The Transformation of the Text: February 2012

In London’s National Portrait Gallery, as well as in the British Library’s copy of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (1804), there is a charming aquatint, Richardson reading Sir Charles Grandison designed by Susanna Duncombe (née Highmore), the author’s friend and correspondent and etched by Joseph Constantine Stadler. Susanna(1725 - 1812) was the daughter of Joseph Highmore, who painted portraits of the novelist and his wife in the 1740s and 1750s.

Richardson and Susanna became acquainted through Highmore and Richardson was greatly impressed by her talents and education. Susanna quickly became an influential member of Richardson’s North End reading circle, where young, intellectual admirers of the author gathered to discuss poetry and writing Susanna was joined by other Richardson fans - Thomas and Edward Mulso, their sister Hester Mulso, Mary Prescott, and the Reverend Duncombe. Of this small group, cheekily dubbed Richardson’s ‘harem’ by some, the women were most active and beloved by the author; Richardson fondly nicknamed Susanna, Hestor, and Mary - Sukey, Hecky, and Pressy. Susanna was both a poet and an artist, but with the passing of time, she has faded into relative obscurity; she is best remembered for her illustration of the North End group listening to Richardson reading Grandison. Susanna claimed that the initial sketch was done during Richardson’s reading, but it was not published until 1804. Susanna’s illustration is simple, softly nostalgic and an obvious choice for a frontispiece to Barbauld’s romantic and laudatory biography of Richardson. But Susanna’s drawing is more than a satisfying posthumous tribute to the author and reveals important observations for scholars of Richardson’s reading circle - the specific spaces for reading, the hierarchy within Richardson’s reading community, and the physical responses to reading.

The reading circle met in Richardson’s summer-house at his Fulham, North End residence.

The North End home was Richardson’s ‘country’ abode and the summer-house was where he spent the morning reading his manuscripts to friends.

The summer-house was a popular eighteenth-century garden feature - it was a freestanding building that functioned as a domestic parlour removed from the main house.

There is an inherent tension in the space; the summer-house is at once isolated from the domestic rhythm of the main building, yet also an extension of the home’s social activities. This contradiction allowed the summer-house to be multi-purpose, a site of entertaining or solitude, reading or writing. No matter the purpose, the emphasis was on pleasure and in Lipsedge’s discussions of summer-houses, she indicates that they were ‘highly personalized buildings,’ an architectural safe haven for self expression. Catherine Talbot, a Richardson admirer not depicted in Susanna’s drawing, remarked that Richardson’s North End summer-house was ‘fitted up in the same Style as his Books are writ ... Every Minute detail ... useful or pleasing,’ This draws attention to Susanna’s depiction of the North-End summer-house which is notable for its decided lack of interior decor, whether ‘useful’ or ‘pleasing.’ In Susanna’s drawing, Richardson’s summer-house is a highly un-personalized space. With Talbot’s letter as evidence, it is likely that Susanna took artistic license, erasing the interior decoration (and perhaps even remodeling the architecture) while emphasizing the collision of the domestic space with nature and highlighting the members of Richardson’s reading circle.

In Susanna’s composition, the North End summer-house appears slightly subterranean, with steps leading down from a garden path into the main room. A study of Susanna’s diverse oeuvre confirms that she is a sophisticated draughtsman, capable of depicting convincing interiors and exteriors, and logical perspectives. Joseph Highmore was an authority on perspective - the author of an artistic treatise that re-worked Dr. Brook Taylor’s earlier theories (1763) - and it is recorded that Highmore passed these techniques on to Susanna. The depiction of the summer-house thus must be accepted, not as an faithful architectural reproduction, but as a contrived space built around and for the figures. The large door frame contains the six listeners, with only the crooked elbows of Thomas Mulso and Reverend Duncombe breaking out of the arc. The door frame acts as the transitional space between the domestic indoors and the groomed nature of the garden; the dirt path seamlessly turns into the steps that lead down into the room. The doors are pulled wide apart, emphasizing the openness and penetrability of the summer-house; the air and birdsong can waft in and the listeners can wander out. The fluidity between the indoors and outdoors in Susanna’s depiction of the summer-house illustrates a philosophical aspect of this reading space - the garden building mediates between the domestic space and nature. The embedding of the summer-house into the garden gives viewer the impression that the room acts as a shelter from natural elements, while the open door suggests that it also selectively embraces nature.

