In Our Time - Epistolary Literature

Episode Date: March 15, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great 18th Century fashion for epistolary literature. From its first appearance in the 17th Century with writers like Aphra Behn, epistolary fiction, fiction in the form of letters, reached its heyday in the 18th Century with works like Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. At over a million words, it's a contender for the longest English novel. It inspired impassioned followers such as Denis Diderot who described reading Richardson's novels like this: “In the space of a few hours I had been through a host of situations which the longest life can scarcely provide in its whole course. I had heard the genuine language of the passions; I had seen the secret springs of self-interest and self-love operating in a hundred different ways: I had become privy to a multitude of incidents and I felt I had gained in experience.”This sense of the reader gaining a privileged peek into the psychology of the protagonists was a key device of the epistolary form and essential to the development of the novel. Its emphasis on moral instruction also propelled the genre into literary respectability. These novels were a publishing sensation. Philosophers like Rousseau and Montesquieu took up the style, using it to convey their ideas on morality and society.So why was letter writing so important to 18th Century authors? How did this style aid the development of the novel? And why did epistolary literature fall out of favour?With John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London; Karen O’Brien, Professor in English at the University of Warwick; and Brean Hammond, Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, today we'll be discussing epitory fiction, that is fiction in the form of letters. From its appearance in the 17th century with writers like Afra Ben,

it reaches heyday in the 18th century with Pamela and Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. and it inspired impassioned followers such as Dennis Didero, who described reading Richardson's novels like this. In the space of a few hours I'd been through a host of situations which the longest life can scarcely provide in its whole course. I'd heard the genuine language of the passions. I'd seen the secret springs of self-interest and self-love operating in a hundred different ways. I'd become privy to a multitude of incidents I now felt I had gained an experience. End quote. The serious novel had arrived.

This sense of the reader gaining a privilege peek into the psychology of the protagonist was a key device of the epistemary form and essential to the later development of the novel. Its emphasis on moral instruction also propelled a genre into literary respectability. These novels were a publishing sensation. Like Clow, Rousseau, Gerta, Montesquieu and Mary Walsoncraft took up the style using it to convey their ideas on morality and society. So why were letter-writing novels and letter-writing so important to 18th century authors? How did this style aid the development of the novel

and why did epistrial literature fall out of favour? Joining me to discuss all this are John Mullen, Professor of English at University College London, Karen O'Brien, Professor of English at Warwick University, and Brian Hammond, Professor of Modern English Literature at Nottingham University. John Mullen, how would you define epistory literature? Well, epistolary books are books which are composed entirely of letters and in the case of novels,

that means that the characters in the stories are also the writers of the story. And one of the fascinating things, which I'm sure we'll discuss about epistolary novels, is that they don't have an author in there organizing things for you and telling you what's happening. And the business of writing and the business of taking part in the narrative

become the same thing. Now, I mean, epistory literature is not just novels, because in the 18th century letters, fictional letters are used for all sorts of books, books of philosophy, travel writing, even satirical poetry is written in the forms of letters. And there's something kind of extremely congenial about letters for sort of polite 18th century readers and writers. A sort of combination of their informality and yet their propriety, which is a sort of combination of their informality, which is a sort of a sort of combination of their informality, which, appeals a great deal to a culture where you're supposed to be polite and yet obeying and informal. And the letter sort of embodies that. Can you give us some idea of this background? The background of the novels being written in letter form comes out, you're saying, the idea of letters growing in importance. And who were writing

these letters to whom? Have you any ideas, have any numbers, have any idea of scale and content? Well, I mean, people are writing real letters and people, And there are lots of books teaching people how to write letters. We're talking about the 18th century? Yes, from the late 17th century onwards. And in some ways I think that the, I mean we're going to talk about epitory fiction, but the use of letters in novels is a kind of almost an accidental discovery, but perhaps an inevitable one where letters are being put to so many various uses.

