SAMUEL RICHARDSON'S CLARISSA (1747-48) AND "THE FAMOUS MR. NORRIS, OF BEMERTON" BY E. DEREK TAYLOR A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2000 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my committee—Dr. Patricia Craddock, Dr. Richard Brantley, Dr. Brian McCrea, and Dr. John Sommerville—for their patient readings of and thoughtful suggestions for my project. I am especially grateful to Dr. Melvyn New, whose willingness to look closely and carefully at draft after draft of this material enabled its completion, and whose professionalism in all areas of his work will continue to serve as an indispensable, if impossible, benchmark by which I measure my own. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS gage ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ABSTRACT CHAPTERS INTRODUCTION: THE FAMOUS MR. NORRIS, OF BEMERTON? NOTES 1. A WOMAN OF SENSE NOTES 2. CLARISSA'S CHRISTIAN FEMINISM NOTES 1 3. OUTNORRISED 1 NOTES 1 BIBLIOGRAPHY 1 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 2 iii Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy SAMUEL RICHARDSON'S CLARISSA (1747-48) AND "THE FAMOUS MR. NORRIS, OF BEMERTON" By E. Derek Taylor August 2000 Chair: Dr. Melvyn New Major Department; English I take as my starting point Richardson's reference to John Norris of Bemerton (1656- 1711) as "famous." By tracing the effects of Norris's thought on Richardson and on figures with whom Richardson is often associated, I am able to place the novelist within a line of Christian-Platonist thinkers who shared important assumptions regarding the human being's relation to God. These assumptions, I contend, should not be relegated to the margins of scholarship, for they have important ramifications for our understanding of Richardson's masterpiece Clarissa (1747-48). The first chapter focuses on Clarissa's implicit critique of a strictly Lockean empiricism. By bringing to bear on Clarissa Norris's neoplatonic distinction between the spiritual "senses" (which can lead to truth) and the physical "senses" (which tend to deceive), I suggest that Clarissa, like Mary Astell (1666-1731) before her, can be a "woman of sense" only by disavowing physicality. iv The second chapter offers a historical defense of Clarissa's radically anti-secular Christian-Feminism. Clarissa's theologically empowered version of selfhood contrasts markedly with that of the ostensibly self-reliant, and ultimately disenfranchised, Lovelace. Richardson's Cartesian ideas about subjectivity led, not surprisingly, to his faith in the intellectual abilities of women, a faith he shared with women like Astell and Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806) and with men like Norris and William Law (1786-1761). Indeed, Richardson's interest in Elizabeth Carter's heavily Platonic "Ode to Wisdom," which he inserted into the second volume of Clarissa, can be explained by his mistaken belief that the "Ode" had been peimed by a female descendant of Norris. The final chapter seeks to explain the problematic Providence oi Clarissa by way of Norris's principle that all human beings exist, whether they know it or not, "in" God, and God "in" them. Critics of Clarissa have often pointed to the lack of direct Providential intervention in the novel, or to what Leopold Damrosch has called the ""^deus absconditus" of Clarissa. By reading Clarissa in the context of the theological writings of Norris, Astell, and Law, and by considering Richardson's careful selection of like-minded Biblical passages to support his novel's theological import, a more complex understanding of God's "presence" in the world of the novel emerges, as well as an explanation for Richardson's decision to end the novel not with Clarissa's death, but with that of Lovelace. INTRODUCTION THE FAMOUS MR. NORRIS, OF BEMERTON? That most students, and many scholars, of the long eighteenth century are unfamiliar with John Norris (1656- 1711), rector of Bemerton from 1692 until his death, is probably attributable, at least in part, to an accident of birth. Norris was a rigorous thinker and a prolific author, whose books of poetry, theology, and philosophy went into multiple editions well into the middle of the eighteenth century. Unfortunately for him, however, Norris was also one of those historical figures of otherwise substantial intellect bom to reside just inside the far-cast shadows of mental giants. Norris' s reputation as a poet pales beside that of an earlier rector of Bemerton, George Herbert (1593-1633), just as his Christian-Platonist philosophy withered in John Locke's rising, secular-empirical sun (1632-1704). Any scholar who doubts the demise of Norris's fame need only visit his church at Bemerton, then-as-now a suburb of Salisbury. Dutiful (or hobby-horsical) scholar that I am, I took time out of a research trip to London in order to make just this pilgrimage. To my