Tobias Smollett, Novelist: Brutish or British?

In his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), William Hazlitt observed of Tobias Smollett, “There is a tone of vulgarity about all his productions. The incidents frequently resemble detached anecdotes taken from a newspaper or magazine.”¹ Hazlitt is far from unique in his assessment of Smollett’s novels. Since their initial publication, critics have found them lacking in formal structure and marred by an excess of violent and “vulgar” humor that is, if not positively immoral, at the very least amoral. Yet Hazlitt points out that these faults are also to some extent virtues. Because Smollett’s novels are composed of a series of comic episodes, they “always enliven, and never tire us: we take them up with pleasure, and lay them down without any strong feelings of regret.”² When Hazlitt wrote this, Smollett’s reputation as a novelist was at its height and would decline rapidly during the nineteenth century.³ As late as 1956, Alan McKillop confidently numbered Smollett as one of the five “masters” of early English fiction; yet his reputation as a novelist has not fared nearly as well in recent years as have those of McKillop’s other subjects: Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne.⁴ Book-length studies of Smollett’s fiction are so few that, according to John Skinner, “he risks becoming the first major English novelist to have passed from widespread popularity to virtual antiquarian status.”⁵ The supposed formlessness and immorality of Smollett’s novels have contributed substantially to this neglect. If the latter scandalized most nineteenth-century readers, the former proved more problematic for many twentieth-century readers. Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) mentions Smollett only in passing, and he has been conspicuously absent from subsequent accounts of the novel’s development, most of which tend to define the genre in terms of its exploration of individual subjectivity, its commitment to empirical realism, and its adjudication of conflicts between an older social order that valued birth and a newer one that valued merit.⁶ In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then, two varieties of intellectual Puritanism contrived to exclude Smollett from the literary canon.

Among his contemporaries, however, Smollett was known as a writer who, according to William Godwin, “published more volumes, upon more subjects, than perhaps any other author” of his day.⁷ In addition to his five novels, Smollett’s major works included a four-volume Complete History of England (1757–1758) and its five-volume Continuation (1760–1765); translations of Lesage’s Gil Blas (1748) and Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1755); numerous contributions to the Critical Review, a journal that he founded in 1756 and edited until 1763; an account of his own Travels Through France and Italy (1766); and a political satire called The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769).⁸ Today, if readers turn to Smollett’s work at all, it is almost invariably to his first novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), or to his last, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). These novels were celebrated by Smollett’s contemporaries for their rumbustious comedy and striking character sketches. However, they remain Smollett’s most popular works in part because they offer readers something that no other major eighteenth-century British novel does—a vivid view of what it was like to be a Scot in eighteenth-century Britain. Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker represent Scottishness as at once a liability—a source of alienation and marginalization—and a boon—a source of gumption and fortitude. Yet I contend here that Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker are not as different from Smollett’s other novels as they seem. For although only Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker feature Scots as major characters, all of Smollett’s novels—including Peregrine Pickle (1750–1751), Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), and Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760–1761)—are about the experience of being on the margins of elite metropolitan English society.

Much as Scottishness is at once a liability and a boon for Smollett’s protagonists, it has proved a double bind in Smollett’s own critical reception. Readers often attribute Smollett’s achievements in Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker to his incorporation of autobiographical elements, treating these novels’ representations of Scots and Scotland as an interpretive key. ⁹ Yet they have neglected to apply this key to the novels that fall between Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker. Instead, critics have tended to situate these novels in an English literary canon without exploring the possible impact either of Scottish literary culture or of Smollett’s experiences as a Scot in London on their apparent aesthetic and moral flaws. Kenneth Simpson has addressed this problem by reading Smollett’s fiction in the context of Scottish literary traditions, suggesting that his use of the grotesque derives from medieval Scottish literature, and that his disregard for linear plot development reflects the patterns of eighteenth-century Scotland’s still vibrant oral culture.¹⁰ The influence of Scottish literary and cultural traditions on Smollett’s writing requires a great deal of further exploration. Conversely, we should take seriously the challenges that Smollett’s novels pose to our current narratives of the rise of the English novel—or the novel in English—by questioning their adequacy to account for a wide range of eighteenth-century fiction. However, in this essay, I examine Smollett’s novels in terms of neither Scottish nor English literary traditions, but rather as one of the origin points of British literature. I suggest that Smollett’s fiction explores both the process of becoming British and the parameters or limits of Britishness in the wake of the 1707 parliamentary union between Scotland and England. Although the Union created a new British nation-state, it did not magically produce a new British identity to go with it. The halting development of British identity arguably began, as did Smollett’s career as a novelist, with post-Union Scottish migration to England, and particularly London, in search of economic opportunity. In metropolitan England, eighteenth-century Scots met with prejudice and disdain from the English, who feared that Scots might come to share the wealth and privileges that the English regarded as their own. In his Continuation of the Complete History of England (1760–1765), Smollett suggests that English fears were justified when he explains that these anti-Scottish prejudices were largely “founded upon the success of the Scots, who had established themselves in different parts of England, and risen from very small beginnings to wealth and consideration.”¹¹ However, Scots’ desire for access to English society was more ambivalent than their southern neighbors imagined, with some resenting and others welcoming the Anglicization of Scottish ways of life. Smollett’s fiction captures these dynamics of attraction and loathing, and incorporation and exclusion by depicting both metropolitan England’s lure for Scots and other outsiders and the cost of assimilation into that society.

