The Columbia History of the British Novel

novel's fabric that one wonders whether Smollett's Greavian penitentiaries reveal an arrière- pensée.

Smollett must have considered his brand of 'English Quixotism' thoroughly original (it anticipated Richard Graves's in The Spiritual Quixote by a decade), especially the suggestion that chivalry could revive manners and morals in Georgian England. The «romantic» landscape found in the book was Smollett's antidote to the cannibalistic city-London-he saw developing in the 1750s, and in Greaves's exposure of fools, knaves, and dupes, Smollett indulged the lingering satiric element in his psyche that needed to assert its affinities with Swift in A Tale of a Tub. But however integrated a 'modern knight' Greaves may be, however dedicated to the cause of uprooting corruption where he finds it (a type of picaro in reverse), his story seemed antiquated to readers of the first volume of Tristram Shandy. Also, Smollett's women in Launcelot Greaves appear stuffier than they had ten years earlier, his men less subjected to psychological scrutiny (for all Greaves's clinical madness, Smollett does little to establish its nature). Ultimately, the versions of realism and representation in the novel are shellacked with an antique veneer, such that the reader is pulled in the opposite direction of 'the contemporary moment' -1762- and of a novelist 'writing to the moment.'

Launcelot Greaves, like its equally problematic predecessor, Fathom, gained little critical acclaim. Appearing when novels of sentiment and sensibility were becoming increasingly popular, it introduced a cast that was derivative and quixotic (though the book was called a 'a modern romance'), lending it an atmosphere of the precious and cutting against the grain of the realistic sentimental fiction then coming into vogue. Nor did it treat of manners and morals in the contemporary scene, as women novelists from Lennox to Frances Burney would. It confronted the present by recreating an old, Cervantic world alien to the social needs of the new decade presided over by a new king, and its satirical vignettes were not strong enough in themselves to redeem the book. So, for the second time, Smollett turned away from novel writing to pursue compilations and histories. -145-

Fortune also bandied him about during the 1760s. While Sterne blazed into the spotlight with Tristram Shandy, Smollett was recovering from a term in prison, grieving the death of his only child, and witnessing the disintegration of his personal health, both mental and physical. Bitter and broken, he went to the Mediterranean in search of recovery and regeneration, returning to England only one more time. While abroad he wrote the vivid Travels Through France and Italy (1766), cast as letters by a splenetic traveler, and the very Swiftian Adventures of an Atom, the more intriguing of the two works from the perspective of the historian of the 'satiric tradition' of the novel.

The Adventures of an Atom is a throwback to Pope in The Dunciad and Swift in Gulliver's Travels, necessitating a «key» to unlock its seventynine characters (Got-hama-baba is George II, Fika-kaka the Duke of Newcastle, Sti-phi-rum-poo Earl Hardwicke, and so forth) and dense political references (every Japanese figure stands for someone English). This violent and scatological roman U+00EO clef is thoroughly «excremental» in its vision, if idiosyncratic in its presentation of Orientalism; and close perusal shows it also to be one of the shrewdest commentaries on contemporary British politics. The challenge of Atom lies less in its unities (a fragment, it appears to have no unity) or style (typically energetic and masculine) than in its versions of allegory and scatology; as a result, some of its first readers wondered what kind of fiction it was-this was the source of the debates about its authorship-and fewer could understand the author's purpose. Novel readers accustomed to Sophia, The History of Lady Julia Mandeville, The Fool of Quality, The Castle of Otranto, The Man of Real Sensibility, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Man of Feeling, The Tears of Sensibility, and, of course, A Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy, were baffled by a prose fragment with isomorphic targets.

The story is of a 'talking atom' contained within the body of haberdasher Nathaniel Peacock, but the «atom» inexplicably breaks away after it has undergone several transformations and political reincarnations. The «atom» (whatever it actually is) was part of the Japanese prime minister's anus, afterward having passed through the guts of a duck and the generative organs of a sailor into Peacock's pineal gland. While inside Peacock, the atom narrates events it experienced in Japan (England) from 1754 to 1767, but the reader unfamiliar with these political events is at sea. Few satirical works of the classical period are more interesting for the historian of the prose fragment than The Atom. Impossible to -146- construe as a novel, even in the experimental mold of Random or Fathom, it raises more puzzles than it solves and does not even attempt to be contemporary or temporal in the way Smollett had been in Launcelot Greaves. It is Smollett writing in his most satirical and Swiftian mood.

