The Politics of Smollett´s ´Humphry Clinker´

Table of Contents

Introduction

1:Important Terms of Analysis

2.: A Short Biography

3.: History
3.1: Parliamentary History
3.2: Social History

4.: The Plot

5.: The Politics of Humphry Clinker
5.1: Social Hierarchy
5.2: Parliamentary Politics
5.3: Economy and Empire

6.: A Tory Utopia?

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

Among the canonical writers of the eighteenth century, Tobias G. Smollett is perhaps the single most underestimated. One reason might be that his earlier novels – Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), and Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), as well as Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760), are by far too violent in contents and by far too close to the romance in form and message to appeal to modern critics.^[1] All these works are written in the tradition of the picaresque, the first three rather in that of the French writer Lesage’s Gil Blas, the last one being closer to, sometimes even plagiarising, Cervantes’s Don Quixote with its more consistent and sympathetic characters. The first three display a rather pessimistic view of humankind, while the latter conveys a much more positive social gospel. In all these novels, contemporary and older history plays a critical role –something similar could be said for the author’s biography: Roderick Random reveals strong autobiographical elements.

A few months before his death in 1771, Smollett published his last and presumably best work, much less of a picaresque and his only epistolary novel. It had taken him years to write it as a project parallel to his Continuation of the Complete History of England (1760-5), The Present State of All Nations (finished 1768, after eight years) and other works, being struck hard with health problems. The novel, when published, quickly became the presumably most successful British epistolary novel and did much more than its predecessors to gain its author a canonical status: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker.

While the other novels’ critical appreciation has suffered a lot by modern critics’ distaste for violence and strong romance influence, the reasons Humphry Clinker tends to be underestimated because it is too historical, too explicitly political to be attractive to a rather ahistoric approach to literature, as it was usual in large parts of the twentieth century.

It is precisely this aspect this work is centred upon: The history informing it and the political creed breathing through the novel’s every sentence. Edward G. Said has called our attention to the movements in narrative space-time that are to be found in novels more than in other literary forms, and to the great importance of the novel in shaping history, shaping our present world, shaping empire.^[2] What do the movements in the novel mean? What is said about imperialism? Why, apart from being a Scot himself, does Smollett have Bramble speak like he does about Scotland? Who is the Duke of N----, and who are the people at his levee? Why does Bramble speak so much, at the end of the novel, about managing an estate? What are the views on trade talked about in so many of the letters, what does Smollett want to say –and what is there he does not say, or he cannot omit saying without losing his circumstantial realism? Why does the end of the novel appear as flawed as it does to modern readers?

To address questions like these, I will begin giving a very short account both of Smollett’s life and politics and an introduction into the political developments in the decade or so around the novel’s being written (George III’s succession in 1760 was followed by a lot of turmoil). After a short summary of Humphry Clinker ’s plot., I will reflect on some of the most important and direct questions posed by the novel.

The next chapter will be dedicated to the question whether Smollett, via Bramble and other political spokespersons, develops a positive utopia and what it looks like. This will involve class relations and Bramble/Smollett’s views on parliamentary politics as well as economy.

Finally, the aim is to arrive at some conclusions useful in understanding both the novel and its age via Smollett’s representation of it. Before going in medias res, however, it will be necessary to lose a few words on the main concepts underlying this analysis. This will be done in the first chapter.

1:Important Terms of Analysis

Describing a long narrative such as a novel as a cultural text appears to be a tautology. It goes without saying that a novel is a text, and that it is deeply rooted in a specific cultural context is immediately visible. But not all cultural texts are narratives, they are not even necessarily written or printed texts in the narrow, conventional, way the word is generally understood. A cultural text can be an oral tradition, a legal warrant, a picture or a statue. It might also be a film, or an advertisement. All cultural texts can be ‘read’ either in the literal sense or in the figurative sense of interpreting them in respect to the culture in which they originate. Take, for example, an advertisement. The busty blonde in her bikini lying on the bonnet of a sports car can tell us a lot about gender relations, aesthetic conventions and the relation between status and wealth in her society. All those things, however, are far beyond the intention the producers of that advertisement had when making it. They just wanted to make that car desirable enough for mainly male customers to make those mainly male customers spend a lot of money on the car.

A multitude of representations of socio-cultural realities and phenomena, of discourses produced by the society and underlying, shaping, its acts of communication is conveyed by that picture of the sparsely dressed young woman on the car: discourses and myths of wealth and style, of the value of displaying both and the connection between material success, happiness and sex. But this process of representation does not stop at just showing the way certain people perceive reality and discourses governing their perception. In a very subtle way the process of representation influences those perceptions: By expressing a perception it provides a frame of reference, it reinforces or questions a discourse –or both.

The total of representations that make up the ‘story’ of the advertisement –buy this car, show your wealth and style, and you will have success with women, who are supposed to look like this, and so on- make up a narrative field. In this narrative field, not only the things immediately referred to, not only the ‘most important’ parts of the narrative, are incorporated. There is also all that is only alluded to, that comes in without the author of the cultural text being conscious of expressing –even things that are deliberately left out, such as the pollution created by the 250-horsepower engine and the way people buying the car think about it.

If an advert is a cultural text, with a narrative field consisting of a multitude of representations, many of whom are not really intended or thought through by the advertisers, each of whom can be supposed to have some sort of effect on future representations of similar discourses or ‘realities’, thus on those ‘realities’ themselves, this implies two things: The first, that we have to watch out what we say because we might imply things we do not wish to imply. The second is that everything that has so far been said applies to literary works just as it does to an advertisement, and that due to the higher complexity of a novel as compared to an advert we might expect a denser, more extensive narrative field with a complex constellation of complex representations of –yes, complex social realities and discourses. Fiction is without a doubt heavily influenced by the way the author sees his or her social reality, how the discourses shaped by and shaping that society look like and how they affect the author, how the author wants us to see that social reality and so on. Apart from that, we must expect that there is a reason for everything that appears in the text –even if the author is either not conscious of that reason or things achieve new meanings by the text’s being read-, that there is a reason for everything that does not appear, that seemingly insignificant details can tell us stories, and that the narrative field can never be controlled by the author as completely as she or he would wish to or believes. The complexities mentioned here have been analysed in detail by Roland Barthes, who thereupon declared the ‘Death of the Author’.^[3]

A deep analysis of a narrative can give us good ideas about the society that gave birth to it, in which it was conceived. Equally, a detailed study of that society tells us a lot about the novel. Edward G. Said and other critics and historians have realized this fact. This work attempts to track down social realities Smollett refers to in Humphry Clinker and to extract the author’s political creed out of the text. The shape representations of social realities and discourses take is central to this effort.