There are undoubtedly autobiographical elements in Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker, as Louis Knapp demonstrated in his literary biography, Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners (1949), more than half a century ago.¹² However, I argue here that the influence of Smollett’s experiences as a Scot in London colored not only Roderick Random, but also his subsequent novels Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Count Fathom, and Sir Launcelot Greaves. Although these novels seem formless, their “plot” or structuring principle is simply the protagonist’s progress toward Britishness. The uncouth humor and physical violence of which critics have complained are simply incidental to that progress, which is never a straightforward trajectory, but which is driven by the protagonist’s repeated and often misguided efforts to infiltrate the inner circles of fashionable English society. In their efforts to win acceptance in metropolitan England, Smollett’s protagonists resort to hypocrisy, cunning, and sheer brutality before they recognize the value of the economic and moral autonomy that rural retirement affords. To become worthy of a country estate, however, Smollett’s protagonists must divest themselves of the moral defects and peculiarities of manner that distinguish other characters and instead become “unmarked” characters, suited by their unblemished perspective to observe the wrongs that surround them and, within a limited scope, to set them right. John Barrell has argued that this “comprehensive view” is an indication of gentility because it distinguishes the broadly educated gentleman from those whose perspectives are blinkered by their occupations. Without wishing to refute this, I suggest that this “equal, wide” perspective is also an indication of nationality, distinguishing the Briton from those individuals whose perspectives are partial and parochial.¹³ In Roderick Random and, as I suggest, in subsequent novels, the unmarked character, with his broad and disinterested perspective, is also a British character.

My argument takes seriously Smollett’s claim in the dedication to Ferdinand Count Fathom that his novels privilege character over plot as an organizing principle. Here, he describes the novel as

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 figure 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 his own importance. (FF 2–3)

Smollett’s protagonists serve to unite the various episodes of which his novels are composed. But although character in some sense takes precedence over plot for Smollett, he is less interested in exploring the intricacies of individual subjectivity than in using his peripatetic protagonists as lenses through which to examine the environments that they inhabit. Damian Grant has argued that, despite the definition of the novel that Smollett offers in Ferdinand Fathom, his protagonists cannot be considered as “an effective principle of organization” because they are empty vessels, without the individuality that we now consider essential to character. I would suggest that this is precisely why and how they function as principles of organization.¹⁴ To varying degrees, Smollett’s protagonists are marked by peculiarities of which they must be cured before they are suited to claim their rightful position as landowning British gentlemen and to undertake the responsibilities accompanying their rank.

An embryonic version of Smollett’s character-centered definition of the novel is implicit in the preface to Roderick Random (1748), where he suggests that the protagonist not only unites the various episodes of which the narrative is composed, but also facilitates readers’ moral improvement:

The reader gratifies his curiosity, in pursuing the adventures of a person in whose favour he is prepossessed; he espouses his cause, he sympathizes with him in distress… the contrast between dejected virtue, and insulting vice, appears with greater aggravation, and every impression having a double force on the imagination, the memory retains the circumstance, and the heart improves by the example.¹⁵

If readers learn from the protagonist’s experiences only when they are “prepossessed” in his favor, then Smollett took a risk in asking them to sympathize with a Scot. After all, only three years before the publication of Roderick Random, the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, which originated in the Highlands, had exacerbated deep-rooted English prejudices against Scots. Tacitly acknowledging this risk, Smollett has endowed Roderick with “the advantages of birth and education,” which he hopes will secure readers’ sympathies “more warmly in his behalf,” especially when they see Roderick subjected to “the selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind” (xxxv).

Roderick Random depicts a world driven by self-interest, in which hypocrisy, affectation, and cunning are the norm. Although he is often subject to others’ spite and cruelty, Roderick himself is far from free of self-interest, as is demonstrated by his readiness to take advantage of others’ weaknesses. At first, Roderick’s schemes stem largely from a laudable distaste for injustice, as for instance, when he is “inhumanly scourged” (6) by his schoolmaster for no reason and responds by tying the schoolmaster to a post and whipping his “withered posteriors” with a cat o’ nine tails (18). In addition to illustrating the physical brutality of which many of Smollett’s critics have complained, this incident establishes a pattern that Roderick will pursue throughout most of his adventures. When he finds himself unjustly used by others, he is overcome by his own injured “pride and resentment” (200) and takes it upon himself to chastise the offending individual. ¹⁶

Much of Roderick’s suffering is due to his Scottishness. In London, he faces poverty and prejudices that leave him a prey to “the artifice and wickedness of mankind” (73). As Roderick’s friend and fellow Scot Hugh Strap points out, within forty-eight hours of arriving in London, he and Roderick “have been jeered, reproached, buffeted, pissed upon, and stript of our money” (72), largely on account of their ignorance of metropolitan English manners and mores. In response to this humiliation, Roderick concocts a number of cunning schemes to attain wealth and prestige; but when he finds himself, as he so often does, the victim of others’ self-interested plots, he responds, as in the incident with the schoolmaster, by attempting to degrade his enemies in their turn—sometimes through physical brutality, sometimes through public humiliation, but most often through the crafty exploitation of their hypocritical self-interest.