So, for instance, the novelist you've mentioned, Samuel Richardson, who in some ways was the most influential novelist writing in letters. He actually almost blundered into it himself because he started off writing a book which was devised to be a manual for young people in particular as to how, not just to write letters, but also how to deal with the moral problems of life. So he wrote a sort of a letter manual book called letters written to particular, friends on the most important occasions, telling them how to write letters, but also how to

deal with life's ethical problems. And that actually sort of became, that inspired him to turn to letters for his fiction. Karen O'Brien, can we develop that a bit? The setting up of an etiquette in writing almost rules the best way to do it, systems of writing. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Yes, as John mentioned, letter writing manuals were very popular in the 18th century, was clearly a great deal of social anxiety about how to write an appropriate letter. And those letter writing manuals would typically contain information about correct grammar, correct forms of address, how to leave little complement cards if you didn't need to write a full letter. But they would also stress the need for a kind of cultivated informality.

And we do see in the 18th century a gradual move from a more formal mode of address and kind of writing to an increasingly informal ones. So, for example, the forms of signing off a letter that we know today, yours sincerely and yours affectionately, were first used in the early 18th century and become more predominant later in the century. Nevertheless, when people write letters, they tend to emphasise kinship relationships and class relationships. So if you write to your father, you write, dear papa, your affectionate daughter. But if you write to your boss or to someone who's your social superior, you write honoured sir, and you sign your humble servant. But within the letter, there's space for a kind of polite, informality.

that is strongly recommended by these letter-writing manuals. Would it be fair to say that the letter-writing, the growth of letter-writing, began to admit more and more women into the notion of writing and being... Well, we'll talk about publication later, but admitted that. It certainly did. Letters are clearly used for a variety of purposes,

for public correspondence, for forms of publication in the epistolary form, as John mentioned. But also, this is a world where women are becoming slowly, not spectacularly, but a little more literate by the late 18th century something like 35 to 40% of women can read and write, not all of them to a high level,

but many of them to a level which would enable them to write simple letters and some very sophisticated letters. And so the letter writing manuals, for example, offer guidance not just to middle and upper class families, but also to servants, to tradesmen and their wives, on how to write. So we're seeing an increasing participation of both women, and of a wider social spectrum of people in this culture of letter writing.

Another thing that are happening in society, like as we talk about the development of the postal system, that's encouraging it and upholding it. It is. The postal system develops really quite spectacular in the 18th century from a situation in the early 18th century where postal networks are functioning, but limited in most letters have to go through London, to an increasingly elaborate system of cross-country postal networks.

which enable people to send letters quite reliably and quite quickly. So you have a system of riding boys, carrying post bags, cross-country, or between London and Edinburgh. But later in the 18th century, you have quite fast mail coaches doing dizzying speeds of 10 miles an hour. Trusted in the average pool in London, isn't a man. Exactly. So by the late 18th century, you could get a letter from London to Bristol in around 17 hours,

which represented a spectacular improvement. And if I may say, I think that sense of an increasingly efficient postal network is reflected in the epistolary writing of the time. There's a novel published in 1771 by the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett called Humphrey Clinker, which tells the story of a Monmouthshire family who travel around the country sending letters to their friends and to their family and to their doctors. And you get a sense throughout the novel of a social network, a social network of, private friendships and families which in many ways could be said to be constitutive of a sense of the nation as a network of letter writers. Brian Hammond, before we come on to the fiction,

how was this vogue for letter writing demonstrated in the press? Did it carry into the press, into magazines, spectator? Can you just let it put in with the background? One more push. As we've been learning, ever since there have been literate people, there have been literate people in love. And these literate people in love have been writing love letters. and we've been hearing that there are some well-known correspondences of love letters.

Abelard and Eloise would might be the most obvious case, but coming closer to our own time in the 1650s, a wonderful correspondence between Dorothy Osborne and William Temple on the opposite sides of the political divide in the Civil War, but a series of very passionate, very tender, very affectionate, very personal letters that survive. And I think it's clear that after the 1660s, there's a kind of thickening up of a desire to use letters from life as the basis of a fiction.

A couple of landmarks, letters from a Portuguese nun. This was a publishing sensation in 1669, a cache of powerfully personal, erotic, even explicit letters, which made a sensation all over Europe. We still don't know, we're still not sure whether these are fictional or real. But again, coming further now into our own time, the figure of John Danton in 1693. He invents a publication called the Athenian Mercury.

