Language In Clarissa, Evelina And Pride And Prejudice

the dangers traveling on the Continent may have been
beyond his educational scope. He, then, was ill prepared
for his job, for he was as innocent of life on the
Continent as was Evelyn. Not telling the Evelyns of his
lack of expertise would have been a conscious omission on
his part.
On the other hand, had he been Evelyn's tutor before
the Grand Tour, then he should have been more prepared
for the trip and its dangers. Unpreparedness would,
then, have been a conscious failing his part. Either
way, Villars had to have made a conscious decision to
leave out information when dealing with the Evelyns and
their son.
The misery the first two Evelyn children caused
Villars was not due so much to the actions of the
children in his care as to his own faulty guidance. As
their tutor and mentor, he was responsible for helping
them make the proper decisions for their futures. We do
not know what he did. His parceling out of information
obscures his own history and muddies the history of the
Evelyn family, relegating the only legacy that Evelina
has as she enters her seventeenth year to what Epstein
identifies as "dialogic silence and white space" (Voices
163).