The publication of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Tobias Smollett’s second novel, was announced in the General Advertiser on 25 February 1751.1 A deeply personal work by an author not yet turned thirty, the novel directs biting satire at those who had injured him, and it shows influences of Smollett’s contemporaneous work of translating Alain René Le Sage and Miguel Cervantes. It also contains ample evidence of what succeeding generations of readers would come to recognize as Smollett’s unique novelistic signature, a mingling of genres and a mixture of fact and fiction, all combining to convey a startlingly vivid representation of life in eighteenth-century Europe.2 Written during a period of its author’s deep immersion in the traditions of narrative fiction, Peregrine Pickle claims our attention not only for its significant intrinsic merits but also for what it reveals about the literary and social history of its times.
Peregrine Pickle occupies a position midway in the initial period of Smollett’s novelistic career, a period that began with The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), published three years before Pickle, and ended with the publication of Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote in 1755, four years after Pickle’s appearance. In a letter to Alexander Carlyle, a fellow Scot whom Smollett had met in London, Smollett revealed that he wrote Roderick Random very quickly, “in the Compass of Eight Months.”3 Between the publication of Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, Smollett completed and saw published translations of two more fictional narratives, Le Sage’s The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane (1748) and The Devil upon Crutches (1750). Peregrine Pickle, then, was the fourth substantial prose narrative that Smollett would complete in the space of roughly three and a half years. If his concurrent work on Don Quixote, which he had begun translating sometime during 1748, is added to this compositional tally, it becomes obvious that the ever-enterprising Smollett was immersed deeply in the genre of prose fiction.4 In later years, family circumstances and financial need would make it necessary for him to broaden his compositional efforts by writing criticism, history, travelogue, and journalism. In short, his efforts would never be so concentrated in a single genre again. Although Peregrine Pickle might, from time to time, challenge the patience of modern readers with the interpolated histories of the long-forgotten Lady Vane, Daniel MacKercher, and James Annesley, the rich variety of its subject matter and the testimony of readers like Charles Dickens (in the voice of his fictional alter ego, David Copperfield) make The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle indispensable reading not only for its own significant merits but also for a full appreciation of both Smollett’s practices as a novelist and the glorious variety of the English novel.
Born on or about 16 March 1721 at Dalquhurn, Dunbartonshire, to Archibald Smollett (d. 1723/24) and Barbara Cunningham (c. 1694–1770), Tobias Smollett was the youngest of their three children. His was a prominent Scottish family. Smollett’s grandfather, Sir James Smollett (c. 1648–1731), held several political offices and was a commissioner for the Treaty of Union with England. He was knighted in 1698. With his first wife, Jane, daughter of Sir Auley Macaulay of Ardincaple, Sir James had four sons and two daughters. Archibald, the father of the novelist, was the fourth of the sons and married without his father’s permission. Although Archibald married without permission, he seemed not to suffer prolonged consequences of neglecting to secure his father’s approval in advance, for Sir James gave Archibald a lifetime lease on the estate at Dalquhurn, which provided him and his family with an income of about £300 per annum. Unfortunately for the family, Archibald did not long outlive the birth of his youngest son, Tobias, and with the death of the father, the family became dependent on the grandfather.5 Tobias’s older brother, James, entered the army with a captain’s commission. He drowned somewhere off the coast of America, exactly when is not known, though from a letter that Smollett wrote to his cousin it is certain that his death occurred sometime after 1737.6 That Tobias loved his older brother is evident from a remark in a letter to his friend and frequent correspondent Alexander Carlyle. In an expression of sympathy for John Home, whose brother David had died, Smollett wrote, “I know what a man of Jack’s sensibility must feel upon such an occasion; for I once sustained the same Calamity, in the Death of a Brother whom I loved and honoured.”7
Tobias Smollett received his early education at Dumbarton grammar school under the tutelage of the scholar, author, and educator John Love (1695–1750). Evidence in Smollett’s later published writings shows deep familiarity with classical literature, especially with Latin authors. There can be no doubt that Smollett’s love for literary composition began with instruction from Love. His friend and early biographer John Moore claims that Smollett’s first attempts at poetical composition appeared while he was at Dumbarton in the form of “verses to the memory of [William] Wallace,” Scottish patriot of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. None of these early compositions survive.8 In 1735, at age fourteen, Smollett traveled the short distance from his home to Glasgow. He attended classes at Glasgow University and worked in a dispensary, thereby starting his training for the profession of medicine. On 30 May 1736 he began a five-year apprenticeship to Glaswegian surgeons. Smollett also continued his other, unofficial “apprenticeship” in written composition. According to Moore, while Smollett was in Glasgow, the young student’s talent and predilection for satire began to reveal themselves. Moore reports that Smollett now “began to direct the edge of boyish satire against such green and scanty shoots of affectation and ridicule as the soil produced, and of which he afterwards found a ripe and plentiful crop in the capital.”9 Moore was not the only one to comment on Smollett’s early satirical habits of mind. John Ramsay, a fellow Scot who provided another of Smollett’s early biographers, Robert Anderson, with anecdotes about the novelist, noted: “Even while at school and college, his pride and cynical humour which turned every thing into ridicule made him be considered as no safe companion or easy friend.”10 His constitutional inclination toward satire would grow stronger as Smollett entered adulthood. For the rest of his days, it would be one of his ruling passions.
For reasons that remain unknown, Smollett never finished his apprenticeship, for, as Lewis M. Knapp has shown, shortly after June 1739 Smollett left Scotland for London.11 Moore reported that the young adventurer carried with him “a small sum of money and a very large assortment of letters of recommendation,” an indication of both his relative poverty and his substantial ambitions.12 There can be little doubt that his ambitions contributed to his decision to abandon his apprenticeship two years before its end in order to seek his fortune in London, as Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and so many other young men of that time had done. Given that he was the youngest son of the youngest son of his grandfather, already some eight years dead, he had no expectations of an inheritance; and London would certainly provide more opportunities for wresting fortune from opportunity than could be found in Glasgow. That he cut short his apprenticeship suggests either impatience with his course of study or the need for a larger stage on which to play out his ambitions, perhaps both. Reading backward from the career of the accomplished adult writer, it seems very likely that the eighteen-year-old had already begun to formulate an alternative career to medicine, one that he had been preparing himself for since his days at Dumbarton under Love. We can be certain of Smollett’s early literary ambitions because, beside the letters of recommendation that he carried with him, he made room for a version of what would become The Regicide, his tragedy about the assassination of James I of Scotland. Smollett had become fascinated with this story while reading the Latin history of George Buchanan at Dumbarton. A decade after his arrival in London, Smollett would admit, with no little bitterness, that his own high opinion of the five-act blank-verse drama conjured in him a “cajoling Dream of good Fortune.”13
Although the young and future author may have amused himself with a dream of literary good fortune, his rather depressed material circumstances—what he terms his “Occasions” in that bitter preface to The Regicide—forced him to defer his dream of literary fame and turn to the practice of medicine.14 In March 1740, less than a year after his arrival in London, Smollett enlisted in the Royal Navy as surgeon’s second mate. On 3 April 1740, when he was just nineteen years old, he boarded the Chichester, an eighty-gun third-rate ship of the line with a complement of six hundred men. His service on board the Chichester came hard upon England’s entry into war with Spain (War of Jenkins’ Ear, 1739–48). By October of the same year the ship was under sail to the West Indies, one of a large fleet that would take part in the disastrous battle of Cartagena.15 Smollett recounted the events of that battle twice, once in “An Account of the Expedition against Carthagene,” which has recently been dated to 1744, and again, most memorably, in chapters 32–34 of Roderick Random. He also mentions it in the Complete History and briefly describes diseases present at Cartagena in The Present State of All Nations.16
Smollett’s experiences in the British navy had a profound effect on his life and his writing. Not only did his service take him to Jamaica, where he met and married Anne Lassells, but it also provided him with firsthand experience of the men of the sea, their habits and their language. He would represent shipboard life in vivid and unforgettable detail in Roderick Random, and in his first two novels he established patterns for quintessential literary British tars. Bowling, Morgan, Trunnion, Hatchway, and Pipes set a standard for these literary types as endearing eccentrics and owners of an indomitable human spirit. Although their actions do not always conform to the laws and customs of the land, their allegiances never waver, and their judgments are guided by a rough-hewn moral sense that seldom errs. While he was creating the type of the lovable eccentric, Smollett did not neglect to represent their opposites. The brutality of naval life finds expression in shipboard tyrants such as Captain Oakum, Dr. Mackshane, and Lieutenant Crampley, all appearing in Roderick Random. His memories of the sights and sounds and smells of the shipboard world, including the loss of life sustained by the British fleet at the battle of Cartagena, nurtured Smollett’s intolerance of official incompetence and public corruption. If his fiction is known for occasional savagery, some of it surely stems from his having witnessed the terrors of war and the horrors of disease in His Majesty’s fleet. Such savagery, however, is always balanced by the “heart-whole” affections of naval characters like Bowling, Morgan, and Rattlin in Roderick Random and Trunnion, Hatchway, and Pipes in Peregrine Pickle. The tragic— or the merely absurd—is made bearable by these comic characters, who also testify to their author’s success in withstanding the worst horrors of naval warfare.
Smollett returned to England aboard the Chichester in September 1741, but little is known of his activities or his whereabouts until mid-1744. Knapp speculates that between 1741 and 1744 Smollett returned to the West Indies and there married Anne Lassells.17 A letter dated 22 May 1744 places Smollett back in London, in Downing Street, at a house previously occupied by John Douglas (d. 1743), a prominent surgeon.18 Smollett stayed at this rather expensive residence for less than a year before moving to a less expensive one.19 During these early years while Smollett was seeking to establish himself among the surgeons in London, he wrote several nondramatic pieces in verse, including the poem “Tears of Scotland” (1746), a fierce condemnation of the Duke of Cumberland’s defeat of the Scottish forces at the battle of Culloden, the culminating encounter between British troops and the army that followed Bonnie Prince Charlie, the young Stuart pretender to the throne. The vehement tone of these patriotic verses, which excoriate a victor whose “soul was not appeas’d” by mere success on the battlefield, testifies to the young author’s devotion to his native land and conveys his outrage at the treatment of its inhabitants.20 Two verse satires modeled after Pope followed “The Tears of Scotland,” Advice in 1746 and Reproof in 1747. Smollett wrote to Alexander Carlyle about the satires, claiming that they “made some Noise” in London. Equally worthy of note in this same letter is the absence of any news of Smollett’s medical enterprises.21 By 1747, although Smollett had not given up the profession of medicine, it seems that his passions were impelling him toward the profession of letters. And although we have little information about Smollett’s medical work in London, his purchase of an MD in 1750 from Marischal College, Aberdeen, suggests that he had not given over entirely the possibility that he would make his living as a doctor. In these early years of his literary career, he appears to have been hedging his bets by hoping for success in one or the other of what were crowded fields in midcentury London.22
What we can say for certain about the last half of the 1740s is that Smollett’s experiences with his tragedy The Regicide had a profound effect on him and his attitudes toward the managers, actors, and patrons of the London theater world. By his own account, they had led him on to expect that his play would be staged, though its appearance was deferred from one season to the next and one playhouse to the other. With each successive deferral, his resentments intensified against those who had failed to recognize the merit he so clearly found in his play until he awakened from his “cajoling Dream of good Fortune” to “the Aggravation of Disappointment.”23 Between 1746 and 1751 Smollett published a string of attacks upon his enemies, real and imagined, whose craven venality, he asserted, led them to oppress his obvious talent for their own interests. The attacks began in rather general terms in the verse satires Advice and Reproof. In the latter, he attacked the manager of Covent Garden Theatre, John Rich, who refused to stage the tragedy sometime in 1746, as a man “with dulness and devotion drunk.”24 The fullest chronicle of his disappointment as a young playwright is found in the poet Melopoyn’s tale of neglect and broken promises (Roderick Random, chapters 62–63). As Howard Swazey Buck proved, that interpolated tale is a thinly disguised attack on the managers Charles Fleetwood (as Supple), James Lacy (as Brayer), and Rich again (as Vandal); the actors James Quin (as Bellower) and David Garrick (as Marmozet); and the Earl of Chesterfield (Earl Sheerwit).25 Melopoyn’s tale portrays the entire theatrical establishment of the day as a corrupt congeries of ignorant, petty, and self-serving hacks. With malice toward everything but their own narrow interests, they colluded to balk the playwright’s ambition and keep a work of genius from the London audience. The harshest attack was leveled at Garrick in the figure of Marmozet, whom Melopoyn calls a “little parasite” and charges with “the meanest practices to gratify that sordid appetite,” avarice, his ruling passion.26 Smollett had also attacked Garrick in a letter to Alexander Carlyle, calling the actor a “little Rascal.”27 Smollett continued his attacks on his theatrical enemies in a printed edition of The Regicide, which was finally published, first by subscription, in May 1749.28 In the preface to the play, he recounted his disappointments. Ten years’ efforts aimed at bringing the tragedy to the stage amounted to nothing but “an accumulated Injury”; at the end, “a Series of the most unjustifiable Equivocation and insolent Absurdity” left him “stung with Resentment.”29 Smollett apparently nursed his resentment for several more years until it erupted again into his second novel, Peregrine Pickle, with additional attacks on David Garrick, James Quin, and the Earl of Chesterfield (chapters 55, 102). His resentment did not, however, entirely dissuade him from writing for the theater, for between 1749 and 1751 Smollett wrote Alceste, a masque to be staged by John Rich with music by George Frederick Handel, and The Absent Man. Neither work was finally produced, and only a few lyrics from Alceste have survived.30
In the decade before Peregrine Pickle’s publication, then, Smollett embarked on two careers at once, medicine and letters. At the outset, at least, neither career fully answered the needs of his “Occasions.” By 1748 Smollett had a wife and a daughter to support. Although he made the acquaintance of several prominent medical men of his time and would continue his efforts in medicine beyond the publication of Peregrine Pickle, as evidenced by his authorship of An Essay on the External Use of Water in 1752 and his preparation for publication of William Smellie’s three-volume Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (1751–64), he failed to prosper as a surgeon. From what we know of the years immediately prior to the publication of Peregrine Pickle, he turned his rather considerable energies to writing, probably at the expense of his medical career. Writing had the advantage of affording Smollett a vehicle for satisfying several of his “Occasions” at once, including providing him with an income, a venue for working out his resentments against those who injured him personally, a forum for expressing a far less personal if no less keenly felt indignation at social corruption, and an opportunity to realize his dream of fame and fortune in the career of a man of letters. We do not know for certain how he felt about his difficulties in the medical profession, but there is little doubt that his medical knowledge and experiences provided material for Smollett the writer. He would subject medical practitioners—like ignorant pedants, theater managers, unfaithful patrons, and hack writers—to scathing attacks in Peregrine Pickle, especially in the chapters set in Bath (see especially chapter 75).
