by Steven Moore
Second, Smollett reinforces this theme by drawing upon the novelistic tropes of disguises, mistaken identities, and unrecognized relations. In a conventional novel, the unmasking of such disguises and mistaken identities at the end is supposed to reveal the “truth” of things, and restore stability after a period of uncomfortable instability. No such comforting stability resumes at the end of Humphry Clinker: the intelligent characters have not necessarily learned to see clearly, only how difficult it is to see clearly, whereas the unintelligent have learned nothing. Winifred writes the last letter in the novel, which indicates she’ll merely be exchanging one prejudicial viewpoint for another after the slight elevation of social status upon marriage, and her semiliterate orthography remains as unstable as ever as she boasts of entering, “by the grease of God, in the holy bands of mattermoney” (20 November).
Winifred’s comically misspelled letters are one of the delights of Humphry Clinker. Smollett anticipates both Lewis Carroll and James Joyce in using puns not merely for laughs but for insidious insights: in the 18th century, “matrimony” was indeed a “matter[of]money,” and when Tabitha—whose spelling is only marginally better than her maid’s—writes to her housekeeper to keep an eye on a servant named Mary Jones because she “loves to be rumping with the men” (2 April), the sexual nature of Mary’s “romping” is exposed. Lydia’s properly spelled letters, on the other hand, are straight out of romance fiction—amazing, isn’t it, that none of the heroines of epistolary romances ever misspells a word—and are probably Smollett’s indication that anyone can write such stuff.312 In one sense, Humphry Clinker is a satiric revue of many fiction trends since the 1740s: in addition to the epistolary romance (it ends with not one, not two, but with three weddings), it has plot points in common with Tom Jones and Clarissa, features Welsh provincials gobsmacked by the big city, mocks Methodists, and of course exemplifies the road romance that Smollett cut his teeth on 23 years earlier. At the same time, it is highly innovative: the novel is named after a minor character who doesn’t appear until a quarter of the way through the novel, and who remains a minor, ludicrous figure; the novel mixes in so many real characters of the time that a reader in 1771 could be excused for assuming that The Expedition of Humphry Clinker was a sequel to Smollett’s epistolary Travels through France and Italy (1766), which reads like it was written by Matthew Bramble in one of his fouler moods; and, last and least, it’s the first novel to describe the game of golf.
The current state of literature is only one of the many topics Smollett takes on in Humphry Clinker. Smollett wrote it on the heels of compiling The Present State of All Nations (1768–69), and the novel functions as his state-of-the-union assessment of English and Scottish politics, religion, architecture, medicine, finance, urban growth, nationalism, fashion, conspicuous consumption, horticulture, folk beliefs and superstitions, diet, trade policies, and anything else Smollett wanted to vent about. It’s a very pessimistic assessment (though Scotland comes off better than England), and even though the novel cautions us to take this as only one man’s subjective opinion, the breadth of observation and depth of experience behind those observations encourage us to take it as a fairly reliable evaluation. Admittedly, it’s a male viewpoint: Matthew (Smollett’s mouthpiece) writes over a third of the letters, and another third are written by Jeremy, who comes around to his uncle’s way of thinking. (The women who write the remaining third—or “turd,” as Winifred spells the word—are personal, unconcerned with larger social issues.) At any rate, no other novel gives a better sense of what it was like to be alive in the 1760s in England—what it smelled like, what people ate and drank, how they ran a farm or a household, how they traveled, how they talked, how they conducted politics, what the cities and countryside looked like from Wales east to London up to Scotland and back—nor offers such a colorful cross-section of society, from aristocrats to commoners, the college-educated to the barely literate, Brits, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Protestants, Catholics, Scotch Presbyterians, Methodists, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, masters and servants, the happily married and desperately single: a veritable panorama of English life in the early days of the reign of King George III. This is the novel Smollett was born to write, but it was his last hurrah: he died three months after its publication.
I don’t have the space to pursue some even more outlandish road romances published during this period, such as The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman (1778) attributed to a sailor named John Elliott (1759–1834), in which Brown sails to New Zealand, is separated from his crew, and wanders through several remote nations near Australia à la Gulliver’s Travels.313 A more obvious imitation of Swift’s novel is the anonymous Modern Gulliver’s Travels (1796), a poetry-rich satire in which a resident of Blefuscu claiming to be Gulliver’s son (by a Blefuscuan nun) recounts what’s been happening on the nearby island of Lilliput ever since Gulliver escaped. Both can be found in volume 4 of Claeys’s Modern British Utopias, which also includes an extraterrestrial road romance by William Thompson (1746–1817) entitled The Man in the Moon; or, Travels into the Lunar Regions (1783), an admiring allegorical portrait of Whig politician Charles James Fox. It reminds me that poet William Blake (1757–1827) began a truly lunatic novel called An Island in the Moon (1784).314 But he left it unfinished, which is a good excuse to leave it and these other travel novels to return to Earth for a sensitive genre I’ve been putting off for too long.
