the distressed and downtrodden, yet whose own life appears to be strung together only by random episodes and a series of romantic escapades. Here, as in Roderick Random, there is an unquenchable thirst for adventure-adventure that ends happily as Perry marries Emilia, inherits a vast fortune, and retires to his country estate. The narrative meanders and races in ways never found in its much tighter predecessor. Smollett tried to organize this huge hulk of material into a tripartite division: the hero's youth, dominated by stories of the sea and his own life in school; the hero on the Grand Tour; and the hero as a fortune hunter in London. But his structure is less evident than Fielding's tripartite division in Tom Jones, and Smollett's «plan» (if that is what it is) has neither the mythic nor the Christian elements of Fielding's book, nor its brilliant contrasts between city and country dramatized in the language of Providence and the carnivalesque. In this version of the amalgam of satire and the -137- picaresque, the latter seems to triumph, but the habit of lashing out at specific social institutions and individuals remains Smollett's most salient feature, seen in his attacks on writers who had hindered his writing career and, again, in the spleen directed at Fielding. Smollett's awareness of social confusion and the need for temporality is again evident, as in his brilliant contrasts between the city and country, land and sea, stereotypes of male and female in a milieu where gender is subservient to money; but human transgression and its consequential alienation are treated less analytically than his readers might have liked. Finally, these matters bear heavily on the novel's tone, suggesting that Smollett has cultivated adventure purely for its own sake in this book, without considering its implications for form and substance.
The new feature in Peregrine Pickle entails three interpolated narratives, longer and odder inset pieces than those found in any previous English novel and probably deriving from the new taste for lengthy narrative. The longest of these, occupying almost a fifth of the novel and occupying the space of more than fifty thousand words, is the 'Memoirs of Lady Vane,' the story of Frances Vane, a prominent socialite in love with pleasure. The others recount the distresses of Daniel Mackercher, an ally of James Annesley in the infamous suit brought against the Earl of Anglesey, and Count d'Alvarez, who was sold into slavery and later found in Bohemia. By the late 1740s, readers of novels expected to find such interpolations or self-contained digressions. Fielding had made use of them as early as the inset about 'Mr. Wilson' in Joseph Andrews, and there are several in Tom Jones: the Man of the Hill, the King of the Gypsies, the puppet show, and smaller ones, but Smollett's incorporation was original in a number of other ways that his readers immediately recognized.
Lady Vane's «Memoirs» are penned by a woman, whereas the other voices are male, and more significantly by a woman who, no matter how much she loves pleasure, continues to be viewed sympathetically by the novelist. At the end of her rueful story of escape and wandering, Smollett shows her to have learned through her far-flung experiences, as when she demands a settlement of a thousand pounds from her last lover. Again, transactions involving money in a fundamental way form the core of the Smollettian fantasy in these early novels. But Frances's story is also organically related to the moral realm of Peregrine Pickle and is not merely an extraneous island of erotic intrigue. Peregrine, perhaps in the role of Smollett's mouthpiece, accepts her account of her -138- amours at her own valuation and passes no judgment on her, just as the historical Smollett allegedly took her story in dictation and accepted it entirely. Finally, this unusual account of an articulate 'courtesan of pleasure,' published on the heels of another set of 'Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure' (Cleland's), permitted Smollett to glance at the anti-Pamela tradition and at contemporary female novelists ranging from Eliza Haywood and Penelope Aubin to Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Lennox. He accomplished this by catering to both male and female readers-vicarious experience satisfied both-and by extending his views about money to include female needs, feminist consumption, and female materialism. He further catered to the expectations of female readers by giving the 'woman of pleasure' a voice of her own through which she could plead that she was virtuous in ways that merited explanation. These 'Memoirs,' the size of a novella, amounted to much more than another conventional or interruptive feature, predictable by mid-century in long English novels.
