when it came to distraction escapism entertainment this was an age in which books of sermons would sell out on publication day that's how desperate the reading public was to eat up literature colin wilson discussing richardson's earlier novel pamela in the craft of the novel puts it perfectly he says that novels like pamela and clarissa had been the books that everyone had been waiting for they satisfied a deep urgent demand that had been building up for decades it differed from early novels as much as cinema differs from the theater the reader could become totally involved in it like entering another world living someone else's life imagine the daughter of a country clergyman on a wet afternoon with nothing much to do but stare at the rain she opens pamela or clarissa and it's as if she has walked out of her own home into the country house of the characters for the next few hours she is the central protagonist she is moved to tears by the indignities and shocked by the attempts at rape at certain points she lays down the book and drifts into a daydream wondering how she would react to being kissed by the leading man in two hours she lives through more experience than in two years of daily routine the novel might be long but for her it is not long enough she would like it to go on forever she has made the discovery that living is not necessarily a matter of physical experience that the imagination is also capable of voyages today this sounds utterly banal in 1740 it was as startling as discovering you could fly by flapping your arms richardson had taught the european mind to daydream i love that and so it bears appreciating that the england of the day was in england in which the church bells all over the country would ring out to celebrate fictional marriages two characters get married in a book and the whole country wants to celebrate this was a country where readers would congregate after church and gossip about the characters gossip about what happened in the latest installment and what they think or what they hope will happen next readers avid readers would congregate in coffee houses and no two readers had the same reading as each other so there would be fierce debate readers would diverge wildly some would be pro clarissa some would be pro-lovelace and many a strange nuanced mixture of the in-between the work ultimately was more likely to read the reader than the reader read the work as all great literature does the first readers of clarissa were active participants in the story needing to interpret the information that they had at hand and needing to exercise their own reasoning powers and there are characters in the novel that provide a template for how to do exactly that if we look at the character of anna howe that's clarissa's friend that's who she writes to they write back and forth anna howe one of my personal favorite characters is the template for the perfect exegete she responds to what clarissa says she criticizes she breaks apart she tries to aid clarissa she writes around clarissa's experience and speaking of experience this was also an age in which private experience was on the rise the inner light of puritanism was on the rise the idea that we have a personal relationship with our god was on the rise and we began to shift from a predominantly oral culture to a culture of readers readers who take the book into a room by themselves and spend some time alone spend some time reading in solitude we used to read our stories aloud or we used to have our stories read to us but with clarissa we see an extraordinary shift and we see the rise of the private reader of course the communal experience the communal aspect was still there but this was a significant point in history where readers would take that book and they would read by a candlelight feverishly turning the pages to find out what happened and to deepen their own intimate relationship with the characters at hand up until this point living arrangements had been very cramped very confined and we didn't have much personal space we used to share bedrooms we used to have one main room with a fireplace and the whole family would be in that room and that room would be really dark we see the window tax meant people would block up their windows in order to save money and they would also save money by rationing their candle use many readers would need to enjoy their story by the light of the moon but at this time we see a new feature of houses was the private closet a private room and this was typically a feminine domain stocked with books a writing table and writing equipment and so readers began to retreat away from others to immerse themselves in this exhilarating story only to then take the story and their thoughts of the story back into society to discuss it reading as a pursuit as a leisure activity was still not something afforded to everybody books were still very pricey and literacy was only a fraction of what it is today but we see the rise of the circulating library the subscription model where one could pay a penny a volume and make their way through stories in triple deckers three volume stories for a penny a piece they borrow the story for a fraction of what it would have cost to buy the book themselves and so circulating libraries earned themselves the unfair reputation as slop houses because suddenly a reading public emerged who were eating up novels specifically novels yes we had other forms of literature the pickeresque we had ballads we had newspapers but now the novel was on the rise and so was the reading public and though reading though still not afforded to everybody was now being afforded to the working classes most curiously to professions like maids and servants and those who were paid to wait on others why because typically