European 2_09 v7

Tobias Smollett’s final novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, published in 1771, is commonly viewed as Smollett’s masterpiece, a mature work which marks a transition from the picaresque adventure narrative to the masterly handling of epistolary form. Part of Smollett’s achievement in Humphry Clinker is in re-fashioning the epistolary travel journal to the purposes of literary fiction while retaining the considerable scope of that genre. Smollett’s choice of the epistolary travel form enabled him to range across subjects as varied as social change and the effects of luxury, topographical detail, moral observation, the description of customs and manners, and reflections on human nature and ‘character’. It also allowed him to draw upon his considerable talents as novelist, travel writer, historian, satirist, and all round eighteenth-century man of letters. Humphry Clinker is a work of great technical skill in which Smollett juggles the multiple viewpoints of five narrators – the superficially misanthropic Welsh Squire Matthew Bramble, his nephew Jery and niece Lydia, the shrewish Tabitha Bramble, and her maid Winifred Jenkins – to achieve subtle effects of irony and humour. The formal accomplishment of Smollett’s work was noted in the great resurgence of interest in the author around the bicentenary of his death, when critics began to question the long tradition of biographical interpretation in Smollett criticism, and to shift focus towards formal elements of his work such as the unity or ‘economy’ of Smollettian narrative, the use of persona, or the modification of picaresque form.ii In this essay I wish to focus on two aspects of Humphry Clinker’s form, epistolary travel writing and Smollett’s treatment of character, in order to resituate the novel within the context of wider enquiries into man, specifically the interest in human diversity and the different ‘characters of mankind’ shown by the science of man in the late eighteenth century.