Richardson is the Hugo, hélas! of the 18th-century English novel, as Coleridge might have said: 'I confess that it has cost - still costs my philosophy some exertion not to be vexed that I must admire - aye, greatly, very greatly, admire Richardson/his mind is so very vile a mind - so oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent.' These sentiments of 1805 echo and reverberate through Coleridge's Notebooks and Marginalia and Table Talk, as well as the Biographia Literaria, to the closing weeks of his life in July 1834. He brooded with fascinated revulsion on 'the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness of every thought and feeling ... the self-involution and dreamlike continuity', like 'a sick room heated by stoves' contrasted with Fielding, who resembles 'an open lawn, on a breezy day in May'.

LRB 12 November 1987 | PDF Download