subgenre, best equipped to capture the realism of the modern city and cope with its versions of brutality, even if it could not accommodate Smollett's other imaginative space: his unrelenting search for exotic adventure. Nothing can detract from the hard fact that the London to which Smollett arrived in 1739 was steeped in squalor and assaulted all his senses, forming one of the most lasting and recurring experiences of his life.
London may have been the setting for many romantic liaisons as the young Smollett entered it, but one would never know it from his early satiric novels. When romantic love appears in Roderick Random or Peregrine Pickle, it is subdued and merely idealized in the most convention-133- al of fictional ways. It is the picaresque hero himself who is romanticized, as several critics have noted, not the innocent women in these novels. Romance in these early novels of Smollett is absorbed, incorporated, diminished, and even inverted, but never made a principle of organization or the shaping block of one of the narratives. The first readers of these novels who had read in the romance tradition could hear the voices of romance as a backdrop-as a curtain behind which the young Scot novelist sometimes stood, as in his depictions of Narcissa-but never as any essential feature, let alone original pillar, of his early novels.
Perhaps it was this ambivalence and anxiety- Smollett's allegiance to satire and picaresque and his fierce recoil from romance-that dominated the substratum of his imagination when he conceived Roderick Random (1748). Here his themes are human violence and brutality, more specifically the transgressions and alienation that result from such acts even in unique circumstances; and this may be why he cast the most autobiographical and confessional of his novels in this mold. The vision is so dark and dreary that it borders on the cannibalistic, as each raw experience follows on one still rawer. But every tug toward the picaresque (as in the picaro's thirst for adventure through the encountering of new character types) drew Smollett back to fictive satire, specifically of the type that exposes vice and corruption within urban settings.
Smollett composes here as a sort of Hogarth 'drawing pictures in prose' rather than as a Swift who relies on parody of an already established form to lash out at his targets; his book is conceptualized as a series of intricate «pictures» intended to capture the entirety of society in its wide diversity. In Roderick Random Smollett uses his quill rather than the pallet (as Hogarth did) to portray the sequence of his hero's dissipations through drink ('Gin Lane' and 'Beer Street') and sex ('A Rake's Progress'), all in a first novel of the tough 'I was born' variety. His fictional canvas is broad (there are 126 characters in a book less than half the size of Tom Jones) and far-flung (Random travels from Scotland to England, Carthagena, Paraguay, Buenos Aires, and back). Fools, knaves, and dupes lurk everywhere: amid the crowds and mobs in the cities he visits, as well as in empty spaces on the rogue road of life and at sea. But there is nothing Swiftian about the strategies of presentation-no parody of an established form (travel literature), no exotic remote landscapes populated by pygmies, giants, and imaginary ratio-134- nal horses against whom the protagonist is constantly being evaluated, all for the purpose of beguiling the innocent reader into believing that the final product-Gulliver's Travels-had been something other than what its surfaces revealed.
Instead, the preface of Roderick Random hits the satiric nail in the center when it claims that of 'all kinds of satire, there is none so entertaining, and universally improving, as that which is introduced, as it were, occasionally, in the course of an interesting story.' Here the story derives essentially from the picaresque: an essentially good and morally honest Rory is turned into a criminal manqué as he makes his way through the kingdoms of villainy. Yet Smollett's achievement here entails his blending of 'picaresque realism' with diverse strains (not merely poetic varieties) of 'satire.' To achieve this end he uses the techniques of rogue biography (first person direct narrative suffused with dialogue) and couplet satire, and he also relies on Gil Blas, his supposed model.
No one could have read Roderick Random in tandem with Gulliver's Travels and thought they were similar. Sailors and the high seas dominate both books, as do a diversity of characters; both books are «pictures» in this sense but their tone and feel differ. Lemuel awakens at the end of his travels as a type of Swiftian Frankenstein's monster, alienated from his surroundings and awestruck that he has returned to yahooland, while Rory emerges from his picaresque road of life-a Dickensian nightmare to the finish-as a reclaimed saint who has arrived in heaven through the gates of a rustic paradise. In the end there is no means to reconcile these two satiric traditions in English fiction, although Fielding and Austen perform heroic attempts by invoking the values of the country estate over the moral chaos and mannerly disorder of the city. But a full account of the satiric differences of Gulliver's Travels and Roderick Random would necessitate further study of this tradition of satiric novel writing in the two decades between 1726 and 1748, a diverse and rich mountain of fiction, even if not distinguished by literary genius.