The steps down into the room also direct the viewer’s gaze back to Richardson, who is reading aloud to his small circle of admirers. From letters from Susanna Highmore, Catherine Talbot and Hester Mulso, it is confirmed that the summer-house is actually where Richardson entertained his friends, but it was also where he occasionally wrote in solitude. This reinforces the summer-house as a multi-purpose space. The flexible functions of the summer-house transform it into an exterior library; in the eighteenth-century the domestic library developed into a central space for solitary activities and social functions, particularly in the morning.

In Susanna’s illustration, it is clear that during the writing of Richardson’s third novel, Grandison, the North End summer-house was a site for morning entertainment and not solitary writing. This transformation of the summer-house from a place of writing Clarissa to a place of reading Grandison indicates that the third novel was written in his closet and thus explains why the summer-house does not occupy Richardson’s subconscious in his final novel. It was during the reading of Gradinson manuscripts that this building moved from private to public and became the nexus for the North End circle’s literary and artistic pursuits.

It is clear in Susanna’s illustration that the focus is on the members of the group, not the faithful reproduction of Richardson’s summer-house. With the use of line, colour (though this could be at the discretion of Stadler), ambient lighting and costume, the composition is contrived to draw the viewer’s eye to Richardson. The diagonal path that cuts through the center of the picture leads the eye directly to Richardson perched on his chair, swinging his legs as if to the rhythm of his prose. Richardson is further differentiated from the listeners by his attire - his ‘usual morning dress.’

Richardson is wearing a banyan and a turban which were considered the fashionable garb of intellectual men in the eighteenth-century. The costume is indicative of a man at leisure and Richardson’s relaxed posture confirms that he was at ease with his visitors during these casual morning meetings. The friends are positioned in a semi-circle, each with his or her turned towards Richardson with rapt attention. Susanna has depicted each figure to make the character identifiable but the likeness is not overpowering. This compositional arrangement has the formula of a conversation piece, an informal group portrait popularized in the eighteenth century by artists such as Highmore, Hayman, Reynolds, and Gainsborough. The conversation piece reflected a shift in taste in the eighteenth-century from grandeur to the ‘poetry of domestic life’ - E.H. Gombrich describes this movement simply as a time when ‘Painters began to look at the life of ordinary men and women of their time, to draw moving or amusing episodes which could be spun out into a story.’

It is fitting that the daughter of one of the most skilled painters of conversation pieces in the eighteenth century should use this format to depict the circle of readers. Traditionally, men were on one side of the picture and women were on the other; Susanna modifies this slightly and places Reverend Duncombe, her future husband, next to her and on the female side. Kinkead-Weekes remarks that the gender balance in Susanna’s drawing is unusual for eighteenth-century reading circles, and Pointon’s explanation of the strict compositional codes for conversation pieces confirms that this integrating of male and female is important: ‘Conversation pieces were sites for the articulation of social and familial propriety...At the same time the social situations imaged in the conversation piece constituted a network of disconnected signs relating to discourses of culture and politics.’ Susanna is not only highlighting the equality of the members, but also the casual, familial nature of their group. The modified group portrait is an apt genre for Susanna to depict her friends listening to Richardson - Edward, Thomas, and Hester Mulso look on the verge of speaking, Mary is standing up as if overcome with emotion, Reverend Duncombe is lost in thoughtful contemplation, and Susanna is sketching the scene. Susanna’s conversation piece eavesdrops on what must have been an intriguing literary discussion; it is, to use Richardson’s term, a ‘speaking picture.’

