Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1747-8), is a novel of letters that tells the disturbing story of Clarissa Harlowe’s attempts to resist the pressures of her family, who want a wealthy marriage, and her love for the devilish, brutish, charismatic Robert Lovelace. It is very long: 970,000 words or so.
For much of its life, Clarissa was published in pieces. Richardson first circulated bits of the novel among his friends around 1744 (as a printer, Richardson would have thought of texts primarily not in terms of whole books, but rather sheets and gatherings). When it became a book, it was a plural thing, with 7 volumes appearing in the first edition of 1747-8.
The modern Penguin edition of 1985 is one volume, which means it’s huge. Too huge, in fact, to read on the move, or to carry in a bag. Which is an interesting problem.
And the physical bulk is a problem in another way. Richardson’s book is an epistolary novel, made of letters zipping between characters, each dated to the day. In fact, Clarissa is in part about what the letter as a form (short, mobile, quick, responsive to the moment, intimate yet circulating dangerously) can do. But this sense of the epistolary gets obscured, or at least compromised, when the book itself is so physically anti-flighty, and so unitary as a pile of words.
One solution is to cut the single volume in two – which looks like violence, or disrespect, but is in fact the opposite: a registering of a desire to read.