Now, this introduces the agony column. Danton's idea is that you can get people to write letters in with questions which you can answer. And these begin with sort of questions of a metaphysical kidney. What sorts of torments will the damned souls endure in hell? But then he gets the idea that what people are really interested in are domestic questions. How can I get the chambermaid to be in love with me? How can I, is it licit to read romances? These are the kinds of questions that people really want to hear about.

So Danton develops a society, actually three people, grandiosly called the Athenian society, who start to deal with people's queries. And you see the currency of the letter. You see how important the letter is starting to be. That carries on, as you've suggested, into the early years of the 18th century with Joseph Addison and the spectator. Addison uses a spectator as, if you like, a sort of unit of exposition. When he's writing numbers of the spectator, he uses the letter to introduce topics of the day, topics which concern what John's already mentioned, the phenomenon of polite behavior, how to be polite, people write in letters either fictional or real, either Addison invents them or they're real.

and he answers them and correspondence begins in that way. Now let's move into the fiction, starting with Afra Ben. Is it useful to start with Afroben, Brian Hammond? I think it's useful to start with Afra Ben. I've already suggested the letters from a Portuguese nun. I think Afra Ben knew these. And Afra Ben invents a wonderful piece of work in the 1680s called Love Letters between a nobleman and his sister.

This is a correspondence between two characters called Sylvia and Philander. Now the whole thing is set against the background of the Monmouth Rebellion, that's to say the rebellion against King Charles II. And Philander is a member of Monmouth's anti-court. And they start, he and his sister-in-law, I guess Philander is very well named, he's in bed with his own sister-in-law. They start writing a romantic, erotic correspondence.

It's a long work, if you don't plan to be. to live forever, I recommend you don't read it, but it's a long work. How did it go down? It went down very well. Was it regarded as a new thing on the block, as it were? Yes, it was regarded as a new thing on the block and didn't have very many imitators. It was only partially successful in my view, and that's because it combines the politics and the romance in a very awkward way.

I could go into that, if you like. Well, I don't know we're going to get much purchase about going into that at the moment. I think that she's there. Something has happened to you, but it's quite a long time before, as it were, the letter form really hits in a way that grips, hits and grips.

In this country, because we're going to go broad in a minute, with Samuel Richardson's Pamela, John Mullin, 1740, can you tell us something a little bit about Richardson? Because back to what Karen was saying, he said that it is used, he'd written letters for people who couldn't write to their loved ones or whatever it was.

was a printing, it was very, by standards of not very well educated and so and so forth. But he writes Pamela. Now, can you tell us, did that break the mould of the literary form more than affrabended? Where does it put it? Yes, I mean, where do you put it to. I think it's almost, I personally think it's almost impossible to over-emphasise the influence of Pamela. I mean, I think there's an argument that it's the most influential book of the whole century, of any kind, published anywhere in Europe almost, because it's the book. There had been what we call novels before Pamela.

We still read Daniel Defoe novels, and they were there, and some of them were evidently quite successful. But Pamela was the book which made what we call the novel a kind of serious thing, a morally serious thing. It was a small book with big pretensions. And Richardson was the most wonderfully unlikely person, in effect, to invent the genre, which now sort of dominates the great.

ground floor of any big bookshop. He was in his 50s. He was a self-made man. He was a rather ponderous, rather ill-read by the standards of the day, rather humourless man, not an amusing conversationalist, not an obviously inventive or imaginative person. Yet he did invent and imagine this extraordinary book written in letters, mostly the letters of a 15-year-old servant girl, Pamela. who is being sexually harassed, we might say, pursued by her master, Mr. B, who assumes that one of his rights, provided he gives her enough presence, is to sleep with her. And she is determined to defend her virtue and defend it she does.

And most of the book are her letters, and eventually the letters turn into a sort of spiritual journal because he imprisons her. and she can't actually send them a lot of the time, her account of her resistance to his schemes and his blandishments. It's a novel whose subtitle is Virtue Rewarded because it has a pious purpose, which is to show her victorious. And in the end, Mr B is converted to virtue and she marries him.

