It has been known for a long time that both the manuscript and
printed text of Clarissa were extensively revised by Samuel
Richardson, but his changes attracted no serious published attention until
recently. In May, 1968 Eaves and Kimpel brought together in one
article[1] scattered comments from
Richardson's correspondence and private papers to illuminate the thorny
problems posed by the revisions he made prior to the first edition, printed
in 1748. Since none of the several manuscript drafts has survived, Eaves
and Kimpel base their chronology of the pre-publication composition of
Clarissa on evidence that is limited in certain respects, but
nonetheless significant enough to establish beyond doubt Richardson's
enormous concern to improve his novel through constructive advice from
others, as well as through meticulous self-criticism.
No study of Richardson's revisions in his published text, comparable
in thoroughness to Eaves and Kimpel's handling of the pre-publication
problems, has yet appeared. Kinkead-Weekes made a start toward such an
undertaking in his stimulating article "Clarissa Restored?"[2] but his prime concern in that study
was
to examine the more general question of whether Richardson's addenda
consist wholly of restorations from earlier versions, or whether newly
invented material is also included. Most of his evidence is drawn from two
different sources that Richardson left behind about his own revisions: a
handwritten memorandum[3] in which
he itemized the "most Material" changes he made in the second edition, and
a separate volume Letters and Passages
Restored from the Original Manuscripts of the History of
Clarissa, which he offered to the public at the same time as the third
edition (1751) "for the Sake of doing Justice to the Purchasers of the Two
First Editions." No independent study of Richardson's revisions, based on
a collation of all four editions published during the author's lifetime (1748,
1749, 1751, 1759), has yet appeared to check on the completeness and
accuracy of Richardson's own records. I have recently collated these four
editions, and the purpose of this paper is to present my findings on the first
set of revisions he made in print — the second edition of
1749.
Besides providing further evidence of Richardson's reflective habits,
and of his exchanges with his contemporary audience, the changes in his
most famous novel also have direct bearing on the recently growing interest
in critical editions of Richardson's works. Since he added over two hundred
pages of text to Clarissa by the time of the third edition in
1751, it has generally been assumed that the third, or some combination of
the third and fourth, best illustrates his final intention. Following that
assumption, all modern editors (with one very recent exception) have
printed the third rather than the first.
Neither the Everyman edition, first published in 1932, nor the
Modern Library abridgement of 1950 identifies which text it uses, but they
both are in fact based on some version of the third edition. George
Sherburn's abridgement for the Riverside Editions (1962) explicitly states
that it follows the typical pattern of conflating passages from different texts
and "is based on the faulty text given in Everyman's Library, which has
been collated with that of 1759, which in turn, chiefly for misprints,
omissions of essential words, etc., has been compared with the texts of
1748 and 1751."[4] The modern
version generally regarded as "standard," though having no special claim
to that designation, is the Shakespeare Head Edition of 1930, now out of
print. It is based on the 1751 text, and according to the editors, it follows
all of that edition's "inconsistencies of spelling and punctuation . . . as
faithfully as possible."
The one exception to this practice is Philip Stevick's abridged
version, published in April, 1971 for the Rinehart Press. Following
Kinkead-Weekes' suggestion that the third edition "is in many ways cruder
than the first," Mr. Stevick argues that the first is the better one: "although
the revised text is better prose, the text in the first edition produces far
more successfully the illusion of authentic letters unmediated by a
controlling author. . . . The substantial difference between
the editions, however, lies not in such small and subtle variations but in
great blocks of material which were added to the third edition."
[5] It is these large blocks of material
that
Kinkead-Weekes had previously argued were probably restored by
Richardson in response to a hostile public. "But if the changes are proved
to be," Kinkead-Weekes asks, "with relatively few exceptions, the direct
result of the misinterpretations of an uncritical audience, the definition of
'intention' becomes less simple. Which represents Richardson's real
intention: the novel he wrote expecting an audience capable of appreciating
it, or the revisions for one he found careless, superficial, and
sentimental?"
[6]
This is where the problem now stands. Before it can be solved, much
more evidence is needed about precisely what Richardson did change in his
variant editions. Only the full scope of the evidence can help scholars
determine whether it is true that the substantial difference between the
editions lies not in "small and subtle variations" but primarily in the large
blocks of material inserted into the third version. On the basis of these
findings an editor can then decide which text represents the author's final
intention, which one offers scholars the best critical text of
Clarissa, which version achieves maximum power as an
artistic
masterpiece, and which one should finally be printed to make a popular
edition available for the pleasure of new generations of readers. There are
no easy answers or procedures with respect to any of these four issues.
Each one confronts more than one option; the evidence presented by
Richardson's revisions is voluminous and exceedingly complex;
the assumptions and criteria used to support any conclusion need to be
carefully tested against alternatives.
