Samuel Richardson

Samuel Richardson (19 August 1689 – 4 July 1761) is an 18th-century English writer and printer.

He is best known for his three epistolary novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753).

Richardson is an established printer and publisher for most of his life and printsalmost 500 different works, with journals and magazines.

Richardson loses his first wife along with their five sons, and eventually remarries.

Although with his second wife he has four daughters who live to become adults, they have no male heir to continue running the printing business.

While his print shop slowly runs down, at the age of 51 he writes his first novel and immediately becomes one of the most popular and admired writers of his time.

He knows leading figures in 18th century England, including Samuel Johnson and Sarah Fielding.

In the London literary world, he is a rival of Henry Fielding, and the two respond to each other's literary styles in their own novels.

Richardson has been one of the authors on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list established by the pope containing the names of books that Catholics are not allowed to read.

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