Politics & Power Quote by Samuel Richardson

Richardson is smuggling a democratic manifesto into a remark about diction. By praising "little words" in the "Republic of Letters", he flips the usual prestige economy of writing: not the ornamental Latinate showpieces but the small connective tissues of language - and, by analogy, society - do the real work. Prepositions, articles, pronouns, conjunctions: the humble parts that make relationships legible. You can write without them, technically, but you can’t persuade, intimate, or build a world with any precision. Their power is structural.

The metaphor is also a quiet social provocation. In an 18th-century Britain obsessed with rank, Richardson suggests that significance isn’t a birthright; it’s an effect of function. "Little folks" keep the nation running the way little words keep a sentence from collapsing into a list of nouns. It’s a rebuke to aristocratic self-mythology, delivered in the polite, plausible tone of literary observation.

Context matters: Richardson wasn’t just any novelist; he was the architect of the epistolary novel, where meaning lives in nuance, address, and the careful calibration of voice. His fiction turns on moral and emotional fine print - the "to", "from", "I", "you" of social reality. The intent isn’t to romanticize the small. It’s to insist that the overlooked is where agency hides, and that good writing, like a workable polity, depends less on grand declarations than on the connective words that make people count.