Outlines the broad field of cognition, focusing on several key concepts driving research in the study of language in the mind: conceptual metaphor, metonymy, blending, and force-dynamics.

Introduction

In this chapter we look at the legacy of a set of Connected Communities (CC) projects which made connections between the ‘research community’ of academics and the ‘policy community’ of civil servants based at the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), UK. They had the potential to leave behind something which might have significant effects at a national scale, – ‘impact’ in the current policy jargon. We make a distinction here between ‘legacy’ in a very broad, everyday sense of ‘anything handed down by … a predecessor’ (OED, online edition) and ‘impact’ with its specific policy meaning of ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’ (HEFCE, 2015). Colloquially, the ‘impact agenda’ refers to the increasingly insistent pressures on the academy to achieve demonstrable impact; in this sense it is an external pressure which may reinforce or conflict with academics’ own commitments to achieving social change through their research.

The three interdisciplinary projects created ‘policy briefs’ for the DCLG, the UK government department responsible for localism, local government, housing, planning and related functions in England. As a central government policy-making body, DCLG is continually in search of robust, research-based evidence to support its work. The policy briefs were to be short and accessible reviews of research relevant to policy on localism. In particular they were intended to identify novel insights from the Arts and Humanities in order to broaden the range of ideas available to policy makers.

Richardson to Lady Bradshaigh

Friday 4 January 1754

MS: FM XI, ff. 58–61. Copy in the hand of William Richardson.

Endorsement: Letter 10 (in another hand); To Lady B. (in the hand of William Richardson); For the Lady's Answer to this Letter, see Letter xiii p. 91 (in SR's hand).

London, Jan. 4. 1754.

Your Ladiship seems not to expect a Reply to your last Favour: But I think myself too much obliged by every Line you send me, to accept of the Dispensation, and forbear to trouble you; especially as you seem to threaten me with a much longer Silence than I wish for, as it is to extend to the Time of publishing the concluding Volume; several Causes conspiring to delay that, perhaps till some time in the nextMonth.

Your Ladiship takes Notice, “that Sir Charles, in praising Miss Byron, distinguishing her noble Frankness of Heart, as superior to that of all Women but one. That he makes this Exception in several Places; but that when he pronounced Clementina the best, the noblest, the most amiable, &c.” [By the way, does he say, the most amiable?] “no Exception was thought necessary, nor any Equal supposed.”

As to the first Part of this Observation, does not your Ladiship consider his Situation? But just returned from Clementina, whose Merits had so greatly risen upon him, that he must have been unjust had he not admired her more in the Rejection of him, the Manner so noble, than he did when he was more assured of her Countenance. He was sensible that Miss Byron knew the whole Story, and that she must expect him to have the highest Regard for a Woman whose Merits even she had preferred to her own. Could he have made Miss Byron herself a higher Compliment than he did by this Exception; which, however, only extends in this one Point of Frankness of Heart (an unenviable one in your Ladiship's Opinion) to an Equality? What must he have been, had he been able to put the noble Clementina out of his Thoughts, when he addressed himself to Harriet; who, as I said, knew all her Story?

On 25 February 1754, Richardson sent Lady Bradshaigh a package containing the seventh and final volume of the first duodecimo edition of Sir Charles Grandison, together with the sixth and final volume of the octavo edition. Both were pre-publication presentation copies; the volumes were issued to the public simultaneously some three weeks later, on 14 March. Richardson had already given Lady Bradshaigh volumes I–VI of the duodecimo and volumes I–V of the octavo; she would now have two complete sets. She should have received her copies before the general public, but the package was mislaid en route from London to HaighHall and delivered to her only on 18 March. She read the entire 400-page duodecimo volume in a single day and then read it through again, ‘that Imay be more sensible of its particular beauties’ (II, 428). In a letter of 21 May, she told Richardson that she had given it a third reading, this time taking a day and a half (II, 443).

Of Lady Bradshaigh's two presentation sets of Sir Charles Grandison, only volume VII of the duodecimo edition has survived. It is housed at the Huntington Library, California, call number 106535, together with volumes I–VI of another presentation copy given by Richardson to Elizabeth Harris (1722–81) and her husband, the linguistic philosopher James Harris (1709–80), who acknowledged the gift in a letter of 10 November 1753. Each of the first six volumes contains the bookplate of Harris's younger daughter, Louisa Margaret Harris (1753–1836). In addition, volumes II and III bear the inscription ‘Eliza Harris’ at the head of the title pages, while volume I is inscribed on the verso of the front free endpaper, facing the title page, ‘Eliza Harris Given by the Author’. Beneath that, in a different hand, is the inscription ‘Louisa M. Harris’. On the front fixed endpaper is written (in Richardson's hand) ‘Lady B. Revised’.

The seven volumes are externally virtually uniform in appearance, being uncut in the original simple untrimmed trade quarter binding, with what are now rubbed and faded marbled boards and spines covered in sheep rather than calf.

