Faith & Spirit Quote by Samuel Richardson

Politeness, Richardson suggests, is the velvet glove on a clenched fist. His translation of genteel courtship into blunt power politics takes the most anodyne social script in 18th-century England - deference, humility, “your humble servant” - and flips it to reveal the actual transaction being proposed: permission for domination. It’s a line that sounds like a joke, but it isn’t trying to be funny. It’s trying to be diagnostic.

The intent is corrective: to teach readers to hear what social language is trained to conceal. Richardson, a novelist steeped in the moral theater of manners, understands that “plain English” isn’t about clarity; it’s about stripping away the protective fog that lets inequality feel like etiquette. By placing “dear Madam” right next to “Lord and Master,” he exposes how intimacy can be weaponized, how tenderness can be drafted into a sales pitch for hierarchy.

The subtext is that consent, in such a world, is often a coerced performance. The lady is invited to “let” him rule, as if power were a gift she might freely hand over, rather than a system already leaning on her. That’s why the sentence lands: it captures the way patriarchy hides in the grammar of courtesy, smuggling entitlement into the posture of humility.

Context matters. Richardson writes in a culture where “address” is a social technology, where reputations, marriages, and livelihoods hinge on the right phrasing. His point isn’t that every gentleman is a villain; it’s that the language of virtue is perfectly compatible with the desire to possess.