The effect of the three interpolations (the two inset stories pertaining to male vicissitude are less original) was to give Smollett's amalgam of satire and the picaresque a peculiarly original flavor, but it did not work as well in this second novel as it had in Roderick Random. If the first part of Peregrine Pickle-populated with the grotesque figures of Mrs. Grizzle, Tom Pipes, Keypstick, Hatchway, Hawser Trunnion and his memorable comrades at the 'garrison'-was entirely original for its novelistic incorporations, parts 2 and 3 were less so. The large themes in part 1- real and surrogate families, the sense of «home» as a spiritual rather than a physical place, life at sea and in school, the new social relations of uncles and nephews, mothers and sons, boys and girls-caused some readers to wonder if Smollett had new philosophical interests he was bringing to bear on the novel, and several modern critics have speculated on the differences between Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle despite their abundant formal similarities. But these philosophical concerns have never been identified and studied because of the dearth of biographical material about Smollett's intellectual life before he took over the editorship of the Critical Review in 1756. Still, there is no doubt that Smollett was beginning to think in a new fashion about the ways in which societies are held hostage to terrorists like Perry the prankster, joker, drinker, exploiter, dissimulator. The only step Perry does not take is the final, anarchic one dissolving rule and order. Viewed from our perspective two hundred years later, it is clear that -139- Peregrine Pickle has much to offer the cultural historian of child rearing, puberty, and adolescence, as well as of school and student life.
The second part of the novel, ' Perry on the Grand Tour,' practically sank the novel with its lack of up-to- the-minute temporality. The problem lay not in Smollett's caricature-like simpletons (the tutor Jolter, the valet Tom Pipes, the painter Pallet who hitches up with Perry in Europe) but in their actions and in the reasons for their erratic and immature behavior. Here Smollett reverted to satire, as his hero and his traveling buddies deride foreign customs, alien figures (Pallet and the physician, who cross-dress, attend masquerades, and are jailed), and public institutions (colleges and societies) — all for the purpose of detecting vice and stamping out brutality. Some early readers were amused by these escapades; others thought there was something serious, almost philosophic, about Smollett's new interest in play and prank; but not even the last section of the novel-Peregrine's tour through polite society as a fortune hunter-or the three inset pieces could rescue the book. In the last part, Perry undergoes 'a rake's progress' and descends into the hell of poverty and despair, only to be rescued by philanthropists, Emilia's love, and his good luck in being restored to his father's estate and inheritance.
Peregrine Pickle was widely read in England and Europe and brought fame to its author, but was not the best-seller that Roderick Random was; nor has it enhanced Smollett's reputation in our time. However, there are signs of a change of tide. The novel's stylistic energy and ebullience in the presentation and development of character is apparent, as is its concession to female and middle- class readers, and there is a fresh sense in our time that Smollett possessed more profound insight into the social order and its confusion when held under stress than he has been given credit for. His novels have been studied for their views of economic wealth and luxury, and as a prose stylist he had much to offer readers seeking to understand how social creatures are transformed for the worse at the moment they become the victims of economic circumstance; but these are ultimately depressing topics for readers in any generation, verging on despair and the pathological.
At the time of its publication in 1751, the critical consensus was that not even Peregrine Pickle's exposure of the secrets of 'polite society,' or its recurrent amorousness, could redeem its male hero, who is so remarkably «crude» and «brutal» (though not as heinous in his acts as his successor, the archvillain Fathom). Nor was the novel redeemed by its constant ironic attack on targets chosen from every niche of human -140- society. No matter how unusual are the twists of his story in Peregrine Pickle, Smollett has revealed himself as a Rabelaisian Panurge or Pantagruel- the quintessence of the satirist-rather than as a sentimental novelist capable of inventing a sympathetic protagonist about whom we care. In the end we care more about Perry's world than his own fate, no matter how loud is Emilia's love song or how much money awaits him on his country estate.
The secret of Peregrine Pickle is found in the preface of Smollett's next novel, Ferdinand Count Fathom, an extraordinary pronouncement because it so strongly contradicts the story that follows while being so genuinely applicable to Peregrine Pickle:
A novel is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual is subservient. But this plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability or success, without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene by virtue of