THE SENTIMENTAL NOVEL
A few months before Humphry Clinker was published, there appeared the locus classicus of the sentimental novel, The Man of Feeling by Smollett’s fellow Scot Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831). As his title indicates, the novel of sentiment—aka the novel of sensibility—privileged feelings over actions, emotional response over rational analysis, and friendship over passion. Its sexless protagonists were more sensitive than most to nature’s beauty, works of art, and poignant moments, and were meant to elicit (if not exploit) the reader’s sympathy and compassion. It’s important to note that back then the word sentimental did not mean what it does today: it’s not mawkish nostalgia, but rather an enlightened empathy involving thought as well as emotion, sense and sensibility, though it quickly degenerated into kitschy emotionalism, a taste for the pathetic rather than for the empathetic. Formally, they tend to be first-person narratives, simulating direct expressions of sentiment without authorial mediation (though there is sometimes a frame supplied by a sympathetic “editor”).315 We’ve already seen several partial examples, specifically those novels in which bad things happen to good people, such as Fielding’s David Simple and Sheridan’s Sidney Bidulph. In fact, the latter displays the sentimentalist in full bloom when Sidney gushes to a correspondent, “Oh, Cecilia! how exquisite are the pleasures and pains that those of too nice feelings are liable to! You, whose sensibility is as strong as mine, know this. From what trifles do minds of such a turn derive both joy and grief!” (283). Henry Brooke’s Fool of Quality is another example, which, in addition to pathetic tales of virtuous distress relieved by benevolence, features a member of the genre’s target audience, the previously quoted lady who admits “I love to weep! I joy to grieve! It is my happiness, my delight, to have my heart broken in pieces” (3:49). Perhaps the best illustration of sensibility can be found in Wollstonecraft’s Mary, after the protagonist witnesses the heartwarming results of her charitable acts:
Mary’s tears flowed not only from sympathy, but a complication of feelings and recollections; the affections which bound her to her fellow creatures began to play, and reanimated nature. She observed the change in herself, tried to account for it, and wrote with her pencil a rhapsody on sensibility.
“Sensibility is the most exquisite feeling of which the human soul is susceptible: when it pervades us, we feel happy; and could it last unmixed, we might form some conjecture of the bliss of those paradisaical days when the obedient passions were under the dominion of reason, and the impulses of the heart did not need correction.
“It is this
quickness, this delicacy of feeling, which enables us to relish the sublime touches of the poet and the painter; it is this which expands the soul, gives an enthusiastic greatness, mixed with tenderness, when we view the magnificent objects of nature, or hear of a good action. The same effect we experience in the spring, when we hail the returning sun, and the consequent renovation of nature; when the flowers unfold themselves and exhale their sweets, and the voice of music is heard in the land. Softened by tenderness, the soul is disposed to be virtuous. Is any sensual gratification to be compared to that of feeling the eyes moistened after having comforted the unfortunate?” (chap. 24)
Sterne answered that question with a wink in A Sentimental Journey, which both contributes to and complicates the genre, as do Tristram Shandy—which contains several sentimental episodes—and foreign examples like Rousseau’s Julie and Goethe’s Werther.
Like Sterne’s novella, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) by Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) is a famous but dodgy example of the genre. Spotting the sentimental trend early on, the impecunious Irishman wrote the short novel in 1762 because he needed the money. (Samuel Johnson, who acted as his agent, told Boswell the publisher who bought it sat on it for four years until Goldsmith was better known.) The story is clearly calculated to tug on the heartstrings: Rev. Charles Primrose calmly explains how he lost his cozy post at Wakefield and had to take a poorly paid curacy in a dreary village 70 miles away, where his family makes the best of their rural life—lots of sitting around the fireside sharing stories and songs, and drinking homemade gooseberry wine—until an escalating series of disasters plague the family: first one, then the other teenage daughter is abducted; his eldest son loses his girlfriend and wanders aimlessly through England and Europe like a Smollett character; the family home is burned to the ground; and Rev. Primrose is bankrupted and thrown in prison, where he receives reports that his eldest daughter has died and his son has been beaten and arrested. At that low point, an eccentric rich aristocrat who has been following their fortunes in disguise reveals himself and makes everything OK. Despite its echoes of the book of Job, it’s a corny story with a confused chronology and way too many convenient coincidences, more like a fairy tale than a novel.