2.: A Short Biography

Tobias George Smollett was born the son of a well-off but not really rich or high-aristocratic family in the Scottish county of Dumbartonshire in early 1719. After attending Dumbarton Grammar School, he went to Glasgow University, taking up an apprenticeship as a surgeon in Scotland’s second city in 1736. Three years later he went to London, where in December 1739 he passed his final examination enabling him to practice as a surgeon –which he did as a surgeon’s second mate on a man of war, the Chichester, in the West Indies. There, he met the daughter and heiress of a rich Jamaica planter: Anne Lasells. He married her, presumably in 1743, and returned to London to practice as a surgeon.

Smollett began to write, proving his lack of talent for tragic plays and his great talent for satire and farce alike. After having started translating Gil Blas from Lesage’s French, the young surgeon-writer published his first, strongly autobiographic, picaresque: The Adventures of Roderick Random. 1749 and 1750 were given to visits to the Continent; writing began to replace practicing as a surgeon as a main source of income. Smollett wrote satires on Fielding, on contemporary personal hygiene, and another picaresque: The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), the violent story of a villain who is finally led back to the path of virtue. Seven years (1748-55) were spent on translating Cervante’s Don Quixote, then work on his Complete History of England was taken up. Having co-founded the Critical Review, 1756 marks the beginning of Smollett’s most productive phase. A savage attack on Admiral Knowles in that paper sent him to prison for libel from November 1760 to February 1761.

In 1760, George II’s grandson had succeeded to the throne as George III. When, in 1761, the cabinet was reshuffled and the Stuart Lord Bute, the king’s friend and substitute father, became secretary of state, Smollett supported his fellow Scot in his attempts at ending the war with France that had cost vast amounts of blood and money since 1756 with a weekly founded for this purpose: The Briton. Suddenly, Smollett was in the middle of an extremely fierce ideological struggle that finally forced his main rival, John Wilkes (The North Briton), to leave the country and may be said to have cost Smollett’s health, as it certainly cost Bute’s position. In June 1763, having given up work on The Briton after peace was achieved and having lost his only child Elizabeth –fifteen years old when she died on April 3 1763- Smollett went with friends and wife to France and Italy. From 1765 to 1768, he returned to Britain, residing in London and Bath and visiting Scotland. Already, he was working on The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, which he published in June 1771, living in the Italian town of Antignano near Leghorn. At the same time he conducted other work, but Humphry Clinker seems to have been his favourite project ever.

Not long after that novel’s first edition had been greeted enthusiastically by public and critics, Tobias George Smollett passed away in his villa Il Giardino, in the study with the breathtaking view over the Mediterranean where he had written Humphry Clinker.

All his life, Smollett had been a Tory of very pronounced views concerning what society should be like, favouring a strong, possibly ‘home-grown’ (as opposed to foreign Orange or Hanover) monarch in Britain’s balanced constitution, a hierarchical society where everyone knew their place and in which politics was made by paternal, independent and self-conscious squires having in mind their country’s well-being. Charity, in his view, was to take the place today’s public welfare takes, and it was to be paid for with thankfulness and loyalty on the side of the receivers, the ‘inferiors’ in his vision of the world. These views, of course, inform his satires and are integral parts of his fiction and his historical, as well as critical, work.

3.: History

3.1: Parliamentary History

George II’s reign had been characterized by the ascendancy of the Whigs –originally a derogatory term for the supporters of the house of Hanover in the struggle about James II’s succession to the throne- and by Sir Robert Walpole’s exceedingly long premiership 1721-1742, a period of relative stability after the short and bloody interlude of Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the much less bloody Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Jacobite invasion of 1715 and the dynastical change of 1714, and before the renewed Jacobite troubles of 1745 –but bought with corruption and oppression.

Frederick Prince of Wales was an impatient man who had grave personal problems with his father, and he took every possible and impossible occasion for a confrontation with the King his father. When Frederick suddenly died his son George, twelve years old, impressionable, naïve and mentally not exactly stable, became successor to the throne. He inherited the views his father had professed without ever understanding that they were but means to vex and harass the old man with the crown. As a substitute father, he chose a friend of the family and alleged lover of his mother’s, John Stuart Lord Bute. Lord Bute became his guide, his idol, his inspiration, the hero whom he worshipped, who helped young George to at least temporarily forget his inferiority complexes while, on a much deeper level, sustainably reinforcing said complexes. Lord Bute never really was the mighty knight in shiny armour George saw in him, but in one point George was right: He himself was never fit to be King of England, Scotland and Wales, head of the Empire. Like many men who are unfit for the job they hold, he compensated for his lack of qualification with an overdose of vigour, which was at times replaced by a depressed lack of activity or periods of veritable madness. In 1760, when George III succeeded his grandfather, he wanted to slay dragons like the patron saint of England whose name he bore. His dragons were corruption, sloth and vice. Unfortunately, he did not realise that the glue holding together parliamentary governments in a time before party organizations and the accompanying ideologies consisted of precisely that corruption and patronage he was about to fight. As a result, his first decade in office was a perpetual crisis of government, and in the second decade the American settlers’ colonies claimed and won their independence. Walter Bagehot was right when he stated that George III was the evidence that a British monarch should leave politics to the politicians and restrict himself or herself to giving glamour and legitimacy to the sometimes dirty business of actually governing the country.^[4]

Hardly had the new king, rather a boy than a man, settled on the throne in the autumn of 1760, his grandfather’s and William Pitt’s government was at the brink of collapse. It had been held in an uneasy balance between Pitt, a cabinet tyrant who detested and refused patronage, and the Duke of Newcastle, the patron of patrons, by a king who virtually always somehow managed to achieve a compromise and bridge the wide gaps within the administration. George III’s first act of making his idol Lord Bute the second secretary of state alienated both Pitt and Newcastle –the one was no longer the unquestionable tyrant in the government, the other suddenly lost his status as the Lord of Gifts,^[5] the man who organized parliamentary support for the government by corruption. Bute had, in the years 1760 and 1761, very quickly achieved a very important position. His disciple George had inherited the throne, he himself a fantastic fortune and the leadership of the Scottish parliamentary group. Now he, politically little experienced, was the key figure in the government –which did not last long. Pitt had urged to expand the war to Spain before the treasure fleet from her colonies arrived. Bute, supported by Smollett’s Briton, had tried to stop the war, whereupon Pitt resigned. On January 4 1762, Spain entered the war that since 1756 had given Britain colonial possessions and a national debt unprecedented in history. Spain’s treasure fleet had arrived and made her a much more dangerous enemy. Peace talks were kept up, but their final success alienated England‘s only Continental ally Prussia.

