Letter 48 Commentary

Letter 48 will become a letter to look back upon once the reader knows of Lovelace’s ways of manipulating Clarissa.  Miss Howe sends Hickman out as a spy to question Lovelace’s friends about his reputation.  His friends say that he is quite honorable, and has changed his ways.  Miss Howe even states at the end that “there was nothing that he was no capable of,” which proves to be too true in Clarissa’s case.  He will go to any length to make Clarissa think that all he has is good intentions for the both of them to be married, and, in this letter, she is fooled by him.

It also addresses the meeting between Anna Howe’s paramour Mr. Hickman and two companions of Lovelace at the Cocoa-Tree in Pall-mall. Interestingly, according to Linda Stradley of www.whatscookingamerica.com, the Cocoa-tree at Pall-mall, the Cocoa-tree was a “fashionable gentleman’s gaming club in London in the 18^th Century”, where Edward Gibbons wrote the first written record of the word “sandwich”. At the Cocoa-tree, Mr. Hickman has an interesting conversation with Lovelace’s friends, Belton and Mowbray. Hickman is known as a moral man, but as Anna tells Clarissa, Belton and Mowbray sing the praises of Lovelace but say nothing of his morals. They tell Hickman that Lovelace is not as rebellious as he once was, but he does enjoy the company of ladies. They describe him as both “brave” and “agreeable”, saying that he has a great future in England. The conversation leads Hickman to believe that there are both positive and negative aspects of Lovelace’s manner.

In this letter, Anna is more hesitant of Lovelace than Hickman is, but she believes that if he were to be reformed, Clarissa would be the only woman able to do it. She looks back to Clarissa’s own conversations with Lovelace and asserts that through his convincing arguments, she does have some “hope of him”. But, Anna does state in the very last sentence that if he were to hold her back in any way, he would not deserve her.