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Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe: The Novel as Polemic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John J. Richetti
John J. Richetti*
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York, N. Y
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Extract

Theophilus cibber's Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) includes a substantial account of Mrs. Elizabeth Singer Rowe and points out the relevance of this lady and her works to contemporary affairs: “The conduct and behaviour of Mrs. Rowe might put some of the present race of females to the blush, who rake the town for infamous adventures to amuse the public. Their works will soon be forgotten, and their memories when dead, will not be deemed exceeding precious; but the work of Mrs. Rowe can never perish, while exalted piety and genuine goodness have any existence in the world. Her memory will be ever honoured, and her name dear to latest posterity.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 7 , December 1967 , pp. 522 - 529
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 These were only nominally by Cibber. According to Johnson, they had been compiled principally by Robert Shiels, one of his amanuenses (Boswell's Life of Johnson, eds. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell, iii, Oxford, 1934, 29–30). For discussion of authorship, see Sir Walter Raleigh, Six Essays on Johnson (Oxford, 1910), pp. 119–125.

2 A reference to popular scandalous memoirs such as Teresia Constantia Phillips' An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. Teresia Constantia Phillips (1748), which reached a third edition in 1750, and to the notorious memoirs of Lady Vane published in 1751 in Smollett's Peregrine Pickle as “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality.”

3 London, iv, 340.

4 A “ninth edition” was published in London in 1777; further editions were published in London in 1784 and 1786, and in 1796 the work was issued as part of “Cooke's edition of Sacred Classics.” I have found record of its publication as late as 1830 in England and 1831 in America.

5 vii (March 1737), 188, 183.

6 In the Gentleman's Magazine, viii (April 1738), 210, appeared “On the Loss of my eminent and pious Friend, Mrs. Rowe”; and in ix (March 1739), 152, were printed an untitled and anonymous verse tribute and “On the Death of Mrs. Rowe” by Elizabeth Carter. Amory, in his Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1755), summarized her life briefly and testified to the popularity and worthiness of her works: “The ingenious, who did not know Mrs. Rowe, admired her for her writings; and her acquaintances loved and esteemed her for the many amiable qualities of her heart” (p. 334).

7 By 1738 a fifth edition was advertised in the February number of the London Magazine. I find record of subsequent English editions published in 1740, 1743, 1750, 1753, 1756, 1768, 1774, 1776, 1786, 1804, 1808, 1811, 1816, and 1818. It is worth noting that the editions of 1740 and 1743 were printed by Samuel Richardson, who had printed in 1738 the second volume of the Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse of Elizabeth Rowe. See William M. Sale, Jr., Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (Ithaca, N. Y., 1950), p. 200.

8 Q. D. Leavis in Fiction and the Reading Public quotes the Autobiography of Eliza Fletcher, born in Yorkshire in 1770, who grew up to become one of the great ladies of Edinburgh at the turn of the century: “My father's library was upon a small scale—the Spectator, Milton's Works, Shakespeare's Plays, Pope's and Dryden's Poems, Hervey's Meditations, Mrs. Rowe's Letters, Shenstone's Poems, Sherlock's Sermons, with some abridgements of history and geography, rilled his little bookshelves” (London, 1939), p. 147.

9 Boswell's Life of Johnson, i, 312.

10 The Hypochondriack: Being the Seventy Essays by the Celebrated Biographer, James Boswell, appearing in the London Magazine …, ed. Margaret Bailey, II (Stanford, Calif., 1928), 93–94.

11 Friendship in Death: In Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living. To Which are added, Letters Moral and Entertaining in Prose and Verse in three parts by the same Author (London, 1733), A3v, the first twenty letters hereafter referred to as Friendship in Death. The Letters Moral and Entertaining is paginated independently in this volume: Part I, 1–138; Parts II and iii, 1–253, hereafter cited simply by these Roman numerals.

12 This is not to claim that Richardson's novel can be “reduced” to the paradigm outlined here; its social and psychological insights go far beyond the ideological roots we are concerned with, without of course transcending or discarding them. Richardson, however, thought of himself as participating in the struggle against unbelief and saw his book as a modern exemplum of neglected Christian virtues. An outline of the exemplary pattern of Clarissa and of its specifically Christian sources and analogues has recently been suggested by John A. Dussinger, “Conscience and the Pattern of Christian Perfection in Clarissa,” PMLA, lxxxi (June 1966), 236–245. Dussinger sees this pattern as following from Richardson's conscious effort “to promote a new era of Christian literature and to supplant the heroism of classical and romantic traditions” (p. 245).