It never ceases to amaze me how often I forget that Samuel Richardson, and his novels, were incredibly pervasive in English literature. I’m reading Millennium Hall right now, and I’m just at the point where it’s revealed that Miss Mancel would have been assaulted by Mr. Hintman had he not died three days before she was to go visit him from a “fit of apoplexy” (Broadview Edition, pg 100). Shortly after his death is revealed, we discover that Hintman bragged that he would be “rewarded for long expectation, and boundless expence; for he should then, he said, be sure of her person, and had long secured her heart” (101). Hintman is then overheard telling his friends that though Miss Mancel has scruples and prejudices that might cause him difficulty, his “steward in a parson’s habit would lull them all to sleep” (101). That is, of course, an indication that Mr. Hintman was planning to trick Miss Mancel into believing that the pair had been legitimately married.
No one who’s read Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa can read this passage without having little bells going off in their heads – the predatory male who is, in some fashion, responsible for the maintenance of a young, innocent woman (by kidnapping, in Richardson’s novels, by ostensible generosity in Scott’s), the planned fake wedding – are all echoes of Richardson’s work. I’m continually amazed by how eighteenth-century authors, both men and women, felt the necessity to respond to Richardson’s work.
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On a completely different note, though perhaps connected, I just finished Dror Wahrman’s book The Making of the Modern Self. I was thinking, as I was writing that little bit on Richardson, how curious the idea that the role of the ‘parson’ can be filled by just anyone. Considering Wahrman’s contention that to wear someone’s clothes was to become that someone, that this role was so easily assumed by any old schlub that came by doesn’t initially seem that odd. Except that a priest had official duties, and an official capacity, and though Wahrman seems to suggest that eighteenth-century society would have seen a person dressed as a priest as a priest, this was one of the roles, I think, that couldn’t be assumed simply by changing costumes. A wedding performed by someone dressed as a priest would, in Wahrman’s context, be seen as legit, because to assume a priest’s clothing was to actually be a priest. Of course, we know that this isn’t the case in reality at all. A fake priest can only perform a fake wedding. I wonder how Wahrman would account for this. After all, if his argument about eighteenth-century notions of self is accepted, and an eighteenth-century audience would have believed that that David Garrick, while dressed in the costume of King Lear actually became King Lear, then wouldn’t a servant dressed like a priest become a priest?
