The Columbia History of the British Novel

utterly alienated figure-a dupe among knaves-in a work brilliant for its glittering depiction of the impoverished writer in the brave new world of print technology and new publishing arrangements. Viewed, however, from the perspective of realism-the moment, the present crisis, characters and life as they are today-Swift's prose narrative fails to cope with the social realities of the hack's world and its values. Two generations later, Smollett's Roderick Random, also crude and alienated, will be presented in altogether different ways.

-129- The extent to which satire had been appropriated by the novel is grasped by consulting Gulliver's Travels (1726). Here the master-servant and fool-knave relation is as central to Swift's purpose as the author's sense of time (the relative present) and place (exotic places that reflect on England and Ireland). Despite Lemuel's travels to remote islands-Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, Houyhnhnmland, places inhabited by pygmies and giants, horses and monkeys-he domesticizes these creatures and dresses them up to resemble local, familiar Britons who appear contemporary, at least on the surface. Lemuel's first-person narrative no doubt lent Swift's story contemporaneity, as did the author's description of Lemuel's response to the odd creatures and places he encounters; and Swift's critique of modern learning (projects) and technology (print, publishing, architecture, mathematics) is so specific in Book 3- the Voyage to Laputa-that the reader of 1726 must immediately have understood why the narrator decried the lack of utility in modern science.

Furthermore, the critique of rationality in Book 4- Swift's 'excremental vision'-is so directly focused on modern targets that readers could construe it as a commentary on the squalid conditions of their own lives (with respect to sewage, plumbing, hygiene, plague, refrigeration, diet) as well as a philosophical pronouncement about the essence of human nature and natural nature. But Swift's ending is far from optimistic, as his readers from the 1720s onward have known, and by the end of the story Gulliver appears so very foolish that contemporary readers must have wondered whether Swift had not been satirizing his protagonist all along. Although we today are sympathetic with Lemuel's responses to the strange sounds and smells he experienced, we also want to laugh at him. But no sooner do we do so than we-especially Swift's most attentive readers-grow aware that we are laughing at ourselves, either unaware of the evil Lemuel has witnessed, or so jaded by its modern versions that we have become immune to the phenomenon of evil itself. Swift maneuvers a secure position between these extremes-like a steersman between the rocks of Scylla and Charybdis-by making Lemuel appear merely silly rather than philosophically pained, tragically afflicted, or even chthonically enraged. Swift's book ends as it began: a tightly constructed prose satire permeated with the attributes of the newly developing prose novel.

But social life in England drastically altered in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble, and coupled to its transformations were diverse new -130- needs for information from a hungry reading public. The old forms of Augustan satire broke down, were no longer adequate; and under the various agendas of the Walpole administration, and-more critically-in the ever-growing English cities, not even Swift's version of satiric realism in Gulliver's Travels was sufficient for readers of the 1730s and 1740s who wanted their literature to be entirely up to the moment. The extraordinary element of the up-to-the-moment syndrome is that all sorts of literature we may consider less than au courant from our perspective today passed as remarkably immediate for those readers-for example, the French and Spanish translations that were consumed in great quantities between the publication of Gulliver's Travels and Roderick Random, especially Cervantes's Don Quixote (the most popular foreign work of fiction up to the publication of Tristram Shandy) and Le Sage's Gil Blas. Even Fielding found Don Quixote irresistible as he fictionalized the 'don's' adventures in England in 1734. Narratives depicting Christian piety and heroism, such as many epistolary novels by women, and political satire, such as The Court Secret (1740), were found on the same shelves as anti-Walpole journalism and oriental travelogues. Even more popular, as many Fielding critics have shown, were works of romance: the form celebrating sentimental love within a wide series of fictive conventions. (Smollett was dubious, as he wrote in the preface of Roderick Random, that «romance» could accommodate his novelistic intentions, even if he did make forays into this form during the 1750s and 1760s.) Added to these were dozens of fictions we would call spy novels (often called by this name, as in Giovanni Paolo Marana's The Turkish Spy, Thomas Lediard's The German Spy, and others), as well as secret histories permeated with racy love and high intrigue. Satire was present in varying degrees in many of these works of the 1720s, 1730s, and 1740s, but not in the form in which it would appear in Smollett's first and perhaps most satiric novel, Roderick Random. Strains of satire are evident throughout Mrs. Haywood's novels of the 1720s and 1730s, but they appear in incongruent forms that adhere to another satiric tradition than the one found in Swift's prose works. Satire was even present in works of high didacticism and pious polemics. In short, it was ubiquitous.