Although Roderick is initially an overenthusiastic but likeable crusader against injustice on his own and others’ behalf, his desire to win a place in the highest echelons of metropolitan English society impels him to adopt the artifices that he despises in others. When Roderick uses Strap’s money to pose as a gentleman of fortune in search of a wife, he not only abuses his friend’s generosity but also reveals his willingness to deceive the wealthy women whom he courts and to forego marriage to his supposedly beloved Narcissa in order to satisfy his ambitions. His transformation from a crusader against injustice into a perpetrator of it eventually lands him in the Marshalsea prison. Imprisonment is a fate Roderick shares with Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Fathom, Sir Launcelot Greaves, and Humphry Clinker, although the latter two are jailed unjustly and soon freed. By isolating them from the corruption that permeates metropolitan England, imprisonment offers Smollett’s protagonists an opportunity to confront their mistakes and change the course of their behavior.

Imprisonment marks a turning point for Roderick after which he ceases to resort to the cunning hypocrisy that he despises in others. When he emerges from the Marshalsea, Roderick turns his back on London’s hostile high society and, like so many Scots in the wake of the Anglo-Scottish Union of Parliaments, finds instead a suitable outlet for his ambitions in Britain’s expanding commercial empire. He takes a position as surgeon on his uncle Lieutenant Bowling’s vessel in the hopes of earning a fortune “by [his] own industry” (400). With neither the opportunity nor the inclination to resort to the kind of schemes that landed him in jail, Roderick divests himself of the misdirected “pride and resentment” that motivated his earlier efforts to infiltrate the highest echelons of English society. He is very quickly rewarded for his industriousness and self-discipline when he is reunited with his long-lost father in Buenos Aires, where Bowling’s ship has delivered its cargo of slaves. Don Rodriguez, as Roderick’s father is now known, has amassed a vast fortune as the overseer of a plantation, some of which he uses to purchase the family estate in Scotland to which he, and eventually Roderick, should have been entitled by inheritance. His father’s wealth thus promises to restore Roderick to the genteel station to which he was born and for which he has finally proved his worth through his good conduct aboard ship. Cured of the extravagant and exploitative habits that he had adopted in London and Bath, Roderick embraces once more his earlier detestation of artifice and injustice. Now, however, his humanity is matched by his prosperity; and, in addition to punishing vice, he is also in a position to reward virtue and help those less fortunate than himself, including Narcissa, whom he marries, and Strap, who becomes the overseer of the Randoms’ estate.

Although some critics have doubted whether Smollett’s novels have a moral vision, I would suggest that it lies in the wandering protagonist’s final retreat from urban corruption to a secluded rural estate, which offers him both the means and the scope to exercise his newfound virtues on others’ behalf.¹⁷ Thus, Roderick, who now unites a good heart with great wealth, will devote himself to improving his estate and promoting the well-being of the “prodigious number of poor tenants, men, women, and children” who, upon his return home, “testified their joy by loud acclamations” (433). All of Smollett’s novels conclude with a rural retreat; however in Roderick Random it is specifically a retreat from the hostility and systematic exclusion that Scots, including Smollett himself, encountered in southern England.¹⁸ By renouncing his attempts to infiltrate elite English society, Roderick does not simply embrace a Scottish sense of inferiority. In the process of acquiring the wealth and rank necessary to win admission into the inner circles of metropolitan English society, Roderick also divests himself of the “pride and resentment” that previously characterized his position as a Scot. In retreating to his family estate, then, he rejects both English artifice and Scottish resentment. His lack of notable moral defects paradoxically marks him as British—an identity that in 1748 had not yet accrued definite connotations and was perhaps defined most clearly by what it was not.

Many of the features of Roderick Random that can be explained, however obliquely, by the hero’s Scottishness—including his orphanhood, his often brutal treatment of his enemies, his cosmopolitan wanderings, and his rural retreat—reappear in Smollett’s subsequent novels divorced from the context of British nation formation. Thus, Peregrine Pickle (1750–1751) is in many ways an expanded rewriting of Roderick Random with an English protagonist who is at once more self-assured and less likeable than Roderick. Like Roderick, Peregrine faces, if not prejudice, at least unfounded dislike, since his mother expresses an insurmountable loathing for her firstborn child. Peregrine, like all of Smollett’s young protagonists, is raised by surrogate parents—in his case, his uncle Commodore Trunnion and his aunt Grizzy. Whereas Roderick’s orphanhood leaves him exposed to the malice and cunning of various masters and relations, Peregrine’s estrangement from his parents allows him to become a small tyrant whose “large proportion of insolence” (70) keeps even his uncle in check.¹⁹ “Nevertheless,” the narrator hastens to inform readers, Peregrine also possesses “a fund of good nature and generosity” (70) that only just prevents him from becoming unlikeable and eventually enables his reformation.

