Form's content: The interpretive impact of graphic design in the novels of Samuel Richardson, master printer

Form's Content examines Samuel Richardson's novels within the visual context of the print culture in which they were read and produced. This dissertation combines cultural history, descriptive bibliography, and literary criticism to recover interpretations which Richardson encoded in the visual production of his fictions. It argues that Richardson deployed graphic design to combat the interpretive instability of his epistolary form. The dissertation thus strives to recover both local and general readings of Richardson's novels: local, in that it offers readings of Richardsonian cruxes informed by the printer-author's visual clues; and general, in that it discloses the extent to which Richardson expected his readers to internalize the physical presentation of his books as part of his fiction's literary 'text.'; Chapter One examines Richardson's early strategy of verbal-visual juxtaposition in Pamela and his commission of pictorial illustrations (from William Hogarth, Francis Hayman, and Francois Gravelot) to gloss pivotal scenes in this novel. In Clarissa, Richardson adopts a strategy of integration, hiding his visual didacticism behind the conceit of mimetic transcription. Chapter Two--which outlines Richardson's expansion of text with graphic 'marginalia'--includes an examination of the oversized, folded, engraved score in Clarissa; this score draws upon a reader's familiarity with contemporary letterpress and engraved musical materials (Psalm books, musical miscellanies, and Vauxhall music sold for "a Penny-a-page") to reinforce the heroine's attempts to define a female community and to implicate the reader in that project. Chapter Two also discloses why the hand-written marginalia in Lady Bradshaigh's copy of Clarissa prompted the verbal and visual re-design of the novel's third edition. Chapter Three argues for the interpretive significance of Richardson's original punctuation and ornamentation. Chapter Four explores the manner in which Richardson repackages and indexes his fiction according to the model of the contemporary reference text for interpretive effect. The dissertation concludes with a Coda on the mid-eighteenth-century reception of Richardson's verbal-visual experiments, focussing on works by John Kidgell and Laurence Sterne.