When Tobias Smollett published the last of his novels, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, he used the familiar epistolary novel form first made famous by Samuel Richardson. Five of his flat, predictable characters wrote letters that differed in their points of view on the many episodes comprising the novel’s plot. Marked by his trademark heavy-handed caricature, the book also contained some factual information based on his travels. This resulted in an unusual blend of fact with comic fiction and removed much of the violence that had marked Smollett’s previous works. While violent acts exist, their sadistic aspects have been softened, resulting in characters somewhat more broadly shaped than his earlier ones.
Matthew Bramble, the main letter writer, cranky but full of heart, resembles Smollett himself. Although only 50 years old, Smollett suffered from overwork and bitterness that eventually translated into an illness that would take his life by the end of 1771. The irascible Bramble mirrors his creator in old age, as the heroes of Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751) had mirrored the younger Smollett.
Bramble sets out on a journey through England and Scotland along with several family members. They include his strong-willed, spouse-hungry sister, Tabitha; her maid, Winifred Jenkins; a congenial nephew who is an Oxford student, Jerry; and a teenage niece, Lydia. Humphry Clinker serves the group as its ostler, or hostler, a keeper of their horses. He soon becomes their postilion, riding the near horse of those leading to guide the horses as they pull a coach. His position comes to symbolize his importance as leader and guide to the group, who, while holding higher social positions than his own, all fall into his debt by the story’s end.
A devoted servant, Clinker guides the family through Bristol, Bath, Harrogate, York, Scarborough, and Durham. As the group visits various “spa” towns, Smollett uses his characters to comment on 1760s manners, with Matthew Bramble criticizing much of what he observes. Fashionable society disgusts him, but his negativity translates into a more gentle humor than that produced by Smollett in earlier novels. Smollett delights in the language and applies satire to what he considered pretentious ideas of the so-called educated. In one passage, a doctor expounds upon the positive aspects of a “stink,” educating his fellow travelers by explaining that “in the Dutch language, stinken signified the most agreeable perfume, as well as the most fetid odour, as appears in Van Vloudel’s translation of Horace, in that beautiful ode, Quis multa gracilis, &c.”
He also provides connections to an earlier work, reintroducing some characters from previous novels. Readers discover a chink in the aptly named Bramble’s armored exterior by chapter two, through Jerry’s letter to a friend. After commenting that he and his uncle seemed as little suited as oil and water, he adds that although he had believed his uncle a “complete Cynic; and that nothing but the necessity of his occasions could compel him to get within the pale of society,” he is “now of another opinion. I think his peevishness arises partly from bodily pain, and partly from a natural excess of mental sensibility; for, I suppose, the mind as well as the body, is in some cases endued with a morbid excess of sensation.” That comment may reveal much about Smollett’s self-view just before his death.
In Durham, Lieutenant Obadiah Lismahago joins the group. An eccentric Scot, Lismahago masks under his grotesque behavior good sense that eventually leads him to marry the love-starved Tabitha following her conversion to Methodism by Clinker. Bramble remarks of the Scot that many would misjudge him by his startling exterior. He explains Lismahago’s appeal by using a comparison: “I have often met with a crab-apple in a hedge, which I have been tempted to eat for its flavour, even while I was disgusted by its austerity.” Another member of the group, Lydia, also falls in love with a handsome actor from a good family whom she eventually will marry.
Along the way, Clinker is falsely accused of a crime, convicted, and imprisoned. The novel’s tone remains light in part due to Winifred’s muddled impressions. Smollett humorously distorts her vocabulary, as in a letter toward the close of the novel when she attempts to explain her feelings to a confidante: “But then I have such vapours, Molly. I sit and cry by myself, and take ass of etida, and smill to burnt fathers, and kindal-snuffs; and I pray constantly for grease, that I may have a glimpse of the new light, to show me the way through this wretched veil of tares.” She declares her love for Clinker, who over several chapters is proven to be Matthew Bramble’s long-lost bastard son.
With the unlikely plot twist of a discovered son, Smollett parodied the famous plot of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), helping maintain what critic Lionel Stevenson describes as “the anti-sentimental ferocity of the Fielding school.” Such an approach to fiction would soon disappear, and although Smollett’s novel is considered his best picaresque, it also stood as somewhat of an anachronism in an age of growing sensibility that Smollett’s natural misanthropy caused him to abhor. The novel remains popular and may be accessed as an electronic text on the Internet.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adamson, William Robert. Cadences of Unreason: A Study of Pride and Madness in the Novels of Tobias Smollett. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.
Gassman, Byron. “The Briton and Humphry Clinker.” Studies in English Literature 3 (1963): 397–414.
Stevenson, Lionel. The English Novel: A Panorama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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