In Roderick Random, realism is achieved primarily through situation and irony rather than character analysis, as we see money won and lost, tricks deployed, stratagems contrived, the ravages of war ironically played out, vices like gambling rampant, heiresses duped, and every kind of innocence and goodness inverted. The grotesques who populate the book-the Bowlings, Straps, Weasels, Banters, Wagtails, Thickets, — 135- Chatters, Quiverwits, Straddles-cut against the grain of realism by virtue of their degree of cunning and knavery. But Smollett recoups what he has lost in grotesquerie from his brilliant blend of situation, satire, irony, and the picaresque threads of his narrative. Geographically, only the sea is made subordinate to modern urban sprawl. Roderick finds himself lonely in both places, suggesting a new type of character realism in the form of what modern sociologists have called 'the lonely crowd.' A second tier of realistic and contemporary themes also emerges: a world of children and their games, their pranks, and their play; school life and education (anticipating the bildungsroman); the ravages and ironies of war; the relatively new vice of sodomy (especially at sea where its tentacles cannot be escaped); and the perennial lure of foreign places basking under strange moons and exotic suns. The more Roderick and his fellows try to escape the clutches of these stratagems, the more alienated they become in a global world Smollett represents as «urban» as well as consistently violent and brutal. George Steiner has remarked, perhaps with Roderick Random in mind, that Smollett's world dwells on the making and losing of money. It is, more minutely, about the versions of despair and brokenness that arise when transactions involving money go awry.
Smollett does everything he can in Roderick Random to assert his sense of temporality. His characters are varied and racy, his pace so quick, that readers imagine they are hearing today's news. Time and space are viewed from the perspective of the present, even when the action is occurring outside England. In familiar and local places, London and Bath, the crowds are so large, the mobs so violent, that characters constantly fear for their lives; in South America and Europe the reader gladly forgoes the next twist in the plot to learn about local custom and practice. Love and intrigue (Miss Williams's sad story is but one example) thrive everywhere, as they did in the sprawl of historical London of the late 1740s. There are narrative insets and incorporations of other stories, such as the 'history of Melopoyn' (a pathetic poet imprisoned with Roderick in the Marshalsea prison) and «Marmozet» (David Garrick, the actor and playwright, who continues to appear in Smollett's novels), and flashbacks of the novelist's own life, as in the account of Smollett's attempt to produce The Regicide. In Smollett's vision the forms of urban dissipation are excessive, as is its crime (we expect to find Random in prison), all of which circumstances must have met the reader's expectations just as they satisfied Hogarth's viewers in 'The Rake's Progress.' -136-
Even the end of the novel courts realism through its combination of fantasy and escape. Here Random's picaresque wanderings through the land of nightmares come to an end and he is happily married-but only by returning to rustic Scotland, the country whose literature always plays an important role in the landscape of Smollett's novels. In brief, Smollett does everything possible to lend to his brand of the novel an aura of realism and the present. Yet in almost every episode or anecdote, every grotesque character or despondent situation, the satirist and ironist in him is evoked. And even the use of first-person narrative, allegedly to permit readers to glimpse the hero intimately, counteracts the energies of novelistic realism by converting it to a prose amalgam of new-style satire and a modified version of the old picaresque. It is a blend that English fiction had never seen before and from which many nineteenth-and twentieth-century novelists would learn. But the continuity of satire is a crucial element in this version: for all his novelistic inventiveness, Smollett, like his satiric predecessors, returns to the themes of the perpetual madness and bestiality of the modern world.
Peregrine Pickle, published four years later in 1751, is Roderick Random composed in another key and amplified to almost three times the size. Instead of 126 characters there are 226, twice as many as are found in Tom Jones, and at its heart lies an aberrant hero who, like Random, is a particular kind of rogue. The same amalgam of new-style satire and modified picaresque is evident, although the novel is written in the third person and is less autobiographical. The story is of a hot-blooded scalawag, «Perry» Pickle, who sympathizes with
