Indeed, she is almost saved by Mrs Townshend, "a great dealer in Indian silks, Brussels and French laces, cambrics, linen, and other valuable goods", and takes her last refuge, in her dying days, with the family of John Smith, a glovemaker in Covent Garden. Nor does Richardson associate commerce with villainy. He could have conventionally reduced Lovelace to the easy stereotype of an unthinking spendthrift. But Lovelace's affairs turn out to be well ordered, and he has "spared nothing for solid and lasting improvements upon his estate". No Restoration or Hogarth rake, his dissoluteness runs to sex but not money.
Richardson breaks the connection between misogyny and materialism.
In this respect, the novelist also serves as a social historian. Clery treats Clarissa as an acute response to the two fraught decades that followed the South Sea Bubble of 1720 -a financial disaster, for which women, she argues, took a disproportionate amount of the blame. Amid all the giddy speculation and ignorant fantasies of prosperity perilously gained on credit, women and men alike made vast fortunes by selling their shares before the market crashed. The fortunate women, who included the Duchess of Marlborough and the King's supposed mistress the Duchess of Kendal, were obvious targets for recrimination and abuse. "We have been ruined", raged the Weekly Journal for May 28, 1721, alluding in particular to Kendal, "by .
. . whores, nay, what is more vexatious, old ugly whores." Post- Bubble, the relatively progressive Mandeville and Defoe retreated to unflattering orthodoxies. Pope launched vitriolic attacks against women writers ranging from Eliza Haywood -offered as first prize in a pissing competition in the Dunciad (a poem over which "Dulness"
presides, personified, naturally, as a goddess) -to his old friend and Bubble victim, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Disreputable memoirs by Laetitia Pilkington and Lady Vane later appeared to confirm men in their opinions about luxurious, passionate womankind. It was in this climate of extreme hostility that Clarissa grew.
Coffee, to return to the initial question, was once deemed an unconscionable luxury and a vice; the government had tried to ban it in 1675, but failed in the face of popular addiction/ opposition. With coffee shops came the age of the "coffee-house politician", often caricatured as unmanly, an effete gossip, a meddlesome debater, and a suspiciously soft figure in general. In other words, he was civilized, and stood outside "existing masculine roles". The pamphlet Coffee Houses Vindicated (also 1675) reveals how the "well-regulated" coffee house is "the sanctuary of health, the nursery of temperance, the delight of frugality, and academy of civility, the free-school of ingenuity".
It was just the place for a "renegotiation of gender roles": "The fact that coffee-houses had an all-male clientele merely intensified the focus on sexual difference". Women were "a crucial symbolic, as well as economic, presence as workers in the coffee house, while female readers and writers were a vital part of the dissemination of coffee-house culture in print".
If Clarissa is a response to the response to the Bubble, and the Bubble itself grew from the new economy based in places like Jonathan's, Garraway's and Lloyd's, then that economy, in turn, required and generated new ways of thinking about sexuality and morality. Clery singles out John Dunton, a feminization pioneer, who established the literary periodical Athenian Mercury
(1691-6) at the coffee shop next door to his bookshop. Dunton encouraged readers of both sexes to submit questions. His "Athenians" would try to answer usefully, and they took especial pains over the great many "female Questions" they received. Soon, the Mercury's absurdly chivalrous attitude had become infamous. Asked if they are bachelors, since "they speak so Obligingly of the Fair Sex", the Athenians respond, "We owe the Happiness of Society, the Defence of Nations, the best Riches of Kingdoms, which consists in the multitude of Inhabitants . . . to that Sex whom we are so willing to oblige". The Athenian Mercury also showed its class by publishing and championing the poems of Elizabeth Singer, earning her a period of celebrity as the "Pindarick Lady", a label she could never entirely suppress. Under Dunton's aegis, Singer took up an "indexical role"; her public standing changed with the times in the same way that her fellow writers would endure a downturn after the Bubble and an upturn with Richardson.
