Seven years passed between the initial publication of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. In which are included, Memoirs of a Lady of Quality in 1751 and the appearance of the much revised second edition, to which Smollett added a brief “Advertisement” defending his work and characterizing his revisions. To the second edition he also added an exchange of letters between Lady Vane and an unnamed Lord by way of preface to volume 3, which contained the former’s memoirs. It would be seven more years before the appearance of the third edition in 1765. The last edition to appear in Smollett’s lifetime came four years later, in 1769. For the next 160 years, subsequent editions of Peregrine Pickle appeared with a dependable regularity, if not quite as frequently as editions of Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker. Although the initial public reception of the novel was not what the young and recently successful novelist had hoped it would be, by the end of the eighteenth century sixteen editions had appeared. It had been translated into French (1753), German (1753), Danish (1787), and, partially, Russian (1788). In 1815 a Dutch translation appeared. Presumably, the book that Dickens’s David Copperfield recalled as among the only and constant comforts of his youth continued to appeal to many readers who, like the fictional Copperfield, sought comfort or amusement in Smollett’s tale of youthful adventures, disillusionment, and ultimate triumph.
Smollett’s second novel has always been included in the major editions of his Works. Robert Anderson, the editor of the first major edition of Smollett’s Works (1796) and an early biographer, justified the novel’s inclusion by calling it “a first-rate novel, whose merits far exceed the modern puny productions of frivolous fashion and sickly sentiment, which load the shelves of our circulating libraries.”1 Despite the work’s length and lingering concerns about its potential harmful effects on young, ignorant, and idle readers, Peregrine Pickle was included in all major editions of Smollett’s works from the late eighteenth into the early twentieth century. Following closely upon Anderson’s edition was John Moore’s, another early biographer and friend of the author (1797). Thereafter followed editions by Thomas Roscoe (1836), David Herbert (1870), James P. Browne (1872), George Saintsbury (1899–1900), W. E. Henley and Thomas Seccombe (1899–1901), and George Maynardier (1902). Notable collected editions of novels, in which Peregrine Pickle appeared, include two volumes of the British Novelists, ed. William Mudford (1810); The Novels of Tobias Smollett in Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library, with a life of Smollett by Sir Walter Scott (1821); and The Shakespeare Head Edition of the Novels of Tobias Smollett (1925–26).
Among notable stand-alone twentieth-century editions of Peregrine Pickle can be counted one from Oxford University Press for the Limited Editions Club (1936), based on the first edition, introduced by G. K. Chesterton, and illustrated by John Austen. A reprint of this edition appeared in the Everyman Library imprint (which had published an edition of 1930, based on the second edition), introduced by Walter Allen (1956). Finally, before the present edition, James L. Clifford was the last to edit and introduce Peregrine Pickle (again using the first edition) for Oxford English Novels (1964) while being the first to do more than merely identify the historical personages in the novel. Paul-Gabriel Boucé subsequently revised and updated Clifford’s bibliography and chronology for an Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition in 1983.
The present edition of Peregrine Pickle uses the first edition of 1751 as copy-text while recording the second edition’s substantive variants. The argument for using the first edition rests on the view that Smollett’s present-day readers are best served by having before them the novel as he wrote it in the sometimes fierce heat of resentment against personal enemies real and imagined and with a liberal—if not libertine— comic spirit unfettered by critical censure. As Smollett himself explains in the “Advertisement” to the second edition, issued seven years after the appearance of the first, his resentments had cooled, and he had second thoughts about some scenes that “could be construed by the most delicate reader into a trespass upon the rules of decorum.” Although the anarchic comic spirit that imbues all of Smollett’s works is still preserved in the second edition, Peregrine Pickle deserves to be read in its first edition as it flowed freely from the pen of an author too impassioned to think much about the rules of decorum. Readers interested in following Smollett’s revisions to the first edition in order to contemplate the effects of sober reflection upon passionate invention are invited to consult the historical collation.
Annotation of Peregrine Pickle can be said to have begun with the delighted surprise of Smollett’s contemporaries. Many readers recognized that the physician whom Peregrine meets in Paris was a portrait of Dr. Mark Akenside. Very few missed the satire—or what some chose to call libel—of Henry Fielding and his patron, George Lyttelton, in the characters of Mr. Spondy and Gosling Scrag, Esq., whom Peregrine encounters at a meeting of the College of Authors (chapter 102). And, of course, wits and writers like Horace Walpole and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu read closely Lady Vane’s memoirs and saw their world and acquaintances reflected in it. Scholarly annotation came later. The most important nineteenth-century annotator of the novel was David Herbert, who focused his efforts on identifying the personages that fill the pages of Lady Vane’s memoirs. Most of those identifications have been accepted here. Without Herbert’s work, the identification of the personages in Vane’s confessional apology would have been far more difficult. Clifford, the first and only modern annotator of the novel, noted allusions, glossed some of the more arcane nautical terminology, supplied more extensive information about some of Lady Vane’s lovers, and filled in the historical background for the Annesley case. Herbert’s identifications and Clifford’s discoveries and judicious observations have been of great benefit to the editors. In addition to this general acknowledgment of our debt to Herbert and Clifford, we have noted specific borrowings in the individual annotations where it was necessary and just to do so.
