his own importance.
Smollett's first two novels, Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, are much finer examples of this aesthetic than his third, as a consequence of the satiric potential of this view of the novel. Yet in Fathom something much uglier and potentially more horrifying than satire surfaces: the utter blackness of human existence-a world so bleak in its versions of villainy that the reader wonders how any of us has escaped from slitting his wrists long ago. As one critic has written, 'as a picture of unregenerate evil, Fathom is Smollett's masterpiece in satirical black comedy.' True, but Smollett's contemporaries did not see the book in this light, and even for those who penetrated its 'satirical black comedy' this content hardly redeemed it. Whether the culprit was the incoherent form of Fathom-a blend of elements-its satirical versions, the inherent villainy of its aberrant hero who remains depressing at best, or something else altogether, this third novel fell flat. Only in our century has Fathom regained some of the critical, and in my view experimental, respect it deserves.
But if satire thrives on incongruence and a rhetoric of irony, Fathom is satiric in ways few of Smollett's dedicated readers of the 1740s and 1750s could have overlooked. Obsessed with roguery and criminality, the rakish Rory, villainous Perry, and despicable Fathom always think - 141- they can beat society at its own game, and in the first two novels they do, perhaps as the result of inherent moral goodness rewarded by Providence. But Fathom exists in another sphere where neither chance nor luck can help him, nor the restoration of lost fathers and forgotten inheritances. Random and Pickle both endure hardship despite a picaresque optimism that always seems to play out in their favor, but Fathom's relation to hardship is that of happiness to the fool: at least the knaves plot their steps carefully (even Random and Pickle in their worst moments). But treacherous fools like Fathom compel their authors to send their readers a message too Swiftian to be missed. 'Happiness… is a perpetual Possession of being well Deceived… The Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves.' Swift iterated it in one satirical key, now Smollett in another.
Smollett's form in this third novel also baffled his readers, and did not enhance his reputation, no matter what symmetries they detected in the forces of good (Renaldo, Monimia, Farrel) triumphing over evil (Fathom) within a providential order ultimately just. The fairness of Providence sets the tone and shape of the book. A fraction of the length of Peregrine Pickle, it possesses a fraction of the number of characters-only seventy-one-and cultivates romantic sensibility rather than the innovative satiric picaresque. Instead of glancing at Apuleius or Petronius, Smollett disengages himself from formal satire and extols fancy and the imagination, fear and the passions. Nor does he incorporate the epistolary tradition or the type of moral allegory Sarah Fielding was then writing. Here the plot centers around the exploits of 'the treacherous Fathom,' born a renegade in 1708 in the low countries, 'a principal character [chosen] from the purlieus of treachery and fraud.' This morality play, soaked in black humor as it were, is played out in a sentimental romance, and early readers wondered whether the loosely connected story amounted to anything more than a string of flat characters monolithically good and evil. No middle, or gray, was sensed. Early readers were asking whether the novel possessed an appropriate mimesis or representation and wondered whether sentimental romance was being cultivated for ends they could not Fathom. Fathom did not seem at all to fit the paradigm of a 'satiric Smollettian novel.'
Yet, however odd the book may have seemed to general readers then, Fathom abounds with new features of great interest to historians of the English novel. The dedication is written by Smollett to himself ('To Dr. S--'), suggesting that an author assumes an autobiographical -142- role whether or not he wishes to. Then, in the dictum about the novel as 'a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life'-a broad canvas rather than a narrow section-a new completeness axiom is introduced to the English novel that reaches a zenith in Trollope, Thackeray, and Dickens. The range in Fathom is more limited than this aesthetic suggests, perhaps as a result of Smollett's fascination with roguery and crime, and in view of his intention to demonstrate, through plot and character analysis, that 'fear is the most interesting of the passions.' In chapter 21, Smollett introduces a scene of still-warm corpses and murderers in an abandoned farmhouse that is so chilling, the reader wonders what his intention is.