And apparently the bells were rung in villages in England where the locals were reading this aloud when her kind of triumph arrived. Can we develop this even more? Huge claims have been made by John Mullenbury and Hammond. Do you agree with them? And how important was it as a fashion setter in a proper sense of the world? Not just, you know what I'm talking about. Very much do agree with them.

And I'd like to look at it from the perspective of the reader as much as from the perspective of the writer. Because I think what Pamela did was invent an entirely new way of reading. We could call that absorptive reading if we wish, but it's the kind of reading which is based on empathy. It's based on extremely close identification with

the character, to such an extent that you lose the boundary between the real and the fictional. I think nowadays we're pretty familiar with that way of responding to, say, soap opera or responding to reality TV or whatever, but it was Richardson who invented it. He invented

a way of writing which created in turn a way of reading that almost destroyed the boundary between the work of art and the reader. The reader gets so far into the work. And that's why I think Pamela sparks off a merchandising spree, a sort of Grub Street grab fest, as it were, where there is, within two years of the publication of Pamela, you can go to the opera and see Pamela and the opera.

You can go to the theatre, see it in the theatre. You can buy a fan which has depictions of Pamela on it. you can go to a waxwork display of Pamela by 1745. You can see endless continuations of Pamela, one of them are thorial, most of them not. You can see, of course, endless parodies and refutations of Pamela. You can go to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, and there you can see panels painted by the painter Heyman of Pamela.

You can go to the races, and you can see racehorses running with names of characters from Pamela. So you get the sense that this is not just a novel. It's actually a media event. And the reason why it's a media event is, as I'm trying to suggest, because of the peculiar identification that Richardson creates with the characters. Karen O'Brien, can we check that even further? That is an extraordinary phenomenon.

Hard to match up really, isn't it? Well, anyway, whether it is today, we're not interested in today. Can we just, why did it have this, why did it grip, as it's from what John Malin said, from what Breedner said, it gripped a big audience very intensely and drew them in. Can you tell us something in the way it's written,

the letter business itself? Three of you have given a good platform for letter writing being around and where it was at the time. But why did this suck people in so powerfully? I think one of the reasons that Pamela was so gripping was because it actually addressed the logistics of letter writing

in a way that previous letter writing novels hadn't done. There had been letter writing. epistory novels in the interim between Afroben and Richardson. And most of these were novels of seduction and intrigue where a secret correspondence between a gentleman and a lady was conducted. And the letter in some ways signified her lack of innocence, her lack of virtue and the secret that she wished to keep. Whereas in Pamela, actually the secret is Mr. B's secret.

Mr. B doesn't wish everybody to know what an artful and awful seducer he's trying to be. And Pamela is writing the truth of her story in her letters. Those are the letters that ultimately authenticate her. Now, acknowledging this difference, one might say it's a difference between the aristocratic and the bourgeois epistoloo novel in some ways. Richardson weaves into the plot of his novel the idea of the letters as part of the plot. So that at one point, Pamela's been writing to her father explaining the kind of pressure she's under from her employer who keeps trying to rape her and entrap her in different ways. And Mr. B intercepts the letters. So there's an idea of interception, which is something that goes on in the wider world of politics, of course, in the 18th century.

And in reading the letters, he learns something about her that he didn't know. He learns that she genuinely is a good and intelligent and interesting girl. And he is increasingly charmed by her and increasingly falls in love with her. Later on, when Mr. Bee finally marries Pamela to the great scandal of Mr. Bee's gentry neighbours and his sister, Mr. Bee shows them her letters so that they can understand. and the truth of what she's really like. So the letter's become part of the plot. Also, during the course of Pamela, we learn a great deal about the whole business of letter writing,

sheets of paper, bits of wax, little pots of ink that she has to hide, so Mr. B doesn't know she's writing letters. We could almost hear the rustle of the paper in the letter. And she writes so immediately... Richardson meant that to be for the moment. He meant that to be for the moment. I am trembling as I write this.