they had their bed and board already sorted out so they did have a little bit of extra pocket change so they could go to that circulating library and they could pay a penny of volume and follow the story over the long term but also because they had downtime pockets of downtime perhaps they didn't need to buy their own candles maybe they were waiting about between shifts between needing to clean up and so they utilized that downtime that new gap of leisure time and filled it with books foreign visitors to england at the time noting that there was a large discrepancy between town and the countryside the city of london was becoming more degenerate it was becoming dirty it was becoming everything that the countryside was not and many writers including richardson saw it as a hot house of criminality and vice but foreign visitors to england noted that regardless of where one was in the country women specifically regardless of their station by and large had a lot more leisure time than men many of the domestic duties that the woman of the household was charged with for example soap making was no longer required working-class women still needed to sew and cook and have other domestic duties but they were now afforded a little pocket of leisure time and they utilized that leisure time by enjoying these rip roaring reeds they would eat them up so private experience was on the rise suddenly we have such a thing as locks on the door private rooms weren't really a thing and now they were becoming a thing and then we have the rise of the penny post so not only were people becoming readers they were becoming writers writers of letters and for me personally this is one of the most exciting periods of the history of literature many critics will try to make the parallel with the elizabethan and jacobean theaters but there was a difference there everybody in shakespeare's day or almost everybody could afford to go to the theater on a regular basis even if you were not well off you could pay your penny you could go to the pit at the globe and you can muck in with everybody else and you can enjoy a good play but with the restoration era came the shutdown of the theatres for an extended period of time and with the high cost of books and the lack of literacy it meant that the normal everyday person didn't have many avenues of entertainment maybe the church sermon but now with the rise of clarissa and the rise of the novel came the rise of the private individual and the rise of the solitary reader and these solitary readers were thoroughly enjoying getting to know these characters on an incredibly intimate level now the next tip i would like to offer you comes from dr samuel johnson who advised readers not to read clarissa for the story but rather to read it for the sentiment it's such an important piece of advice that the everyman's library have decided to print it on the inside flap of their dust cover jacket if you were to read richardson for the story said dr johnson your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself you must read him for the sentiment and consider the story as giving occasion to the sentiment i don't know if you can hear that by the way but the rain is pounding down quite hard and there's this delightful patter of raindrops falling outside it's honestly one of my favorite sounds and without fail this gets me thoroughly in the mood for enjoying some great literature so we're very fortunate that the skies have decided to rain for our discussion today dr samuel johnson told us to read clarissa for the sentiment and richardson himself may have agreed with that he believed that regardless of how long clarissa was there was not a single sentence that could be removed there was nothing extraneous and there was nothing that was a disservice to the story everything was integral according to richardson but how exactly do we read this novel how do we read clarissa for the sentiment well what we do is we read it for the escapism it affords us we do not read it for the benefit it could bestow we do not read it for information we don't read it with an outcome-based model of thinking we simply immerse ourselves and we go with the flow the benefit will come later but the rewards are much more immediate with that mindset johnson said that richardson demonstrated the great use of books is that of participating without labor or hazard the experience of others he's talking about vicarious experience or vicarious participation if you can read clarissa if you can involve yourself in the narrative if you can see the characters see the scene see every little detail and if you can immerse yourself fully without question then you have learnt to read every other great piece of imaginative literature in history clarissa as a book is a protected space where we can learn through the experience of others this is not memetic it's not representation of experience it is vicarious experience and for richardson the aim was to give the reader this vicarious experience so as to reform them and improve them and we'll talk about that in a moment too but my next tip is for you to familiarize yourself with the epistlery form the epistlery form is basically a narrative that takes the form of letters it's a very charming narrative device and one that would have gripped those first readers because those first readers were letter writers in addition to books of sermons and prayers being incredibly popular the reading public also devoured collections of letters and conduct manuals how-to guides etiquette guides on how to write a letter to such and such a person how to write this kind of letter or that kind of letter samuel richardson was actually a printer who was working on this very kind of manual and he was writing all of these different example