Although Peregrine Pickle has fewer biographical elements than Roderick Random, like its predecessor it exposes to the young author’s searching ridicule actual persons who must have vexed Smollett rather directly if not personally. Moore tells us that Smollett met a painter during his trip to Paris in 1750 and that the painter became Pallet, whom Peregrine meets in the Palais Royal (chapter 46). Moore does not name the painter in his biography, and there is no record of anyone’s suggesting a living model for this caricature during Smollett’s lifetime; nonetheless, we have no reason to question Moore’s report that the “pert manners of the man disgusted Smollett” and provided him with material for this inspired caricature.31 For the painter’s companion, the doctor, we have Moore’s testimony that Smollett had in mind the well-known poet and physician Dr. Mark Akenside (1721–70). Smollett satirizes the doctor for his pedantry, his politics, his unthinking promotion of all things ancient, and ultimately his willingness to sacrifice fellow-feeling on the altar of a political ideal (chapters 46–70). Moore reports that he has “been told that Smollett’s pique at [Akenside] arose from some reflections Akenside had thrown out against Scotland, after his return from Edinburgh.”32 In the absence of any corroborating evidence of Akenside’s verbal slander against Scotland, Buck argues that the more likely cause of Smollett’s attack was Akenside’s sneering indictment of Scottish grandees in his poem Ode to the Earl of Huntingdon (1748), which Smollett must have known, because he parodies it in Peregrine Pickle. Buck’s conjecture provides us with textual evidence for Smollett’s pique, which Moore’s report lacks, and it has the virtue of having occurred closer in time to the appearance of Peregrine Pickle than Akenside’s earlier return from Edinburgh, which occurred sometime in 1743.33 Whether the cause was personal pique arising from disparaging observations on Scotland or its people, disgust at Akenside’s notorious pedantry, or the young author’s weakness for flapping the age’s gilded bugs seeking to climb to the top of the social dunghill, the doctor is among the novel’s more truly vicious characters.34 In the end, the times and Smollett’s comic genius save Akenside from perpetrating real evil in the narrative and make him but the comic counterpart to the French republican projectors that would one day people Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.
If there is room to doubt that a personal provocation motivated this portrait of the doctor, there is no question that an animus impelled Smollett to attack other well-known figures in Peregrine Pickle. Among those singled out for attacks were the greatest actor of the century, David Garrick (1717–79), and his fellow thespian James Quin (1693–1766), whom Garrick, with his more “natural” acting style, had supplanted as the time’s favorite actor. On two different occasions both actors are criticized for their stage performances, once by the Knight of Malta while Peregrine is traveling in France (chapter 55) and once after Peregrine’s return to London when he is among the college of authors (chapter 102). Both actors had also appeared under pseudonyms in Roderick Random, where they fell victim to the poet Melopoyn’s resentments arising from frustrated literary ambitions. Those attacks, however, did not fully alleviate Smollett’s own resentments. That the actors came in for a further drubbing in Peregrine Pickle suggests that the injuries Smollett sustained when he took his tragedy to the playhouses still pained him while he composed his second novel. For their sins against him, Smollett ridiculed the acting styles of both men.35
Although Garrick and Quin were treated harshly, the roughest handling of all Smollett reserved for two famous figures with no known connection to The Regicide: the politician, patron, and author George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton (1709–73), who is pilloried in the character of Gosling Scrag, Esq.; and Henry Fielding (1707–54), who is satirized in Mr. Spondy. Buck and Knapp argue that Smollett’s attack on Lyttelton was prompted by his failure to promote The Absent Man, a now-lost comedy that he had recommended Smollett compose for the stage.36 In a letter to Francis Hayman (1708–76), who provided illustrations for Roderick Random and would provide more for Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote and his Complete History, Smollett asks his correspondent to convey his comedy to Garrick even though he expects to “suffer the Mortification of a Second Refusal.” In the same letter, Smollett provides a telling account of his feelings toward those who stood between him and success on the stage:
I have been frustrated in all my attempts to succeed on the Stage, not by the Publick which I have always found favourable and propitious, but by the Power of two or three Persons who (I cannot help saying) have accepted and patronized the works of others, with whom, in point of Merit, I think myself, at least, upon a par. This I speak not from Vanity, but Resentment for the hard usage I have met with. I own I feel severely when I reflect upon my (I was going to say) unjust Exclusion from the Theatre, but I begin to grow warm, and therefore will conclude.37
Smollett’s anger over his unjust exclusion from the stage must have finally boiled over while he was composing the last volume of Peregrine Pickle, and he struck out at Lyttelton as both author and patron. In the “college of authors” episode, another poet scorns Lyttelton’s reputation for genius as founded upon “a few flimsy odes, barren epistles, pointless epigrams, and the superstitious suggestions of an half-witted enthusiast” (chapter 102). The poet’s vituperative comments on Lyttelton’s reputation come immediately after Spondy recites to the college his “pastoral . . . composed upon the death of [his] own grandmother,” which is a wicked parody of Lyttelton’s ode to his dead wife, “To the Memory of a Lady Lately Deceased” (1747). Smollett’s masterful parody of the elevated language and classical allusions in Lyttelton’s ode serves a dual function of mocking his style and ridiculing his expression of grief upon the death of his wife. Lyttelton’s “Where were ye, Muses, when relentless Fate/From these fond Arms your fair Disciple tore” becomes “Where wast thou, wittol Ward, when hapless fate/From these weak arms mine aged grannam tore.”38 As a patron—and he was patron to Fielding, Akenside, and James Thomson—Lyttelton is described as hungering after unmerited praise from any conniving, needy hack unprincipled enough to stroke his vanity and “feed him with the soft pap of dedication” (chapter 102). In the pages of the novel, Lyttelton becomes nothing more than “the best milch-cow that any author ever stroaked,” thus implying that Smollett failed in his attempts to win Lyttelton’s patronage because he refused to stroke Lyttelton’s vanity and accord him the “abject veneration” that he demanded from his sycophants. Lyttelton’s refusal to promote The Absent Man proved to Smollett that Lyttelton had no right to call himself a poet, a patron, or a general arbiter of taste.
Although Smollett carried independent grievances against both Lyttelton and Fielding, the latter’s association with Lyttelton provided Smollett with the opportunity to attack the character of the rival novelist. Fielding as Spondy is encouraged to feed Scrag with the “soft pap of dedication,” a comment that, if not aimed at Fielding directly, certainly glances at him, since he had dedicated Tom Jones to Lyttelton in February 1749.39 Spondy is of the tribe of venal sycophants ready “to make a job” of the death of a grandmother in order to win Scrag’s support. The chairman of the college of authors advises Spondy “to give [Scrag] the refusal of this same pastoral” with the hope that “he may have the good fortune of being listed in the number of his beefeaters.” To this point, the satire is general, applicable to any writer willing to stoop to flattery to earn a payday. The satire turns libelous, however, when the chairman holds out the hope that when Spondy “is inclined to marry his own cook-wench, his gracious patron may condescend to give the bride away; and finally settle him in his old age, as a trading Westminster-justice” (chapter 102). By 1751 no astute reader who kept up with the gossip in the world of literature would have missed this vicious personal attack on Fielding. On 27 November 1747, with Lyttelton in attendance, Fielding had married Mary Daniel, kitchen maid to his late wife, who had died three years earlier. Daniel was six months pregnant at the time. A year later, with the help of Lyttelton and the Duke of Bedford, Fielding began work as a justice of the peace for Westminster, to be followed shortly by the magistracy for Middlesex.40 Smollett’s attack on Fielding has dismayed both critics and biographers. Buck noted “Smollett’s distressing jealousy of Fielding,” and Knapp found it “regrettable that Smollett and Fielding did not become brothers in a guild of novelists.”41 But there is no wishing away Smollett’s cruel attacks on Fielding and Lyttelton, which might very well have supplied cause for Horace Walpole’s calling Smollett “worthless.”42 Whether Smollett was indeed jealous of Fielding’s greater success in the literary and critical marketplace or outraged by his conviction that his “brother” novelist had stolen hints from characters in Roderick Random for use in Tom Jones and Amelia cannot be known with certainty. What remains, however, is obvious evidence of Smollett’s antipathy toward Fielding and his patron. And that antipathy must have drawn its power from the same source that fed his resentment against the fortunate and the powerful, who did nothing to lift the depressed fortunes of the talented young writer and struggling physician from the North and might have worked actively against them. Even if we set aside the professional jealousy that contributed to Smollett’s antipathy toward Fielding, the fact that Smollett had experienced rejection at the hands of at least two potential patrons is enough to explain why he chose to use Peregrine Pickle to sling mud at the system of patronage itself by showing the bad judgment of patrons and the bad faith of their protégés.43 The abuse directed against Lyttelton and Fielding provides us with a good indication of Smollett’s internal state during the months when he was writing Peregrine Pickle and may even explain the relish with which Smollett skewers the other rogues and fools that people his fiction if we concede that the personal libels did not fully exhaust his “spleen.”
Smollett’s vituperative attacks on Lyttelton and Fielding in Peregrine Pickle gave rise to further skirmishes with the latter, which are appropriate to note here, even though they occurred after the publication of Smollett’s second novel. About a year after the publication of Peregrine Pickle, Fielding began to write his Covent-Garden Journal under the pseudonym Sir Alexander Drawcansir. Perhaps responding to his portrait in the novel, Fielding took aim at Smollett in the Covent-Garden Journal for 7 January 1752. In that number, military forces led by “a younger brother of General Thomas Jones” rout those under the command of “Peeragrin Puckle” and “Rodorick Random.”44
Smollett responded to Fielding’s counterattack almost immediately with a counterattack of his own, a pamphlet entitled A Faithful Narrative of the Base and Inhuman Arts That Were Lately Practised upon the Brain of Habbakkuk Hilding by Drawcansir Alexander.45 In the pamphlet Smollett accuses Fielding of stealing the model for Tom Jones’s sidekick, Partridge, from Roderick Random’s valet, Strap, and Captain Booth’s prison paramour, Miss Mathews (in Amelia) from Miss Williams, the prostitute whom Roderick nurses back to health.46 Buck calls Habbakkuk Hilding “one of the worst pieces of vilification on record,” one so filled with “venomousness” that he was led to “question— almost seriously—the mental balance of the writer.”47 Martin C. Battestin, writing more than a half century after Buck, is a bit more balanced in his estimation of the pamphlet, but he still finds it “one of the liveliest and most malevolent pieces of invective in the language.”48 Judging from the volleys in this paper war, each man appears to have struck a nerve in the other. In the end, however, Smollett’s reactions were the more extreme, pointing once again to a temperament that was easily disordered, even at the mere suggestion of a slight. Like some of his fictional characters—perhaps most like Cadwallader Crabtree, the misanthrope in Peregrine Pickle who sees a world dominated by folly and vice (chapter 78)—the author of Habbakkuk Hilding finds nothing but vicious self-interest in the relation between poet and patron. That he is a victim of that self-interest explains the intensity of the attack. The tone of the pamphlet reflects the effect of rancor upon imagination, expressed in a form that is free from even the loose constraints of the novel’s principles of decorum and aimed at a man who added public insult to the private injuries that Smollett had already complained of.
The fierceness of Smollett’s attacks on his enemies reveals a man who could not forget and was hard pressed to forgive a slight, whether actual or imagined. Never one to avoid confrontation if he thought he was not paid the deference owed him, Smollett struck out in words and—in at least one case, his assault on Peter Gordon in November 1752—in deeds.49 By 1753, however, he had acknowledged his irascibility even if he did not apologize for its effects, or so one suspects from his candid dedication of Ferdinand Count Fathom to himself:
Know then, I can despise your pride, while I honour your integrity; and applaud your taste, while I am shocked at your ostentation.—I have known you trifling, superficial and obstinate in dispute; meanly jealous and aukwardly reserved; rash and haughty in your resentments; and coarse and lowly in your connexions.—I have blushed at the weakness of your conversation, and trembled at the errors of your conduct.—Yet . . . your faults . . . are chiefly the excesses of a sanguine disposition and looseness of thought, impatient of caution or controul.50
The traits enumerated in this dedication left their marks on Peregrine Pickle, where the hero’s cruel practical jokes express the same pride and resentments that characterized his creator. Although Peregrine’s “practical satire” (chapter 89) may disturb the gentle reader, it also offers a clear indication of how Smollett regarded the world in which he moved during the first decade of his adult life. Over the course of that life, Smollett would change his opinions of others and soften his resentment toward those who once roused it. Already by 1758, in the “Advertisement” to the second edition of Peregrine Pickle, he “owns with contrition that in one or two instances, he gave way too much to the suggestions of personal resentment, and represented characters as they appeared to him at that time, through the exaggerating medium of prejudice: but, he has in this impression endeavored to make atonement for these extravagances.”51 As he had done in the case of his criticism of Garrick’s acting in the second volume (chapter 55), Smollett removed attacks on Garrick, Lyttelton, and Fielding from the college of authors scenes.52 Several years later, he was to praise them along with Quin in his Continuation of the Complete History of England.53 As he explained in a personal letter to Garrick written from Chelsea shortly after the publication of the passage in the Continuation, Smollett’s praise of the great actor was “no more than justice” and “a duty incumbent on me in particular to make a public attonement in a work of truth for wrongs done him in a work of fiction.”54 Smollett would make an additional public atonement for wrongs against another actor in a posthumous tribute to the actor Quin (d. 1766), who appears as himself in Humphry Clinker and is described as “a very honest man; highly susceptible of friendship, warm, steady, and even generous in his attachment; disdaining flattery, and incapable of meanness and dissimulation.”55 Though written twenty years after the appearance of Peregrine Pickle and shortly before Smollett’s own death, its graciousness serves as a fitting epitaph to the quarrels that embittered his youth. Two and a half centuries after the publication of Peregrine Pickle, all personal animosities now sunk in the gulf of time, we can delight in the satirical portraits and in the knowledge that their author saw that he had handled his objects too roughly and made amends for having done so.
Because neither documents nor testimony pertaining to the composition of Peregrine Pickle survives, it is necessary to rely on conjecture and circumstantial evidence to determine the novel’s dates of composition. If we accept Smollett’s statement to his friend Alexander Carlyle that he wrote Roderick Random, a work of approximately 220,000 words, “in the Compass of Eight months,” then it is possible to calculate Smollett’s average compositional speed for his first novel. We must also account for Smollett’s claim that “several Intervals happened of one, two, three and four Weeks, wherein [he] did not set pen to paper,” as he told Carlyle in the same letter.56 Knapp estimates that it actually took “less than six months” for Smollett to complete Roderick Random.57 If six months is taken as the shortest and eight months as the longest period of time that Smollett spent writing, then his average compositional speed ranges between 27,500 and 37,000 words monthly. Peregrine Pickle comprises approximately 380,000 words, some 50,000 of which are given to the long, interpolated tale the “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality.” Setting aside for the moment the questions surrounding the authorship of the “Memoirs,” at such a pace Smollett would have needed from ten to fourteen months to write Peregrine Pickle. If the “Memoirs” are excluded from the calculation, the period of composition is reduced to between nine months and a year.