Although Richardson is the dominant figure in this illustration, there is also a personal hierarchy among the other members of the group. Susanna positions her close friend Hester slightly off the central line of the composition; Hester is the only female character to have her face depicted head on and her gaze redirects the viewer’s eye directly back towards Richardson, linking the two. Hester was a revered intellectual, beloved by Richardson and Samuel Johnson, and frequently debated with Richardson about parental control of daughters, leading him to fondly dub her a ‘spitfire.’ Susanna is not only recognizing Richardson’s close relationship with Hester, but also her own inseparable friendship. In Warren Mild’s research on Joseph Highmore, he includes several stories of Susanna’s relationship with Hester, and the girls’ friendship with Richardson. Susanna and Hester were the authors of a series of love poems written under the pseudonyms Aspasia and Stella - disapproved of by some as having lesbian tendencies. Mild describes their friendship as ‘confusing.’ Their poetry celebrating their sentimental friendship was appreciated by the other members of the North End reading circle, but Mild notes Richardson’s gnawing jealously of Hester and Susanna’s intimacy: ‘The manuscripts of theses poems were read around the circle and their friends called them by their adopted names [Aspasia and Stella]. Shrewd Samuel Richardson may have felt more than just the chagrin of a neglected old man when he chided Hester for strolling off with her Highmore.’ Richardson here displays a fatherly anxiety and indeed, the author and his members interchanged the language of friendship with the language of family, a mixing and redefining of roles and relationships in the North End summer-house.

Richardson frequently assumed the paternal role in the North End reading circle’s familial metaphor. In her biography of Richardson, Barbauld declares that the author honoured his favourite readers with the label of ‘daughter.’ Richardson’s eagerness to transform his close-knit reading circle into a familial unit is perhaps directly linked to the fragility of his own family - he lost six sons, two daughters, his wife, his father, and two brothers all within the space of two years. His role as father, therefore, had been shaken and shaped by tragedy, acting as a paternal figure among his friends must have allowed him to reclaim some of this loss. Greenstein also picks up on Richardson’s paternalistic attitude to his readers, writing that he is ‘progenitor, admirer, and at times, fond advocate.’ The family was also the preferred structure for socializing in the eighteenth-century, and Roy Porter explains the ‘extended’ definition of family and its center of control: ‘It was normal for domestic servants, apprentices, unmarried farm servants and paying lodgers to live with the family...In families, husbands ruled.' In Grandison, Harriet Byron explains the security of socializing within such a close-knit group: “‘My Grandfather used to say, that families are little communities, that there are but few solid friendships out of them; and that they help...to secure the great community, of which they are so many miniatures.’”

Thus, in many ways, the North End circle was a literary family, with Richardson ‘ruling’ as father and head, and the members as offspring. Richardson actions confirm that these members were also treated as family; he read aloud to them just as he did to his wives and daughters in the evening. Susanna translates the emphasis on familial relationships into the artistic sphere by using the conversation piece format, a genre traditionally use to depict families.

Susanna’s picture is rich with the themes intimacy and interconnectedness - the two groups figures overlap and are interlinked through the flow and folds of garments - and her image goes beyond the language of family to the language of memory. The conversation piece not only honoured families but also served as a memorial to the deceased members of the family, sometimes those passed were painted into the picture as if they were living.

The drawing was published after Richardson’s and Hester’s deaths and the emphasis on the figures of author and beloved friend is a nostalgic nod to an idealized past. Mild narrates Susanna’s emotional connection to the summer-house and the people that occupied it: ‘North End, with its gardens and walks and summerhouse, was dear to her, but most of all she would revere it for having brought together bright people who measure life by the knowledge of the heart Richardson had put into his novels.’

Thus, Susanna’s picture is a remembrance of a past family, a time lost.

The Transformation of the Text

Friday, 17 February 2012

Illustrated Books

Wednesday, 8 February 2012

'Samuel Richardson' or 'Grandfather and Grandson with Greyhound and Hoop?'

Preface to 'Reading Speaking Pictures'

Reading Speaking Pictures