Somebody is banging at the door. I must hide. That's right. Yes. Right up to the moment. And that was widely ridiculed in the many satires that commented on Pamela. But obviously it really went

very deep. Let's just explore again once more. Maybe take one more stage, John Mullen. Was it, is that Richardson was a very pious man indeed. And there's some talk about, from what you three have written about, his work going back to spiritual journals

and the idea of this becoming a religious and maybe replacing religion is far too big to get into. But certainly religious in its tone and in its drive. How far do you think that is true and how far do you think that added to its impact? I think, well I think it is true

in that when you read Pamela you believe it and Richardson certainly believed it and he makes Pamela believe it so that the letter becomes a form of sort of self-examination as a pious Protestant form of inspecting your own motives. Because a great thing about a letter you see

you're writing to somebody else and even if that person is somebody you're very fond of, somebody who sees your best qualities. In a way, you're having to explain and defend yourself to that person. So Pamela's writing to her parents, and she's doing that, and she's examining her own behaviour and having to sort of vindicate herself. And this becomes a really extraordinarily subtle thing in Richardson's next novel, Clarissa, his greatest novel, and I think one of the greatest novels ever written, which he produces, starts writing, starts publishing seven or eight years later,

where Clarissa, the heroine, in a comparable situation, being pursued by a man, but a much more subtle and brilliant man than Mr. B, writes to her friend, Anna Howe. And she writes partly to examine herself, but also to defend herself. And the letter becomes a kind of, so it's very familiarity becomes a sort of imposes on the letter writer to inspect their motives. And that's a kind of, that's a religious duty. But it's also a wonderfully sort of dramatic thing for the reader of the novel.

But we're still holding that religious pulse there that you think it was there and you think it was a big factor. I think it was. I think it was much, as Karen suggested, in the case of Pamela, it was much mocked because Fielding wrote this sort of wonderful. I would ask Brian about that because we have to acknowledge Fielding. It would be good to do a programme on Fielding sometime, but let's just bow on the way through.

He wrote Chamola, which sent up Pamela. Fielding was, he'd been at eaten, he was very, very well-educated. He's sprinkled Latin and Greek quotations all over place, much to Rich's as irritation, as I understand it. And he mocked it. Chamola was actually a scheming young woman who all her wiles were being employed in order to get this rich, I was going to marry her. And it really set up two of the forms of the novel,

didn't it, in this country anyway. By 1742, when Shamala had been published, when Joseph Andrews had been published, hot on the heels of Shamala, continuing... Again by fielding, the same family, coming, yes,

continuing the Shamala fun. You could say that you had the two blueprints for the novel. You had the psychological novel, the novel that John's been talking about, which is very much akin to spiritual autobiography, the novel which delves into the self. And you had the road movie.

You had the fielding novel which was essentially expansive, epic, large canvas, might be leading on to novels like those of Dickens, for example. So, yeah, by 1742, as a result of reactions to Pamela, you had two different blueprints for the novel, two different possibilities. Going back to what the three of you said at the beginning of the programme, the idea of letters being so growing in importance, Just so that listeners know, there were great efforts made by these early authors,

these early author, to publish them as genuine letters. I mean, it was not Pamela by Samuel Richardson. It was a collection of letters as if they'd been found somewhere. And also they use all sorts of technique. Well, we would call them techniques. Maybe they'd call them tricks on the text. Spelling mistakes are there. Sometimes when the woman is faintly,

the writing is slant, printing is slant across the page. And so they're holding. on to the idea of genuineness, aren't it? This is real. These letters are real by real people, although that we own... They're fiction. Mostly the device, as you've suggested, is that these are edited collections of letters.

They're caches of letters that are found or handed on, and then somebody edits them. The point you make about typography, I think, is a very interesting one. In Clarissa, after Clarissa is raped, she goes to pieces. She writes a whole series of fragmentary letters, which she tears up. But these are retrieved, that's right.