Working backward from the novel’s publication on 25 February 1751 and using the midpoint between the shortest and longest periods of composition (eleven and a half months) as a rough estimate of the duration of composition suggest that Smollett began writing Peregrine Pickle early in 1750. Fortunately, there are other circumstances against which this conjecture can be tested. It is likely, for example, that Smollett was occupied with his translation of The Devil upon Crutches until shortly before its publication on 27 February 1750. Basing an estimate on the same circumstantial evidence that must be considered here, O M Brack, Jr., and Leslie Chilton conjecture that Smollett was working on that translation during the autumn and, perhaps, the early winter of 1749 and 1750, even while he was revising his translation of Gil Blas.58 Translating The Devil upon Crutches and revising Gil Blas, however, did not take up all Smollett’s time during 1749. Knapp conjectures that Smollett was writing his “Alceste, an extraordinary combination of opera, tragedy, and masque,” now lost except for some scattered lyrics, sometime before he mentioned the project to Carlyle in a letter of 14 February 1749. In this same letter, Smollett writes that he has “opened a Subscription for publishing” his tragedy The Regicide.59 The subscription edition of The Regicide appeared about 12 May 1749. The edition for the general public was advertised in the General Advertiser on 22 June.60 Sometime shortly after the appearance of The Regicide, Smollett “made a Tour thro’ part of France, Flanders and Holland,” as he reported in a letter to Carlyle.61 He was back in London by late September, when, according to Brack and James B. Davis, Smollett was revising Roderick Random for the third edition.62 During this same period, Smollett might also have been composing and then revising his now-lost comedy The Absent Man, which he first mentioned to Carlyle in a letter of 7 June 1748 and again in a letter to the illustrator Francis Hayman dated 11 May 1750.63 Given all these projects, most of them overlapping and some of them interrupted by his Continental tour in the summer of 1749, it is not likely that Smollett wrote much if any of Peregrine Pickle during 1749; rather, it is much more likely that Smollett began intensive drafting of the novel only after the end of his efforts on The Devil upon Crutches.
If, indeed, Smollett did begin to write his second novel in February 1750, he had about four months to devote to composition before moving his residence from Beaufort Street to Monmouth House, Chelsea, at the end of June 1750.64 Shortly after this move, Moore reported that Smollett and he traveled to France, during the summer of 1750.65 Buck has proposed that Smollett had probably completed much of volume 1 by the time of his departure for the Continent, basing this conjecture on the observation of another early biographer, Robert Anderson, who claimed that Smollett traveled to France “to survey the characters of mankind on a new theatre, and in greater variety than he had hitherto had any opportunity of viewing them in the capital of England.”66
Smollett might well have crossed the Channel in search of inspiration or material to fill out the scenes in his second novel, for there can be no doubt that much of what he observed found its way into the composition of Peregrine Pickle, including Pallet and the Doctor (chapters 46–70) and a Mr. Hunter of Burnside, the exiled Jacobite whom Peregrine accompanies to the seaside at Boulogne (chapter 40). These characters, as well as the detailed rendering of French, Flemish, and Dutch scenes, make it all but undeniable that Smollett composed the second volume of his novel either during his travels or shortly after his return to Monmouth House, Chelsea, in late September 1750.67 Sir Walter Scott’s claim that “Peregrine Pickle is supposed to have been written chiefly in Paris” seems unlikely, however, given that Smollett spent at most three months in Paris, or about half the time that he claimed it took to compose his shorter first novel.68
James L. Clifford has shown that mention was made of Peregrine Pickle as early as 10 November 1750 in a letter from Thomas Birch to Philip Yorke, Earl of Hard-wicke.69 A letter from Samuel Richardson to Sarah Chapone, dated 6 December 1750, suggests that Lady Vane’s memoirs, which comprise most of volume 3, were in press by that time.70 Presumably, then, by the late fall of 1750, Smollett had completed or nearly completed writing his second novel. Even if he were relieved of a large part of the composing of volumes 3 and 4 by the inclusion of ready-written chapters containing the memoirs of Lady Vane (chapter 88) and the history of the Annesley case (chapter 106), Smollett appears to have completed Peregrine Pickle with no less efficiency than he had completed Roderick Random.71 His speed of composition becomes even more impressive when one considers that at this time Smollett had not yet given up his medical practice. Sometime around June 1750, he paid a fee of £28 Scots for a medical degree from Marischal College, Aberdeen.72 Around the same time, he was preparing the first volume of William Smellie’s three-volume Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery for publication in 1751.73 Given so many commitments, his dual occupations, and the disruptions of relocation and travel, it is likely that Smollett wrote wherever and whenever he could during 1750. Near the end of the eighteenth century, one critic observed that Smollett “often wrote in such circumstances, that dispatch was his primary object.”74 And yet despite this “dispatch,” the pages of Peregrine Pickle bear eloquent testimony to what the same essayist called Smollett’s “inventive genius, and . . . vigorous imagination.”75
If Smollett’s compositional burden was lessened by the inclusion of the “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,” the sensational misadventures of Lady Frances Anne Vane recounted in a fifty-thousand-word scandalous narrative that constitutes most of volume 3, the “Memoirs” have presented a different kind of challenge to Smollett’s biographers and the novel’s critics. Although the life of Lady Vane—her two marriages, her lovers and elopements, her struggle with second husband Lord Vane for a separation and maintenance at his expense—does not carry the same interest for the modern reader as it did for her contemporaries, no problem related to the composition of Peregrine Pickle has generated more speculation than the attribution of authorship of the “Memoirs.” The modern debate over attribution was begun by Buck, who in 1925 summarized what he thought of as the range of possible attributions: (1) Lady Vane composed the “Memoirs” herself without any assistance; (2) the doctor and sometime Smollett antagonist John Shebbeare wrote them, presumably having been given the material by Lady Vane; (3) Shebbeare revised material provided by Lady Vane; (4) Daniel MacKercher, the philanthropic lawyer and expatriate Scot, wrote them; (5) Smollett himself wrote them; or (6) Smollett revised material provided by Lady Vane.76 Based on a questionable assertion that the sensibility found in the “Memoirs” was “utterly beyond the ken of Narcissa’s creator (and indeed most men),” on the “feebleness of the narrative and the colorlessness of the individuals,” and the presence of moralizing passages not compatible with Smollett’s usual practice, Buck concluded that Lady Vane herself wrote the “Memoirs,” which were then “looked over and ‘corrected’ by Dr. Shebbeare.”77 Rufus Putney, however, answered Buck by pointing out that his “summary minimizes the overwhelming weight of contemporary opinion against his case,” which held that Smollett had a hand in preparing the “Memoirs” for publication.78 Putney then argues that close analysis of the “Memoirs” reveals two unusual stylistic “mannerisms” present in both Peregrine Pickle and the “Memoirs”: “Smollett’s habit of using two words, wholly or partially synonymous, where one would suffice” and “alliteration carried to unusual limits.”79 Drawing further upon Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s opinion that Lady Vane was incapable of writing the “Memoirs” without help and asserting that Shebbeare’s extant published compositions prove that he was capable of no more than correcting “the punctuation and the spelling,” Putney concluded that Smollett was the author of the “Memoirs” and Lady Vane was his source.80 Knapp agreed with Putney.81
The most recent entry in the debate over the attribution of the “Memoirs” comes from O M Brack, Jr., who agrees with Putney that “Smollett wrote [the “Memoirs”] from materials supplied by Lady Vane.”82 Extending Putney’s stylistic analysis, Brack shows other “stylistic habits” common to both Peregrine Pickle and the “Memoirs.” Brack also notes that the only piece of surviving external evidence related to the question of authorship of the “Memoirs,” Smollett’s letter to his publisher, William Strahan, containing instructions for the printing of the second edition in 1758, strongly suggests that Smollett had a “considerable” role in “shaping the ‘Memoirs.’”83 In the absence of physical evidence that would allow a definitive attribution, Brack concludes that the “Memoirs” were a collaboration between Smollett and Lady Vane.
With conclusive external evidence lacking, a definitive answer to the question of attribution of the “Memoirs” remains beyond reach. In the third century after its publication, it grows increasingly unlikely, as Neil Guthrie wrote in 2002, that external evidence will be discovered and dispel once and for all the mystery surrounding the composition of the “Memoirs.”84 In the absence of new external evidence, conjecture about the authorship of the “Memoirs” must rely on the subtle stylistic comparisons described above and other forms of internal evidence. One such piece of internal evidence, small but compelling, is an allusion in the “Memoirs” to Gil Blas, the novel that Smollett had translated and that was published on 13 October 1748.85 On one of her Continental sojourns, Lady Vane falls ill and seeks medical attention at Lisle. There, she tells us, she consulted “a physician, who seemed to have been a disciple of Sangrado, for he scarce left a drop of blood in my body, and yet I found myself never a whit the better. Indeed I was so much exhausted by these evacuations, and my constitution so much impaired by fatigue and perturbation of mind, that I had no other hope of recovering but that of reaching England, and putting myself under the direction of a physician on whose ability I could depend. . . . [B]y that time we arrived at Dover, [I] was almost in extremity” (chapter 88). Dr. Sangrado is a character from Gil Blas. Called in to attend to Gil Blas’s master, Sangrado orders “frequent and copious evacuations” of blood with the result that “in less than two days the old canon was reduced to extremity.” Realizing that he is near death, the canon asks Gil Blas to stop his treatments and tells him that “tho’ there is scarce a drop of blood left in my body, I don’t find myself a whit the better.”86 While it is possible that Lady Vane or a ghostwriter other than Smollett could have copied this sentence from Gil Blas, it is much more likely that we owe the allusion to Smollett himself and that these sentences stand as a barely legible mark of ownership, an occult signature easily overlooked in a fifty-thousand-word manuscript. While this allusion does not provide conclusive proof that Smollett wrote the “Memoirs,” it certainly adds weight to the argument that Smollett did more than merely insert the memoirs without alteration into his narrative.
The question of the attribution of the approximately twenty-thousand-word interpolated tale that comprises chapter 106, commonly known as the Annesley case, has not occupied scholars to the extent that Lady Vane’s “Memoirs” has, nor did any of the contemporary notices of the novel remark on the style or authorship of the Annesley materials. The tale recounts episodes in the life of Daniel MacKercher (1702–72), soldier, lawyer, lover, humanitarian, and merchant whom Smollett had praised in Reproof as the “melting Scot.” According to Smollett’s footnote to that line, MacKercher “exceeded the scripture-injunction, by not only parting with his cloak and coat, but with his shirt also, to relieve a brother in distress.”87 That brother was James Annesley (1715–60), whom MacKercher had met shortly after Annesley’s return from the West Indies in October 1741.88 Annesley claimed to be the son of Arthur Annesley, 4th Baron Altham (1688/89–1727), and he accused his uncle Richard Annesley of having him kidnapped, transported to America, and there sold into indentured servitude in order to keep him from claiming his rightful inheritance.89 MacKercher undertook Annesley’s cause and supported him in his attempts to claim his inheritance. It is this story, and the histories of both men, that Peregrine hears while he is imprisoned. Lewis Knapp and Lillian de la Torre speculate that Smollett’s account was based upon “a MS. Case of James Annesley,” which was written sometime after 1747 in order to raise funds for Annesley’s legal bills and to advance his claim to the earldom of Anglesey. According to Knapp and de la Torre, the manuscript was published as An Abstract of the Case of James Annesley, Esq; Veritas Praevalebit. Printed in the Year MDCCLI. It was followed by a Dublin edition, presumably further edited, An Abstract of the Case of the Honourable James Annesley, Esq. . . . Printed in the Year MDCCLIV.90 After collating the two printed sources and MacKercher’s story from Peregrine Pickle, Knapp and de la Torre concluded that Smollett’s account of the Annesley affair was derived from the manuscript version of An Abstract, which Smollett then “compress[ed] . . . for his own purposes in Peregrine Pickle.” Details in the Annesley narrative that do not come from this source, such as MacKercher’s life story, they argue, must have come directly from MacKercher himself.91 A comparison of the Dublin edition of An Abstract (1754) with the Annesley material in chapter 106 supports Knapp and de la Torre’s report that both works share identical phrases, sentences, and entire paragraphs. If we grant that the Dublin edition of An Abstract was composed before the Annesley chapter, then Knapp and de la Torre must be correct in their claim that Smollett worked over materials that were probably written by someone else before inserting them into his novel.