letters how to write a letter to a creditor how to write on behalf of one's fiance how to write a letter to one's father to one's parish priest and what he found was a narrative began to emerge and so he indulged that narrative with his novel pamela he didn't want to waste all the good stuff all the juicy stuff with the conduct manual why did people want to read a book composed of letters well because letters were considered a peephole a way of seeing into another's heart into their inner and better knowing another these letters often boasted candied expression they were often confessional in tone they were informal and incredibly intimate they were also conversational on a recent video one reader of clarissa said it would have been like reading another's mail and that was the intrigue you could pretend and actually you wouldn't need to suspend willingly your sense of disbelief that much you could feel as though you were reading someone else's private mail can you imagine that today obviously there would be a sense of guilt if you stumbled across someone else's private messages but if you were given the go-ahead and you were given these private messages and you were allowed to read them and they contained some really juicy stuff with these really compelling characters you could be pulled in quite easily couldn't you we all love a good gossip we all love peeking behind the scenes and we all love living vicariously through somebody else's domestic strife and that is what clarissa afforded those first readers and continues to afford us today the epistlery form also lends itself perfectly to storytelling in addition to explication of character and getting to know another on an intimate level we have suspense built into the form there are constant cliffhangers there are constant opportunities to wonder what's gonna happen you will mark that the works that truly capture the public's imagination really exploit this feature i'm thinking primarily of bram stoker's dracula which has an incredible amount of suspense built into it just like clarissa but in addition to suspense you also have dramatic irony you have foreshadowing you have the same event relayed from different people so it's going to be different so you have to fill in the blanks that's rewarding too now my next tip for you might be a little bit unconventional but i would urge you to take up this assignment and the assignment is this try your hand at letter writing yourself now of course if you don't actually want to take a pen and a fresh sheet of paper you can go back and examine your own private correspondence with different people and think about the persona you have been sculpting even in those most intimate of message exchanges what is left unsaid but if you really want to take it to the next level i would highly recommend you write a letter everybody loves getting mail we don't get it nearly enough today it's a lost art as is etiquette but pick a person who could really use a good letter and write them a good old-fashioned letter or indeed you could write yourself a letter write a letter to your future self seal it and open it in the future you may also want to experiment with keeping a journal or a diary but during the act of writing keep conscious as to how much of yourself you truly reveal what do you reveal and what do you conceal how much is persona and how much of who you are writing to how much does that influence what you write and how you write and ask yourself what can't you write what remains unwritten and why because this is a really important thing to keep in mind clarissa writes the story lovelace speaks of the pre-meditation of writing why is this so important it's important because the letters in clarissa are not immediate sense impression they are not experience or consciousness as it happens despite the fact that many critics try to claim that that is exactly what it is a lot of critics in a kind of damning way will call clarissa a primitive precursor to works like ulysses to the writings of virginia woolf but it is so much more than primitive precursor yes it will influence those modernist texts to come but it's important to establish that regardless of how immediate the letters feel and very often they feel incredibly immediate we feel as though we are watching the character literally right in real time there is still an element of premeditation when it comes to acts of writing and that's important to keep in mind another important thing to keep in mind is to historically contextualize clarissa how was clarissa different from the other novels at the time in the hardcore literature book club lecture series we will be seizing this opportunity to appreciate snatches of defoe and fielding fielding's tom jones for example and fielding would mock richardson's earlier pamela with his shamala and will be appreciating the foes mole flanders and robinson crusoe i would implore you to get yourself some cheap second-hand copies of these works and stack these authors up against clarissa make it part of your clarissa reading experience to see just how different samuel richardson's novel was from what was popular at the time these novels are incredibly important in their own right and foundational for an understanding of the rise of the english novel too speaking of the rise of the novel a great work that you should get your hands on is the rise of the novel by ian watt fielding reminds us constantly that we are reading a novel that we're currently in the process of reading a novel escapism is difficult with fielding though of course the narrator can be charming and witty and that's why we read fielding but when it comes to writers like fielding we see that they needed to consciously and overtly remind the reader of their moral purpose throughout