Marriage Quote by Samuel Richardson

Richardson lands the blade where polite society is softest: its eagerness to launder male wrongdoing through the respectable machinery of marriage. The line is built like a legal loophole disguised as moral wisdom. “Let a man do what he will” is brutally roomy language, a wink toward coercion and predation that the era often refused to name outright. Then comes the real target: not the man, but “the world,” that genial chorus that prefers tidy endings to messy accountability. “Encouragingly apt” drips with irony; the encouragement isn’t for virtue, it’s for men to treat matrimony as retroactive permission.

Richardson’s intent isn’t simply to condemn one villain; it’s to expose a social settlement that protects reputation over justice. The phrasing “sufficient amends” borrows the vocabulary of debt and restitution, as if a woman’s bodily autonomy and future could be squared like a ledger. It’s a critique of a culture that converts harm into a marriage plot, the same narrative reflex that makes a forced or pressured union read as resolution rather than further captivity.

Context matters: Richardson’s novels (especially Pamela and Clarissa) live inside the 18th-century obsession with female “virtue” as currency. Once damaged, a woman’s social options shrink to near nothing; marriage to the offender is framed as rescue because it restores public legibility. Richardson shows how that “amends” functions less as repair for the woman than as an amnesty for the man and a comfort blanket for everyone watching. The sentence is sharp because it refuses sentiment and names the bargain: society would rather stage a wedding than confront what happened.