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. In which are included, Memoirs of a Lady of Quality appeared on Monday, 26 February 1751, at a price of 12s. for the four volumes bound in calf and 10s. 6d. in paper-covered boards.92 Smollett initially reserved the exclusive copyright for himself, and the title page proclaims “Printed for the Author.” Albert Smith has presented convincing evidence that the printer was William Strahan.93 David Wilson, who was working in Edinburgh in 1748 but had moved to “Plato’s Head, near Round-Court, in the Strand by the time Smollett’s second novel was published, was the bookseller.94 At some point Smollett sold to Strahan either half or all of Peregrine Pickle for £400, perhaps as early as July 1751, as Smith discovered in his examination of Strahan’s ledgers.95 The £400 that Strahan paid Smollett does not seem out of line for the author of the popular Roderick Random, especially given the publicity enjoyed by Lady Vane’s “Memoirs” both before and after publication.96 On 9 February 1750/51, the General Advertiser announced the publication of a rival memoir, The History of a Woman of Quality: or, the Adventures of Lady Frail (London: M. Cooper and G. Woodfall, 1751), attributed to John Hill. Smollett or his publisher was concerned enough about being scooped by Lady Frail that one or both placed a notice in the General Advertiser for 7 February 1750/51 warning the public not to mistake Lady Frail for the genuine article of Lady Vane’s adventures, available only in Peregrine Pickle.97 Following shortly upon the publication of Peregrine Pickle were A Letter to the Right Honourable the Lady V——ss V——, published by W. Owen and announced in the General Advertiser for Tuesday, 6 March 1751; A Parallel between the Characters of Lady Frail and the Lady of Quality in Peregrine Pickle, published by R. Griffiths and announced in the General Advertiser for 9 March 1751; and An Apology for the Conduct of a Lady of Quality, Lately Traduc’d under the Name of Lady Frail. In a Letter from a Person of Honour to a Nobleman of Distinction, published by M. Cooper and announced in the London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette on 10 July 1751.98 Thus, not only the sensational nature of the self-revelations in the “Memoirs” but also the booksellers’ attempts to capitalize on the scandal’s popularity kept Peregrine Pickle before the public and might have led Strahan to hope that the scandalous narrative would stimulate sales of the novel.99
That a second edition of Peregrine Pickle did not appear until 1758 suggests disappointing sales, at least when compared to Roderick Random, the second edition of which appeared only months after the first. In the “Advertisement” that prefaces the second edition, Smollett attributed the seven years that passed between editions to efforts “to stifle him [Peregrine Pickle] in the birth, by certain booksellers and others, who were at uncommon pains to misrepresent the work and calumniate the author.”100 Knapp speculates that if there were such a conspiracy among the booksellers, it may have originated in their disapproval of “Smollett’s independent reservation of the whole copyright.”101 Evidence from a contemporary, however, suggests that Smollett’s loss of standing with the booksellers could have been a consequence of disappointing sales rather than its cause. On 14 October 1752 Thomas Birch wrote to Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke, that Smollett was “trying his fortune again as writer of romance, notwithstanding the ill success of his Peregrine Pickle which ruined his reputation among the booksellers.”102 And yet, if Smith is correct and Strahan purchased half or all of the copyright from Smollett six months after the appearance of the first edition, then we must conclude that at least one bookseller maintained enough faith and interest in Smollett to buy Pickle six months after its appearance and probably with the disappointing sales already evident.103 We are left, then, with a perplexing picture of the fortunes of Smollett’s second novel. Whether, as Smollett himself charged in the “Advertisement” to the second edition, unnamed enemies “decried [the novel] as an immoral piece, and a scurrilous libel . . . and some formidable criticks declared that the book was void of humour, character and sentiment,” or whether the novel failed to attract the interests of a reading public for other reasons, the fact remains that Peregrine Pickle was a commercial disappointment when compared to its predecessor.104
That Peregrine Pickle did not enjoy the success of Roderick Random was most likely an unpleasant surprise and a bitter disappointment to the ambitious author.105 In a letter written to Alexander Carlyle on 7 June 1748, Smollett confessed that this first success had given him “Occasion to experience that Weakness of Vanity in an Author which exults even in the applause of [a] fool.”106 In the case of Peregrine Pickle, however, with few exceptions applause was faint, and there was little cause for vanity. John Hill, author of The History of a Woman of Quality: or, the Adventures of Lady Frail and thus both rival and antagonist, taunted Smollett over the poor sales of Pickle. In his “Inspector” column for the London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette for 30 April 1751, Hill includes the following bit of doggerel verse, supposedly sent him by a correspondent: “That with you Tommy S——t, Dame Fortune is fickle / All see, without Grief, in the Fate of poor PICKLE.”107 Although Hill’s criticism is clearly not disinterested, it is unlikely that he would have called attention to the novel’s poor sales if it were actually selling well. Both Howard Buck and Fred W. Boege argue that Lady Vane’s story generated initial interest in the novel. The lengthy interpolation of “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,” amounting to nearly one-seventh of the novel, Buck asserts, and not the story of a young man’s education, travels, and uncertain progress toward maturity, made the book, however briefly, a “best seller.”108 The surviving records of contemporary reactions leave no doubt that the appearance of the “Memoirs” created something of a sensation: Horace Walpole, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Thomas Gray, and Henry Fielding all had something to say about it. Reactions to the “Memoirs” were as might be expected: some readers were amused, some found in Lady Vane’s revelations a warning to the young not to depart from the narrow path of virtue, and others were at a loss to understand Lady Vane’s motives for exposing her behavior to public scrutiny.109 Controversy over the “Memoirs” may have indeed “distracted the attention of the public from the permanent merits of Peregrine Pickle,” as Knapp suggests, but that interest may not have been strong or widespread enough to generate large sales.110
Even though Pickle’s sales were disappointing, and much private commentary on the novel was limited to gossip about Lady Vane’s life, it would be misleading to suggest that other parts of the novel escaped commentary or that all critical responses around the time of publication were negative. John Cleland, writing anonymously, began a relatively favorable notice in the Monthly Review by numbering Smollett among those British authors who take their “matter . . . from nature, from adventures, real or imaginary, but familiar, practical, and probable to be met with in the course of common life.”111 Cleland tempers his praise, however, by noting that Smollett has not “every where preserved propriety and nature.”112 As evidence of the former, he notes the joke that Peregrine plays on his aunt Grizzle by perforating her chamber pot (chapter 14); of the latter, he notes that the Doctor whom Peregrine meets in France is “rather overtouched.”113 And, like other critics, Cleland devotes almost as many words to Lady Vane as he does to the rest of the story. Another anonymous reviewer, writing in the Royal Magazine, calls “Mrs. Grizzle’s indefatigable pains to gratify [Mrs. Pickle’s longings when she is pregnant with Peregrine] . . . extremely ridiculous” and censures the scene for a lack of “probability.”114 The same reviewer also complains about Peregrine’s escapades in Oxford (chapters 24–25), claiming that they “might have better been omitted in a work, which is likely to have the juvenile part of mankind, for the majority of its readers.”115 Whether Smollett had these criticisms in mind when he penned the “Advertisement” to the second edition cannot be known, but he did remove the joke on Grizzle with the chamber pot in that edition.116
The private judgments of other readers that have survived are far less kind than the public reviews. Thomas Gray called the novel “very poor indeed with a few exceptions”; Lady Luxborough, revealing her true interests, wrote William Shenstone that she “hired” the book “merely for the sake of reading one of the volumes, wherein are inserted the Memoirs of Lady V——; . . . The rest of the book is, I think, ill wrote, and not interesting.” Mary Granville Delany called it “wretched stuff.”117 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is an exception to this damning chorus, though she seems to be unaware of the book’s author. To her daughter, Lady Bute, she writes, “I am sorry not to see any more of P[eregrine] Pickle’s performances; I wish you could tell me his name.”118 That Peregrine Pickle offered Smollett little occasion for the enjoyment of authorial vanity seems obvious. In his surviving correspondence, Smollett mentions Peregrine Pickle directly only in a letter of instruction to Strahan regarding the printing of the second edition and only by inference in a letter of apology to Garrick.119 How disappointing must it have been to the young author that Peregrine Pickle’s initial and apparently short-lived success was in fact a mere succès de scandale.
Although Lady Vane’s memoirs may have caught the fancy of the beau monde, eager to read about the amorous misadventures of one of their own, the passing of that bright if brittle world has resulted in the loss of much of the allure of the “Memoirs.” If the tale has not quite come to be considered, in the words of Sir Walter Scott, “a tiresome and unnecessary excrescence upon the main story,” the sheer length of the interpolation certainly tries the patience of all but the most scholarly or charitable readers.120 Moreover, the “Memoirs” are not the only distraction from the “main story” of the hero’s journeys from childhood to marriage. While the extended satire on the Grand Tour that takes up volume 2 has the power to amuse and sometimes shock because of its fully realized characters and vivid tableaux, the lengthy exposition of the long-forgotten legal dispute over James Annesley’s claim to the earldom of Anglesey lacks those touches of comic genius and is apt to leave its readers impatient for a return to the “main story.” And yet, despite his work’s troubled entry onto the cultural scene, Smollett did not abandon his second experiment in narrative. Seven years later, returning to it in order to correct some of its faults, he revised his novel, answering his critics “by retrenching the superfluities of the first [edition], reforming its manners, and correcting its expression.”121 As a result of his revisions, the second edition was substantially shorter than the first, which pleased at least one later reader. Scott welcomed the excisions and added that “the work would have been much improved by a more unsparing application of the pruning knife.”122 Not all readers have agreed with Scott’s opinion that less is more; and this edition, like Clifford’s earlier edition for Oxford University Press, uses the first edition as copy-text in order to bring before the reader the novel as it spilled from the author when he was in the throes of resentment or when he was feeling indelicately mischievous.123
Shortly before the close of the eighteenth century, John Moore wrote that Peregrine Pickle, like its predecessor, Roderick Random, was written in imitation of Le Sage, its “object evidently . . . to lead a young man through a variety of scenes, and put him into situations which afforded opportunities of exhibiting human nature in interesting points of view, of agitating the passions, of amusing the imagination, and of instructing the understanding of the reader.”124 Peregrine Pickle certainly has scenes and situations enough to interest, agitate, amuse, and instruct. Like its predecessor, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle follows its hero from his birth to his marriage. Unlike Roderick Random, however, Peregrine Pickle has a rather more carefree and materially comfortable early life until he, like Random again, finds himself in the Fleet Prison because he cannot pay his debts. The novel rambles across southern England to France and the Low Countries and back. And although Peregrine’s social superiority to Roderick Random means that Smollett sacrifices the opportunity of dwelling long among society’s lower orders, he introduces them as needed for comic effect or satiric attacks. As readers follow the hero from his birth to his wedding day, they experience with him fortune’s vicissitudes, which are intensified by youthful pride and appetites, before finally leaving him at the altar with the assurance (if not the conviction) that his experiences have prepared him to shoulder the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood.
Over the centuries since its appearance, no one has faulted Peregrine Pickle for a lack of variety, either in scene or in character, though, beginning with Lady Luxborough, some have complained that, despite all its variety and matter, it is “not interesting.” Fearing, perhaps, that many readers’ reactions might resemble Lady Luxborough’s, even appreciative critics are often defensive when they consider the work. Sir Walter Scott finds “splendid merit” in it while conceding that “there is an ease and simplicity in the first novel which is not quite attained in the second.” Judging that a more conscious effort at literary composition went into the making of Peregrine Pickle than Roderick Random, he nonetheless concludes that the novel evinces a “rich and brilliant display of the talents and humour of the distinguished author.”125 Fellow novelist Charles Dickens offers his praise in the form of David Copperfield’s special affection for a novel that brought him the comforting company of Tom Pipes and Commodore Trunnion. One cannot help but wonder, however, if Dickens’s praise has more to do with juvenile need than literary appreciation.126 No less astute a Smollettian than Jerry C. Beasley judges Peregrine Pickle the “weakest of all Smollett’s fictional works” and calls it a “flawed performance.”127 Even George Orwell, in praising Smollett for his “outstanding intellectual honesty” and in claiming that he “often attains a truthfulness that more serious novelists have missed,” implies that Smollett’s works do not quite attain the seriousness of those by his contemporaries.128
In his short but penetrating appreciation of Smollett, Orwell also raises issues of formlessness and amorality that have formed the basis of much of the dissatisfaction with Peregrine Pickle. Starting with Rufus Putney in 1947, some modern critics have sought to refute the charge of formlessness by finding signs of an organic or thematic structure. Putney described “eleven major divisions” in the novel, “cover[ing] a period varying from a few weeks to several years in the hero’s life.”129 Paul-Gabriel Boucé later reduced the number to five.130 This critical disagreement suggests that any such division must ultimately be arbitrary: one could just as easily divide the novel, for example, into three grand “movements,” the first covering the hero’s early family life and education up to his departure from England to embark on the Grand Tour, the second recounting the adventures on the Grand Tour itself, and the third encompassing the adventures that attend Perry after his return to England, with perhaps a coda to encompass the denouement once he leaves prison (chapter 112). Given that Peregrine Pickle recounts the birth, youth, and early adulthood of its hero, the discovery of a more or less orderly succession of stages from youth to maturity seems inevitable. Even if one argues that these stages are organized by dominant motifs (education and first love; travel and adventures; socialization, disillusionment, and marriage), such motifs themselves are common to most biographical plots. These general motifs, moreover, do not provide the causal connections that have come to define the classic realist novel, where actions produce specific consequences, which in turn produce more actions. To claim for Peregrine Pickle discrete and orderly divisions is as much an expression of a preference for structure over succession and design over accident as an account of the experience of reading the novel.
If Peregrine Pickle has a principle of organization, it is successive rather than causal, additive rather than developmental. Even so fierce a proponent of a developmental plot in Peregrine Pickle as Robert Giddings, who calls the novel Smollett’s masterpiece and argues that the hero undergoes a moral transformation over time, sees the novel’s structure as “the result of its moral content” rather than as a finely constructed chain of causal connections between specific episodes in the plot. If there are causal connections, as Giddings sometimes claims, they appear in the form of a general expectation derived from the hero’s disposition.131 Peregrine finds himself in prison, for example, because his pride makes him an easy target for his enemies and prevents him from appealing to his friends for assistance. The hero’s disposition rather than his actions produces consequences, but those consequences do not enchain particular actions to predictable outcomes that accumulate over time until they finally resolve in a finely constructed plot. A reader looking for a finely constructed plot, such as can be found in Fielding’s Tom Jones, must conclude that the novel is indeed a flawed performance. But judging Peregrine Pickle against Tom Jones, at least in this respect, is missing the mark by using an inappropriate standard for comparison. As Linda Bree notes, any such comparison of Fielding to Smollett “was hardly likely to favor Smollett, given the very high admiration of Fielding’s plot construction.”132 To read Smollett for the plot when, as Orwell aptly notes, he was at his most effective when he was composing “formless tales full of farcical and improbable adventures” is to allow rather narrow— and somewhat anachronistic—generic expectations to cloud Smollett’s powerful and unique vision of his world.133 Like another British novelist of the sea, Joseph Conrad, Smollett possessed a genius to make us see the world as he saw it.134 He expressed this genius by means of his powers of keen observation, the results of which he then conveyed through what Clifford has identified as “many diverse traditions—the picaresque, classical formal satire, comedy, melodrama, the new sensibility, and at times stark realism.”135 This representational ability—an ability to convey his unique vision of experience—constitutes his contribution to the literary history of narrative fiction; and it is Smollett’s “great fertility” of imagination and “vigour of presentation,” to quote James Clifford again, that imbue Smollett’s compositions with the force and immediacy of a revelation.136
Smollett’s reliance on rich and varied narrative traditions allows him to paint a sometimes gloriously, if sometimes maddeningly, disordered world. Comedy, satire, melodrama, romance, picaresque, the sentimental novel, the scandalous memoir, the travel diary—Smollett uses all these forms to render his vision of life in words. That these forms are not quite fully integrated into an aesthetic unity that would come to be expected of the classic realist novel, however, is not so much a flaw as it is a characteristic of Smollett’s writing and a product of the moment in which he wrote, a moment where forms could still riot on the page and thereby create a strangely beautiful apprehension of life. Moreover, with the exception of the interpolated tales of Lady Vane and Daniel MacKercher, Peregrine Pickle does provide a principle of integration in the figure of its protagonist. Smollett himself provides us with a statement of this compositional principle in his dedication to Ferdinand Count Fathom, published just two years after Peregrine Pickle:
A Novel is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groupes, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of a uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient. But this plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability or success, without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene by virtue of his own importance.137
This statement reveals that Smollett thinks of novel composition spatially first and temporally last. He tells us that the novel is a picture; that it comprehends figures, disposed and exhibited in certain situations; that it has a uniform purpose and a “principal personage” to hold the attention of its readers. Diffusion and difference and variety compel the reader to attend to the details of the pictures even as they challenge the principal personage’s powers of perception and judgment.138 If the novel is to succeed, its hero needs wit and stamina to solve the puzzles of experience, and its reader must accept that those puzzles comprise all that is important in life. In other words, as Smollett defines the novel in this passage, the whole is a movable spectacle, catholic in its scope, credible in its depictions, and clear in its intention upon the reader. In this definition of the novel, plot is merely a function of personage, an accidental product of the succession of events.
In the place of plot are isolated powerful effects that play out, as it were, on the pulse of the principal personage and the reader alike. It is the principal personage, bemused in life’s labyrinth, who allows the reader to experience those effects in a startlingly direct way. Smollett’s great contemporary Samuel Johnson, writing in 1750 just months before Peregrine Pickle’s publication, explains how the power of identification generates interest in the reader. Using a theatrical metaphor as Smollett would do in his own aesthetic manifesto, Johnson writes: “[W]hen an adventurer is leveled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of the universal drama, as may be the lot of any other man; young spectators fix their eyes upon him with closer attention.” Johnson worried that the reader’s fascination with the universal drama might become so strong that the “power of example” would “take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will.”139 In his works of fiction, where visual elements predominate, Smollett often provides powerful “examples” of experience: Roderick Random’s service aboard the Thunder, especially the battle scene, during which the hero is immobilized by being manacled to the ship’s deck and finally becomes “insensible” amidst the carnage (chapter 29); or, in Humphry Clinker, Matt Bramble’s attendance at the assembly at Bath, which produces such an overwhelming profusion of sights, sounds, and odors that he also loses consciousness (To Dr. Lewis, 8 May). These vivid scenes, which depict intense experiences that register upon the bodies of the principal personages, have immediate rather than lasting consequences for the characters undergoing them. Random returns to England, neither better nor worse for his experience of naval warfare; and Bramble continues his journey toward health and contentment, neither stronger nor weaker for his experiences of the social chaos at Bath. For the reader, however, the scenes endure not only because of their relation to the principal personage but also because they capture an intense, discrete, separable moment in the universal drama. The hero of Peregrine Pickle escapes these moments, for in Smollett’s second novel intense scenes—the banquet in the manner of the ancients, Pallet’s fears while he is imprisoned in the Bastille, Commodore Trunnion’s wedding day—leave lasting impressions upon the reader without passing through the body of the principal personage. They linger nonetheless because they are imbued with the “intellectual honesty” that compelled Smollett to render experience vividly and without concern that all scenes assume their places in a finely wrought chain of events tied directly to the principal personage.
