Edward Bulwer-Lytton on Samuel Richardson

“Richardson is the first of our novelists who set the fashion of concentrating all the interest of human life upon the war between man and woman. With what wondrous patience he depicts the siege of Clarissa and the stratagems of Lovelace! In that narrative, so full and so long, there is no other interest for a moment but this, "What will Lovelace do with Clarissa, and what will Clarissa do with Lovelace?" The effect thus produced by Richardson on the craft of the novelist has been general and durable. Of all our novelists, with the single exception of Scott, he is the one whose influence has been the most profound and the most pervading on the literature of foreign nations. I doubt whether even the Werther of Goethe or the Nouvelle Heloise of Rousseau would ever have been written if Clarissa Harlowe had not laid the trains of thought that led to their composition. In France, more especially, even to this day, three-fourths of the novels that treat exclusively of the Tempter and the Tempted may be as clearly traced to Richardson as three-fourths of the metaphysical works that inculcate materialism may be traced to Locke.”

“While Richardson has been thus influential over the greatest authors of prose fiction on the Continent, he has been no less potent over the very feeblest of such writers as we in England read but do not boast of. Certainly few of our fashionable novelists have ever read Richardson, but nine-tenths of our fashionable novelists are exclusively erotic. Take the love-story away from their plots, and, insipid though the love-story be, nothing of a plot would remain. Now, those nine-tenths of our fashionable novelists would never have been erotic if Richardson, whom they have never read, had not written.”