with clarissa however for the first significant time we get escapism we get realism we get less artifice and we can lose ourselves in the story readers who find clarissa boring today do not understand how thoroughly captivating it would have been back in the day so retrospective third person and the third person omniscient narrator the narrator who intrudes into the story and has their own personality that is out when it comes to clarissa and first person continuous narration with characters as the narrators that's in johnson delineates the difference between a fielding and a richardson marvelously by saying that fieldings characters are characters of manners whilst richardson's characters are characters of nature now it's also important to understand the art has social utility or art has moral purpose paradigm because regardless of how much escapism richardson gives us he's still an intensely moral writer and he had a moral aim richardson sought to demonstrate clarissa as a paragon of virtue as an exemplar of her sex and of course yes that is problematic to us today many doubts whether richardson's genius was deliberate or not because by all accounts richardson was a rather stuffy man he was a humorous man and he was a printer and he would spend his evenings writing thousands and thousands of words of his own fiction accounts of richardson the person don't line up very well with how extraordinarily genius works like clarissa and pamela are but i personally don't think his genius was accidental we can tell from his discourse in his own letter writing that he very much had strong conscious aims and sought to reform and re-energize the novel this incredibly puritanical man somehow managed to stand back from his stories and allow his readers to make up their own minds richardson didn't want to be overtly instructive but rather hoped that if the readers were entangled in the story if they could become intertwined in the narrative that by virtue of the vicarious experience they could come out the other end reformed in the way he wanted them to be reformed the england that flourished under queen elizabeth the first is now a distant memory england used to have its festivities used to have its revelries used to have its entertainments but now an intense religious fervent religious guilt gripped the nation the theaters were seen as the devil's houses and entertainment needed to have a moral purpose and do the service of the pulpit and in the words of richardson needed to instruct rather than amuse or divert and so we are talking about a time in history in which everybody is concerned about what their neighbors doing and if their neighbors devout enough if they're pious enough if they're doing the right thing or not it sounds incredibly claustrophobic and cloying as far as atmospheres go but it did also give rise to some incredible works of art and there was already a precedent for stories like clarissa an appreciation of clarissa will require you to acquaint yourself with the concept of rakes and libertines the reading and theater going public was obsessed with men who were libertines aristocratic men of leisure for the most part nerdwells who had all the time in the world to make the undoing of woman after woman their chief goal in life the modern parallel that i can think of is lad culture and so stories abounded with libertines or rakes that's another way to say liberty who were reformed reformed by a woman can the bad boy be tamed can a woman change him and in the libertine comedies the answer was yes the libertine can be tamed and in the tragedies the answer was no in clarissa colonel morden says to be a libertine at setting out all compunction all humanity must be overcome to continue to be a libertine is to continue to be everything vile and inhuman in dr samuel johnson's dictionary we have a threefold definition with each definition of libertine increasing in how damning and severe it is libertine comes from the latin word libertinus which implies a freed man or a former slave and the first definition of libertine is one who is unconfined or unrestrained one who is free one who is at liberty the second definition of liberty is slightly more sinister and means one who lives without restraint or law the third definition is one who pays no regard to the precepts of religion the reading public were fascinated with libertines because libertine figures weren't just individual degenerates their degeneracy threatened society at large threatened to undo it threatened to rock it libertines were seen as plotting scheming figures machiavellian figures iago like figures who sought to undo all moral and religious law if we look to the name of robert lovelace love lace some contemporary readers would have pronounced it love less as in lacking love love less which is an allusion to collie kibber's libertine figure in love's last shift in 1696 the lace part of the name love lace conveys illicit pleasure we get a sense of illegal passions don't we we also see precedent for this figure in charles johnson's wrong love so it's rather on the nose wrong love we also have rose 1703 fair penitent we have his lathario now we've always been fascinated with this figure and we continue to be fascinated in one form or another when we talk about dark byronic protagonists for example when we talk about anti-heroes we are talking about the progeny of the libertine and the rake when we find ourselves fascinated by a don juan or a don giovanni indeed when we talk about milton satan and there are tons of milltonic illusions running through clarissa there are allusions to shakespeare in the form of othello and there are allusions to milton aplenty because ultimately clarissa is a full narrative and clarissa is an eve figure lovelace is a satan