Vivid episodes are not the only fictional elements that Smollett chooses in the place of plot. As he tells us in the dedication to Fathom, he also creates moral labyrinths to hold our attention. The hero travels the maze of life, which, like the labyrinth of myth, is governed by powerful forces, personified in the Minotaur, half-human and half-bestial. Unlike the labyrinth of myth, however, there is a Minotaur at every turn, waiting to tax the hero of some of his humanity in order to supplement its own diminishing stores. It is the hero who, as surrogate, shoulders the weight of the reader’s interest, carrying it into every encounter, around every bend, into every dead end and out again. This is especially true of Peregrine Pickle as the young hero confronts his own powerful appetites in episodic encounters from which emerge the clues that lead to mastery of the labyrinth. Mastery requires repetition, and to avoid such repetition in the fiction runs the risk of elevating entertainment over instruction, fascination over truth. The clue to appreciating Smollett’s practice as a writer of fictions, then, is to avoid imposing upon the fictions a need for order or design that the novelist himself finds missing in the world he is imitating. Rather than looking for a logic that links one turn of the labyrinth to the next, we are asked to attend to the challenge that each turn brings to the principal personage.
If there is little relation between one turn and another, even if at times there seems to be little difference between one passage and another, this absence of relation is neither fault nor accident. The lack of relation conveys the contingent nature of experience, the feeling that one never knows what waits around the next blind turn. The lack of meaningful difference (which is not to be confused with a lack of variety) relates that truth noticed by Orwell and prized by Smollett’s contemporaries: that human nature is ruled by a finite spectrum of passions. The challenge for hero and reader alike is to master the passions within and withstand the passions without. The aim of each of Smollett’s heroes is to return home to his best self, which he has, paradoxically, carried with him all along. To read Smollett’s novel on its own terms is to accept its offering of a concatenation of events that, by their nature, disorient the principal personage and prompt him to “unwind the clue to the labyrinth.” And while such a plan might go against our expectations of the structural unity that one finds in a work like Tom Jones, it also offers us a freedom from being driven against our will by a plot’s well-oiled engine, constructed in such a way that it responds to the needs of its creator. Although the well-oiled machine offers readers a sense of an ordered universe under the direction of a fabricating, godlike author, Smollett’s practice gives the reader a sense of open-endedness and, because of its comprehensive diffuseness, a greater acquaintance with the “characters of life.” In this regard, Smollett might be thought of as writing a parodic quest narrative, secular rather than sacred, social rather than romantic, where the many substitute satisfactorily for the one. Only at the end, bowing before the necessity to close the scene, does Smollett leave the many to return to the one appropriate to comic romance.
Peregrine Pickle’s adventures in the labyrinth provide an opportunity for Smollett to exercise his comic genius, his satirical impulse, and his keen understanding of human motivations. Smollett has long been appreciated for a comic genius that finds expression in the creation of sympathetic if eccentric figures such as Tom Bowling in Roderick Random and Lismahago in Humphry Clinker, both of whom are closely associated with the principal personages in those novels. In Peregrine Pickle Smollett creates one of the most memorable of these eccentrics in Commodore Trunnion, Peregrine’s uncle by marriage and benefactor by choice. Cut from the same sailcloth as Tom Bowling and making his appearance before the hero himself takes the stage, Trunnion is a one-eyed veteran sailor who has never found anything to please him as much as his life at sea. Having retired to his “garrison” in the English countryside, he continues the routines of shipboard life on dry land (chapters 2–10).
In Trunnion, Smollett has not only created a character who has delighted readers for centuries but also reanimated the eighteenth-century English structures and institutions that mold the commodore, from the country inn to the rural drawing room, from marriage to the navy. The navy, of course, has had the greatest impact on Trunnion’s life, but it is not the only “institution” that has shaped it. Two other institutions—law and family—led Trunnion to the navy and are also responsible for his comic characteristics. Arrested for “an adventure of deer-stealing” in his youth, he escapes the rigors of the law only by being subjected to the “rigour and inhumanity” of his “own relations, and in particular an uncle on whom he chiefly depended,” who demanded that he “go to sea within thirty days after his release, under the penalty of being proceeded against as a felon.” Trunnion accepts the offer rather than “remain in prison disowned and deserted by every body, and after all suffer an ignominious trial, that might end in a sentence of transportation for life” (chapter 16). In a remarkably economical fashion, Smollett gives us a credible account of Trunnion’s origins and a representation of familial life that run counter to the dominant sentimental mode. The episode reveals that Smollett could, when he so desired, fashion a general consequence of a particular action by putting those actions in a particular social context. In this instance, familial interests work together with criminal law to turn adolescent adventure into an adult destiny. That the boy Peregrine is also abandoned by his closest relations adds motive to Trunnion and pattern to otherwise random events.
Ultimately, however, we care less about the reasons that led Trunnion to the sea and more about his attempts upon his return from the sea to translate the watery main to the English countryside. He has built and outfitted his landlocked garrison to resemble a ship so that he may command it as he once did his seagoing vessel. His seafaring subordinates, lieutenant Jack Hatchway and boatswain’s mate Tom Pipes, find their pleasure by catering to his whims and taking advantage of his eccentricities. Although Hatchway’s and Pipes’s antics make us question the ultimate effectiveness of Trunnion’s command, at least in the garrison, they also reveal a Shakespearean depth to his character. Allusions to Falstaff reveal that Smollett had him and his band of fellows in mind as he shaped Trunnion, whose love of ale and adventure comes through even though his options for both become increasingly limited by changes that occur in the garrison over the course of the narrative.140 Through his gruffness and singular forms of expression, genuine compassion and an admirable generosity radiate. Like Don Quixote, another model for his character, Trunnion chooses to inhabit a world of his own creation without sacrificing affection for those closest to him. In other words, Smollett’s achievement is to humanize the eccentric. It is Trunnion’s humanity that lends him an aura of grandeur, which he never loses, even when he is the butt of comic business.
Nowhere do we see Trunnion in a more purely comic moment than on his wedding day, when he embodies that idea of comedy whereby human actions are reduced to mechanical repetition inappropriate to the context.141 Understandably for the man who has spent his adult life exclusively among other men (no women are allowed in the garrison overnight), the commodore is a reluctant bridegroom, startled into his decision by a stratagem devised by Hatchway and executed with the help of Pipes (chapter 7). The stratagem is itself a masterpiece of comic business, as Hatchway and Pipes together impersonate an otherworldly visitant whose sole purpose is to order Trunnion to “turn out and be spliced, or lie still and be damned.” Taken together with earlier news that his bride-to-be had bequeathed him one thousand pounds in the event of her death, the visitation lands Trunnion in a quandary, where he finds himself “bewildered in the labyrinth of his own thoughts.” Fear of God and—perhaps to an even greater extent—fear of the loss of his boon companion Hatchway, who has threatened to leave Trunnion if he ignores the “supernatural” advice he has received, provide the motives for him to find his way out of his particular mental labyrinth. Although it is “against the current of his own inclination,” Trunnion agrees to “grapple”: he will consent to be married to Grizzle Pickle (chapter 7). There is so much comic prowess to engage the reader in the prelude to the wedding day that it is easy to overlook the rich variety of psychological and moral motives behind Trunnion’s ultimate decision to “grapple”: friendship, gratitude, fear, and admiration all play a role in his decision to enter into the solemn covenant of marriage. With breathtaking economy and comic verve Smollett has succeeded in representing a common human experience with remarkable fidelity to the complexity of motive that a lesser writer might sacrifice for the sake of a joke.
Smollett extends the reader’s delight over two more chapters that comprise the events of the wedding day and night. The day of the wedding is arguably one of the finest pieces of comic writing in the history of the English novel, beloved enough to have enjoyed a second life on the stage, when in 1818 Peregrine Pickle; or, Hawser Trunnion on Horseback was produced at the Royal Amphitheatre.142 Although Trunnion travels to the church on horseback, he rides his horse as if he were at the helm of his ship, tacking, maneuvering, and adjusting course in order to take advantage of the shifting winds. He never rides straight ahead. Trunnion’s approach to the church is a crisscross, zigzag affair, not unlike his approach to the marriage he is about to enter into. It is much more than merely an expression of “a recalcitrance . . . oppose[d] to a recalcitrant world,” as William Bowman Piper suggests, though that is a part of it.143 It is also, rather significantly, an expression of a natural hesitation in a mind that contemplates making a momentous change. Trunnion’s indirect progress to the altar dramatizes the strategies of indirection that we often employ to harness the power of our prevailing passions to the discipline of our will, and Smollett shows how even chance crosswinds impede our journey.
The wind is not the only force that conspires to keep Trunnion from his appointment with his bride-to-be, for when he is just about to reach the church, the “notes of a pack of hounds” attract the attention of his and Hatchway’s horses, and off the riders go away from the church that they have worked so hard to approach (chapter 8). When his renegade horse (who is, after all, only following his own nature) finally reaches the owners of the hounds, the narrative pauses to take stock of the horse’s rider:
The commodore’s person was at all times an object of admiration; much more so on this occasion, when every singularity was aggravated by the circumstances of his dress and disaster.
He had put on in honour of his nuptials his best coat of blue broad cloth . . . trimmed with five dozen of brass buttons, large and small; his breeches were of the same piece, fastened at the knees with large bunches of tape; his waistcoat was of red plush lapelled with green velvet, and garnished with vellum holes; his boots bore an intimate resemblance both in colour and shape to a pair of leathern buckets; his shoulder was graced with a broad buff belt, from whence depended a huge hanger with a hilt like that of a backsword; and on each side of his pummel appeared a rusty pistol rammed in a case covered with bear-skin. The loss of his tye-periwig and laced hat, which were curiosities of the kind, did not at all contribute to the improvement of the picture, but on the contrary, by exhibiting his bald pate, and the natural extension of his lanthorn jaws, added to the peculiarity and extravagance of the whole. (chapter 8)
Smollett’s particular strength as a writer comes to the fore at this moment. The passage is above all a rather obvious attempt to remind the reader of Trunnion’s physical and social eccentricities, which are here expressed in his dress. It is significant, however, that he has lost his tiewig and laced hat, which he presumably added in honor of his approaching nuptials. Now stripped of those two ceremonial pieces of his wardrobe, he is momentarily spared the change that he has agreed to and left with the weaponry that he thought fit to carry with him from the garrison to the church, where, no doubt, he planned to grapple with and subdue the enemy. The oversized and rusty nature of the weaponry, however, calls in doubt its utility, and we become increasingly aware of how ill suited Trunnion is to the commerce of everyday life, whether erotic or martial in character. Arriving in such dress and condition among the hunters, he is, of course, immediately recognized as an easy mark and cheated of the value of his horse, which he willingly sells to the first bidder. The subduer is here subdued, and he ends the day “half-seas over” in a country inn (chapter 9).
This initial subjection is prelude to the more significant one that follows hard upon his wedding night. After some additional comic business involving a hammock and accommodations that do not quite live up to the bride’s expectations, Trunnion begins his married life. It is not a particularly auspicious beginning, and after the misadventures of the wedding night and Grizzle Trunnion’s reordering of the household economy, Trunnion rapidly discovers that his wife’s “influence among his adherents had already swallowed up his own; and . . . that he must leave the management of every thing within doors to her, who understood best what was for his honour and advantage” (chapter 9). Through rather conventional satire on the overbearing woman, Smollett represents the domestication of the comic spirit as it is embodied in Trunnion. In less than three months, the narrator reports, Trunnion “became a thorough-paced husband,” better trained, one assumes, than the horse that carried him away from his bride (chapter 10). Before long, Mrs. Trunnion discovers certain physical signs of an approaching pregnancy and uses her condition to extort further concessions from her husband. These early scenes between Trunnion and Grizzle might have indeed provided inspiration to Laurence Sterne. Surely Trunnion’s negotiation with his allegedly pregnant wife resembles that between Walter Shandy and his pregnant wife, and his ultimate ineffectualness—if not innocence—is reminiscent of another military man, Captain Toby Shandy, equally comic and equally humane, who did not know the “right end of a woman from the wrong.”144 Even if Sterne did not take inspiration from Smollett (whom he attacks as Smelfungus in A Sentimental Journey), a comparison of Trunnion and Toby reveals an important difference between Smollett’s broad comic vision and Sterne’s rather more solipsistic and self-reflexive comedy. Unlike Toby, Trunnion acts. He marries because he is convinced that it is appropriate for him to do so. As a result of this marriage, he becomes benefactor to Peregrine and ultimately the standard by which Peregrine is judged and found wanting for his failings. The character in the blue coat and red waistcoat with vellum holes becomes the tutelary genius of the hero’s moral sense, the eccentric who lives outside the norms without, however, sacrificing his humanity.145 Refreshingly free from a self-pity that sometimes taints Smollett’s heroes, Commodore Trunnion is the best representative of the comic spirit that invests this novel.
Just as Smollett excelled at inventing comic characters, he was equally adept as a satirist. In the “entertainment in the manner of the ancients” (chapters 48–49), Smollett attacks the vain pedantry of a doctor whom Peregrine meets in Paris while on the Grand Tour. The doctor, who finds value only in things that he can trace back to the classical world, from a form of government to sauce for a goose, offers his new acquaintances a banquet in the ancient mode and presides over the concoction of a series of dishes that trigger involuntary reactions of disgust in his guests.146 The effects of the doctor’s efforts upon his guests become clear even before they seat themselves at the banquet. Appropriately, given satire’s bodily fixations, they have strong visceral reactions to the unsavory feast:
[T]he entertainer led the way into another apartment, where they found a long table, or rather two boards joined together, and furnished with a variety of dishes, the steams of which had such evident effect upon the nerves of the company, that the marquis made frightful grimaces, under pretence of taking snuff; the Italian’s eyes watered, the German’s visage underwent violent distortion of features; our hero found means to exclude the odour from his sense of smelling, by breathing only through his mouth; and the poor painter running into another room, plugged his nostrils with tobacco. (chapter 48)
The poor painter, who is as thoughtless an advocate of modern culture as the doctor is of ancient, serves as the principal representative of the body’s rebellion against the doctor’s pedantic dietary regimen, which denies both pleasure and sustenance to his guests. After tasting the very first course, the painter “seemed to be deprived of all sense and motion, and sat like the leaden statue of some river god, with the liquor flowing out at both sides of his mouth” (chapter 48). His body’s rebellion soon infects the entire room, with the exception of the hero and the doctor, who, oddly if appropriately enough, is the only one to refrain from partaking of the historical delicacies that he has attempted to re-create. The meal itself ends in uproar, with Pallet the painter upsetting the table and fleeing from the room. Only after the meal has been removed and wine introduced does the company’s pleasure return.
Whereas Trunnion’s comic spirit breathes life into the fiction, bequeathing to the hero the cranky generosity that ultimately culls him from among the denizens of the vicious world he moves in, the doctor’s pedantry drains pleasure from everyone it touches. If Trunnion possesses the Midas touch, the doctor is the anti-Midas, turning food into offal. Of the two English objects of satire that Perry meets on the Grand Tour, the doctor, with his egregious vanity and self-assuredness, is far more dangerous than Pallet with his plain, bumbling, and ultimately innocent ignorance. The doctor’s “self-conceit,” which the painter later glosses for us nicely as his being “bigoted to his own opinion” on the superiority of classical civilization and the failures of the current mode of government, makes him a double of our hero (chapter 96). Just as Trunnion is the author of the hero’s beneficent impulses, the doctor draws out his vicious inclinations. This very banquet initiates a chain of events that unleashes in Peregrine a cruel rage. Through comic action, Smollett celebrates life’s generative virtues; through satire, he attacks its degenerative vices.