But at least one of them has a whole series of marginalia, scribbled marginalia, quotations from poems, the mad sequence from Othello. And you get a sense of the fragmentation of the self. The point here is that the typography is a kind of mimesis, a kind of imitation of Clarissa's going to pieces and herself being destroyed as a result of the rape. And I think these kinds of typographical effects are taken further by Lauren Stern,

not, by and large, an epistolary writer, so we won't talk more about him. Not this time. Sorry, I've been made to interrupt you completely. I mean, the brilliant thing about Richardson, in a way, it's what Karen was saying earlier, is the letters, what happens to the letters is part of the story,

and there's an extraordinary literal-mindedness, I think, about Richardson. I mean, he really makes the mechanics of it. What, how, when are you writing this? How long is it taking you to write it? where's this bit of paper going to end up? He makes that part of the story. And the villain in Clarissa, Loveless,

makes the interception and the forgery of letters a main part of his scheme to ensnare Clarissa. Karen O'Brien, I don't lose sight of the fact that women were not only the subjects of this, but actually were writing a lot of this. And by the end of the 18th century, is it in one of your, in one of some research document I read for this? Anyway, it's all over the place.

It's about half and half. the number of women writing fiction and men writing fiction. Can you tell us why there was so... It seems to be a very good way in, doesn't it? And maybe you can use Fannie Bernie as an example. It was a good way in, and certainly the most spectacular success in the epistolary form by a woman was Fanny Bernie.

Her novel, Evelina, it was published in 1778, and the 1770s had been something of a dry spell for novels, and I think a lot of people thought that the novel was on its way out, and certainly the epistory novel had run its course. And then Fannie Boney came along and wrote a novel about a young woman of dubious social standing who is trying to make her way in London life in the 1770s and ultimately find a rich and wealthy husband. And throughout the course of the novel she writes to her protector and guardian, Mr. Villas.

And rather like Pamela, she writes seeking approval. And to some extent, as with Pamela, the recipient of the letters is not highly significant. You get the sense that Evelina, even more than Pamela, is anchoring her own sense of her self-worth, her need to make decisions for herself, her need to justify and rationalise herself through the act of writing by writing to a kind of father figure. And ultimately she does, after a series of scrapes, managed to make her way to a successful marriage. And this novel was an extremely successful novel in the 1770s. And it paved the way for a flourishing of the epistlery novel in the 1780s. it reached a kind of high in the 1780s with around 60% of all novels being published in that form

many of them, perhaps a little less than half by women, and yet tailing off by the end of the 18th century, so that by the end of the 18th century the form was gone into terminal decline, never again to be really revived, and only about 10% of all novels are written in that form. I'd like to come back to that in a minute, but I think we've got to go across the channel, it's just to be otherwise too ridiculous to perica.

We don't have to say that for very long, but Russo, one of the most, important and certainly best-selling novels of the 18th century. Gertrater, John Mullen, just give us some view of what happened over there. Right. Well, I mean, I think there's a big direct connection to Richardson because I think what, if Pamela makes the novel sort of morally serious, Clarissa makes the novel art and what we would call art. And I think that you've mentioned Diderot, but a lot of writers outsize,

Britain, read Clarissa, and they think, they suddenly realise that this form is actually capable of the highest and most subtle kinds of literary and intellectual expressiveness. And Rousseau writes a famous novel called a very, very successful novel called Jules or the Nouvelle-Elois, based on the story of Eloise and Abelard, the teacher and student who fall in love with each other. And it's published in 1761, and it's extremely influenced by Clarissa. But it's a different plot, because the plot is that these two young people have this passionate love for each other, which is going to, they can't marry each other because she's already betrayed to somebody else, and he is a low social standing.

And they actually do consummate their passion once to the scandal. and titillation of the readers. And then in the second part of the novel, they sort of establish a menager, sort of high-minded menager-at-a-tois she marries. And Saint-Pruhe, her former lover, moves in with her and her husband. And they live a sort of virtuous life

in a village near the foothills of the Alps together. And this sort of novel, it imitated Richardson by recording in the letters of the protagonists are the sort of the trembling of their fine feelings and their sensibilities. This is the big sort of word that they... It also allowed Rousseau to bring, best known as a philosopher, much better known now as a philosopher,

to bring his ideas into a novel form, rather than having them over there in the treaties on philosophy. Here, in the letter form, reaching, as it turned out, a massive readership. So writing letters became a way of character, in novels having kind of discussions, not in Rousseau's case quite the sort of pious puritan examinations of virtue and religious duty that they were in Richardson, but discussions about the proper ways of living and behaving. And then the intellectual appeal of it also is behind a Gertes' adaptation of the epistem of the epistem reform in the Sorrows of Young

