Samuel Richardson

Samuel Richardson was an English writer and printer, born on 19 August 1689 and dead on 4 July 1761. He earned his living in the London printing trade and came to fiction in middle age, and he is remembered as one of the founders of the English novel in the eighteenth century. His best-known work is Pamela, which presents the experience of a young servant woman, and the library catalogue record that lists his output files it under subjects such as psychological fiction, young women in fiction and the social life and customs of England. His work belongs to the period of early English prose fiction, when novels about private feeling and domestic conduct found a large readership, and it is still read and studied as part of that history. The catalogue record counts a very large number of editions and reprints of his writings, which reflects how widely his books circulated.