Peregrine is an almost pathological prankster, and the European tour that is intended to complete his education is nothing more than a series of boyish escapades that produce a plethora of grotesque smells, sounds, and sights, and that often escalate into physical violence. Whereas Roderick’s pranks are often intended to punish others’ injustice or hypocrisy, Peregrine’s have no such morally retributive aim. Instead, Peregine seeks out “subject[s] for his ridicule” (115) simply to expose, laugh at, and sometimes exploit their oddities and infirmities, rather than to punish or cure them. The Commodore’s hatred of lawyers, Mrs. Trunnion’s secret penchant for brandy, Pallet the painter’s cowardice, and Mr. Hornbeck’s jealousy of his wife’s chastity, all come in for mockery. The pleasure that Peregrine takes in ridiculing others’ bizarre affectations allows Smollett to paint the vivid caricatures at which he excels and which, as McKillop observes, owe much “to dramatic tradition, and in particular to the stock devices and characters of city comedy.”²⁰ His caricatures and the episodes through which their faults and foibles are exposed also evoke Hogarth’s tableaus, a similarity that Peregrine Pickle’s narrator acknowledges when, after one of the many pranks that Peregrine plays on Trunnion, he remarks that “It would be a difficult task for the inimitable Hogarth himself to exhibit the ludicrous expression of the commodore’s countenance” (85).

Even while Peregrine’s pranks expose others’ foibles, they also serve to define Peregrine’s own character, becoming as predictable as Mrs. Trunnion’s drinking or Crabtree’s cynicism. Peregrine’s plots against others to a large extent structure Peregrine Pickle’s very thin plot. Much as Peregrine’s practical jokes leave characters in uncomfortable situations—covered with piss, blood, or humiliation—the cumulative effect of his pranks is to create discomfort in readers as they lose sight of any linear narrative progression. A similar principle informs the “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,” an account of Lady Frances Vane’s romantic entanglements that probably was included in Peregrine Pickle at Lady Vane’s request. Peregrine Pickle’s earliest readers found the “Memoirs” the best part of the novel; yet it has been dismissed by recent critics as a tedious digression that attenuates even further Peregrine Pickle’s narrative structure. But the “Memoirs” is in fact structurally congruent with the rest of the novel in as much as Lady Vane’s narrative proceeds according to the same cumulative principle as Peregrine’s story.²¹ Whereas Peregrine concocts one scheme after another until they become virtually indistinguishable from each other, Lady Vane takes one lover after another, with the same effect. In each case, the repetition transgresses a breaking point, beyond which Lady Vane and Peregrine dissolve from distinctive characters into predictable patterns and become less individuals than assemblages of traits and tendencies. Although Smollett conceived of the protagonist, rather than the plot, as the organizing principle of his novels, Peregrine Pickle’s episodic structure, including the “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,” undermines the distinction between character and plot because its characters are defined through repeated patterns of behavior rather than, as in Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748), published roughly contemporaneously with Roderick Random, through the expression of their thoughts and feelings.

Peregrine’s pranks do not succeed in curing any of his victims of their flaws and foibles, but they do suggest to readers the desirability of attaining the unmarked character that Roderick achieves at the end of his story—one that is free from mannerisms or quirks and that exhibits qualities that elicit admiration rather than mockery: compassion, honesty, and self-control, among others. Peregrine abandons the penchant for practical jokes that has come to define him as a moral oddity only after he has squandered in London the fortune left to him upon Commodore Trunnion’s death and landed in prison, where, like Roderick before him, he awakens “to all the horrors of reflection” (565). Peregrine is rescued from ignominious imprisonment and instated in his rightful social station in much the same way as Roderick, by an unforeseen paternal inheritance that rewards a very minimal demonstration of good conduct but that also seems to motivate its continuance. Upon his father’s death, Peregrine finds himself “in possession of a fortune more ample than his first inheritance, with a stock of experience that would steer him clear of all those quicksands among which he had been formerly wrecked” (635). His mismanagement of his first inheritance, which he wasted in “licentious riot” with a “set of young noblemen” who waged “war against temperance, oeconomy, and common sense” (485) has prepared Peregrine to retire from London to his father’s rural estate with his bride, Emilia. Once in the country and “shielded with caution, he bore his prosperity with surprising temperance; every body was charmed with his affability and moderation” (638–639). Similarly to Roderick, then, Peregrine acquires wealth and, somewhat less believably than Roderick, the virtues necessary to use it wisely.

