Correspondence with George Cheyne and Thomas Edwards

Description

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), among the most important and influential English novelists, was also a prolific letter writer. Beyond its extraordinary range, his correspondence holds special interest as that of a practising epistolary novelist, who thought long and hard about the letter as a form. The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson is the first complete edition of his letters. The present volume contains his correspondences with Dr George Cheyne and Thomas Edwards, linked not only by their pronounced medical content but also by their generally unguarded character. An early admirer of Richardson's Pamela (1740-41), Cheyne elicits some of the novelist's most significant statements concerning his own literary practice and tastes. Edwards, an astute literary critic as well as notable sonneteer, draws Richardson into expressing some remarkable insights as a close reader of poetry and prose.

David E. Shuttleton is Reader in Literature and Medical Culture at the School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, where he established the Medical Humanities Research Centre. He is the recent author of Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and has written numerous essays specialising in literature and medicine in the long eighteenth century. John A. Dussinger is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Illinois where he taught for 36 years. He is author of The Discourse of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1974) and In the Pride of the Moment: Encounters in Jane Austen's World (1990), and has written numerous articles and reviews on iconic writers such as Swift, Shaftesbury, Locke, Hume, Middleton, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Johnson and Austen.