Home > ECF > Vol. 24 > Iss. 3 (2012)
Article Title
Abstract
This article re-examines the "Ode to Wisdom" in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. The ode's last three stanzas were set to music by Clarissa Harlowe and included in the novel as a fold-out plate of engraved music. I reconstruct the ode's printing history, comment on its composer and musical style, and offer corrections to some claims found in earlier critical discussions. I also note some previously unobserved bibliographic and textual problems in the text of the ode and the musical plate.
Recommended Citation
McGeary, Thomas
(2012)
"Clarissa Harlowe's "Ode to Wisdom": Composition, Publishing History, and the Semiotics of Printed Music,"
Eighteenth-Century Fiction:
Vol. 24:
Iss.
3, Article 2.
Available at:
http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/ecf/vol24/iss3/2
Contributor's Note
Thomas McGeary has written extensively about the reception of Italian opera, singers, and Farinelli in early eighteenth-century Britain. His Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. He is completing a complementary study on the cultural politics of opera in the era of Handel, Pope, and Walpole.
Engravings of the musical piece "Ode to Wisdom"
ECFdc1688Table1.doc (38 kB)
Table 1 for essay DC# 1688
ECFdc1688Table2.doc (33 kB)
Table 2 for essay DC# 1688