If Peregrine Pickle’s ending is less satisfying than Roderick Random’s, it is perhaps because Peregrine’s reformation seems more sudden and less clearly motivated than Roderick’s, and the world that he has been inhabiting seems so incorrigibly permeated with hypocrisy, vice, and self-interest. Whereas Roderick is mocked and manipulated by others before he responds in kind, Peregrine only begins to suffer similar slights when he has wasted his first inheritance, after a long career of ridiculing others. For most of Peregrine Pickle, in other words, Peregrine might very well have been one of the Englishmen who jeered at and shunned poor, proud Roderick. Yet when Peregrine does begin to experience contempt and ridicule, his circumstances are very similar to Roderick’s upon his arrival in London: he has wasted his fortune and been expelled from fashionable society, leaving him with few friends or resources to rely on. Metropolitan England, hostile and alienating, exacerbates both protagonists’ moral flaws, the indulgence of which leads them to their lowest point—imprisonment. Their reformation requires that they eschew the city in favor of the country estate, where they can enjoy the moral and economic autonomy for which their encounters with hypocrisy, affectation, and self-interest have prepared them. Peregrine the Englishman, as much as Roderick the Scot, becomes a British gentleman.

Together, Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) and Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760–1761) effectively parse into two the moral preoccupations and narrative patterns established in Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle. Whereas Ferdinand Count Fathom’s unabashedly villainous protagonist takes to an extreme Roderick’s self-interest and Peregrine’s trickery, Sir Launcelot Greaves features as its hero a man who, at the beginning of the novel, already possesses the humanity and prosperity that Roderick and Peregrine acquire only toward the end of their stories. That these are generally considered Smollett’s weakest novels may be due in part to their one-sidedness, as if each was half of a single whole. Read as a pair, however, Ferdinand Count Fathom and Sir Launcelot Greaves illuminate the British identity that Smollett had begun to explore in his first two novels. They associate cosmopolitan or nationally mixed societies with self-interested cunning and parochial insularity with genteel virtues.

Compared to other mid-eighteenth-century fiction, Smollett’s novels cover a lot of ground: Roderick and Peregrine move between continental Europe and Britain, with the former also venturing as far afield as the West Indies and South America. In contrast, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews never leave England. The geographical mobility of Smollett’s protagonists recalls the itinerant heroes and heroines of an earlier generation of fiction writers including Daniel Defoe and Penelope Aubin. However, in Smollett’s novels, the protagonist’s mobility is driven by his social aspirations and indicates his moral stature: the more virtuous he is, the more confined his travels are. Ferdinand Count Fathom’s eponymous antihero is as cosmopolitan as he is villainous and continually changes his identity to blend in among people of various national origins and social classes. Sir Launcelot’s adventures, by comparison, are confined exclusively to England, and although Sir Launcelot Greaves adapts the Spanish picaresque Don Quixote—an English translation of which Smollett had published only five years earlier—the novel’s protagonist is as purely English as he is completely good.

Ferdinand Fathom’s rootlessness, the tenuousness of his ties to any determinate geographic or familial origin, enables his continual self-reinvention. Born in a wagon on the border between Holland and Flanders while his mother followed the allied army to its next post, Ferdinand “might be said to be literally a native of two different countries.”²² He is “acknowledged by no mortal sire” (8) because his mother has offered many a soldier her services in order to “sweeten the toils and dangers of the field” (9). Thanks to his itinerant military youth, Ferdinand can pass as a native of several European countries. When he arrives in Paris, for instance, he finds “a reputable place frequented by fashionable strangers of all nations” where he hears spoken “the high and low Dutch, barbarous French, Italian and English languages” and proceeds to “accost a native of each different country, in his own mother tongue” (90) so convincingly that none of his new acquaintances can determine the mysterious Count Fathom’s origins. During his travels, Ferdinand disguises himself not only as a person “of superior dignity of station” (91), but also as a musician and a physician, among other occupations. Ferdinand’s frequent changes of costume and his desire to pass as a member of fashionable society recall Roderick Random’s ploys; however, his willingness to exploit others for his own gain far exceeds that of Smollett’s first protagonist.

England holds special attractions for Ferdinand, both as his mother’s birthplace and as a land whose natives, he believes, are especially susceptible to exploitation. London, in particular, offers Ferdinand innumerable opportunities for self-reinvention because the entire city is like “a vast masquerade, in which a man of stratagem may wear a thousand different disguises, without danger of detection” (145). Matthew Bramble, Humphry Clinker’s moral compass, famously abhors the heterogeneity of cities, most notably London and Bath. In contrast, this heterogeneity appeals to Peregrine and Ferdinand because the chaotic mixture of ranks, nationalities, creeds, and characters offers scope for the former’s pranks and the latter’s more sinister plots. If Roderick loves London less, it is only because there he is too often the victim of others’ self-interest to fully pursue his own.