When the war was over in 1763, Britain was completely isolated in Europe but the dominant colonial power. The American settlers already started to give a bad headache to various successive English governments who consequently alienated the King’s no longer loyal subjects on the other side of the Atlantic with new taxes designed to alleviate the national debt. With great regularity, minor problems led to major crisis in the government while the king failed to reconcile the warring parties –as far as the word is accurate: The first organization resembling a political party was founded in 1769: The superficially radical populist John Wilkes’s Society for the Defence of the Bill of Rights.

Pitt was, after a few years, created Earl of Chatham and thus moved to have another go at governing the country in 1766. He tried to destroy the factions that existed in the House of Commons and succeeded in giving disproportionate strength to the only one that opposed him: That of Bedford, Temple and Grenville. He tried to end Britain’s isolation in Europe and left his post when Frederick the Great of Prussia disappointed his aspirations –leaving behind an administration in which every minister did more or less his own business without any serious coordination. The Bedfordites gained power and government posts they utilized to reverse Pitt-Chatham’s policies and –in their own perception- conduct a ‘policy of firmness’ towards the American colonists, who might have been stopped from getting revolutionary aspirations had it been different.

In 1768, Smollett’s and Bute’s nemesis John Wilkes came back from his French exile to take his personal revenge for the legal trouble that had made him leave the country years before. He did it by bringing England closer to the brink of revolution or at least civil war than she had ever been since 1688, while at the same time an anonymous writer who called himself Junius and seems to have been Philip Francis, an officer in the War Office, conducted a slander campaign that added to the general instability.

Only in 1770, after a further government had collapsed, did a phase of stability begin that was to last for twelve years.

This panorama is what Matt Bramble has been living with for a few years when he does his tour of Britain. But apart from parliamentary troubles, what else happened?

3.2: Social History

On a level below that of the parliament, just as in parliament, the country was ruled by what Watson calls a ‘squirearchy’.^[6] The local landlords were not only the focal figures in political and economic life, they also monopolized virtually all branches of the legal professions. To become a Justice of the Peace (JP), it was vital to be a landowner in most parts of Britain. In Middlesex, the tasks of JPs were fulfilled by ‘mercenary JPs’, men who were not gentlemen and lived on the fees they took for their services. They often were corrupt.

To vote, a man had to own, not rent, an estate worth 40s. a year. A county’s local government was made up of its JPs, and appeal against a JP’s decision was a very expensive and difficult legal procedure. Matt Bramble was a member of his day’s ruling class.

In London trade flourished, but of Britain’s population of ten to eleven million inhabitants (3¼ million of whom lived in Ireland and therefore did not play a big role), most still lived off of the land; the two biggest cities in England by 1760 were Bristol (60,000 inhabitants) and London (750,000). Many landlords, however, invested rather in trade and industry than agriculture once their estates had been enclosed.

By 1763, after the Seven Years War, Britain had the largest and most powerful empire ever, and the importance and prestige of trade had grown correspondingly. It must be owned, anyway, that the status assigned to trade was still much bigger than its real volume or importance. New wealth came into the country from the colonies, and it profoundly changed the social hierarchies. A strong, self-conscious urban middle class, literacy, and a new literary genre that by the end of the century was virtually unanimously referred to as ‘novel’ rose simultaneously,^[7] and urbanization began to take up pace –at the end of George III’s reign it was to be a rush for the newly industrializing cities.

The foreign trade balances delivered staggering profits that were appropriated by small minorities usually living in London. A bank system began to emerge, and in the 1760s, the first canals were built. They were to be the greatest improvement in transport until the railway was established.

In English agriculture, a first ‘Green Revolution’ had taken place after Jethro Tull and others had introduced the idea of scientific farming, which required literacy, capital and large strips of land in one hand only to deliver its admittedly impressive improvements. As the requirements suggest, it turned out to be a top-down revolution leaving many small farmers landless, slightly bigger farmers with grave disadvantages in the increased competition of ever-bigger sheep that grew quicker and quicker, and much-improved wheat harvests. The winners were big gentlemen farmers, who used their political and legal power to enclose the old commons. The paradoxical consequence was a vastly increased agricultural production that allowed much fewer people to actually make a living producing it. The once important class of the yeomen had virtually vanished by 1770.

Wealthy people invested abroad, in the colonies, and got exceedingly rich by it. The money for the initial investment likely as not came from the country, but the money earned almost invariably went into the cities, and of these mainly to London.

As a whole, it can be said that Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century was a country in the transition from a pre-modern, feudalist, to an early modern, capitalist, society. England, as so often, was the leader among the British nations at realizing change. Even though the transition was a quick one, it was surprisingly smooth. There was no revolution, as there was to be in France. This was partly due to new religious movements like Wesley’s Methodism, partly to the fact that the old gentry understood, after the top-down ‘Green Revolution’ of the enclosure movement, that there was a lot of money in new technologies and trade. It was a squire-turned fabricant who financed Watt’s invention, and it was the Duke of Bridgewater who, in 1759, had the canal from the Worsley coal fields to Manchester built.

Not all landlords cared much about their estates: In Gloucestershire, for example, there were parishes that had not had a resident landlord since the Norman conquest.^[8] Newly rich men bought land and parliamentary seats to accompany their wealth.

The most obvious social problem of the age was crime. It had impressive dimensions, and an inefficient judicial system responded by creating vast amounts of criminal offences. Stealing a loaf of bread and a pint of ale was enough to be hanged, and as a whole there were more than 500 capital offences. This did not help fighting crime, however: It made punishment appear like a particularly hard fate, since hardly any criminal was ever caught. The people on the gallows were mainly clumsy hungry paupers who did not run quick enough. Many judges were corrupt, and virtually no one was qualified. Humphry’s juristic problems in London are untypical only insofar as he has a gentleman patron to help him out.