figure the rake is a threat to all law all stability rather than simply being an individual degenerate and there are historical as well as fictional analogues too contemporary readers would have been obsessed with the earl of rochester a very naughty poet well worth checking out and also philip duke of wharton and another thing that's worth wrangling with is understanding the patriarchal view of the world at the time the conflict at the heart of clarissa is that this lovelace figure is setting out to impose himself on clarissa and his rationale the rakes creed we might call it his rationale is if he can overpower her then in some way she is complicit and it is her fault it's awful it's absolutely awful reasoning but perhaps the most awful thing to contemplate is the fact that in that time a woman who had suffered a sexual assault rather than being fully sympathized with for the most part would have been seen as partly to blame complicit it's a despicable viewpoint one that still manifests itself and rears its ugly head in our culture today and in cultures all over the world and so the struggle is the struggle of can clarissa remain virtuous can she keep her virtue intact against this plotting scheming libertine in addition to manuals on letter writing and etiquette and conduct the most popular books of the time were about the ethical systems of family and society family as microcosm for society and father as heavenly surrogate as delegate for god the father the head of the family was seen as the king or kingship in miniature god in surrogate and whilst richardson was printing and indeed the first thing he printed was his own conduct manual patrick delaney's 15 sermons upon social duties a knockoff of william fleetwood's influential relative duties of parents and children husbands and wives masters and servants that book was really popular and these books would discuss the obligation of daughter to father for example and the absolute necessity of complete and utter fidelity complete duty to one's father for the well-being of society delaney writes the duty of children to parents hath justly obtained the first place because all other duties to mankind begin and are founded here it is from a right deference to the authority and institutions of parents that we learn to become good men good neighbours good friends and good subjects as well as good sons so familial harmony was seen as the bedrock for civil harmony throw in the consideration that the function of family was to control the bloodline and property and what we see in many unfortunate cases is extreme guarding of the daughter and behavior on the part of families that looks like tyranny indeed is tyranny tyranny over the volition the personhood of another because indeed if you were a woman at the time you didn't have that whereas sons for example were exempt from many of these duties and if you were born into the wrong family this could be exploited and one's life could be made a living hell one needed to have blind obedience to one's father especially if one was a daughter because these conduct manuals would claim that a daughter's first duty was to her father men and widows weren't subject to such a worldview but daughters were because the father was a delegate for god and in 1753 we see this landmark marriage act a powerful legal intervention on the side of paternal authority which ruled secret marriages void all over the land there were many daughters who were being told to marry one man but because they didn't love him and that didn't matter their feelings were completely disregarded because they didn't love him they went off they eloped with somebody they actually wanted to marry and clandestine marriages were increasing up to 6 000 per year in just one london chapel alone so this law ruled that such marriages without the paternal consent would be void and of course you don't need to read too far into clarissa before you see that this discussion is incredibly relevant now let's talk about what our reading should look like our approach our pacing and my recommended editions for you now clarissa is a really big book but i recommend a breathlessly fast reading pace i recommend you try to take it swiftly two books that readers often group together are prousts in search of lost time and samuel richardson's clarissa and for good reason the length primarily is their commonality but i believe we should have wildly different approaches to these two books proust is the epitome of the deep slow reading approach with rereading baked in that i so ardently love with proust our reading is an exercise in savouring and appreciating and lingering and following rabbit holes it is a lifelong reading journey that's incredibly rewarding with clarissa however i believe we are refining the art of the binge and that we should learn to read fast this is an exercise in inhaling huge blocks of prose so the proustian reading experience is very sensual it's decadent it's rather therapeutic whereas this is very much a binge read that's how you get through it because indeed though i absolutely adore slow reading and even with a fast reading approach clarissa is still going to take you some time i adore slow reading but there isn't just one mode there's not just one speed one gear sometimes we need to go slow to go fast and sometimes going fast can teach us something too now my top recommendation is that you invest in a multi-volume set the most common addition on the market at the moment is that really big cumbersome penguins paperback copy this one here it's an absolute door stop it's much bigger than the other penguin classics putting it up against some of the other penguin paperbacks really brings its size into focus how many pages is it yeah 1500 pages and the text is very small it's cumbersome it's difficult to hold but if you like this copy if you want this paper back then it's very commonly available it's good for marginalia but it's probably not the best book to carry around with you it's not super portable but you might like it anyway and it's still a good addition now personally i absolutely adore my everyman's library 4 volume set from 1932.