Richardson and Lady Bradshaigh

In mid-July 1748, some six weeks after the publication of volumes III and IV of Clarissa, Richardson received, via one of his London booksellers, a letter bearing a Warrington postmark from an anonymous lady. About two weeks later, she wrote to him again. These letters are not extant, but their contents were summarized by the first editor of Richardson's correspondence, Anna Laetitia Barbauld. In Barbauld's account, the lady informed Richardson of a rumour that Clarissa ‘was to end in a most tragical manner, and, expressing her abhorrence of such a catastrophe, begged to be satisfied of the truth by a few lines inserted in the Whitehall Evening Post’. Evidently intrigued by this unknown new correspondent and her indirect way of communicating with him, Richardson complied with her request, sending a letter to the newspaper in which he asked for her name and address and offered to discuss with her his novel in progress. In her reply, her first extant letter to Richardson, the unknown correspondent used, apparently for the first time, the pseudonym ‘Belfour’, echoing the name of Belford, Lovelace's principal correspondent and confidant in Clarissa.

The mysterious Belfour's letter ends with a memorable curse. If, she told Richardson, he failed to bring the novel to a happy ending:

Although Richardson might ‘think all this proceeds from a giddy girl of sixteen’, the writer, she assured him, was ‘past my romantic time of life’. Over the next thirteen years, until his death in July 1761, Richardson would exchange several hundred letters with Belfour, who revealed her identity only in February 1750 and who met him at last a month later, on Birdcage Walk adjoining St James's Park, during one of her periodic winter visits to London. The assignation was fraught with anxieties. As Barbauld writes, ‘No lover ever expected his mistress with greater ardour than the grave Richardson seems to have felt for his incognita, when he paced so fruitlessly up and down the Mall, gazing with expectation at every lady he met.’

On 15 December 1748, Samuel Richardson sent a letter to Lady Bradshaigh, whose identity was still unknown to him and who was still using the pseudonym ‘Belfour’. In his letter, Richardson told his correspondent that he had sent her a presentation copy of all seven volumes of Clarissa: ‘the whole Work courting your Acceptance and Perusal’ (vol. I , 68). This is the copy that she would annotate, probably in 1749 or 1750, before receiving a presentation copy of the much revised third edition from SR on 17 March 1751. She is unlikely to have annotated the first edition after or even shortly before receiving the revised edition.

On the fly-leaf of each of the volumes, Richardson wrote the inscription ‘From The Author’. On receiving the set, Lady Bradshaigh wrote her name, ‘Do: Bradshaigh’, directly over each inscription in each volume (adding the date, ‘1748’, beside her name in volume I). She probably did so to conceal the origins of her copy from curious visitors to Haigh Hall, although more elaborate explanations for the unusual placement of her signature have been offered. PatriciaH.Marks believes that in this over-writing ‘the relationship between author and reader could hardly bemore emblematically declared’, while JaniceBroder finds it ‘symbolic of the claim to textual power made by Lady Bradshaigh's annotations throughout her volumes’. Janine Barchas suggests that Lady Bradshaigh's ‘gestures on the book's fly-leaves are representative of the manner in which she confidently attempts to impose her readings of the book over that of its author in her many annotations and “corrections”’.

Lady Bradshaigh annotated her copy copiously, writing nearly four hundred comments in all. She treated volumes I and II, set at Harlowe Place, relatively lightly, but once Clarissa leaves the family estate, had a great deal to say on each of the remaining volumes, with volume VII receiving the most extensive remarks of all. Part of her commentary takes the form of stylistic corrections and suggested improvements. There are also, however, more extensive responses, at times admiring and at times indignant, when she reads a passage to which she objects. Before she undertook this task, she had already read at least the first five volumes of the novel: volumes I–IV well before she began her correspondence with Richardson (in July 1748) and V in November 1748.

Richardson to Lady Bradshaigh

Monday 2 January 1758

MS: FM XI, ff. 227–9. Copy in another hand.

Endorsement: London. Jan. 2. 1758. (in another hand).

Most joyfully do I congratulate my dear Lady <Bradshaigh> on her Restoration to “that comfortable State of Health,” which she gratefully so piously, acknowledges! Many happy Seasons attend you & your best Friend!

Your Ladiship's kind Sollicitude for my Health must ever engage my Gratitude.

How considerate the Return of the untranscribed Letter, wrote in a disturbed State of Mind (discoursing of all things with a Friend, as we were used to do) which yet from the Nature of the Case, is not quite calmed — And why? Because, my Justice, in my own Opinion, is impeachable: & the latter Days are advancing so fast, that there can be no Prospect of Retrieving the Step I was, as I may say, precipitated to take. But, however indelicately treated in the Progress of the affair, I am not a little comforted in the good Account I have from every mouth of my Girl's Happiness, & the Man's Behaviour to her & good Character, upon the Whole. No more at present on this Subject; which an ungrateful attempt meditated against my Family when I am no more, by a Man I had by my Confidence in him, & the good offices I had done him, enabled him most unprovokedly to hurt me, aggrevated. –

“You will pity Mrs. R. for all him.” Why so do, Madam: But I am glad you find something to chide her for, notwithstanding.