The eighteenth century was a period of rapid change in just about every sector of social activity (society should be understood as a process rather than as an entity), and this chapter is necessarily flawed by its generality and brevity. But as a whole, what has been said should give a gross picture of Matt Bramble’s times.

4.: The Plot

As has already been stated, Humphry Clinker is, unlike Smollett’s earlier novels, not a real picaresque: the picaro, the rogue who makes a living by his wits, being drawn into often violent, often grotesque, adventures, is missing –although Obadiah Lismahago is a very Quixotic figure. One typical picaresque feature, however, is maintained: Much of Humphry Clinker consists of episodes that are linked rather loosely, and the motif of travelling remains central, as the novel’s name suggests. But while a real picaro is forced to travel by having to run away from prosecution for a crime, by having lost an estate he (almost universally, a classical picaro is male) wants to regain, or by similar reasons, Matthew (‘Matt’) Bramble of Brambleton Hall and his family are tourists.^[9]

Bramble, an ingenious Welsh model country squire in his fifties, gout-ridden and hypochondriac, often grumpy but good as gold at heart, arch-conservative even for his age but well-educated and with a fair share of common sense, leaves his estate in Monmouthshire with his husband-hunting sister Tabhita (‘Tabby’), his nephew Jery Melford –Oxford graduate and just as given to satire as his uncle-, and Jery’s sister Lydia, a seventeen-year-old beauty of a romantic disposition, sensitive and in love with an actor called Wilson, to regain his health. Of the servants they take with them, only Winifred Jenkins, Tabhita’s beautiful but almost illiterate maid, who writes several of the novel’s 83 letters, with many fantastic malapropisms, is really important.

Bramble himself quickly comes to hate Bath, where social barriers play a much smaller role than he would like them to, but his younger relations love it. Tabhita hunts for a husband, but the Irish knight she manages to interest in her rather scarce charms is quickly disenchanted when Bramble opens his eyes as to his sister’s real financial situation.

When the season in fashionable Bath has finished, the old squire leads his company to the Big City: Lydia has never seen London, the centre of political, economic and social life in the British Isles. If Bramble hated Bath, he detests London even more. It is the symbol of the corruption of the age, social distinctions are diminished to the point where a footman pretends to his master’s status, and city life is unhealthy. On the way to London, however, the family meets a young peasant called Humphry Clinker, who helps them after an accident that makes Bramble dismiss both his coachman and his valet. Humphry takes them first to the next inn in a coach, then, after having been relieved from a very bad economic situation by Bramble’s charity, out of thankfulness offers himself to fill the second position without wages. His wish is almost granted –he cannot avoid being paid.

From London the company, now with Humphry, who has had problems with a corrupt judge in the City, saved Win Jenkins from rape and revealed himself as a most devout and talented Methodist lay preacher –the latter much to Bramble’s dislike- starts on the way to Scotland.

Bramble keeps on criticising the society that makes him sick, Tabby goes on looking for a husband, Lydia dreams of Wilson and Jery enjoys himself, since Bath looking beyond his uncle’s grumpiness and hypochondria and admiring him more and more. Win Jenkins is not sure whether to give her affection and whatever it entails to Jery’s new footman, a Francophile proto-dandy, or to solid and able Humphry, who proves to be extremely useful but sometimes over-zealous. Approaching the Scottish border, the company has a first encounter with Obadiah Lismahago, a Scottish veteran and retired lieutenant who has had a more than hard time in America, and a friendship develops. Jery’s dandy footman, after having given a display of his real, rather secular, interests, leaves in a hurry with an Irish fortune-hunter’s prey, much to Humphry’s delight –the honest servant with his dog-like loyalty to his master is now without a rival in his attempts on Win Jenkin’s heart. In Scotland, Bramble recovers his health and returns to England a changed man: dynamic, virile and optimistic.

On the way home to Wales, the new Matt Bramble gets plenty of possibilities to show his new energy, his restored health and virility. Lismahago, who had his own business to attend to in Scotland, re-joins the company on English ground and wins Tabby’s heart, not just her despair –and Bramble’s consent in doing so.

The occasions for Bramble’s display of his new-found energy involve the restoring of estates of old friends ruined by the corruption of the age, notably the bad influence of a woman addicted to luxury and displaying wealth to the point of its destruction. When Bramble meets a college friend, some real identities are revealed: Lydia’s Wilson is in fact the gentleman son of Bramble’s college friend, and Humphry is Bramble’s illegitimate son, thus almost a gentleman.

Tabby having won Lismahago, Lydia her ‘Wilson’ George Dennison, and Win Jenkins her Humphry –now Mathew Loyd-, three marriages are celebrated before Matt Bramble and Mr. and Mrs. Lismahago return to Brambleton Hall. The youngsters, significantly, are drawn back to Bath.

The end, as conventional, romance-like, even trivial, as it may seem, is significant: Wales (Tabhita, Lydia) is married to Scotland (Lismahago) and England (Wilson/Dennison), after the sick gentleman (and thus the virtues embodied in Bramble) has recovered his health and helped other gentlemen to restore their estates, while virtue and loyalty (Humphry, Win Jenkins) are rewarded: Humphry is ‘promoted’ to an almost-gentleman and gains the prize of the love and hand of a beautiful woman who knows exactly what is required of a wife –this she learned by being a chambermaid for years.

5.: The Politics of Humphry Clinker

5.1: Social Hierarchy

People who are not members of the gentry are dramatically underrepresented in Humphry Clinker, to the point where a superficial reader not versed in the age’s history might get to the conclusion that, beside the gentry and aristocracy, there was only a tiny class of servants and a somewhat bigger bourgeoisie. The fact that the vast majority of the population of Bramble’s England consisted of rural paupers is one of the things Smollett consciously leaves out. Letter number 29 (Jery to Watkin Phillips, London, May 24), however, has the company and thus the reader plunge into the realm of mean life: The family, after a coach accident, meets Humphry the peasant. Humphry, honest as he is, has recently had some bad misfortunes. He was ill, and his illness has not only cost him his job as an assistant messenger, but forced him to pawn all his halfway decent clothes. He offers his help, which is accepted. Conducting the family to the next inn in the repaired vehicle, he shows an unacceptable amount of naked skin. Win Jenkins notes that that skin is particularly delicate, but on Tabhita this is lost. Bramble, having fenced off his sister’s rage at the naked facts in front of her eyes, helps the pauper, who thereupon insists in an ingenious way on being accepted as a footman in Bramble’s service –a favour that finally is granted.

