History, Humphry Clinker, and the Novel

History, Humphry Clinker, and the NovelRobert Mayer Smollett's fictional narratives often seem to be texts at odds with themselves. A large literature has grown up around the question of what they are—satires, picaresque tales, and romances being among the most popular, but by no means the only, candidates.1 For some critics the application of one or more of these generic labels to Smollett's narratives amounts to an assertion that those texts ought not to be considered novels.2 Critics have also decried the "methodlessness" of Smollett's fiction, and such complaints have often been another way of commenting on the multiform character of his texts.3 An exception is generally made, however, for The Expedition ofHumphry Clinker. Robert Folkenflik finds in Smollett's last fiction not "a high-spirited hodge-podge" 1 See, for example, Sheridan Baker, "Humphry Clinker as Comic Romance," Papers ofthe Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 46 (1961), 645-54; David K. Jeffrey, "Roderick Random: The Form and Structure of a Romance," Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire 58 (1980), 604-14; Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 165-218; G.S. Rousseau, "Smollett and the Picaresque: Some Questions about a Label," Studies in Burke and His Time 12 (1970-71), 1886-1904; and Robert D. Spector, Tobias George Smollett (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989). 2 Ronald Paulson argues mat the "unmodified satiric conventions" found in Roderick Random are at odds witii "die realistic world of die post-Richaidsonian novel" (pp. 176-79). See also Alan McKillop, The Early Masters ofEnglish Fiction (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1956), p. 151; and Jeffrey, p. 614. 3 H.W. Hodges, ed., Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett (London: Dent, 1927), p. xiii; see also A.R. Humphreys, "Fielding and Smollett," in From Dryden to Johnson: Volume 4 ofThe Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 314. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 3, April 1992 240 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION but a "sense of unity in variety."4 Scholars have offered various explanations for the greater coherence of Humphry Clinker, some of which are discussed below. In what follows I argue that the key to the structural superiority of Humphry Clinker, as compared with Smollett's other fictions, is a historical argument about the United Kingdom that is enacted within the text. I also contend that Smollett's use of history in his last fictional narrative—both in the historical argument and in the implicit definition of the novel found in the frame of Humphry Clinker—is what makes Smollett's last work his most "novelistic" achievement and his one indisputably canonical novel.3 That Smollett had history on his mind when he wrote Humphry Clinker is not a new idea. Louis Martz argued that Humphry Clinker was "an adaptation to novel-form of the topical and historical interests" of Smollett 's various historiographical efforts, and many critics have discussed the political or historical theme in the text.6 Robert Gorham Davis showed mat "in Humphry Clinker, the movement through time is also a movement through space, a movement from England into Scotland and back into England again, a movement of reconciliation which ends ... with symbolic intermarriages of Welsh, Scotch, and English."7 What I now want to demonstrate is that, while Davis and other like-minded critics have been correct in linking the greater unity of Humphry Clinker to 4 Robert Folkenflik, "Self and Society: Comic Union in Humphry Clinker," Philological Quarterly 53 (1974), 204. Others who have asserted die unity of me work include Robert Goriiam Davis, ed., The Expedition ofHumphry Clinker (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), pp. v-xxiii; and B.L. Reid, "Smollett's Healing Journey," Virginia Quarterly Review 41 (1965), 549-70. 5 By "history," I mean historiography or historical writing, not historical events; by "historical argument" and "historical vision," I mean a line of reasoning or a set of insights about die evolution of the British nation. I assume, here and elsewhere, even though I recognize the problematic character of my assumption, that "fiction" and "history" are fundamentally different forms...