[00:47:06]if you like this set there are plenty of them online available as second-hand editions the reason why i like this set so much is because it's incredibly portable so you can actually carry around volumes at a time so whilst you're out and about you can carry around this absorbing read it gives you a really rewarding sense of progression each book is a milestone and it also makes it much easier to break your reading pace down into chunks i'll always remember the advice my first year tutor at oxford gave us when it came to reading moby dick he said well how do you devour the white whale one bite at a time and if you read a chapter a day you will read moby dick in less than a year and the same approach still stands for clarissa it stands for any great big book break it down into manageable chunks one of these volumes is roughly 500 pages and i would recommend one volume of this size per month four or 500 pages per month most people can get through a medium-sized book in a month and this one broken down into four chunks will get you through the book in 12 to 16 weeks depending on how strongly the narrative pulls you in for me that's a fast read for others that might be on the slow side but for me i'm a slow reader i'm a deep reader reading a big book like clarissa which has its challenges over a handful of months across the course of a season that feels very fast to me now self-pacing of course is key so if that feels too fast if you're reading other books alongside clarissa and i would highly recommend you do then you may wish to double the pace if the addition you end up getting your hands on is this chunky penguins classic flipping to the back you will see how different volumes have been laid out and this is a guide to different readers potential reading pace with this book they have the everyman's library four volumes set there and they show you for example that volume one goes up to letter 99 so it's a lot easier to tell yourself oh i'm going to read 99 of the letters in a month and then we're told that volume 2 goes from letter 100 to 228 volume 3 from 229 to 361 and so on so each month you're roughly reading around 100 letters which seems doable if you want to break it down even more you have the first edition seven volume set approach and again you can see which letters they encompass so volume one in that addition goes from letter one to letter forty which seems very doable doesn't it 45 letters in a month that's a bit more than a letter a day that seems very doable each letter's only a couple of pages self-pacing is important but so is moving at a fair and steady pace what we will be doing in the book club with the lecture series is we will be having a lecture after each volume so every four to five hundred pages we will have a long form deep dive lecture that you could use as orientation or an introduction if you don't mind knowing what you're about to read or you could use that lecture as a milestone a resting point to aim at as you hike up the mountain you know that in four to five hundred pages you get to have a little rest you get to enjoy some refreshments and most importantly you get to have a good gossip with other deep readers about the characters and everything that's going on and you get to reflect on everything that you've just read and you get to have everything put into focus you get the historical contextualization you have the examination of character themes and preoccupations and you find yourself revitalized re-energized to forge on up the next part of the mountain so these milestones are very motivational it's something to look forward to a nice little break where you get to have the discussion and that is how you will make it up the mountain though experiencing clarissa as those first readers did is an embracing of reading in solitude it's also an embracing of that intermittent communal aspect and with our lecture series readers of clarissa are not alone you're not alone we are forging on up the mountain together and we will not only read this book not only understand this book or appreciate it but hopefully fall in love with it too it's a very special book it means a lot to me personally it's one of my favorite novels of all time and with a little bit of can-do spirit i think it will be yours too clarissa is one of the books that i have been most keenly anticipating a deep discussion of for the longest time and for very good reason there isn't much discussion and there aren't too many resources to draw from when it comes to reading clarissa it's a difficult book but it's so incredibly rewarding and yet the reading aids and resources are incredibly sparse so we are going to rectify that and we are going to give samuel richardson's clarissa the deep loving communal reading that he deserves thank you very much for watching today thank you for being here and thank you for reading along with me let me know your experience or your relationship with clarissa at the moment have you tried to read clarissa before indeed have you read it are you gearing up for a re-read or are you preparing for your first reading if you're preparing for your first reading let me know what do you anticipate with this book i would love to hear anything you would like to share but for now i would like to once again thank you for being here and wish you all the very best of luck with clarissa happy reading everybody and bye bye for now