What we have here is a representation not only of the hardships of a peasant’s life, but also of the way part of the contemporary gentry reacted to it: Tabby can be interpreted as a representative of the more arrogant and superficial (in her case female) gentry: Humphry, in her perception, ‘ha[s] the impudence to shock her sight by shewing his bare posteriors’.^[10] Tabby does never bother to think why Humphry is incorrectly dressed.

Bramble, on the other hand, shows himself a real gentleman, as Smollett understands the term. He does inquire, and he extracts the peasant boy’s story from him. He concludes: ‘Heark ye, Clinker, you are a most notorious offender – You stand convicted of hunger, sickness, wretchedness, and want’, and he gives him money to get back his clothes from the pawnbroker.^[11] Bramble shows charity, and Humphry pays it back with a dog-like loyalty: ‘I will serve you on my bended knees, by night and day, by land and by water’, he tells Tabby, and to her brother he offers to ‘follow him to the world’s end, and serve him all the days of his life, without fee or reward’.^[12]

It is here for the first time, that Smollett’s idea of a perfect society begins to take shape. Later the loyal servant, having had occasion to prove his commitment, is to turn out to be Bramble’s illegitimate son Matthew Loyd. The symbolic value appears clear: Bramble, the model squire, is the father of Clinker, his model peasant/servant. There is no coincidence or simple poetic justice here. This is a political statement.

The main group to whom statements concerning social hierarchy are directed, however, are not the peasants. The questionable honour of being constantly reprimanded for social ambitions belongs to the bourgeoisie, the newly enriched class of tradesmen and merchants. In Bath, like in London, Bramble is positively disgusted by the intermingling of classes. In the twenty-third letter, his letter to Dr. Lewis dating from May 8, Bramble describes how he was ‘obliged’ to go to a ball with Lydia. He hated the ball with its mixed attendance, and the smell, he says, made him faint. Bath, to him, appears simply horrible, and the reasons are based in his social attitudes:

Every upstart of fortune, harnessed in the trappings of the mode, presents himself in Bath, as in the very focus of observation-Clerks and factors from the East Indies, loaded with the spoil of plundered provinces; planters, negro-drivers, and hucksters, from our American plantations, enriched they know not how; agents, commissaries, and contractors, who have fattened, in two successive wars, on the blood on the nation; usurers, brokers, and jobbers of every kind; men of low birth, and no breeding, have found themselves suddenly translated into a state of affluence, unknown to former ages; and no wonder their brains should be intoxicated with pride, vanity, and presumption.^[13]

Bramble detests the luxury –a term that was just beginning to acquire its contemporary meaning-, and he detests the fact that in Bath, he is surrounded by ‘men of low birth, and no breeding’. He plainly states whom he has in mind uttering his objections.

In London, Bramble finds that there is ‘there is no distinction or subordination left.’^[14] That Bramble figures as Smollett’s political spokesperson here, can be seen from the author’s treatment of Buonarrotti’s painting Last Judgement in his Travels through France and Italy (1766): It appears disorderly to him, representing ‘a mere mob, without subordination’. Equally, he is shocked by the fact that Michelangelo used a common assassin dying on the wheel as a model for his Jesus on the Cross.^[15]

There are many instances where Bramble insists on subordination, and the way he and Jery act, pass judgement on people and help out the deserving, infallibly finding out who is a virtuous pauper etc. is a strong statement concerning the virtue of a gentleman. For the sake of brevity, however, let us now go on to the next point.

5.2: Parliamentary Politics

Matt Bramble is a Tory, just as his author was a Tory. In the eighteenth century, however, parties were not quite what we understand the term to mean today. For one, there was no such thing as a party organization, and Whigs and Tories should rather be understood as two not absolutely distinct tendencies in the political class. Watson claims:

[…] it may be said that anyone calling himself a tory was glorying his lack of political common sense and lack of ambition for office. Whigs were those who aspired to ministerial status, but also included those who –even if as anti-court as any tory- gladly accepted the existing order […] The country whigs cannot be logically distinguished from tories.^[16]

Generally, it was still believed that somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum there was to be found a single ‘patriotic line’ that could be found by a thoughtful, honest gentleman with a sufficient dose of common sense. This philosophy saw faction and party as the root of all evil, while in fact it stopped compromise from happening: If someone believed he had found the only right thing to do in a given situation, anyone else could only be of a different opinion if either he had no common sense or he was less than honest. George III himself believed himself to be in the possession of the ‘patriotic line’. So did many. The only point of real unanimity as to what the ‘patriotic line’ was , was that central government was not to be trusted.

Bramble, like Smollett, is a child of his age. In London, he has much opportunity to show his views. For starters, there is Mr. Barton MP, Jery’s college friend. In the thirty-second letter (June 2), Jery tells his friend Phillips of an event at court he and Bramble have witnessed with Barton. The MP uncritically glorifies everyone he sees, while Bramble utters critique that might be sufficient for him to be sent to prison for libel. Also, the Duke of N(ewcastle) figures for the first time. Here, as on the levee he gives soon after (Jery’s letter dating from June 5, number 35), he is depicted as a fool who cannot remember names, greatly over-estimates his own power and flatters everyone in a ridiculous way. William Pitt is described as ‘the great pensionary’ and ‘weathercock of patriotism’,^[17] Smollett’s old enemy John Wilkes and Earl Temple as Pitt’s ‘satellites’. Wilkes in particular has ‘rancour enough in his heart to inoculate and affect a whole nation.’^[18] Bramble wonders how Barton can speak as supportive of the government or anyone in Parliament as he does ‘without obliging us to resign all title to the privilege of common sense.’^[19]

The Thursday after, ‘the father of corruption’,^[20] as Bramble calls Newcastle, has a levee. Letter 35 (Jery to Phillips, June 5) describes the scene at this levee. A certain Captain C. (he cannot be identified) is at the levee –he is a well-known French spy, but even in a time when war with France is a likely prospect no one really seems to mind. This sort of behaviour amounts to high treason on Newcastle’s part.

Charles Townshend, who was part of various governments and had a tendency to change his ideals according to the current majorities, appears. Captain C. says: ‘He would really be a great man, if he had any consistency or stability of character [,] wants courage’ and is ‘cowed by the great political bully’ William Pitt, who ‘is no more than a craven at bottom.’^[21]

When the ambassador of Algiers comes to visit the man he believes to be the Prime Minister (Newcastle), the duke makes a fool of himself. The ambassador reacts by saying, more than a bit alienated:

‘Holy prophet! I don’t wonder that this nation prospers, seeing it is governed by the counsel of ideots; a series of men, whom all good mussulmen revere as the organs of immediate inspiration!’