Although Ferdinand is more single-minded in his underhanded pursuit of wealth and status than is Roderick, he is nonetheless a notably unsuccessful villain. His devious plots are more often than not foiled, and his rare triumphs are precarious and fleeting. Smollett explains in the dedication to Ferdinand Count Fathom that he has chosen his “principal character from the purlieus of treachery and fraud… to set him up as a beacon for the benefit of the unexperienced and unwary” and to warn those “who hesitate on the brink of iniquity” of the “infamy and punishment” they stand to incur (5). However, it is not enough for Smollett that vice should be punished; virtue must also be rewarded. The last third of the novel thus leaves Ferdinand languishing in debtors’ prison and rather jarringly shifts its focus to the adventures of Ferdinand’s childhood companion, Renaldo Melvil, who has been deprived of his inheritance by his stepfather and has lost his fiancée to Ferdinand’s machinations. Renaldo’s ultimately successful endeavors to right these wrongs introduces a by now familiar conclusion: he is restored to his rightful position as heir to his father’s estate and uses his newfound wealth to help his less fortunate friends, including Ferdinand. In contrast to Renaldo, even Ferdinand’s remorse for his past misdeeds is self-interested. He wonders why he has “exhausted a fruitful imagination, in contriving schemes to betray my fellow-creatures, if, instead of acquiring a splendid fortune, which was my aim, I have suffered such a series of mortifications, and at last brought myself to the brink of inevitable destruction?” (274).

Despite his history of unmitigated villainy and his seemingly undiminished stock of self-interest, Ferdinand is granted a reduced version of the estate that rewards Peregrine’s and Roderick’s reformations, a concession that perhaps undermines the moral aims stated in the novel’s dedication. Renaldo rescues Ferdinand from “the extremity of indigence, squalor and distress” (347) and generously settles him “in a cheap country in the north of England, where he and his wife could live comfortably on an annuity of sixty pounds, until his behaviour should intitle him to a better provision” (355). Removal from the general iniquity that reigns in London promises to enable Ferdinand’s moral recuperation. However, Ferdinand’s rescue is also a punishment of sorts: unlike Roderick and Peregrine, he never successfully acquires the wealth and rank that would cement his acceptance in metropolitan English society. From his liminal beginnings, Ferdinand remains socially marginal until he is effectively exiled to the outskirts of England.

If Smollett’s first three novels seem increasingly pessimistic, with each featuring a more disorderly world and a more flawed protagonist than the last, Sir Launcelot Greaves marks a turning point, offering a vision of a just and harmonious society, albeit on a small scale. First published in installments in The British Magazine, Sir Launcelot vies with Ferdinand Count Fathom for the position of Smollett’s worst novel, with many readers dismissing it as an Anglicized, modernized, and therefore rather ridiculous adaptation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote.²³ Taking a questing knight as his protagonist allowed Smollett ample opportunity to condemn the self-interested hypocrisy that he so abhorred: Launcelot’s self-professed aims are “to combat vice in all her forms, redress injuries, chastise oppression, protect the helpless and forlorn, relieve the indigent, exert my best endeavours in the cause of innocence and beauty, and dedicate my talents, such as they are, to the service of my country” (49–50).²⁴ In contrast to Roderick, who adopts the hypocrisy he simultaneously deplores, Launcelot remains distanced from the moral disorder that he encounters during his travels. It is no accident that although Sir Launcelot Greaves still includes the earlier novels’ brutal physical humor, Launcelot himself does not join in the fun. Instead, incidents of physical violence and bodily humor fall to comic characters like Launcelot’s squire, Crabshaw, or his followers Captain Crowe and Tom Clarke.

At the novel’s beginning, then, Launcelot has already acquired the prosperity and humanity at which Smollett’s earlier protagonists arrived only after their reformation. Thanks to Launcelot’s careful management of Greavesbury Hall, the estate he inherited from the uncle by whom he was raised, “one would have thought the golden age was revived in Yorkshire” (61). Launcelot lacks moral foibles of any kind—except the seeming madness inspired by his thwarted love for Aurelia Darnel, whose family has long nursed toward the Greaves a hatred “hereditary, habitual, and unconquerable” (71). The Darnel estate borders Greavesbury Hall, and the surrounding community initially hopes that Launcelot and Aurelia might “extinguish in their happy union the mutual animosity of the two families, which had so often embroiled the whole neighbourhood” (65). When Aurelia’s devious uncle forbids the match, the neighbors “began to think Mr. Launcelot a little disordered in his brain, his grief was so wild, and his passion so impetuous” (72). Launcelot channels his thwarted passion into his quest to defend the weak and innocent from the corrupt and powerful. If his seeming madness is a form of lovesickness, then Aurelia’s affection is necessary to restore harmony both to Launcelot’s mind and to the neighborhood.

