The History of Sir Charles Grandison - Critical Response

Critical Response

Samuel Johnson was one of the first to respond to the novel, but he focused primarily on the preface: "If you were to require my opinion which part should be changed, I should be inclined to the supression of that part which seems to disclaim the composition. What is modesty, if it deserts from truth? Of what use is the disguise by which nothing is concealed? You must forgive this, because it is meant well." Sarah Fielding, in her introduction to The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia, claims that people have an "insatiable Curiosity for Novels or Romances" that tell of the "rural Innocence of a Joseph Andrews, or the inimitable Virtues of Sir Charles Grandison". Andrew Murphy, in the Gray's Inn Journal, emphasized the history of the production when he wrote:

Mr. Richardson, Author of the celebrated Pamela, and the justly admired Clarissa... an ingenuous Mind must be shocked to find, that Copies of very near all this Work, from which the Public may reasonable expect both Entertainment and Instruction, have been clandestinely and fraudulently obtained by a Set of Booksellers in Dublin, who have printed of the same, and advertised it in the public Papers.... I am not inclined to cast national Reflections, but I must avow, that I looked up this to be a more flagrant and atrocious Proceeding than any I have heard of for a long Time.

Sir Walter Scott, who favored the bildungsroman and open plots, wrote in his "Prefatory Memoir to Richardson" to The Novels of Samuel Richardson (1824):

In his two first novels, also, he shewed much attention to the plot; and though diffuse and prolix in narration, can never be said to be rambling or desultory. No characters are introduced, but for the purpose of advancing the plot; and there are but few of those digressive dialogues and dissertations with which Sir Charles Grandison abounds. The story keeps the direct road, though it moves slowly. But in his last work, the author is much more excursive. There is indeed little in the plot to require attention; the various events, which are successively narrated, being no otherwise connected together, than as they place the character of the hero in some new and peculiar point of view. The same may be said of the numerous and long conversations upon religious and moral topics, which compose so great a part of the work, that a venerable old lady, whom we well knew, when in advanced age, she became subject to drowsy fits, chose to hear Sir Charles Grandison read to her as she sat in her elbow-chair, in preference to any other work, 'because,' said she, 'should I drop asleep in course of the reading, I am sure, when I awake, I shall have lost none of the story, but shall find the party, where I left them, conversing in the cedar-parlour.' — It is probable, after all, that the prolixity of Richardson, which, to our giddy-paced times, is the greatest fault of his writing, was not such an objective to his contemporaries.

Although Scott is antipathetic towards Richardson's final novel, not everyone was of the same opinion; Jane Austen enjoyed the novel so much that she adapted it into a play around 1800, although it wasn't published until 1980. Also, she claimed that the novel was so familiar that she could describe "all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour".

Later critics believed that it is possible that Richardson's work failed because the story deals with a "good man" instead of a "rake", which prompted Richardson's biographers Thomas Eaves and Ben Kimpel to claim, this "might account for the rather uneasy relationship between the story of the novel and the character of its hero, who is never credible in his double love — or in any love." Flynn agrees that this possibility is an "attractive one", and conditions it to say that "it is at least certain that the deadly weighted character of Sir Charles stifles the dramatic action of the book." John Mullan suggests that the problem stems from Grandison's role as a hero when he says, "his hero is able to display his virtue in action; as a consequence, Sir Charles Grandison presents its protagonist without the minutely analyzed reflexes of emotion that brought his heroines to life."

Some critics, like Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Margaret Doody, like the novel and emphasise the importance of the moral themes that Richardson takes up. In a 1987 article, Kinkead-Weekes admits that the "novel fails at the crisis" and "it must be doubtful whether it could hope for much life in the concluding volumes". However, those like Jean Hagstrum believe that "Richardson's last novel is considerably better than can be easily imagined by those who have only heard about it. But admittedly it represents a falling off after Clarissa". Morris Golden simply claims that the novel is a book for old men.