"While Richardson has been thus influential over the greatest authors of prose fiction on the Continent, he has been no less potent over the very feeblest of such writers as we in England read but do not boast of. Certainly few of our fashionable novelists have ever read Richardson, but nine-tenths of our fashionable novelists are exclusively erotic. Take the love-story away from their plots, and, insipid though the love-story be, nothing of a plot would remain. Now, those nine-tenths of our fashionable novelists would never have been erotic if Richardson, whom they have never read, had not written."
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Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 'Love, In Its Influence Upon Literature' (1862), quoted in Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Miscellaneous Prose Works, Vol. II (1868), pp. 374-375
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Samuel_Richardson
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Samuel Richardson
(19 August 1689 – 4 July 1761) was an 18th-century English writer and printer. He was one of the most admired fiction-writers of his day, both in his native England and across Europe. He is now considered one of the fathers of the novel.
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