Yet it is not entirely clear that Launcelot is mad. To be sure, he has a family history of madness, and those whom he meets in his travels generally assume that he is at least a little unhinged, but Launcelot himself affirms that he is perfectly sane. His quest is inspired by the same spirit of indignation that inspires Roderick’s schemes to overcome his enemies, but Launcelot seeks to right wrongs committed against others, rather than, like Roderick, those committed against himself. Whenever Launcelot encounters injustice or oppression, “his grey eyes shone with such vivacity, as plainly shewed that his reason was a little discomposed” (49). The narrator’s emphatic “plainly” suggests that it is not in fact plain that Launcelot is mad, as his sparkling eyes might as easily express anger or indignation. Indeed, the novel suggests that a society in which a proponent of justice and compassion is deemed mad is itself disordered; and, if this is so, then Launcelot’s seeming madness “protect[s] Smollett more than his hero, allowing the author to engage in true social criticism while hiding behind the mask of Launcelot’s exculpating insanity.”²⁵ His seeming madness leaves Launcelot vulnerable to mockery and, worse, to confinement in a madhouse in London. His confinement elicits a type of remorse very different from Ferdinand’s: Launcelot “heartily repented of his knight-errantry, as a frolic which might have very serious consequences with respect to his future life and fortune” (229). The similarities between a jail and the madhouse are obvious; for Smollett, both are institutions in which the innocent but powerless suffer at the will of the corrupt and wealthy. Launcelot initially searches for Aurelia in London’s jails, believing her uncle may have had her imprisoned on false pretenses, before finding her in the very madhouse to which he is committed.

As a means of creating social order and harmony, Launcelot’s marriage to Aurelia both recalls Roderick’s marriage to Narcissa and prefigures the double marriages that conclude Humphry Clinker. The marriage of the Scottish Roderick and the English Narcissa reflects the fraught state of Anglo-Scottish union in 1748, as Narcissa acquires for Roderick the status of a totem that will enable his assimilation into elite English society. In contrast, Launcelot and Aurelia’s marriage constitutes a much happier image of national unity. It overcomes the history of hatred between the Darnels and the Greaves by uniting their estates so that “the perfect and uninterrupted felicity of the knight and his endearing consort, diffused itself through the whole adjacent country, as far as their example and influence could extend” (254). Far from undermining Launcelot’s devotion to helping the poor and downtrodden, his marriage and the private happiness it brings only increases his commitment to the public good. The conjoined estates—significantly located in Northern England, far from London and close to the Scottish border—stand at once in metonymic and metaphoric relationship to Great Britain, as the neighborhood’s harmony and prosperity both contribute to and stand for the nation’s.

Thanks to its questing hero, Sir Launcelot Greaves maintains a fairytale-like quality despite its commentary on political and judicial corruption in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. Humphry Clinker (1771), in contrast, insists constantly on its own topicality as the novel surveys the state of the nation through its correspondents’ travels from Wales through England and Scotland. The journey reveals that wealth and virtue rarely coincide in Britain, with the former concentrated in metropolitan England and the latter in the rural peripheries. Humphry Clinker’s epistolary form makes the novel seem like a more dramatic departure from Smollett’s earlier fiction than it really is. For, as Aileen Douglas has observed, “the extent to which the novel honors multiple viewpoints… has been exaggerated.”²⁶ Smollett invites us to laugh at the misspellings and misinterpretations of Tabitha Bramble and her maid, Win Jenkins, and to humor Lydia Melford’s romantic musings, but it is the letters of Matthew Bramble, a cantankerous but kindly Welsh gentleman, and Jery Melford, Bramble’s Oxford-educated nephew, that dominate the narrative in terms of sheer volume and moral authority.²⁷

Published more than twenty years after Roderick Random, Humphry Clinker offers a reassessment of Anglo-Scottish relations that offended some of its earliest readers with its “flagrant partiality to Scotland,” which threatened “to rather widen than heal the breach that at present subsists betwixt the South and North Britons.”²⁸ Admittedly, the novel condemns the ostentatious luxury and absurd affectations that Bramble observes in metropolitan English society as much as it lauds the simple virtues he finds in Scotland. Yet Humphry Clinker celebrates national unity through its harmonizing of multiple voices and its development of the metaphoric and metonymic relationships between estate and nation introduced in Sir Launcelot Greaves. Baynard’s estate, ruined by his wife’s love of “shew and ostentation” (326), reflects metropolitan England’s moral enervation, whereas Dennison’s moderation and industriousness have brought his estate to the highest “pitch of rural felicity” (362).²⁹ Scotland resembles Dennison’s estate writ large, offering the travelers a respite from the corruption and chaos of urban England. Lismahago, the Scottish half-pay officer with whom Bramble establishes a rather fraught friendship, explains that although the Scots “lost the independency of their state, the greatest prop of national spirit” in the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union (315), they have retained their economic and cultural independence from England and have not yet been infected with their southern neighbors’ love of luxury. Bramble is occasionally taken aback by the comparative simplicity of Scottish ways of life, but Lismahago reminds him that “No country is poor that can supply its inhabitants with the necessaries of life, and even afford articles for exportation” (315). If Roderick Random depicted Scotland as a place that an ambitious man would want to escape from, in Humphry Clinker, it is place that a sensible man would enjoy visiting—almost enough to want to stay.