Experiment and inventiveness also abound in his formal plot: the novel begins in middle Europe, shifts to England, returns to the Continent, and ends (as it did in Roderick Random) with redemption in rustic retreat in a northern English county. There is nothing comic or lighthearted in this bleak picture of human depravity found in broad daylight as well as in prisons and asylums; villainy and madness dominate Fathom's pages as do fun and pranks in Peregrine Pickle, and the book has an altogether different flavor. Furthermore, the reader's expectations of realism are thwarted by twists in the story that are by turns fanciful, romantic, sentimental, Gothic, treacherous, and unpredictable-all registering a threshold of the 'merely probable' that troubled Smollett's readers. Even the flat, stereotypic character types drawn from many nationalities and religions function in this «probable» way: Jews and Mohammedans, Europeans and Turks, creatures from social classes high-born and low-born; and no episode in the 'love scenes,' no instance of the novelist's benevolence displayed toward Fathom, staves off the Gothic sense of impending evil that lurks throughout the novel. Nothing in the imagined world of the great Augustan verse satirists-the Popes and Swifts and their imitators during the 1730s-approximated this extremity of bleakness. The vision is so black that one wonders what Smollett's imagination was if it produced a book like this on the heels of two rollicking novels filled with light and sunshine.
For all of Pickle's formal oddities and digressive incorporations, that novel still resembled 'the Smollettian mold' and the Fieldingesque novel through its penchant for incorporations and digressions and its reliance on picaresque satire. But Fathom was unrecognizable and fulfilled few, if any, of the reader's novelistic expectations. Smollett, discouraged and having lost favor with some printers after its publication -143- in 1753, then turned to other forms of writing-histories, compilations, journalism, reviews-which informed the content of his last four works of fiction: the themes of prisons and punishment in Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762); the newly leisured sightseer in Travels Through France and Italy (1766); Japanese culture in The Adventures of an Atom (1769); and a new version, and inversion, of the res in urbis theme-the country within the city — in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). In certain ways Sir Launcelot Greaves is an even odder experiment in fiction than Fathom. A «romance» about 'English Quixotism' and knight errantry, it is the story of the young, melancholic Sir Launcelot Greaves, heir to a titled Yorkshire estate, who decides to become an 'errant knight,' and his hunchback peasant squire, Timothy Crabshaw. The book makes clear that Smollett's forays into romance (as in Count Fathom) were always made at a price.
Greaves is in love with the lovely Aurelia Darnel, whose father disapproves of their marriage, and Smollett spends much energy separating and uniting them, many times, until their marriage paves the way for the recovery of Greaves's estate. Marriage always saves the day in Smollett's fictions; here it takes a back seat to romantic love and Quixotism, to such a degree that even Gilbert, Greaves's horse, is thoroughly Cervantic. The pace is quick, the characters unfamiliar in the satiric prose tradition from Swift to Smollett, deriving as they do from the quixotic romance tradition. The story cultivates action rather than character (virtually all the characters are monochromatic grotesques named for their chief attributes: Cowslip, Crabshaw, Dawdle, Fang, Ferret, Gobble, etc.), and situation rather than theme. The remaining material satirizes local politics, elections, and various forms of patronage, rather than grand universal themes of life and death, reason and the passions; and the relatively small amount of satire is conveyed through familiar quixotic figures rather than animated norms (Houyhnhnms and Yahoos), as it had been in Swift. Yet the satire is also concrete and specific, as in the old forms of Smollettian villainy and grotesquerie from the 1740s.
It is hard to imagine why Smollett thought this model of the novel could succeed in 1762, even with its illustrations and serialization (Greaves is the first novel by a major English writer to employ both techniques). The versions of realism are problematic throughout, as incident after incident requires some deus ex machina to salvage the good guys. And its notion of fictive temporality is constantly placed in -144- jeopardy despite the development of the themes of madness (Smollett quotes profusely from contemporary psychiatric theory), imprisonment (hero and heroine are incarcerated next to each other and the penitentiary lurks as a motif throughout the book), and politics (corruption is rampant among local politicians). Indeed the theme of incarceration extends so far into the