I have taken the Liberty to read your Excellent Rules to Servants, to two Ladies you esteem; Miss <Talbot> & Mrs <Donnellan.> They both very much admire them; & each very earnestly requested a Copy of them. I presume you will not disallow Copies to those two Ladies. I was most agreeably surpriz’d to be acquainted in your Favour before me, that, unknown to each other, we were both employ’d in the same Work. Sympathy surely in ourMinds as your Ladiship observes.

It would be hardly pardonable (Would it?) after you have so complaisantly acquitted me of the Power of Disguising, to refer that Part of our joint Work to your Ladiship? The Delicacy of Sex, your own peculiar Delicacy, & worthiness of Heart, will, in some Measure, justify my Reference.

Thanks to the editorial labours of the twentieth century, there are few major British authors of the eighteenth century – the classic period of the familiar letter as a genre – whose correspondence is not available in a standard scholarly edition. Some of the most ambitious undertakings, such as the Yale edition of James Boswell and the Oxford/McGill-Queen's edition of Frances Burney, are still in progress, and some of the most long-standing, such as the Oxford and Chicago editions of Alexander Pope and Edmund Burke respectively, now require extensive supplementation, perhaps even replacement. But there is no more anomalous case than Samuel Richardson, whose correspondence holds special interest, beyond its extraordinary scale and range, as that of a practising epistolary novelist who thought longer and harder than any contemporary about the letter as a form. Almost half of the surviving Richardson correspondence, which totals almost 1,700 letters, has never appeared in print, and barely a quarter of it is represented – with silent abridgements, conflations, and other interventions – in the early edition on which scholars have had to rely until now, Anna Laetitia Barbauld's six-volume The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (1804).

The process of publication got off to a good enough start. Individual items began appearing in print within Richardson's lifetime, and in his last years he took practical steps towards preparing a selected edition. Even before the success of Pamela propelled him to fame in the early 1740s, a reply he wrote in humorous couplets to a guild invitation – emphatically a rhyming letter, not a verse epistle – found its way into the Gentleman's Magazine for January 1736. The epistolary commentaries he printed about later novels, such as his Answer to the Letter of a Very Reverend Worthy Gentleman, Objecting to the Warmth of a Particular Scene in … Clarissa (1749) or his Copy of a Letter to a Lady, Who Was Solicitous for an Additional Volume to … Sir Charles Grandison (1754), were formal versions of actual letters, written and sent in response to letters he received. Richardson also included as an appendix to Sir Charles Grandison extracts from his acrimonious correspondence with George Faulkner, the Dublin bookseller, about literary piracy and property.

Richardson to Lady Bradshaigh

Saturday 30 July 1748

Printed source: Whitehall Evening-Post: Or, London Intelligencer, No. 386, 30

July – 2 August 1748.

First printing: Whitehall Evening-Post: Or, London Intelligencer (1748).

July 30, 1748

IF the ingenious Lady, who wrote to a certain Bookseller in London,3 about the 10th of this Month of July, and another Letter a few Days ago, both withoutName orDate; but the Post-mark of the first Letter WARRINGTON; will be pleased to signify to the Person to whom she orders those Letters to be given, how she may be addressed to by Letter; and will have the Goodness to construe as favourably as deserved, and not to the Persons Apprehension of his Suffering in his Interest for pursuing, with the best Intention, the Dictates of his own Judgment;5 all possible Satisfaction shall be endeavoured to be given her in Relation to the Subject she writes upon.

Lady Bradshaigh to Richardson

Monday 10 October 1748

Printed source: B: IV, 177–82.

First printing: Barbauld, Correspondence (1804).

October 10, 1748

I am pressed, Sir, by a multitude of your admirers, to plead in behalf of your amiable Clarissa; having too much reason, from hints given in your four volumes, from a certain advertisement, and from your forbearing to write, after promising all endeavours should be used towards satisfying the discontented; from all these, I say, I have but too much reason to apprehend a fatal catastrophe. I have heard that some of your advisers,who delight in horror, (detestablewretches!) insisted upon rapes, ruin, and destruction; others, who feel for the virtuous in distress, (blessings for ever attend them!) pleaded for the contrary. Could you be deaf to these, and comply with those? Is it possible, that he who has the art to please in softness, in the most natural, easy, humorous, and sensible manner, can resolve to give joy only to the ill-natured reader, and heave the compassionate breast with tears for irremediable woes? Tears I would choose to shed for virtue in distress; but still would suffer to flow, in greater abundance, for unexpected turns of happiness, in which, Sir, you excel any other author I ever read! where nature ought to be touched, you make the very soul feel.