No such puzzlement greeted Smollett's last novel, the magnificently crafted Humphry Clinker, completed while the writer was abroad in search of health. Composed in the epistolary mode, but with letters that never resemble Richardson's, this comic «expedition» is built around five correspondences that show a relativity of viewpoints about human experience as it relates to social organization. The book is in every way a 'large broad picture' written in accordance with Smollett's earlier aesthetic. The correspondences are by the protagonist Matthew Bramble, a prickly and misanthropic Welsh squire with a heart of gold; Bramble's ward, Jery Melford, an Oxford University spark in search of his own identity; Jery's younger sister Liddy, a romantic boarding-school girl who is actually an inexperienced young noodle; Bramble's sister Tabitha (Tabby), a grasping and prudish spinster who has become man-crazy; and their commonsensical maid Win Jenkins, who writes hilarious misspelled letters yet whose religion permits her to see what the entourage actually is: 'a family of love where every sole is so kind and courteous.'

The five sets of letters are weighted in the correspondences of Bramble (prickly as his first name is biblically benevolent) and Melford (a realist who comments intelligently on Matt's excesses). Most of the eightythree letters, spanning over nine months from April Fools Day to Christmas, are written from Matthew to his personal physician, Dr. Lewis, and from Jery to his Oxford tutor, Sir Watkin Phillips. Henry James adjudged this complex point of view to be Smollett's greatest contribution to the development of the English novel, but it is only one of the book's interesting aspects. Smollett's achievement is more complex than any single element and includes the managing of satire, comedy, and romance under the aegis of a new epistolary model, as well as his new vision of the social order linking sex and sensibility, the city and the country, chaos and decay, life and death. He also fulfills certain readerly expectations while thwarting others, as when he operates against all expectations generated by the book's title (Clinker does not appear until the second third of the novel). His form here is a tightly constructed prose vehicle: an epistolary satire 'right up to the moment,' especially in its exposure of urban decay and confusion, but always with a new twist in the story line; the novel glitters in ways no previous book of Smollett's had. -147-

Humphry Clinker's 233 characters exceed the number in Peregrine Pickle, a book more than twice its size, and many of the figures are historical ones (real politicians, statesmen, preachers, scholars, physicians) at whom potshots are taken. Despite this, manners and morals never lie far from the novelist's imagination. The plot is episodic, loosely strung together, perpetually interrupted by accidents, detours, fires, flashbacks, characters who reappear from earlier Smollett novels (such as a repentant Fathom), and interpolations (like Jery's account of Paunceford and Serle, who suffer economic reversal). The five-way correspondences require that everyone's point of view be subjected to interpretation by everyone else. And the autobiographical elements are so strong (Smollett as Bramble) that even while exercising caution, it is impossible for the reader not to recognize that Smollett has refined his earlier satiric thrust into a symbolic myth about the good life, based on health of mind and body, the family, the country, and the pastoral north. But Smollett's epistolary vehicle also mitigates excessive contradictions by reasserting trifling comic values, as when Bramble informs Tabby that she must decide between him and 'her lap dog.' Smollett's epistolary mode sparkles in the way Pope's couplets had, and as Jane Austen's tight fictions would a generation later. The book's comic and terrifically grotesque flavor is further strengthened by Matt's 'goutiness,' the most resistant to therapy, if also most 'male,' of chronic Georgian diseases because few women contracted it while everyone seems to have endured its agonies without incurring serious jeopardy. Smollett's story (Humphry Clinker) and Bramble's medical condition (gout) are both inherently comic insofar as no great harm ever comes to either: the story ends happily and the victims of gout always recover. But in Smollett's time women were thought not to contract gout, virtually assuring readers that gout was a male condition. Moreover, there is something genuinely comic in the bloated male bodies populating the pages of Humphry Clinker.

Satire is diffused throughout Humphry Clinker and developed in relation to the clutter and filth of the British cities the group visits: a constant reminder of the assault on their physical senses, especially the olfactory (jokingly, Sterne nicknamed 'Smelfungus Smollett' for his sensitivity to smell). But clutter and chaos extend thematically beyond the city to all social forms, including politics, patronage, preferment, language, and social mobility. Smollett