A fifteen-year-old servant writes home about her late mistress's son, who has begun to follow her about the house, and goes on writing through everything he then tries. Richardson was a printer who came to fiction at fifty by way of a commission for a book of model letters, and invented the English novel more or less by accident. It was answered, parodied and pirated inside a year. Fifty-nine plates by painters from Hogarth to Munch trace the rooms, houses and assemblies that frame a servant's testimony.