Although the comic and satiric scenes are both capable of causing uneasiness in the reader, the satiric scenes show Smollett at his most recklessly provocative, as is the case with the immediate aftermath to the doctor’s banquet. Relieved from the physical disgust caused by the banquet and with his spirits elevated by wine, Peregrine observes an exchange of sexual intimacies between two other guests at the entertainment, the German baron and the Italian count. He becomes enraged upon this discovery. Rather than having Peregrine express his aroused indignation immediately by inflicting punishment upon these two men, however, Smollett provides a surrogate for Peregrine in the form of an indignant street mob, thereby allowing Peregrine to abandon his intention to punish the two men for what he considers their unnatural actions. When the men escape the outraged mob, Peregrine is deprived of the satisfaction of witnessing their punishment. From the events that follow this scene, it would seem that the men’s escape from punishment leaves the hero in a state of excited cruelty too insistent to go ungratified and so in need of a victim. The hapless painter, whose most serious vices are ignorance and timidity, is conveniently at hand. And so another seemingly disconnected adventure starts with Pallet dressing as a woman to accompany Peregrine to a masquerade, there to undergo terrifying humiliations. The terror reaches a high point in the Bastille, appropriately enough, where Peregrine misleads Pallet into believing that his release can be assured only by undergoing castration. Through this gratuitous and cruel deceit upon Pallet, whom Peregrine had found in his cell with “every feature of his face . . . lengthened to the most ridiculous expression of grief and dismay” (chapter 51), Peregrine satisfies an emotional need that had its beginning in the doctor’s pretensions and gained force through his indignation arising from the discovery of the baron’s and count’s mutual affections. Through a series of displacements (doctor—homosexual couple—hapless painter) the novelist finally allows his hero’s rage to exhaust itself.
That it is Pallet rather than the doctor who remains the principal object of the hero’s cruel pranks for the remainder of the Continental tour might be explained in the same way that Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones explained Hamlet’s reluctance to take revenge on Claudius: Peregrine cannot punish in the doctor that vice of being biased in favor of his own opinions because he finds the very same bias in his own heart.147 Such bias, despite all his blustering, is missing in Pallet just as it is missing in Trunnion, whose marriage shows him to be open to being persuaded to accept others’ behavior. The attack on Pallet also sounds a major theme of this work: violence, whether personal or social in origin, falls on the weak. Diffuse though the pictures that convey this theme may be, they nonetheless contribute to the honest exploration of the roots of individual and social cruelty. Only late in the work, when Pallet returns to the narrative in a more pitiful condition than he left it, does Peregrine make a small gesture in recognition of the painter’s distress by subscribing to a raffle for one of his works. Meanwhile, the doctor has escaped further insult by withdrawing to the country, a path that will be followed by the hero at the end of his adventure. And although there are additional passing reflections on the follies—if not vicious self-delusions—of both characters, the satiric rage that has taken the form of “practical satire” directed against them exhausts itself once the hero returns to London. There, in the company of Cadwallader Crabtree, he finds other and more immediate objects to attack. None of these new objects, however, prompt in the hero the sustained and individuated aggression prompted by the doctor and aimed at Pallet. By following the logic of the relation between this pair and the hero through successive scenes, the reader finds another skein of the thread that will mark the way out of the labyrinth. Trunnion may bluster, but he ultimately embraces others in all their particularity. The doctor—and, insofar as he is like the doctor, Peregrine—demands that others conform to his own view of the way the world ought to be.
With a compositional range that moves from comic gusto through satiric vitriol, Smollett opens up the representational possibilities of the novel. Smollett’s particular sociopoetical vision complements the erotic intensities of Eliza Haywood, the architectonic elegance of Fielding, and the psychological penetration of Richardson. Like Sterne after him, Smollett’s is a self-consciously literary work, indebted to the earlier narrative forms that Clifford identified. Use of the older forms allows him, perhaps paradoxically, freedom from imitating his peers. No other major novelist of the time can lay claim to as rich a narrative inventiveness as realized in Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Count Fathom, Sir Launcelot Greaves, and Humphry Clinker. One of the more remarkable aspects of Smollett’s practice as a writer is his ability to be both utterly conventional and idiosyncratic. His idiosyncrasies often find expression in his fearless combination of forms, such as we find in Peregrine Pickle, with its memoir, cause célèbre, travel narrative, and conventional romance. It is the latter, finally, where Smollett is least convincing and original, for his romance plot is not comic, or satiric, or especially realistic, even by eighteenth-century standards. Yet despite its flaws, it does serve to attract our attention to the hero as he seeks to remove the obstacles that stand between him and the object of his affections.
When we turn our attention to the hero and the generic conventions of love and marriage, we are forced to face the other great fault that has been found to run through the pages of the first three novels: the amorality of the hero.148 Peregrine torments both aunt and uncle despite the fact that they provide him with an education. He seduces a married woman for the sheer joy of the challenge. He tries to seduce Emilia, his beloved and intended, employing drugs, a carriage ride in the dark, and a setting where there is no hindrance to rape besides the young woman’s own spirited resistance. Despite these highly questionable actions by Pickle, some critics have defended Smollett against the charge that his hero is a scoundrel. Giddings and Boucé have made the strongest rebuttals: the former calls Peregrine Pickle Smollett’s “most moral novel,” and the latter finds in both Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle “the more or less conscious recurrence of particular moral themes”; he notes that “the moral significance of the adventures . . . does not lie at the end of the story; it runs through it, sustains it and underpins it all the time.”149 Ronald Paulson also finds in the hero “independence and moral vigor” and adds that “[Peregrine] is a chastiser of folly and evil, a stripper off of false appearances.”150
Even those who find the hero’s behavior questionable tend to extenuate it by comparison to the general depravity of his society. Putney called the novel “a satire on the affectations and meannesses, the follies and vices that flourished among the upper classes.”151 But such extenuation has not always meant exoneration. Putney himself argues that the satire fails because the hero, as the author’s surrogate, covets the privileges of the status that he so frequently attacks. Paulson acknowledges that Peregrine’s practical jokes are cruel and self-centered. And Joel Weinsheimer concludes that “Peregrine’s cruelty, vanity, and boorishness” make him no more worthy of the conventional comic reward than those upon whom he has practiced his satire.152 That so much critical effort has been directed at solving the “problem” of the novel’s moral tendencies is a testament to our understandable unease at the juvenile pranks, the scatological humiliations, and the blithe seductions that are found in these pages. Critics seek to salvage moral edification from the representation of brutal jokes and painful injuries or explain them as the vehicle for higher aims. For example, Aileen Douglas claims a moral aim for the representation of painful pranks: “Smollett’s representation of physical experience as absolute and irreducible becomes the basis of his social and political criticism.”153 Yet when the young Perry punctures his aunt Grizzle’s chamber pot (chapter 14) or seduces Mrs. Hornbeck (chapter 63), it is hard to tell what social or political ends are in view. Only Orwell seems unafraid to find the hero a scoundrel without condemning him for it.154
Jerry Beasley has offered a possible solution to the problem of amorality in Smollett’s works. He suggests that we shift our critical attention from the novel’s “moral structure” (or lack thereof) to its “restless movement and the fracturing of narrative order,” which he attributes to modernity’s effects upon traditional beliefs and practices. Unwilling to neglect entirely the moral dimension of Smollett’s fiction, Beasley finds a “dialectical” opposition between “moral idealism” and “irregularity, confusion, and swirling movement.”155 Such moral idealism, if it is to be found, can be found only on the margins of the text, especially after the hero returns to London at the conclusion of the Grand Tour. Moral idealism is found in the unconditional loyalty of Peregrine’s friends Pipes and Hatchway. These two characters—the retainer with unshakable devotion and the peg-legged friend of youth—remain steadfastly loyal to Peregrine. Once again, the reader looks to the “characters of life” to discover a greater clarity of vision than that accorded the hero, who at this point still finds himself lost in the labyrinth.
For Smollett to have created a fictional world in which right and wrong are completely disentangled, however, would have entailed too great a falsifying of his material. Orwell finds Smollett’s morality as a novelist not in the creation of morally unblemished characters but in his “willing[ness] to mention things which do happen in real life but are invariably kept out of fiction.”156 Weinsheimer agrees and notes that Smollett is often blamed not for lack of realism but for being “too real.”157 Just as it is important for a reader to approach Peregrine Pickle without overlaying on it expectations derived from later practitioners of the genre, so it is equally important to notice Smollett’s unflinching and mostly uncommented upon representations of the weaknesses and confusions of the characters that he places on the stage before us, especially the principal personage. If we are shocked by Peregrine’s cruelty to Pallet, his assault on Emilia, or his hatred of social climbers, Smollett has made us see behaviors from which we would more willingly avert our gaze. If we agree with Johnson that there are “those parts of nature which are most proper for imitation” and that the hero should be imbued with those parts, then we perhaps must take issue with the attributes that Smollett gives his hero.158 If, however, we agree with Orwell and find that “Smollett often attains a truthfulness that more serious novelists have missed,” then for the sake of that truthfulness we will follow with interest the hero’s twists and turns as he wanders through the labyrinth.159 And for the gift of that truthfulness, we can do nothing less than admit Smollett to his deserved place in the great tradition.
Peregrine Pickle is an angry book written by an angry young man whose sense of injured merit drove him to describe his world as he felt it. At times, the novel offers its readers the perverse pleasure of watching its young hero choose between two questionable goals: social distinction and physical gratification. The former is relatively scarce and usually insubstantial, as fame always is; the latter is copious and consequently devalued by its availability. The novel features numerous instances of a choice between the two in the various conflicts between duty and desire, manners and instinct, sincerity and affectation. The clash of these opposing forces offers an opportunity to study what might best be called, following Beasley, a dialectical relation between romance and realism. In the final instance, despite his debts to the conventions of romance, the latter most visible in the hurried contrivances that usher in his heroes’ marriages, Smollett chooses verisimilitude and takes his characters from life.
Nowhere is this choice more visible than in the antiromance of the “hedge inamorata,” a brief interlude that takes up all of chapter 95. The title to that chapter makes an explicit promise of romance: “Peregrine sets out for the garison, and meets with a nymph of the road, whom he takes into keeping, and metamorphoses into a fine lady.”160 The promise of the transformation of dross into gold, of the common into the rare, is fundamental to romance narrative. In this brief episode, however, Smollett undercuts the expectation of romance conveyed by the chapter title in order to satirize the pretensions of the elites. The nymph of the road is a sixteen-year-old girl whom Peregrine “for a small sum of money purchased” from her mother. Smollett sketches what might otherwise have been an ephemeral type with characteristically brilliant economy. As she rides behind Tom Pipes on the same horse, the two talk at hilarious cross-purposes: the jargon of the sea comes in contact with the cant of the begging crew without the possibility of understanding or even accommodation. The fine young lady, we are told in what is a bit of foreshadowing, possesses “such a flow of eloquence, as would have intitled her to a considerable share of reputation, even among the nymphs of Billingsgate.” And her tongue is not her only weapon, for as Pipes follows Peregrine’s orders and “performed upon her soft and sleek person the ceremony of scrubbing, as it is practised on board of the king’s ships of war,” his charge retaliates for this rough handling by “employ[ing] her talons so effectually upon his face, that the blood ran over his nose in sundry streams.” Although this portrait is vivid—and delightful—enough to stand on its own, it serves a double satirical purpose: to call into question the assertion that Peregrine “had (as I believe the reader will readily allow) made considerable progress in the study of character” and to explore the premise that the only difference between “the highest rank . . . [and] the most humble station in life” is accidental, owing entirely to the “form of an education, which the meanest capacity can acquire, without much study or application.” The reader who has already been forced to assent to the narrator’s questionable evaluation of Peregrine’s progress is further lulled into believing that education is always and fully transformative.
But even as the narrator attacks the triviality of fashionable life and exposes its empty forms, he holds in store a reversal. There is not much surprise in the discovery that the hedge inamorata fails to make an exact study of the manners of the high life or that she cannot totally shake off her “inveterate habit of swearing, which had been indulged from her infancy and confirmed by the example of those among whom she had lived.” Given that she receives her education in the country, the initial tests of her education take the form of pleasing a “set of country squires” who, we must assume, are not only more easily pleased than urban gentry but also more willing to be pleased and less likely to act in a way that will revive the inamorata’s inveterate habits. In other words, because the transformed fine lady tries out her new role on an easily pleased out-of-town audience, she is surprised by the more urban crowd, with its complex motives.
Once she is relocated to the town, however, and there introduced to the beau monde, the test proves rather more different and more difficult than those she met easily in the country. Detecting a lady cheating at cards, and having the bad grace to make her discovery known to that lady and her circle, she is attacked by the cheater for her violation of decorum. The nymph’s sense of injured merit overpowered “all her maxims of caution” and “burst open the floodgates of her own natural repartee, twanged off with the appellations of b—— and w——, which she repeated with great vehemence, in an attitude of manual defiance, to the terror of her antagonist, and the astonishment of all present”; as the young woman “quitted the room,” Smollett continues, she “applied her hand to that part which was the last of her that disappeared, inviting the company to kiss it, by one of its coarsest denominations.” Her spontaneous expression of contempt for the lady caught engaging in dishonest play causes her to be expelled from polite society and revealed for a “common trull.” The failure of the metamorphosis to hold appears at first to be a disaster for our hero. Denied admission to the town’s fashionable assemblies, he appears to have badly miscalculated the power of polite education to repress a savage indignation that arises when one feels unfairly denied one’s due. This consequence, however, allows Smollett to correct our own overinvestment in education by exposing not only its weaknesses in moments of passion but also its inappropriateness in situations of social injustice. Our angry author takes as much pleasure in exposing that truth as the nymph of the road takes pleasure in exposing herself to the crowd. In her we find the image of the satirist, perhaps even the representative of our young author as he himself has come to understand the real ways of the world. Although her spontaneous outburst results in her expulsion from polite society, she gains the personal satisfaction of leaving behind her a lingering image of contempt.
Because there is too much glee in the episode for it to be otherwise, all ends well with the hedge inamorata, as she elopes with the Swiss tutor Hadgi, whom Peregrine had employed to teach her. Their romance plot, as it turns out, has been driven by Hadgi’s “personal qualifications.” Peregrine quickly gets over his anger at their elopement, and he helps the couple open a coffeehouse and tavern, of which it is believed that the wife “would be an ornament . . . and a careful manager.” The coffeehouse suggests a form of exchange that is less a matter of trading manners for social advancement than it is of giving money for common human comforts. It is a hopeful end insofar as the young woman can look forward to managing her own social and physical pleasures. In this conclusion we might even suspect that there is true romance, more substantial than the metamorphosis that the chapter title suggested. At novel’s end, however, we learn that the hedge inamorata has run away from her husband to a new lover and left the husband the holder of nothing but debts. Once again, we are forced to consider that the lover was probably also “powerfully recommended by his personal qualifications” and that something like nature reasserts itself in romance just as it had reasserted itself in realism. Magical transformations are denied the characters of life, and the servant and his inamorata reenter the labyrinth that they had momentarily exited.