Newcastle makes promises of patronage he is no longer in the position to keep, and he commits blunders whenever he talks to a guest.

Apart from the display of strong personal animosities, it can be very clearly seen that Smollett criticizes corruption and patronage (in Newcastle’s person), incompetence and lack of independence and patriotism in his days’ political class. As before, a multitude of examples must be left out, but the general picture should be clear from what has been said.

5.3: Economy and Empire

The one domineering fact in late eighteenth century Britain was the Empire. It had effects both in Britain and the wider world that were to dwarf the effects of all other political and economic realities. The Seven Years War (1756-1763) had left Britain the centre of a gigantic mercantilist and centralist empire that by its sheer size takes up a unique place in the history of the world. It made indispensable the maintenance of the biggest navy the world had ever seen. For its maintenance, Britain heavily depended on an extremely unprofitable trade with Russia. It forced writers, even when they concentrated on the motherland, to locate their narratives in a Greater Britain that stretched from India to Canada and what today is the USA.

At home, imperialism had dramatic social effects. When Matt Bramble in Humphry Clinker laments the flood of luxury sweeping over the country, urbanization and the loss of social distinctions, he refers to effects the expansion of trade and thus the Empire has on his society. It was international and colonial trade that enriched the people of ‘low birth, and no breeding’ who have captured our attention above.^[22] When Bramble speaks of ‘plundered provinces’,^[23] Smollett utters a critique of imperialism he does, however, not maintain consistently or elaborate upon.

The most fruitful discussion of trade and imperialism Smollett gives in his novel can be found in Bramble’s conversations with Lismahago, the stereotypical Scot Smollett forces us to respect and who becomes both his link to Greater Britain and his political spokesman concerning the less acceptable aspects of trade.^[24]

Lismahago is a monument to the ingratitude of England for her ‘arsenal’ Scotland and her soldiers, he personifies Scottish virtue, and he has suffered greatly in the wars creating the Empire. Now he is cast away, lives on a meagre half-pay, never having been promoted beyond the rank of lieutenant despite of great bravery –a common fate for a Scot, as he tells Bramble.^[25] Lismahago defends Lord Bute’s peace, which ended the Seven Years War –Bramble finds the peace shameful.^[26] The Scot has, as Bramble observes in his letter of July 15, rather original ideas concerning trade and wealth. He only sees the disadvantages and dangers, while Bramble, who has previously professed similar fears, focuses on the merits of commerce. Lismahago is convinced that Scotland’s poverty (famines were still frequent) is a blessing for the country. He says ‘that commerce would, sooner or later, prove the ruin of every nation, where it flourishes to any extent – that the parliament was the rotten part of the British constitution – that the liberty of the press was a national evil – and that the boasted institution of juries, as managed in England, was productive of shameful perjury and flagrant injustice […that] the nature of commerce was such, that it could not be fixed or perpetuated […]’, that sooner or later there was an end to trade.^[27]

It is tempting to assume that at this point, Lismahago takes Bramble’s place as Smollett’s political spokesman, as Evans maintains.^[28] In fact, the lieutenant voices only part of the discourse the author wants to establish, as can, apart from the evidence yet to be given in this work, deduced from Jery’s and Bramble’s joining the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce.^[29] It would be inconsistent if Smollett’s main spokesperson was to enter that society while the author disapproves of its aims.

Bramble goes into great detail in respect to Lismahago’s views, and he feels obliged to contradict his every argument. After returning from Scotland, in a renewed debate with Lismahago, Bramble states: ‘[…] I am one of those who think, that, by proper regulations, commerce may produce every national benefit, without [the disintegration of social order by luxury and effeminacy].’^[30] It is here that Smollett speaks. The reasons for regulation have been voiced in admirable clarity by Lismahago, and their nature is hinted at when, on September 12, the family witnesses a touching scene: A son believed dead but having made his fortune abroad comes home and gives new economic life to his rural parish by being charitable and investing his money in his village, not in a city.^[31] Bramble does approve of trade, and so does Smollett. Both are one in claiming the profits of trade for the countryside, to improve the estates and the lives of those who live on and off the land.

6.: A Tory Utopia?

Michael Rosenblum, in the article of his that has already been mentioned above,^[32] develops the argument that the movements in narrative time-space and the political ideas expressed in Humphry Clinker, as well as, notably, the last pages of the novel amount to no less than a positive Tory utopia developed by Smollett and uttered by Bramble. All things considered, the writer of these lines is strongly inclined to share Rosenblum’s arguments. The representation of social reality in the work evokes a picture of a society that is as ill as Matt Bramble. Having visited Scotland, with its still-alive clan system Bramble describes admiringly though not uncritically, the health of the novel’s focal figure is restored, and he sets out to set things right. The impulse comes from England’s Northern neighbour, and it comes from an idealized past long lost to England whose reflections can still be seen in Smollett’s native country. The money to effect changes can be taken both from the land itself and from a commerce that is directed towards the restoration of a Golden Age. England has to overcome her social malaise in order to achieve this, but finding inspiration in Scotland’s living history, she can.

What does Bramble’s ideal society look like? Many single features have already been mentioned above. Thus, insubordination has to be stemmed, every person is to know his or her ‘station in life’, as the contemporary phrasing ran. Luxury, in its new-found meaning as a vice of the affluent, has to end and be replaced by content, wholesome living. The corruption ruling in London has to stop, corrupt and incompetent politicians have to go.

The profits of trade have got to stop flowing into London, and be appropriated by honest squires like Bramble, who will use them for the good of the country. The squires must not gain too much individual power, as is the case with some highland lairds, but the class of independent squires as a whole is to remain the ruling force in the country.

One ever-recurrent motif in Smollett’s fiction is the recovery of a lost estate. Roderick Random gets rich by trading in slaves after having met his lost father and uncle, who are in the same business. With the money, he wins back the family estate that was lost when the father disappeared. In the other picaresque novels, similar things happen. Bramble now, never having lost his estate, is not in a position to recover it. It is evident, though, that Smollett was not ready to give up on this element when writing his last and finest novel. Apart from that, coming home from Scotland, his beloved niece Lydia still has not won her Wilson.

