Samuel Richardson's vindication of female virtue through his emplotment of seduction in Clarissa participates in the same movement to redefine sexual difference that gives rise to the new image of the penitent prostitute as a victim of seduction in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. The prostitute became an object of pity and charity, in part, because women's essential nature had been re-imagined to exclude innate vice. William Dodd, a central figure in the Magdalen Hospital and its chaplain, rationalizes the charity's mandate to reform prostitutes by invoking the new definition of essential femininity: “every man that reflects on the true condition of humanity, must know, that the life of a common prostitute, is as contrary to the nature and condition of the female sex, as darkness to light.” Unsurprisingly, Richardson was a supporter of the Magdalen charity from the beginning and, like its founders, he understood the prostitute as a victim of seduction, abandoned to poverty but essentially innocent. We see this in his enthusiastic defense of T. C. Phillips when she published her courtesan narrative shortly after the appearance of Clarissa in 1748. In a letter to Lady Bradshaigh, he indites Phillips's initial seducer, Grimes, and vindicates Phillips's virtue because he believes her initial fall happened without her consent: “What, think you, has not Mr Grimes to answer for in the ruin of Constantia Philips … if the story she tells be true? What ruins, the consequences of her ruin, may not be laid at his door?