The refashioning of the nymph of the road is just one of the many episodes in the novel in which comedy, satire, and verisimilitude combine to give a “diffused picture [of] the characters of life.” Taken together, these episodes add up not only to a vision of society but also to a vision of human nature that is as profound and important as one that chooses to delineate the psychological consistency or trace the moral development of a central figure. If Smollett himself felt kinship with the nymph of the road, and if, like her, he considered the pleasure of hurling defiance into the teeth of society well worth the consequences, we are richer for his inveterate habit of defying social or novelistic decorum. In Smollett’s early work—and nowhere more so than in Peregrine Pickle—we see the aesthetic transformation of desire and resentment. These two raw drives fuel an enormously fruitful authorial imagination. Out of Smollett’s rag and bone shop emerge characters who renew life’s intense pleasures in the face of a sometimes stultifying social decorum. Surely one of Smollett’s most profound accomplishments is to have rendered for us so fully the consequences of the struggle for social distinction. Preserved in the eruption of his powerful prose are the unforgettable figures of Pallet, Vane, Crabtree, and Pickle, all of whom strive for social eminence, and the equally enduring Trunnion, Hatchway, Pipes, and MacKercher, who reject eminence for more material satisfactions. The nymph belongs to both categories, as, perhaps, does her creator. In the end, these characters and their adventures more than compensate for a diffuseness that might suggest a weakness in plot.
The genius of Peregrine Pickle and its young author is to be found neither exclusively in the interpolated tales that its contemporary audience read avidly nor in the “main story” that appealed to its later readers but rather in the entire canvas upon which is painted a densely populated and vividly realized fictional world. Taken in its entirety, Smollett’s novel still holds the power to delight and instruct a modern audience by virtue of its author’s capacious vision, his force of spirit, and his ability to capture life in words and images. By contrasting the genteel and the common, the sophisticated and the primal, Smollett conveys forcefully the way it felt to be alive in the middle of the eighteenth century.
1. Earlier announcements of the novel’s imminent publication had appeared in the General Advertiser for 23, 24, and 25 January and 7 February 1751. For the novel’s publication history, see the textual commentary, below, 813–14.
2. Thomas R. Preston has noted previously Smollett’s “comic fusion of historical, factual, and fictional elements that constitutes reality” (introduction to Humphry Clinker, xlv).
3. Smollett to Alexander Carlyle, 7 June 1748. In this letter, Smollett also noted that during the time of composition, “several Intervals happened of one, two, three and four Weeks, wherein I did not set pen to paper” (Letters, 8). Smollett met Carlyle in London in 1746. For a brief summary of their relationship, see Lewis M. Knapp, “Early Scottish Attitudes toward Tobias Smollett,” Philological Quarterly 45 (1966): 263–65. For an account of the publication of Roderick Random, see Knapp, 94; and O M Brack, Jr., and James B. Davis, “Smollett’s Revisions of Roderick Random,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 64 (1970): 295–311.
4. See Knapp, 103–5. See also O M Brack, Jr., and Leslie A. Chilton, introduction to Devil, xv. For Don Quixote, see Smollett to Carlyle, 7 June 1748, in which Smollett reports being “fairly engaged” in the translation (Letters, 8).
5. Moore, 1:xcix.
6. Smollett to James Smollett of Bonhill, 4 April 1737, in Letters, 1. James Smollett of Bonhill was Smollett’s cousin.
7. 15 April 1754, in Letters, 38.
8. Moore, 1:cviii. Moore’s biographical essay, characterized by a deeply romantic attachment to the area of Smollett’s birth and Scottish history in general, contains very little reliable information about Smollett’s early life.
9. Moore, 1:cxi.
10. Ramsay quoted in Knapp, “Early Scottish Attitudes,” 267.
11. See Knapp, 7–25. Much about Smollett’s early years remains unknown. There is no record, for example, of Smollett’s matriculation at Glasgow. Some facts that are claimed to be known by early biographers bear striking resemblance to the account of Roderick Random’s youth. For example, the exact date of Smollett’s departure from Glasgow is obscure. Some have speculated that he left on 1 November 1739 because Roderick Random left Glasgow on that date (Buck, 57; Kahrl, 2 n. 2). Paul-Gabriel Boucé argues convincingly against extracting details from Roderick Random and taking them as trustworthy facts of the author’s life (48).
12. Moore, 1:cxv.
13. Smollett, preface to The Regicide, in Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 89. For an overview of the tragedy, see Byron Gassman, introduction to Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 69–84.
14. Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 89.
15. For Smollett and Cartagena, see, most recently, Roderick Random, xxv–xxvii.
16. Roderick Random, xlix; Complete History, 4:609–10; Tobias Smollett, The Present State of All Nations, 8 vols. (London, 1768–69), 8:382–83.
17. Knapp, 35, 44.
18. Smollett to ? Mr. Barclay of Glasgow, in Letters, 2; Knapp, 47.
19. Knapp, 45–46.
20. Smollett, “The Tears of Scotland. Written in the Year MDCCXLVI,” line 38, in Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 26.
21. Smollett to [? 1747], in Letters, 5.
22. Knapp, 49.
23. Preface to The Regicide, in Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 89.
24. Smollett, Reproof: A Satire, line 168, in Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 44.
25. Buck, 55–57.
26. Roderick Random, 335.
27. [? 1747], in Letters, 4.
28. A general edition followed a few months after the subscription edition, which apparently did not garner the support that had been hoped for. For the publication history of The Regicide, see the textual commentary to Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 572–73.
29. Smollett, preface to The Regicide, in Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 92, 89.
30. For a history of Smollett’s efforts on Alceste and The Absent Man, see Knapp, 85–92. See also Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 61–66, 77–79.
31. Moore, 1:cxxii. In the twentieth century, Ronald Paulson made a strong argument that William Hogarth served as a model for Pallet, but his argument has not been universally accepted. See chap. 46, n. 4, below.
32. Moore, 1:cxxiii.
33. Howard Buck, “Smollett and Akenside,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 31 (1932): 10–26.
34. For more on Akenside, see chap. 46, n. 3, below.
35. In 1750 Garrick apparently offended Smollett again by rejecting a comedy, The Absent Man, no trace of which survives. See Alan D. McKillop, “Smollett’s First Comedy,” Modern Language Notes 45 (1930): 396; and Gassman, introduction to Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 78–80. Phillip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773), who gave a copy of The Regicide to Garrick, is also subjected to ridicule again in Peregrine Pickle. For Chesterfield’s role in The Regicide, see Buck, 81–86; and Knapp, 55–56. Buck suggests that Chesterfield is treated more harshly in Peregrine Pickle than in Roderick Random because he had neglected to subscribe to the private edition of The Regicide (84).
36. In his letter of 7 June 1748, Smollett informed Carlyle that he had “planned a Comedy which will be finished by next winter” (Letters, 8). In Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second, Horace Walpole reported that Smollett “wrote a tragedy and sent it to Lord Lyttelton, with whom he was not acquainted. Lord Lyttelton, not caring to point out its defects, civilly advised him to try comedy. He wrote one, and solicited the same Lord to recommend it to the stage. The latter excused himself, but promised, if it should be acted, to do all the service in his power for the author” (ed. Lord Holland, 2nd ed., 3 vols. [London, 1846], 3:259). Buck (100 n. 114) and Knapp (128 n. 94) rely on Walpole’s report of Lyttelton’s refusal to recommend the comedy after he had advised Smollett to write it to contest claims by Scott and later biographers that Lyttelton had a hand in Smollett’s disappointments with The Regicide.
37. Smollett to Francis Hayman, 11 May 1750, in Letters, 13–14.
38. George Lyttelton, Baron Lyttelton, “To the Memory of a Lady Lately Deceased: A Monody” (London, 1747), 5. For Ward, see below, chap. 102, n. 36.
39. For a survey of the initial reception of Tom Jones and information on the relationship between Lyttelton and Fielding, see Martin C. Battestin, with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), 450–52. Smollett commented unfavorably on Tom Jones in a letter to Carlyle dated 1 October 1749 (Letters, 11). Linda Bree provides a useful summary of the points of correspondence between Spondy and Fielding (“Fielding and Smollett: Rival Novelists?,” in Tobias Smollett, Scotland’s First Novelist: New Essays in Memory of Paul-Gabriel Boucé, ed. O M Brack, Jr. [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007], 153–55).
40. For an account of the marriage and some contemporary reactions to it, see Battestin, Henry Fielding, 421–23; for his appointment to the magistracy, see 448–50.
41. Buck, 103; Knapp, 132.
42. Walpole, Memoirs, 3:259.
43. For an account of the relations between Smollett and Fielding, see Bree, “Fielding and Smollett,” 147–63. Bree points out that the rivalry between Smollett and Fielding “seems to have been conducted entirely in print: though the two men were living in close proximity to each other in London, and with acquaintances, if not friends, in common, there is no evidence that they ever met” (146).
44. Fielding, Covent-Garden Journal 2 (7 January 1752), in “The Covent-Garden Journal” and “A Plan of the Universal-Register Office,” ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 24–25. See also Knapp, 130–33.
45. Advertised on 15 January 1752 in the London Daily Advertiser. For some time the attribution of the Hilding pamphlet to Smollett was considered questionable. O M Brack, Jr., has argued that Smollett certainly wrote the pamphlet; see “Tobias Smollett’s Authorship of Habbakkuk Hilding (1752),” Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, n.s., 20, no. 3 (September 2006): 5–17.
46. For a review of these charges, see Buck, 116–17; and Brack, “Tobias Smollett’s Authorship.”
47. Buck, 114, 121.
48. Battestin, Henry Fielding, 555; see also 534–35.
49. For the attack on Peter Gordon, see Knapp, 151–53; and H. P. Vincent, “Tobias Smollett’s Assault on Gordon and Groom,” Review of English Studies 16 (1940): 183–88. The plaintiffs recovered damages, and on 23 February 1753 Smollett wrote a bitter and indignant letter to Gordon’s attorney, Alexander Hume Campbell (see Letters, 21–26). Knapp argues that the letter was “probably never delivered” (153).
50. Ferdinand Count Fathom, 4.
51. Tobias Smollett, “Advertisement,” in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, 4 vols. (London, 1758), 1:[A2v]. It is worth noting that Smollett’s contrition was rather finely calculated to extenuate his guilt by suggesting he was as much sinned against as sinning. He continues in the next sentence to defy “the whole world to prove that he was ever guilty of one act of malice, ingratitude or dishonour. This declaration he may be permitted to make without incurring the imputation of vanity or presumption, considering the numerous shafts of envy, rancor and revenge, that have lately, both in private and in publick, been leveled at his reputation.”
52. In the second edition, Smollett omitted the criticism of Garrick found in chapter 55 and inserted the sentence “Your favorite actor is a surprising genius”; he also omitted reflections on Garrick in chapter 102. See the historical collation, below, 2.243.13 and 4.544.7–4.545.10. Buck notes that Smollett and Garrick were reconciled before the second edition, perhaps because Garrick was instrumental in bringing Smollett’s farce The Reprisal to the stage in 1757 (93). Smollett drops a tantalizing hint in a letter to Alexander Carlyle that his attacks on Garrick were intentional and strategic. Smollett tells Carlyle that he is “determined to turn the Tables upon [Garrick], and make him court my good Graces in his turn” (to Carlyle, 7 June 1748, in Letters, 8–9). Smollett also removed the part of chapter 102 that contained the attacks on Lyttelton and Fielding. See the historical collation, below, 4.547.11–4.551.1.
53. The praise of all four appears in Smollett’s Continuation of the Complete History of England, 5 vols. (London, 1760–65), 4:126–27. Volume 4 of the Continuation appeared serially during 1761–62, published in ten issues between 25 July 1761 and 24 July 1762; this passage is in no. 33, published between 3 and 17 October 1761. See James E. May, “The Publication and Revision of Smollett’s Continuation of the Complete History of England, 1760–1771,” in New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction: Hearts Resolved and Hands Prepared: Essays in Honor of Jerry C. Beasley, ed. Christopher D. Johnson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 231–354, esp. 237–41. Fielding was dead by the time the second edition of Peregrine Pickle appeared. See also Buck for a discussion of Smollett’s compliments to both men after 1758 (110–12, 121).
54. Smollett to David Garrick, 27 January 1762, in Letters, 103.
55. Jery Melford to Sir Watkin Phillips, Bath, 30 April, in Humphry Clinker, 48–49.
56. Smollett to Carlyle, 7 June 1748, in Letters, 8. It is, of course, possible that Smollett is exaggerating the speed of composition in order to impress his correspondent and, as he writes, excuse “a little Incorrectness.”
57. Knapp, 117.
58. Brack and Chilton, introduction to Devil, xxv.
59. See Knapp, 85; and Smollett to Alexander Carlyle, 14 February 1749, in Letters, 9–10.
60. See Knapp, 106–7 and n. 70.
61. Smollett to Carlyle, 1 October 1749, in Letters, 12.
62. See Brack and Davis, “Smollett’s Revisions,” 300. The third edition of Roderick Random appeared in 1750. Brack and Davis speculate that Smollett may have taken “time out” from writing Peregrine Pickle to revise Roderick Random.
63. Letters, 8, 13.
64. See Knapp, 109.
65. See Moore, 1:cxxiii.
66. See Buck, 2; and Robert Anderson, The Life of Tobias Smollett, M.D., with Critical Observations on his Works, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1800), xxxii; see also Moore, 1:cxxiii.
67. Knapp, 116, bases his conjecture regarding Smollett’s return to London on a letter dated 28 September 1750 sent by Smollett from Monmouth House to John Moore. See Letters, 14.
68. Sir Walter Scott, Lives of the Novelists, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey, 1825), 1:93.
69. See Clifford, xv.
70. In the letter to Chapone, Richardson asks her to consider publishing a reply to Lady Vane’s “Memoirs.” In the interest of forwarding this project, Richardson promises to try to “procure a Specimen Sheet of the Work, for it is not yet printed quite off.” His opinion of Lady Vane’s story, which follows his appeal to Chapone, is worth providing here: “Mrs. Pilkington, Constantia Phillips, Lady V. (who will soon appear, profaning the Word Love, and presuming to attempt to clear her Heart, and to find gentle Fault only with her Head, in the Perpetration of the highest Acts of Infidelity) what a Set of Wretches, writing to perpetuate their Infamy, have we—to make the Behn’s the Manley’s, the Heywood’s look white. From the same injured, disgraced, profaned Sex, let us be favoured with the Antidote to these Womens Poison!” (qtd. in Alan Dugald McKillop, Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936], 180). On 11 January 1751, in a subsequent letter to Mrs. Chapone, Richardson tells his correspondent that he is sending “that Part of a bad Book which contains the very bad Story of a wicked woman” (180). See also John Carroll, ed., Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 173 n. 68; Knapp, 117.
71. Knapp and Lillian de la Torre claim that “Smollett had the use of a MS. Copy of the Annesley Case long enough to compress it for his own purposes” (“Smollett, MacKercher, and the Annesley Claimant,” English Language Notes 1 [1963]: 31). In A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, Patrick Spedding estimates that the average number of sheets printed per week by one printer (Charles Ackers) was one to two ([London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004], entries for Ab.55 and Da.6). Because it is not known when Smollett fed his publisher the manuscript for the work, the time to print Peregrine Pickle is unknown, though such an average argues for a date early in 1750 for the beginning of composition.
72. Knapp, 144.
73. Knapp, 138.
74. Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791), 2nd ed. (London, 1797), 268–69.
