Samuel Richardson (1689 - 1761). Samuel Richardson was an English writer and printer. He is best known for his three epistolary novels: Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady and The History of Sir Charles Grandison. Richardson was an established printer and publisher for most of his life and printed almost 500 different works, including journals and magazines. He was also known to collaborate closely with the London bookseller Andrew Millar on several occasions. At a very early age, Richardson was apprenticed to a printer, whose daughter he eventually married. He lost his first wife along with their five sons, and eventually remarried. With his second wife, he had four daughters who reached adulthood, but no male heirs to continue running the printing business. While his print shop slowly ran down, he wrote his first novel at the age of 51 and immediately became one of the more popular and admired writers of his time. Richardson knew leading figures in 18th-century England, including Samuel Johnson and Sarah Fielding. He was also close friends with the eminent physician and behmenist George Cheyne and with the theologian and writer William Law, whose books he printed. At the special request of William Law, Richardson printed various poems by John Byrom. In the London literary world, he was a rival of Henry Fielding, and the two responded to each other's literary styles in their own novels. His name was on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list established by the Pope containing the names of books that Catholics were not allowed to read. Richardson, one of nine children, was probably born in 1689 in Mackworth, Derbyshire, to Samuel and Elizabeth Richardson. It is unsure where in Derbyshire he was born because Richardson always concealed the location, but it has recently been discovered that Richardson probably lived in poverty as a child. The older Richardson was, according to the younger: a very honest man, descended of a family of middling note, in the country of Surrey, but which having for several generations a large number of children, the not large possessions were split and divided, so that he and his brothers were put to trades; and the sisters were married to tradesmen. His mother, according to Richardson, was also a good woman, of a family not ungenteel; but whose father and mother died in her infancy, within half-an-hour of each other, in the London pestilence of 1665. The trade his father pursued was that of a joiner. In describing his father's occupation, Richardson stated that he was a good draughtsman and understood architecture, and it was suggested by Samuel Richardson's son-in-law that the senior Richardson was a cabinetmaker and an exporter of mahogany while working at Aldersgate-street. The abilities and position of his father brought him to the attention of James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth. However this, as Richardson claims, was to Richardson senior's great detriment because of the failure of the Monmouth Rebellion, which ended in the death of Scott in 1685. After Scott's death, the elder Richardson was forced to abandon his business in London and live a modest life in Derbyshire. The Richardsons were not exiled forever from London; they eventually returned, and the young Richardson was educated at Christ's Hospital grammar school. The extent that he was educated at the school is uncertain, and Leigh Hunt wrote years later: It is a fact not generally known that Richardson. received what education he had at Christ's Hospital. It may be wondered how he could come no better taught from a school which had sent forth so many good scholars; but in his time, and indeed till very lately, that foundation was divided into several schools, none of which partook of the lessons of the others; and Richardson, agreeably to his father's intention of bringing him up to trade, was most probably confined to the writing school, where all that was taught was writing and arithmetic. However, this conflicts with Richardson's nephew's account that it is certain that was never sent to a more respectable seminary than a private grammar school located in Derbyshire.