biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1689–1761)
|
| biography:
| Novelist, born in Mackworth, Derbyshire, C England, UK. He was apprenticed to a printer, married his master's daughter, and set up in business for himself in London, where he became the centre of a wide circle of friends. Pamela (1740), his first novel, is ‘a series of familiar letters now first published in order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion’, and this was the aim of all his works. He also wrote Clarissa (1748), published in seven volumes, and Sir Charles Grandison (1754). In using the epistolary method (which suggested authenticity at a time when mere fiction was frowned upon), he helped to develop the dramatic scope of the novel, then little regarded as a literary form. |
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