To the superficial reader, The Vicar of Wakefield is sentimental in both the 18th-century sense—the novel is ripe with sympathy, feelings, and benevolence—and in the modern, nostalgic sense of evoking a simpler time of strong family values and rural joys. For those readers, the novel is comfortingly antiintellectual: each time book-learning is displayed, it turns out to be part of a scam. But to the sophisticated reader, there’s something wrong with this picture. Rev. Primrose represents an ideal Christian, but he’s easily and repeatedly duped throughout the novel: his financial naïveté is responsible for his expulsion from Edenic Wakefield, along with his naïve commitment to narrow religious dogmas that cost him his job and even endanger others: because his daughter swore an oath to her abductor, he tells her not to reveal his identity “even though it may benefit the public,” and he rejoices to learn they were secretly married, content to see his daughter shackled to her rapist. By the end of the novel, he’s become something of a joke, as when he buzzkills everyone’s excitement on their wedding day: “I told them of the grave, becoming and sublime deportment they should assume upon this mystical occasion, and read them two homilies and a thesis of my own composition in order to prepare them” (chap. 32). The novel appears to be more of a satire of sentiment than a celebration of it, especially since Goldsmith possessed a subtle, deadpan sense of humor that often went over the heads of his auditors.316 When Rev. Primrose’s eventual benefactor is first described, his “sensibility” is compared to a medical condition: “Physicians tells us of a disorder in which the whole body is so exquisitely sensible that the slightest touch gives pain: what some have thus suffered in their persons, this gentleman felt in his mind. The slightest distress, whether real or fictitious, touched him to the quick, and his soul laboured under a sickly sensibility of the miseries of others” (3). Later, a girl who sheds a tear at a sad story is said to be “possessed of too much sensibility” (19).
In a novel rife with deceptions and disguises, it shouldn’t surprise us that The Vicar of Wakefield is not what it appears to be. The warm, fuzzy tale has a rigorously mathematical structure—32 chapters, with the abduction of the daughter occurring exactly in the middle, with poetic statements of the theme in chapters 8 and 24—and virtually every plot development is artificially contrived: in the introduction to the Oxford edition I’ve been quoting, Robert L. Mack notes, “Almost every narrative episode in the Vicar’s account took its cue from or found its model not in lived human experience or behavior, but had been drawn straight from the work of a contemporary or immediate predecessor” (xxiv). The novel is not heartfelt but brainy; as Mack suggests elsewhere, “it is as if [Goldsmith] has caught all the mechanism of the sentimental novel without the emotional basis for which it is constructed.”317 This is not a criticism but a testimony to Goldsmith’s artistry. For generations The Vicar of Wakefield was read as a sentimental paean to homespun values and what Rev. Primrose calls “those harmless delusions that tend to make us more happy” (3). But today it reads like an exposé of the inadequacy of such values, and even the danger of those delusions, when trying to cope with living in the real world.
Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771) is one of the most peculiar novels of the 18th century, fascinating because of its form rather than its content. The story is negligible (and very reminiscent of Fielding’s David Simple): uncertain how to succeed in the world, a shy, overly sensitive young man named Harley is encouraged to go to London to obtain the lease to some land next to his modest estate; meets and listens to the sob stories of various people (a beggar, a prostitute, a madwoman in Bedlam); is fleeced by some conmen; fails to attain the lease and returns home, where he meets an old soldier with an even sadder sob story; contracts an illness from tending to the sick soldier, compounded by a broken heart after he hears a false report that his unrequited love is getting married; and then dies happily after she tells him on his deathbed that she has always loved him, a man too sensitive to survive in this harsh, corrupt world.
Although the story is pure 18th-century schmaltz, the form is surprisingly avant-garde. The novel consists of fragments, the remaining remnants of a much longer manuscript that a fat, insensitive curate has been using for wadding paper for his hunting rifle. Consequently, it begins with chapters 11–14 (which may have given Hamilton the idea to begin Memoirs of Modern Philosophers with chapter 5), then jumps to chapters 19–21 (with further gaps within 21), then 25–29 followed by an unplaced fragment, and so on until the concluding chapter. Hence, only 20 of the manuscript’s original 57 chapters are present, along with three fragments from the others. The story is preceded by an introduction by an unnamed editor who informs us that the manuscript was written by a sympathetic friend of Harley’s whom the curate describes as “a grave, oddish kind of man” called “The Ghost” by countryfolk (real name Charles). But since Charles narrates scenes at which he was not present, its veracity is in question. Thus the fragmentary manuscript, its uncertain status as an accurate memoir, and the three-ply frame around it all complicate The Man of Feeling, for which the manuscript’s editor apologizes at the end of chapter 40:
