The work(s) of Samuel Richardson

the long version

Samuel Richardson has come, over two hundred years, to be seen as a man in conflict. The bourgeois, even priggish, master printer has seemed to be difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with the original author of Clarissa and lesser works of genius. Fysh's The Work(s) of Samuel Richardson addresses this problem in Richardson studies by examining Richardson not as an author but as a maker of books. In this study, Fysh covers a range of ground to redress the traditional conflicted view of Richardson, addressing on the way issues of interest to textual theorists, historians of publishing, printing, popular culture, labor and copyright, and literary critics. Samuel Richardson emerges in Fysh's analysis as a man on the cusp of change - in the organization of the printing industry and of labor generally, and in the nature of the literary text - and his work as a printer as well as his literary works (the two being fundamentally inseparable) come to be seen as instrumental in and representative of these changes.