Verta published about 12 years after Rousseau's novel, which is written in letters, the of young Verta to his friend. And again, it's all about an impossible passion, which he has for a woman who's going to marry and does marry somebody else. And he's a man of extremely intense and sensitive feelings. So it's getting bound up, Brian. It's getting bound up with the cult of sensibility, people who are thinking about ideas,

but being able to find a place to put their ideas in a mass population. Bill of Fiction. Of course there were huge sentimental set pieces in Clarissa itself. We should come back to Clarissa a little because Clarissa is a kind of IMAX version of Pamela and the reason why I think Richardson comes back to do this again but to do it bigger is because he wanted to give a sense of real real evil which he never managed to get from Pamela. And to take up the spiritual point, Richardson I think genuinely wants to take up the spirit of Christianity where the sermon on on the Mounts says, Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Richardson wants to show that, and in Clarissa, he wants to keep control of the ways in which we read that novel, which he, of course, did not succeed in doing with Pamela.

And so much of Clarissa is devoted to Clarissa's death. The final third of it is a sentimental set piece, a welter, a tear fest, as Clarissa gradually descends to the grave. And that becomes a huge moment for the cult of sensibility. I'm going to haul us back to Europe yet again, if only for a moment to do. Karen O'Brien, in Lacklo, a lot of people will know about Les and D'Eon-Gerros from the stage of the film and from the book as well. How did that, we're talking about a French, obviously, we don't have French,

but it was a different sort of, although it was letters, pistol, it was very, it was a different sort of structure and a different sort of supposition from that of Britishism, wasn't it? Yes, it was. It was published in 1772, and it was translated in England as dangerous connections just a couple of years later. And it caused a lot of puzzlement and concern. We were talking about Rousseau as a philosophical novelist. And I think one of the things that Rousseau does, and LaClau is a contrast to this, is as a philosopher, he dramatizes the intractable incompatibility of private feelings, private passions, sometimes illicit sexual passions, and the demands of society. Whereas what LeClo does is he, he, he, he's not so that. He does. He takes a cold eye and looks at the way in which society might work behind the scenes. This novel is uniquely among epistory novels propelled entirely by letters. So the letters are entirely the substance of the plot. The plot is a pact between two characters, the Comte de Valmont and the Marquise de Mertoy,

to ruin innocent people and to betray as many people as they can. And they do this secretly behind the scenes in a series of letters. and either this is an entirely libertine or immoral novel as many people thought it was, or somewhere behind it there is a progressive thinking liberal Lacloux who's taking a look at the ways of Ancian regime France, the way that politics is conducted, the way that private relationships are conducted among the aristocracy and exposing it to public view. And people read it in many different ways.

But certainly one of the ways that they read it was as an examination of what pure rationality could do if sensibility were taken out of the world altogether. I mean, Melvin said that lots of people know it from stage and film adaptations. The thing that you never get from those, which is so vivid in reading it because it's written in letters, is that these characters who, of course, are chatting and sleeping with each other in the plot of any film or play, in the book, all they're doing all the time is writing letters. and there's something quite, I think, profound and chilling about LaClo's sense that libertinism is actually quite a lonely business. But only when you're in the truthfulness of your own cabinet, in your own space, when you're writing this letter on your own.

Are you really living out your truthful self? And actually experience is something that you're always writing about in the novel. It's not something you're ever having. Brian Hammond, we are at the stage where the novel of the novel of the novel, in letters has been given the greatest praise by all of you in the person of Richardson. It's been taken up by Russo, taken it by Gertes, be taken it by LaCloe,

it's been taken up by Pani-Burney. Wilson, it can go on. But very soon, it loses intellectual respectability. It keeps being written in the 19th century. It's still great success, but it loses the sort of respectability that these writers brought to it and got from it. Why is that?