Smollett cunningly combines both narrative strings to increase the force of both of them. After the company has had some rather negative experiences with Lord Oxmington, a proud and capricious man, and the degenerate ex-college friend of Bramble’s who jests by the name of Sir Thomas Bullford (both names allude to cattle and thus bovine stupidity), they meet first another of the squire’s college friends and then, by a providential accident, a man called Dennison. The latter is a man much after Bramble’s taste, the former, Mr. Baynard, in a bad situation. Baynard is being ruined by his wife, who is addicted to the display of status and to luxury, wasting her husband’s slender fortune. Significantly, she is of ‘low birth’. Most of Baynard’s neighbours –four in number- are in a similar fix, threatening to be undone by their capricious and vain wives, who all try to outdo each other in splendour.

Bramble offers his help, but moves on until the accident stops him in Dennison’s house. We have here the most crucial sighting of the new, recovered Bramble at his best.

Dennison reveals himself to be still another old friend of Bramble’s, and he knows his old name: Mathew Loyd of Glamorgan (the name was changed when he inherited his present estate). Mathew Loyd of Glamorgan, in his student days, had an affair with a certain barmaid called Dorothy Twyford from Chippenham. Humphry Clinker, whose real name is that of his father, is no other than the fruit of this affair. What appears to be a little satisfying slip back into the providential pattern of virtue rewarded, however, has a significance that will be analysed below. Another recognition scene is to be expected when Dennison’s son George comes back from an excursion: Having assumed as an alias the name of Wilson when roaming the country to experience low life, George Dennison has fallen in love with a certain Lydia Melford. Wilson is Dennison’s only son and heir, and thus an eligible gentleman, as he always claimed to be.

Unlike Bramble, Dennison senior fits into the pattern of loss and recovery of an estate.^[33] Disinherited due to primo genitur, his family’s estate wasted by his elder brother who died young and dispossessed, Dennison had to regain his possessions by hard work, strict economy, and with the help of his honest yeoman neighbours: the real Wilson and his father-in-law, the substantial farmer Bland. His example inspires Bramble, who employs his restored virility in helping his friend Baynard and his neighbours restoring their estates.

There are two main points to observe here. The first, a glance at respectable economy and the value of hard work as a virtue. This has already been hinted at and strikes the eye immediately. The second is just as important: Dennison had to rely on virtuous yeoman neighbours and peasants. These offer their help, loyalty and friendship, without ever aspiring to the rank of a gentleman, thus never questioning the existing order and showing the virtue of subordination. They are highly skilled in their respective areas, and put their abilities into the gentleman’s service. Smollett’s earlier novels show a similar pattern: The peasant companions of his picaros belong into the same category. Clinker himself is a similar figure, as he has proven his loyalty many times and is skilled in most handicrafts.

It is in this context, that Clinker’s real heritage becomes important. Just as Mathew Loyd alias Humphry Clinker is the son of Mathew Loyd alias Mathew Bramble in a biological sense, thus the peasants and yeomen in Smollett’s utopia are to be their squires’ children in a symbolic sense: Their squire is to care for them, punish them justly when necessary, be generous in his rewards and his helping out the ‘deserving poor’ and to educate them to virtue and subordination.^[34]

Whenever Bramble gives directions concerning his business at home, it is on these lines, such as in a dispute with his sister about a lambskin he gave to a tenant for free,^[35] or tells his friend Dr. Lewis to give a servant he, Bramble, had to dismiss, ‘a character for honesty and sobriety’ and a redundancy pay,^[36] and in the numerous instances that move his charity.

The way the recovery of Baynard’s estate is to be financed is equally revealing: Bramble gives credit himself and moves the people around him –Tabby, Lydia and Dennison- to do so as well. The interest is low, and the money is to flow from the land to the land, without the interception of urban banks: A reassertion of the gentry’s independence par excellence.

To conclude, it may be said that Smollett, in Humphry Clinker, does indeed develop a positive utopia. This utopia is ‘Tory’ insofar as its main elements –the patriarchal constitution of estates, the emphasis on the land as a source of national income, the call for the independence of the squires- are cornerstones of contemporary Tory philosophy, just as the ideas on international trade that are represented in the novel bear a distinct Tory mark.

The three weddings that end the novel, where representatives of the three nations that constitute the island of Great Britain (Ireland, significantly, is not only left out but repeatedly sniggered at) are, as Win Jenkins (now Loyd) has it, ‘chined, by the grease of God, in the holy bands of mattermoney’,^[37] reveals one more aspect of this Tory utopia: The union of the United Kingdom, an end to animosities and a spirit of mutual love between England, Scotland and Wales.

Conclusion

Much has been said, more has had to be left away. Interesting as it is, the question of how women are represented in the novel, especially in comparison to both other literary works and non-fictitious representations of the same period, had to be left out in order not to make this essay a book. Though Smollett is one of the key figures in spreading a certain tendency of Scotophilia in literary, aristocratic, and educated circles of his time, even though Scotland plays a key role in the novel, Northern Britain could only be referred to superficially. Furthermore, I was not able to go into all the detail complex topics such as the representation of rural poverty, urban and highway criminality, parliamentary politics and imperialism deserve. Other areas, notably religion, have suffered a similar fate.

This essay’s aim, however, was to deliver a broad overview concerning one highly important aspect of a great novel. It shall be left to the reader to decide how well this aim has been achieved.

Humphry Clinker, despite of the central role politics and contemporary history play, is not a political pamphlet. It is an epistolary novel with remarkably well-constructed characters, in my opinion surpassing Fielding and other contemporaries in this respect. Thus, it should be read as a novel. It should be kept in mind that Bramble is not Smollett.

The carefully devised political message, however, cannot be separated from the novel; it has to be understood in order to enable a reader to understand the novel as such. The way Smollett represents important discourses that enter his novel’s narrative field, the way he represents the world of his age as he sees it, can help us today to understand his age.

Smollett saw the world that gave birth to Matt Bramble in a process of sudden, open-ended, and perpetual change. He did not like that change, and he dreamed himself back to a Golden Age. It was not a Golden Age where all men shall be equal. It was a Golden Age where every single person knew their place, and for the vast majority of people that place was to be their landlords’ fields, rented for a just amount of money. For the vast majority of people, this Golden Age was to involve their landlord’s being their judge. Smollett saw the problems this might ensue, but in his Golden Age, the landlord was to be an honest, a just man –never a woman with the same attributes, but neither a Lord Oxmington.