chagrin, if not quite to my surprise, informational pamphlets, suggestions for donations, framed sketches on the wall, all bore Herbert's name, image, story, and snippets of his poetiy. Norris, on the other hand, was marked only by a stanza from his poem "The Aspiration," hanging in needlepointed thread beneath his burial tablet. The literature explaining the history of the church similarly focuses almost exclusively on Herbert; Norris receives one brief paragraph, wherein he is bemusedly dismissed as a religious 1 2 "enthusiast" who, like the master Herbert, dabbled in poetry, and who, armed with hopelessly mystical weapons, quixotically challenged Locke to a philosophical duel, the outcome of which was never—could never have been—in doubt. Even on his home turf, it occurred to me during the walk back to Salisbury (easily accomplished on a clear day, thanks to Wren's massive steeple), Norris is little more than a footnote. Today's footnotes, however, were very often yesterday's primary texts. Certainly, when Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) wrote his second novel and masterpiece Clarissa (1747-48), Norris had yet to lose completely his popularity. Norris' s name and citations of his writing appear explicitly in each installment of Richardson's novel. In the first installment (volumes one and two, published in December 1747), Aima Howe quotes "the words of Norris" in explaining her relationship to the besieged heroine. ' In the next installment (volumes three and four, published in April 1748), Anna attempts to secrete a note for 50 guineas to Clarissa in her copy of "Norris 's Miscellanies"; this leads to a series of letters in which Clarissa returns Aima's "Norris" and Anna worries that she might have need of "my Norris" (512, 513, 514, 529). Later in the same installment, Lovelace gains access to several of Anna's letters to Clarissa and becomes particularly irritated by Aima's promise that her ''Norris" is ''forthcoming on demand"—"The devil take me," Lovelace vows, "if I am out-Norrised!" (634; cf 639, 691). In the final installment (volumes five, six, and seven, published in December 1748), Belford quotes a stanza from "a poetical divine who was an excellent Christian"; in an editorial footnote unlike any other in Clarissa, Richardson provides the name of the "excellent divine" to whom Belford — refers "The Rev. Mr Norris of Bemerton" (1229). Nor is Richardson's interest in Norris evident only from Clarissa. In a 1747 letter to Elizabeth Carter of Deal (1717-1806), s 3 Richardson refers to the "famous Mr. Norris, of Bemerton," to whom he mistakenly believed Carter was related.^ And in an 8 August 1750 letter of consolation to bookseller Andrew Millar, Richardson included a poem from "Mr. Norris."^ The novelist's several references to Norris have done little to counteract Norris' reputation as a historical footnote among scholars of Richardson. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, whose exhaustive account of Richardson's life and works is undoubtedly one of the triumphs of literary biography, offer a telling case in point. Nowhere do the biographers mention Norris as an intellectual precursor to or influence on Richardson; they ignore Norris not, however, because they considered him and found his influence wanting, but because they failed to recognize his name at all—Norris appears in the text and the index of the Biography as "Mr. Norris," just as Richardson had named him in his letter to Millar."* Even for excellent scholars like Eaves and Kimpel, in other words, it is easy for expectation to determine recognition. Of course, one might with some justification wonder just how "famous" Norris could really have been, if scholars as thorough as Eaves and Kimpel fail to recognize him. Norris's publishing record, however, tends to support Richardson's characterization. Norris' s/i Collection ofMiscellanies (1687), the text with which Richardson seems most familiar, went into its ninth edition in 1730. According to Richard Acworth, this assemblage of metaphysically charged religious poetry and like-minded essays was "the most popular of all Norris's works with the cultivated public in general."^ Other of Norris's works also had multiple editions. The Theory and Regulation ofLove (1688), to which is appended a series of letters between Norris and Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614-87), went into a seventh edition in 1723, and Reason and Religion (1689) was likewise in its seventh edition by 1724. Four volumes of Practical Discourses upon Several Divine Subjects (1690, 1691, 1693, 1698), the first volume of which is also known as Christian Blessedness: or, Discourses Upon the Beatitudes, reached a fifteenth edition in 1728 as a collection. Norris's correspondence with Mary Astell (1666-1731), entitled Letters Concerning the Love ofGod (1695), had a third edition in 1730.