In annotating Peregrine Pickle, not only have the editors benefited from the work of Herbert and Clifford, but we have also relied heavily on the biographical and critical studies of Smollett that have appeared since the 1920s. Of especial value with respect to Peregrine Pickle, still, is Howard Swazey Buck’s A Study in Smollett, Chiefly “Peregrine Pickle” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1925). Despite the appearance of a recent popular biography by Jeremy Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003), we have turned for biographical information first and last to Lewis M. Knapp’s Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Letters (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1949). In addition, we have consulted with regularity George M. Kahrl, Tobias Smollett: Traveler-Novelist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945). Of the many excellent critical monographs devoted to Smollett’s work, two deserve mention here: Paul-Gabriel Boucé, The Novels of Tobias Smollett, trans. Antonia White in collaboration with the author (London and New York: Longman, 1976), and Jerry C. Beasley, Tobias Smollett: Novelist (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). We have profited from all biographical and critical attention that scholars continue to direct to Smollett and his work. Some will find their debt acknowledged in individual notes; others are included in this general expression of gratitude.
Annotating Peregrine Pickle has presented us with several kinds of challenges. Some of those challenges became less daunting as the digital revolution caught up with our work. The ability to search through hundreds of thousands of digitized texts helped us solve some puzzles and make educated guesses at others. Relying on the texts found in Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), we frequently referred to William Falconer’s An Universal Dictionary of the Marine (London, 1769) for help with nautical terms. In most instances, we cross-checked Falconer against the OED, which was a first recourse for glossing words. In many instances, however, we consulted Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) and freely used it to define a usage when we thought it particularly appropriate. The translations of the Greek and Latin authors quoted in the novel are from the Loeb Classical Library unless otherwise indicated. For Shakespeare, we used The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).
The chief resources consulted for annotating the “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality” and the Annesley case are too many to enumerate here. We direct the reader to the list of abbreviations and the notes themselves. In every instance we have striven to follow the high standards of the editors of the previous volumes in the Georgia Edition. We consulted them freely, and to their erudition we owe an enormous debt. We can only hope that this volume matches their achievements.
The first illustrations to Peregrine Pickle were designed by Henry Fuseli and appeared as frontispieces to the fourth edition of 1769. Subsequent illustrators include Thomas Stothard (1781), Daniel Dodd (1784), Richard Corbould (1794), Thomas Rowlandson (1795), and George Cruikshank (1831). From these illustrators we have chosen to include illustrations of Peregrine Pickle designed by Fuseli, Corbould, Rowlandson, and Cruikshank. The frontispieces by Fuseli were the only illustrations to appear in Smollett’s lifetime. Moreover, they have the distinction of being the only illustrations done by Fuseli for a work of English fiction. Rowlandson’s and Cruikshank’s reputations as artists and illustrators assured them a spot in this volume. Corbould’s work provides interesting and instructive counterpoints to the more freewheeling interpretations of Rowlandson and Cruikshank.
G. S. Rousseau began work on this edition many years ago, well before the advent of word processing reduced the amount of labor such a project requires and certainly without the benefit of having keyword-searchable digitized texts to query in order to follow leads about a person, a place, or a phrase in Smollett’s text. He performed groundbreaking work on the entire text, casting much-needed light not only on the countless allusions and references to actual eighteenth-century persons and events in the fictional narrative but also on the now, alas, rather obscure and somewhat more personal dramas that play out in the interpolated tales of Lady Vane and James Annesley. With a fine attention to detail, persistent detective work, and careful scholarship, he laid the foundation for the present edition. When other important projects demanded his attention, he handed over editorial responsibilities to John Zomchick, who revised and completed the annotations and the introduction and prepared the volume for the press. Because of the passage of many years and the number of successive iterations of the annotations and introduction, it is all but impossible to apportion credit for the work of the volume. If the volume’s readers and reviewers find occasion to assign blame, however, it is fitting that it should fall upon the editor who worked last on the novel and delivered it to the press.
J. P. Z.
1. Robert Anderson, The Life of Tobias Smollett, with Critical Observations on his Works (London, 1796), 48.