I think you can study that in the works of Jane Austen. Jane Austen in 1795 wrote an early piece called Lady Susan. It's written in letters, but you can read that and see Jane Austen's impatience with the form. You are confined to what a character can say about himself or herself in a letter or a journal. And Lady Susan is more or less abandoned, but it is completed by Jane Austen, but she gets fed up with the letters because she can see that her protagonist, that she wants to treat subtly, she wants to treat in a nuance. way is confined to saying the most

grotesque and artless things about herself. And what Jane Austen needs to invent, and does invent, of course, famously, is free and direct speech, is the narrator who can place the characters and tell you more about them than they can tell you about themselves. So you can see in Jane Austen's career the limitations of the form. You can see that it has gone perhaps as far as it's going to go

and to get anywhere else with the novel, you need to do two things. You need to invent free and direct speech, and you need to come back to story, because Richardson has killed story by the middle of the 1750s, and you need to rediscover plot in some sense to get anywhere in the novel. Kai, would you like to develop that a bit, because it's quite interesting, did Jane Austen have that effect, or was it nearer, other people thinking that this form had run itself out, however powerful it had been?

I think it had become terminally associated with excess sensibility. So, for example, there's another early piece by Jane Austen written when she was only 14 called Love and Friendship, which is also an epistory novel. It's an older woman writing to a younger girl about her early experiences. And it's absolutely hilarious. It describes the ridiculous sentimental adventures of this woman and her friend when they were young and how their husbands were tragically killed and how they kept fainting. I think at one point she says, we fainted alternately on a sofa. And there's a Clarissa-type mad scene where she must. mistakes her dead husband for a cucumber.

And I think there's a sense that the form has become exhausted, that it's become ridiculous. And as Brian suggests, there is a return to plot rather than plotting. And it wasn't only Jane Austen that pioneered this return. Fannie Bernie herself turned to that kind of unobtrusive third-person, narratorial form that we associate so much with Jane Austin. And I think it was actually women novelists in many ways who set in motion a new kind of novel, which is a novel about personal responsibility, about making one's way in a complex and difficult to understand world and hopefully arriving at a successful outcome. I think also at a deeper level, there's a wider shift in the public understanding of personal life in the late

18th century and the notion that the real significance of the events of one's life are best understood retrospectively. And if you understand your life retrospectively, you may see the shape of a plot a plot that's about coming of age, about moving towards love and marriage, about becoming a writer. But the significance of individual events is best understood in retrospect. I mean, what Brian and Karen says is absolutely true, to which one might add, though, that the letter doesn't disappear, it kind of goes underground because, as any reader of Jane Austen will know, her novels are full of letters, very, very important letters. And extraordinarily, and two of them, pride and prejudice and persuasion,

key disclosures are made by somebody who comes up to somebody else and instead of speaking to them just puts a letter into their hand because they can't express it in speech. The letter does carry that power, doesn't it? It's still in Jane Austen. There's an extraordinary exercise in Emma where the longest letter in the whole of Jane Austen, Frank Churchill's letter explaining himself.

And Emma and Mr Knightley, as it were, examine this letter, sentence by sentence as if they were sort of literary critics. And you can tell from a letter where somebody's speaking the truth, where somebody's evading the truth, where somebody's trying to make themselves look better than they are. And that practice of reading is one which has this whole history we've been talking about behind us. And the letter holds the truth if you can properly decode it,

if you're a skilled reader. I would agree with that. I think the real legacy of the epistolary novel is the letter as plot device, and it's the letter of disclosure. It's the evidentiary letter, the unread letter that Tess sends revealing the truth about her first relationship, and the forensic letter in the 19th century. We'll keep going. It goes on and on, but it ceases to be the medium of narration.

But do you think there's any chance finally and briefly that this form will return? I think it perhaps has returned. In it's pure form, I mean, there's masses of letters in masses of books. That's not what we're about that. Yeah, I mean, there are email books now, aren't there? where either phone conversations or emails become the kind of unit of exposition. We'll get back to the letter. I don't know what you know.

But it is extraordinary, actually, although the pure... We've got to stop. We've got to stop. Sorry. Thank you very much, Kate of Brian, John Mullen and Brian. Hammond. Thank you for listening. Next week, Otto von Bismarck. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk

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