Religion was to inform a person’s behaviour, but never enthuse; there had been too much of that in recent history. Common sense, honesty, education, charity and virtue; these were to be the governing principles of the gentry, subordination and virtue those of the peasantry. Smollett knew there were too many Newcastles, too many Oxmingtons, too many Mackilliguts (the Irishman who wants to marry Tabby for her money in Bath) in the world. If he had given up hope, he would have written a quite different novel –if any at all.

Today, we live in an age that, like Smollett’s and Bramble’s, is, to quote myself, in a process of sudden, open-ended, and perpetual change. We can learn from Bramble and find, in his patriarchal, hierarchical society, ideas for more democratic times, and in the utter failure of Smollett’s utopia we can find reasons for democracy. And hope, never to give it up.

Bibliography

Primary Work:

- Smollett, T. G.: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. by Knapp, L.M., for: Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

Secondary Works:

- Ford, B. (ed.): The Pelican Guide to English Literature Vol. 4: From Dryden to Johnson, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980):

- Humphreys, A.R.: The Social Setting.

- Humphreys, A.R.: Fielding and Smollett.

- Past & Present (Oxford: Past & Present Society):

- Rollison, D.: Property, Ideology and Popular Culture in a Gloucestershire Village 1660-1740, Vol. 93 (1981).

- Philological Quarterly (Iowa City: University of Iowa):

- Staves, S.: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 1978, Vol. 58 (Fall 1979), pp. 429-468.

- Nelson, T.G.A.: Smollett’s Representation and Critique of the Traffic in Women: A Narrative Strand in ‘Roderick Random’, Vol. 78 (Summer 1999), pp. 283-300.

- Evans, J.E.: ‘An honest scar received in the service of my country’: Lismahago’s Colonial Perspective in ‘Humphry Clinker’ Vol. 76 (Fall 2000), pp. 483-499.

- Publications of the Modern Languages Association (New York: Modern Languages Association):

- New, M.: ‘The Grease of God’: The Form of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction, Vol. 91 No. 2 (March 1976).

- Richetti, John (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996):

- Hunter, J.P.: The Novel and Social/Cultural History.

- Rosenblum, M.: Smollett’s ‘Humphry Clinker’.

- Said, E. W.: Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994).

- Watson, S.J.: The Reign of George III –1760-1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

- Watt, I.: The Rise of the Novel, (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1983).

Cover Illustration:

- http://www.slainte.org.uk/scotauth/smolldsw.html

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^[1] C.f.: New, Melvyn: ‘The Grease of God’: The Form of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction; in: Publications of the Modern Languages Association Vol. 91 No. 2 –March 1976 (New York: Modern Languages Association, 1976), pp. 235-244 and Humphreys, A.R.: Fielding and Smollett (1954), in: Boris Ford(ed.): The Pelican Guide to English Literature Vol. 4: From Dryden to Johnson, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).

^[2] Said, Edward W.: Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994).

^[3] The quotation is the title of one of Barthe’s essays. Unfortunately, I was not able to track down an actual copy of the essay, or bibliographical data.

^[4] Bagehot, Walter: The English Constitution. As with Barthes, I was not able to get bibliographical data. I read the book, just as Barthe’s article, a few years ago.

^[5] A title of Tolkien’s evil character Sauron in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. Though both books have nothing to do with Newcastle, the title mirrors both the corrupting power of Newcastle’s methods and their high potential in gaining support and thus power.

^[6] Here, as above and following: c.f.: Watson, Steven J.: The Reign of George III –1760-1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). The book is a reprint of the 1960 edition and Volume XII of The Oxford History of England series.

^[7] C.f.: Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel, (Harmonsworth: Peregrine, 1983).

^[8] C.f.: Rollison, D.: Property, Ideology and Popular Culture in a Gloucestershire Village 1660-1740, in: Past & Present Vol. 93 (Oxford: Past & Present Society, 1981)

^[9] For a detailed discussion of eighteenth-century travel and its importance to Smollett’s fiction see: Rosenblum, Michael: Smollett’s ‘Humphry Clinker’, in: Richetti, John (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Rosenblum draws heavily on Said’s Culture and Imperialism.

^[10] Smollett, Tobias G.: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. by Knapp, Lewis M., for: Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 81.

^[11] ibid., p.82.

^[12] ibid., pp. 83f.

^[13] ibid., pp. 36f. My italics.

^[14] Ibid., p.88.

^[15] C.f.: Rosenblum, p. 182. The quotation is taken from Rosenblum’s article.

^[16] Watson, p.51. He does not put the names of the ‘parties’ in capital letters to evade the notion of their being parties in a modern sense.

^[17] Humphry Clinker, p.97.

^[18] ibid.

^[19] ibid., p. 99

^[20] ibid.

^[21] All quotations ibid., p. 114.

^[22] ibid., p. 36f. See also the paragraph on social hierarchy in this work.

^[23] ibid.

^[24] C.f.: Evans, James E.: ‘An honest scar received in the service of my country’: Lismahago’s Colonial Perspective in ‘Humphry Clinker’, in: Philological Quarterly Vol. 76 (Fall 2000), (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2000), pp. 483-499.

^[25] Humphry Clinker, p.204; letter 51: Bramble to Lewis, Tweedmouth, July 15.

^[26] Given Smollett’s strong support for Bute during the time he edited The Briton, this appears inconsistent. It might be that Horace Walpole was not all wrong when he called Smollett a polemical ‘hireling’.

^[27] ibid., p. 204. The remark on the liberty of the press mirrors a rather ambiguous attitude towards the press Smollet has Bramble and Barton express in a dialogue earlier in the novel. Given the example of the Junius letters, his ambiguity gains a point.

^[28] C.f.: Footnote 20 above.

^[29] Humphry Clinker, p. 115; Jery’s letter to Phillips, June 5.

^[30] ibid., p. 280.

^[31] ibid., p. 263ff.

^[32] See chapter 4

^[33] Humphry Clinker, Letters 72, 73, 74, 75: Jery and Bramble on October 8, 11, and 14.

^[34] C.f.: Rosenblum

^[35] Humphry Clinker, p. 77; Bramble’s letter of May 19 (number 27)

^[36] ibid.: p. 90; Bramble on May 29 (number 30)

^[37] ibid.: p.352; Win Loyd on November 20 (last letter, number 83)