Thanks in part to its representations of Scotland, Humphry Clinker has been subjected to biographical readings almost as often as Roderick Random. It is quite possible that Bramble’s affinity for Scotland’s simple virtues and stern beauties reflects Smollett’s own nostalgia for his homeland, which he last visited in 1766, five years before his death, and it is equally possible that Bramble’s bodily illnesses and irritable sensibility resemble Smollett’s own decrepit condition during that visit. But Humphry Clinker is less of an autobiographical farewell tour than a multifaceted reworking of the themes and plots that run through Smollett’s earlier novels. Whereas Roderick Random takes as its protagonist a fatherless young man who must prove himself worthy of his inheritance, Humphry Clinker features in Bramble a father who does not know of the existence of his son, the eponymous Humphry Clinker. In comparison to the titular characters of Smollett’s earlier novels, however, Clinker is a comparatively minor personage—a “miserable and shabby” stable boy (113) whom Bramble, unable to witness unmerited suffering without attempting to relieve it, hires as a servant. Only much later, after Clinker twice saves Bramble from drowning, is he revealed to be his benefactor’s illegitimate son. The revelation of Clinker’s origins allows Smollett to describe the reunification of father and son from the former’s perspective. Much as Roderick Random must prove himself worthy of his paternal inheritance, Bramble must recognize that Clinker is worthy of his affection. Clinker possesses all of his father’s sensibility and generosity without his cynicism and irascible temper, and Bramble eventually acknowledges that his son is “trusty, brave, affectionate, and alert” (388), not to mention “very sober and conscientious” (387). Although Bramble does not explicitly name Clinker his heir, he installs his son permanently at Brambleton-Hall, where he will train “as a Welch apothecary” (387)—a profession very similar to Roderick’s.

Indeed, Clinker at times seems like a parodic version of Smollett’s earlier wandering heroes. During the travelers’ sojourn in London, Clinker briefly sets himself up as a Methodist preacher, but since there is “no affectation or hypocrisy in [his] excess of religion” (186), this pretense hardly rivals Roderick’s or Ferdinand’s many impositions. Similarly, Clinker’s brief imprisonment for a robbery he did not commit is a comic reworking of Roderick’s and Peregrine’s transformative incarcerations. Clinker spends his time in jail attempting to save his fellow prisoners’ souls through his preaching. Clinker’s establishment at Brambleton-Hall, too, reworks the endings of Smollett’s previous novels insofar as he promises to revivify the already well-managed estate by peopling it with “a whole litter of his progeny” (387). This is by no means to suggest that Smollett, as he grew older, began to see the lower orders as the natural heirs of the wealth and prerogatives that his previous well-born heroes acquired. On the contrary, Humphry Clinker is loud in its protests against upstarts—common people, who, flush with the spoils of Britain’s commercial empire, flock to Bath to display their new wealth. Clinker is raised to his new position through the generosity and under the authority of Bramble, whose education and experiences suit him to oversee the British nation’s moral regeneration while Clinker’s loyal virtues suit him to participate in it.

Of all the novels written by McKillop’s five early masters, Smollett’s have the greatest claim to be called British. As scholars have begun to examine literature’s roles in the creation of British identity in the century following the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union, Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker have received renewed critical attention. That Smollett’s three other novels do not explicitly explore Britishness perhaps accounts in part for their continued neglect. I have argued here that there is more continuity among Smollett’s five novels than is generally recognized because all of them explore the questions of who counts as British and why. By rewriting Roderick Random with an English protagonist, Peregrine Pickle reveals the extent to which Roderick’s status as Scottish underdog makes us care about his fate. Ferdinand Count Fathom takes an outsider as its antihero, but although Ferdinand cheats his way across much of continental Europe, he fails either to infiltrate elite metropolitan English society on the one hand or to attain the position of a British gentleman on the other. Sir Launcelot Greaves, by contrast, is relatively insular in scope: its shining hero makes a brief foray into London’s corruption and chaos before beating a hasty retreat to northern England, which resembles Scotland in its comparative moral integrity. All of Smollett’s novels explore the experience of exclusion through protagonists who are marginal to elite metropolitan English society, and they depict brutality because exclusion is inherently brutal. Whereas his first two novels feature protagonists who determinedly seek admission to fashionable English society only to realize that they do not really embrace its values, the last two depict protagonists who, from the beginning of their stories, could inhabit that society but choose not to. We can only speculate as to whether the shift indicates Smollett’s acceptance of his own liminal status as a Scot in London’s literary circles, but it is perhaps significant that, in all his novels, it is those outside the pale who are marked as British.

Of course, Smollett’s near expulsion from the canon of eighteenth-century literature in recent years is not due entirely to the content of his novels, whether we are considering their Britishness or their brutal humor. Rather, it is because they do not fit easily in our “rise of the novel” narratives or conform structurally to our aesthetic expectations of canonical fiction. Arguably, however, the aesthetic standards preserved by the canon are not nation-neutral, let alone universal. The novel’s “rise” in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales takes a different trajectory than it does in England, yet the literary canon is concerned with Englishness rather than Britishness.³⁰ Smollett thus illustrates the double-bind of the “special case,” at once valuable and devalued because of his Scottishness. Rather than silently brushing Smollett aside because he disturbs our literary historical narratives, we might take his novels as an occasion to develop new and perhaps more accurate narratives. Then again, we could also follow Hazlitt’s lead and just enjoy a good joke on occasion.