During the 1730s the problem was how to satisfy a craving for contemporary realism, especially in its low- life versions, outside the confines of journalism and periodical essays. As John J. Richetti has written, the novel was, especially then, permeated with a 'native journalis-

-131- tic instinct for the notorious and the sensational.' All sorts of prose writing-secret histories, chroniques scandaleuses, romances of many varieties, voyages both real and imaginary, utopian and dystopian prose, rogue and other criminal stories, accounts of spiritual life and salvation, shilling pamphlets-attempted to cope with this demand for contemporary realism, though few fulfilled it with literary mastery. The old masters were no longer writing, the new not yet on the scene. By the 1730s Defoe was dead; Fielding, still a devoted playwright, had not yet written novels; Richardson, the successful printer, was still churning out didactic manuals instructing young women on how to behave; and Smollett, a Scot, was ten years old in 1731, growing up on the banks of rustic Loch Lomond, hundreds of miles north of London and Birmingham, a place remote enough not to be contaminated by the squalor of Glasgow and Edinburgh. No one knows exactly which literature, especially which prose works, Smollett read in these formative years before he entered the University of Edinburgh as a medical student. He must have read widely if his two poetic satires, Advice and Reproof, are an indication, but he grew up luxuriating on the banks of the lake, close to the land and its rustic values, within an environment as different as can be imagined from the one in London he would never genuinely consider to be home.

Seeking fame and fortune, he migrated to London in 1739 at eighteen, a penny in his pocket and persuaded that he could do other things if medical practice did not pan out, soon to experience the greatest jolt of his life-the chaos and confusion of one of the world's largest cities. Here he found a density of population he had never before imagined, as well as every form of violence and carnality, perversion and panhandling, rendering the people there alienated from each other, veritable accomplices in their daily transgressions. Fielding and Richardson had both been living in London for a long time and were better prepared for its vices, but Smollett was shocked by its aberrations. Like Fielding, he tried to gain entry to the city's literary life through the drama; but his first play, The Regicide, fell flat on its nose and he soon turned to the writing of prose narratives such as Roderick Random. Fielding had also turned to the writing of prose fiction in the 1740s, though for reasons very different from Smollett's, and if Fielding was temperamentally as attracted to epic, Quixotism, and roguery (as in Jonathan Wild), as Richardson was to tragedy and sentiment, Smollett found himself lured by a modified form of picaresque fiction-an old Iberian form dating -132- from the time of Cervantes and Lazarillo de Tormes in the sixteenth century whose essence chronicles the adventures of master and servant on the rogue road of life. But in Smollett, modification occurs as the result of his extraordinary endings, while reconciliations occur between characters and their society in ways no earlier picaresque writer could have imagined.

The advantage of this modified picaresque model for Smollett lay in its realism and the opportunities it presented for eschewing romance at all costs. Its essential mold combining adventure and wanderlust in a world overrun by knaves and fools was, to be sure, one of its main attractions for Smollett, as was the fact, so glaring to him, that it mirrored his own experiences, including his sexual encounters, in dangerous London as well as at sea as a ship surgeon. A loose, rambling form, picaresque sprawled to wherever the hero went; it was anecdotal and episodic, and thrived on a low level of probability, likelihood, and specific setting. The picaresque storyteller imagined his authority as deriving from the simple fact that his male cronies (there was little room for women in this patriarchal picaresque world, except to fulfill the most stereotypic of roles) wanted to listen to his stories recounting exotic adventures. The more the picaro rambled in picaresque, even when in the mode of a Swiftian 'progress piece,' the more he endeared himself to his listeners.

But picaresque also had disadvantages nowhere evident in satire. Satire existed in a more certain mental landscape, defined its values more clearly, was less self-conscious about its versions of didacticism and morality, and, most importantly, thrived on the vices of the city (as in Samuel Johnson's London, a modern imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal, the Roman poet). Satire, not romance in any version, was the literary form, perhaps even