75. Tytler, Essay, 267.
76. See Buck, 31–35.
77. Buck, 37–48. Buck finds in the “Memoirs” passages that are “genuinely, even pathetically, feminine. . . . But the real, though highly individualized, femininity of the Memoirs is less apparent in particular passages than in the persistent but unconscious display of vanity, and in a knowledge of the symptoms of infatuation, jealousy, and satiety not only utterly beyond the ken of Narcissa’s creator (and indeed most men) but of most women, too, who do not happen to be ‘Lady Vanes’” (40). He argued that both Smollett and Lady Vane had a hand in revising the “Memoirs” for the second edition (48).
78. Rufus Putney, “Smollett and Lady Vane’s Memoirs,” Philological Quarterly 25 (1946): 123 n. 7. Putney does point out that the Gentleman’s Magazine contains conflicting claims regarding the authorship of the “Memoirs.” In an obituary for Lady Vane, first published in the April 1788 issue, appears the statement: “Her Ladyship actually wrote, and superintended the press while they were printing those anecdotes respecting herself, which are introduced in the celebrated novel of ‘Peregrine Pickle;’ . . . Dr. Smollett received a very handsome reward for inserting them [the “Memoirs”], but had no share whatever in preparing them for the public eye” (Gentleman’s Magazine 58 [April 1788]: 368). The following month, a correction to that obituary (which had confused Susannah, Lady Viscountess Fane with Lady Vane), stated somewhat more ambiguously, “[S]he certainly communicated the materials for her Life to Dr. Smollet [sic],” but follows this statement with the following: “Her Memoirs in ‘Peregrine Pickle’ were given to Dr. Smollett from her own pen; but they were written by another celebrated doctor” (Gentleman’s Magazine 58 [May 1788]: 461). When Lord Vane died a year later, his obituary, published in the issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine for April 1789, attributes the “Memoirs” to Smollett: “The story of a Lady of Quality, in Smollet’s [sic] Novel, is supposed by the candid to have been much embellished by the fertility of that writer’s invention. Lady Vane, in a fit of most unjustifiable resentment, furnished the Novelist with a few particulars which he worked up, by the aid of imagination, to an entertaining episode. Versed as he was in the arts of publication, he knew that personal anecdotes would contribute greatly to the sale of his book; and, incited by the desire of rendering his narrative interesting, it is not to be wondered at, that he should have adorned the little truth he possessed with the graces of poetic fiction” (Gentleman’s Magazine 59 [April 1789]: 376). A subsequent correction provided by a correspondent, “AW,” claims that Lady Vane wrote her memoirs “as well as she could herself, and Dr. Shebbeare put it in its present form at her Ladyship’s request” (Gentleman’s Magazine 59 [May 1789]: 403). Neither of these corrections has persuaded critics that anyone other than Smollett was responsible for the final shape of the “Memoirs.”
79. Putney, “Smollett and Lady Vane’s Memoirs,” 121–22.
80. Putney, “Smollett and Lady Vane’s Memoirs,” 125, 126.
81. Knapp’s only addition to the controversy is to cast doubt on the claim made well after Smollett’s death that he was paid by Lady Vane to insert the “Memoirs” into his novel (see 117, 124).
82. O M Brack, Jr., “Smollett and the Authorship of ‘The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,’” in Brack, Tobias Smollett, Scotland’s First Novelist, 38.
83. Brack, “Smollett and the Authorship,” 36–37, 48.
84. See Neil Guthrie, “New Light on Lady Vane,” Notes & Queries, n.s., 49 (2002): 372–78. Brack regards as “improbable” Guthrie’s speculation that the novelist and reviewer of Peregrine Pickle for the Monthly Review, John Cleland, might have been the author of the “Memoirs” (“Smollett and the Authorship,” 64 n. 13).
85. Gil Blas, xviii.
86. Gil Blas, 67, emphasis added.
87. Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 42 n. 122.
88. Ejectment, 153.
89. Patrick Spedding has shown that Eliza Haywood’s fictionalized account of the case, Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, the first volume of which was published on 10 February 1743, was very popular, with five editions appearing within the year (Bibliography, entry for Ab.57). Gassman notes that the Annesley case was still so famous in 1747 that Smollett thought it unnecessary to call attention to it in his own note on MacKercher in The Reproof. He adds, however, that by 1777, the editor of Smollett’s later Plays and Poems thought it necessary to supply information about the case (Poems, Plays, and “The Briton,” 448 n. 19). For a complete account of the case, see below, the annotations, chap. 106, n. 55.
90. Knapp found the 1751 edition of the Abstract in the British Library before World War II. He was unable to relocate it after the war, however, and the authors speculated that it was destroyed during the war. No other copy of the 1751 edition has been reported (Knapp and de la Torre, “Smollett, MacKercher,” 29–30).
91. Knapp and de la Torre, “Smollett, MacKercher,” 29–31.
92. See General Advertiser, 21 February 1750/51.
93. See Albert Smith, “The Printing and Publication of Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle,” Library, 5th ser., 26 (1971): 39–52. For Strahan’s dealings with Smollett generally, see Lewis Knapp, “Smollett’s Works as Printed by William Strahan,” Library, 4th ser., 13 (1932): 282–91. See also the textual commentary, below, 813.
94. See Letters, 18 n. 2. In 1748 Wilson published in Edinburgh The Expository Works and Other Remains of Archbishop Leighton. He would also sell Smollett’s An Essay on the External Use of Water (1752) and is included in the imprint of the second edition of Peregrine Pickle.
95. See Smith, “The Printing and Publication,” 48–50.
96. As a point of comparison, Henry Fielding had received £600 for Tom Jones (see Battestin, Henry Fielding, 440).
97. Knapp, 118. In “Controversy or Collusion? The ‘Lady Vane’ Tracts,” George S. Rousseau discusses the publication and reception of Lady Frail (Notes & Queries, n.s., 19 [1972]: 375–76).
98. See Rousseau for an account of these works (376–78).
99. While we lack figures for the print run of the first edition, Smollett justified the appearance of the second edition (1758) by claiming in the “Advertisement” prefacing that edition that “a very large impression has been sold in England.” Presumably, Smollett is referring to the first edition in this address to his readership of the second, and while we cannot dismiss the possibility that authorial vanity might cause him to inflate the number of the first edition, there is likewise no reason to believe that the first edition would not have been large given the success of Roderick Random. Anderson writes that the novel “was received with such extraordinary avidity, that a very large impression was quickly sold in England, another was bought up in Ireland, a translation was executed into the French language, and it soon made its appearance in a second edition” (Life of Tobias Smollett, xxxiii). Scott repeats this claim, almost verbatim, in his “Life of Smollett” (Lives of the Novelists, 1:93).
100. Smollett, “Advertisement,” in Peregrine Pickle (1758), 1:[A2v].
101. Knapp, 119.
102. Birch to Hardwicke, 14 October 1752 (qtd. in Knapp, 119).
103. Strahan also printed Ferdinand Count Fathom (see Smith, “The Printing and Publication,” 48).
104. Smollett, “Advertisement,” in Peregrine Pickle (1758), 1:[A2v].
105. Knapp notes that “the success of Roderick Random was immediate, impressive, and prolonged. From the printing records of the publisher, William Strahan, it is evident that some 6,500 copies were put through his presses from January 1748 to November 1749” (94).
106. Letters, 7.
107. London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette, 30 April 1751. See also William Scott, “Smollett, Dr. John Hill, and the Failure of Peregrine Pickle,” Notes & Queries 200 (1955): 389–92.
108. Buck, 2–3, 48–52; see also Fred W. Boege, Smollett’s Reputation as a Novelist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947), 6–10. Knapp states that the novel “was widely read because of its magnificent naval characters,” but he fails to give any proof for this statement (119). Kahrl speculates that “most readers and critics agree . . . that there is a falling-off in quality and originality after the death of Trunnion and the return of Peregrine from the Grand Tour” (50).
109. In a letter to Horace Walpole dated 3 March 1751, Thomas Gray asks his correspondent if “that miracle of tenderness and sensibility (as she calls it) lady Vane had given [him] any amusement” (in Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935], 1:344). In a letter to her daughter, the Countess of Bute, Montagu wrote that Vane’s memoirs “contain more Truth and less malice than any I ever read in my Life. . . . Her History, rightly consider’d, would be more instructive to young Women than any Sermon I know” (16 February 1752, in The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967], 3:2). Horace Walpole wonders at Lady Vane’s decision to allow the memoirs to be published, “only suppressing part of her lovers, no part of the success of the others with her: a degree of profligacy not to be accounted for; she does not want money, none of her stallions will raise her credit; and the number, all she had to brag of, concealed!” (to Horace Mann, 13 March 1751, in Walpole, 20:230). Lady Henrietta Luxborough finds Lady Vane’s decision to publish her confession unaccountable (to William Shenstone, 27 May 1751, in Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Lady Luxborough, to William Shenstone, Esq. [London, 1775], 265–66). Fielding alludes to Lady Vane unfavorably in Amelia (bk. 4, chap. 1; bk. 8, chap. 5) and in the Covent-Garden Journal for 7 January 1752 (see above, n. 42).
110. Knapp, 125 n. 85.
111. [John Cleland], “Review of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle,” Monthly Review 4 (March 1751): 356.
112. [Cleland], “Review,” 358.
113. [Cleland], “Review,” 361. Cleland also notes that Smollett might not have “respected the delicacy of those readers, who call every thing Low that is not taken from high-life” (357–58). Boege confirms that many of Smollett’s contemporaries found his novels “low” and improper (Smollett’s Reputation, 3). See also a similar opinion by an anonymous author on Roderick Random that “some Truths are not to be told, and the most skilful Painters represent nature with a Veil” (The Parallel; or, Pilkington and Phillips Compared [London, 1748], 8); and Samuel Johnson’s strictures on novels in general in Rambler, no. 4 (31 March 1750), in The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968), 1:19–25, esp. 24.
114. “Review of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle,” Royal Magazine; or Quarterly Bee 2 (January–March 1751): 396.
115. “Review,” Royal Magazine, 400.
116. See the historical collation, below, 1.76.37–1.78.14.
117. Gray to Walpole, 3 March 1751, in Toynbee and Whibley, Correspondence, 1:344; Luxborough to Shenstone, 25 August 1751, in Letters Written, 290–91; Delany to Mrs. Dewes, 7 October 1752, in The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany, 1st ser., 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1861), 3:162.
118. 23 July 1754, in Halsband, Complete Letters, 3:68. In that same letter, she guesses Roderick Random to have been written by Henry Fielding (66).
119. Smollett to ?, November–December 1757?, in Letters, 63–64. For the letter to Garrick, see n. 54, above.
120. Scott, Lives of the Novelists, 1:95.
121. Smollett, “Advertisement,” Peregrine Pickle (1758), 1:[A2v].
122. Scott, Lives of the Novelists, 1:97.
123. See the textual commentary, below, 820–21.
124. Moore, 1:cxxx.
125. Scott, Lives of the Novelists, 1:93–95.
126. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 48–49.
127. Jerry C. Beasley, Tobias Smollett, Novelist (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 78–79.
128. George Orwell, “Tobias Smollett: Scotland’s Best Novelist,” in As I Please, 1943–45, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 3 of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 247.
129. Rufus Putney, “The Plan of Peregrine Pickle,” PMLA 60 (1945): 1060.
130. Boucé, 124–25.
131. Robert Giddings, The Tradition of Smollett (London: Methuen, 1967), 114–15.
132. Bree, “Fielding and Smollett,” 143–44.
133. Orwell, “Tobias Smollett: Scotland’s Best Novelist,” 245.
134. In an oft-quoted passage from the preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Joseph Conrad writes, “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see! That—and no more, and it is everything!” (ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd ed. [New York: W. W. Norton, 1979], 147).
135. Clifford, xxv.
136. Clifford, xxv.
137. Ferdinand Count Fathom, 4.
138. Lady Vane’s “Memoirs” pose a challenge to this reading of Smollett’s practice as a writer. Not only did the “Memoirs” leave contemporary readers baffled as to the reason for their insertion in the novel, as noted above, but they also lack the variety, imagination, and “vigour of presentation” that Clifford identifies. And although it might be argued that the “Memoirs” are in some way subservient to the novel’s general dedication to a comprehensive representation of the “characters of life,” the representation of actual aristocratic elites is out of harmony with the fictional elites that make an appearance during the hero’s attempts to attain distinction in political life (chapters 90–105). The “Memoirs” are an exception to Smollett’s compositional creed and a violation of Peregrine Pickle’s “uniform plan.”
139. Johnson, Rambler, no. 4 (31 March 1750), in Bate and Strauss, The Rambler, 1:22.
140. For the allusions to Falstaff, see below, chap. 17, n. 7, and chap. 35, n. 6.
141. See Henri Bergson, Comedy, introduction by Wylie Sypher (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 155.
142. See Boege, Smollett’s Reputation, 73.
143. William Bowman Piper, “The Large Diffused Picture of Life in Smollett’s Early Novels,” Studies in Philology 60 (1963): 49.
144. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, 3 vols. (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978–84), 1:117.
145. In his deservedly beloved death scene (chapter 79), Trunnion warns Peregrine against seducing Emilia. Of course, Peregrine ignores the warning and thereby loses the respect of many a reader. That loss can be weighed against the love and respect of all those present at Trunnion’s death. It is a social death scene, unlike Toby Shandy’s death, which is bypassed by Sterne in favor of expressing the pathos that its memory evokes in Tristram’s forward-looking narration.
146. For the identification of the doctor with Akenside, see above, n. 33; for the identification of Pallet with Hogarth, see below, chap. 46, n. 4.
147. See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (1899; repr., New York: Avon Books, 1965), 298–99.
148. For a summary of these charges, see Boucé, 100–101. Boucé (102) also quotes Arnold Kettle, who argued that “Nashe and Defoe and Smollett . . . are less consciously concerned with the moral significance of life than with its surface texture” (Introduction to the English Novel, 2 vols. [London: Hutchinson, 1951], 1:21). Kettle’s considering “moral significance” apart from the social forces that shape moral categories is typical of the critical reaction.
149. Giddings, The Tradition of Smollett, 97; Boucé, 103. See also Ian Campbell Ross, “‘With Dignity and Importance’: Peregrine Pickle as Country Gentleman,” in Smollett: Author of First Distinction, ed. Alan Bold (London: Vision Press; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1982), 148–69.
150. Ronald Paulson, “The Pilgrimage and the Family: Structures in the Novels of Fielding and Smollett,” in Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M. Knapp, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Paul-Gabriel Boucé (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 62.
151. Putney, “The Plan,” 1053.
152. See Putney, “The Plan,” 1065; Paulson, “The Pilgrimage,” 63; and Joel Weinsheimer, “Defects and Difficulties in Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle,” Ariel 9 (1978): 60.
153. Aileen Douglas, Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), xx.
154. See Orwell, “Tobias Smollett: Scotland’s Best Novelist,” 245.
155. Beasley, Tobias Smollett: Novelist, 16, 31.
156. Orwell, “Tobias Smollett: Scotland’s Best Novelist,” 247.
157. Weinsheimer, “Defects and Difficulties,” 49.
158. Johnson, Rambler, no. 4 (31 March 1750), in Bate and Strauss, The Rambler, 1:22.
159. Orwell, “Tobias Smollett: Scotland’s Best Novelist,” 247.
160. In a note published in 1926, E. S. Noyes lists the similarities between George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and the novel before transcribing a letter from Shaw’s secretary that denies that Shaw ever read Peregrine Pickle. See “A Note on Peregrine Pickle and Pygmalion,” Modern Language Notes 41 (1926): 327–30.