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“... The garden whose pleasures and plenty are described in A Paradise out of a Common Field is neither typical nor representative. Its owner is extremely rich, and its location a Victorian form of Arcadia: a place where money is no object, where all the world is the topmost Society, and where the servant class knows its place. Perhaps because this flawless corner of Victoria’s England is so very unlike what we know of it from Dickens and Mayhew, George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell, it seems rather an unreal landscape ...”

“... Georgian workhouse has been saved from demolition because it’s reckoned, on evidence detailed by Ruth Richardson in Dickens and the Workhouse, that it must be the most famous workhouse of all – the one in Oliver Twist. The claim isn’t convincing. Oliver Twist’s workhouse is 75 miles north of London and if it ever existed outside Dickens’s ...”

“... were in short supply (Burke and Hare were soon to find a novel solution to this bottleneck). As Ruth Richardson argues in her original anatomy of the Anatomy Acts, sentiment had always run strong throughout society against the desecration of the corpse. Popular piety went in awe of the shades of the departed, while traditional Christian orthodoxy ...”

“... Richardson is the Hugo, hélas! of the 18th-century English novel, as Coleridge might have said: ‘I confess that it has cost – still costs my philosophy some exertion not to be vexed that I must admire – aye, greatly, very greatly, admire Richardson/his mind is so very vile a mind – so oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent ...”

“... To read the letters of Dorothy Richardson is to become exhausted, vicariously, by the ‘non-stop housewifery’ which consumed her days. From 1918 until 1939, Richardson and her husband moved three times a year. Every autumn, they settled in a primitive rented cottage in Cornwall, where Richardson was responsible for shopping, cooking and cleaning, as well as for her own and her husband’s sizeable correspondence ...”

“... her own money (which the Littlewoods managed), she sold the film rights to John Osborne and Tony Richardson’s production company for the very substantial sum of £20,000 (the equivalent of around half a million pounds today).In September 1960 Richardson directed a production of A Taste of Honey in Los Angeles; in October ...”

“... the body, but that is another proposition altogether. Similar questions arise in the treatment of Richardson’s Clarissa, the protracted dying of whose heroine prompts an extended comparison with the grim rituals practised in the Irish hunger strike of 1981. Disarmingly acknowledging some obvious incongruities of this conjunction – between fiction and ...”

“... to have left him a parting gift: a small compass that William’s most recent biographer, Robert Richardson, takes as a hint that her lover orient himself in her direction.* This may be over-reading – William was an enthusiastic hiker – but the temptation is understandable: both before the marriage and for more than 30 years afterwards, she is the fixed ...”

“... book of 1881 confidently assured its readers, before going on to issue the usual warnings against Richardson and Smollett. For Sarah Stickney Ellis, poetry was particularly suited to women readers because it is removed from ‘the realities of material and animal existence’. On the other hand, much of the autobiographical evidence that Flint has assembled ...”

“... of her claim. The collection opens with a narrative immediacy that would do justice to Samuel Richardson, as EBB hastens to reaffirm the bond her marriage and flight have threatened to sever: My beloved Arabel I write to you after a thousand thoughts . . (for I have not heard a breath of any of you yet) but the strongest brings me still to writing to you ...”

“... section of information derived from the novels, restricted to the work of seven novelists: Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve and Frances Burney. (There are occasional references to other writers, such as Jane Austen.) A segment on, for instance, ‘Daughters’ will discuss daughters and the code of ...”

“... are central to the action, not least in one of Coppard’s most anthologised stories, ‘Dusky Ruth’, in which an overnight traveller is beguiled by a young woman with hair ‘as black as a rook’s wings’. As for the names of his characters, they sound like bit parts in a Shakespeare play: Codling, Cocking, Knatchbole, Tottel, Crabbe, Dogtrees. The ...”

“... new play, apparently Jane Austen’s version of a work she had admired from childhood, Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. It was actually a discovery only in a manner of speaking, since the manuscript was never properly lost. It had been handed down among the descendants of Jane Austen’s niece Anna Lefroy, born Anna Austen in 1793, the eldest ...”

“... of others. In her study of the 18th century, for instance, she repeats what a number of scholars (Ruth Perry especially) have already dealt with, and this should be more openly recognised. Even more striking is the paucity of literary quotation, and the almost total absence of quotation from, or reference to, novels; the exception is Philip Roth’s The ...”

“... are here being rewritten less for the excitement than for the feeling, as Dr Johnson said of Richardson: both O’Brian and Farrell share the wholly civilised, entirely good-humoured champagne Irishness of Laurence Sterne. Celtic fantasy maybe, but there was never anything less like a leprechaun.Both writers are immensely well-informed and take infinite ...”