Samuel Richardson

(1689 - 1761)

Around the age of thirteen, Samuel Richardson was employed by his female friends to ghostwrite their love letters. In 1741, nearly forty years later, having established a successful London printing business, he published Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, an epistolographic manual featuring the correspondence of fictional characters; several of the letters anticipate the plot of his novel Pamela, which he began drafting around the same time. He was, wrote one biographer, “not one of those who make genius an excuse for idleness.”