"About savages and the awfulness of America": Colonial Corruptions in Humphry Clinker

Tobias Smollett's last novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, articulates a deeply felt and acerbic indictment of British society. From the cesspools of Bath to the superficiality of London to the poverty of Scotland, Matthew Bramble and his family discover, in their travels, a nation suffering from the corrosive effects of institutional and systemic corruption. Even the country squirearchy, as represented by the Burdocks, the Bayards, and Lord Oxmington, spectacularly fails to provide the kind of hospitality and serenity so prized by traditionalists like Bramble. Given the parlous state of the kingdom, the sensible and sensitive Briton can only disengage and retreat ... but not too far. While condemning widespread anarchy and degeneracy in Britain, Humphry Clinker emphatically rejects a solution embraced by many disappointed or marginalized citizens: it abjures escape to the place where Moll Flanders and Jemy can "live as new People in a new World," where Clarissa might hide her scandalous elopement until "all is blown over," and where Henry Esmond finds serenity "far from Europe and its troubles, on the beautiful banks of the Potomac."¹ For Smollett, writing in 1771 during an alarming exodus from Scotland to the colonies, America represents a double danger: it siphons off manpower that could otherwise help build a strong post-Union Scotland, and it distributes wealth in the home country in a destructively egalitarian way. In Humphry Clinker, Smollett joins the argument against emigration by showing how colonial adventuring has damaged the social and political health of the mother nation and by depicting life in America as dangerously savage.

Lismahago, during his debate with Bramble about the 1706 Union, asserts that England gained more than Scotland because Scotland provided a most valuable resource, an army of imperial workers:

they got an accession of above a million of useful subjects, constituting a never-failing nursery of seamen, soldiers, labourers and mechanics; a most valuable acquisition to a trading country, exposed to foreign wars, and obliged to maintain a number of settlements in all the four quarters of the globe. In the course of seven years, during the last war, Scotland furnished the English army and navy with seventy thousand men, over and above those who migrated to their colonies, or mingled with them at home in the civil departments of life.²

For once, Lismahago does not exaggerate. While early attempts at establishing Scottish settlements in America failed, the "turning point in Scottish emigration was the Seven Years' War," according to Ned C. Landsman, "which attracted large numbers of Scottish soldiers after mid-century ... . Perhaps 40,000 Scots ventured to America during the next dozen years."³ This enormous outflow created a problem of depopulation that contemporary witnesses deplored. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, travelling in Scotland in 1773, repeatedly encounter signs of escalating emigration, including a dance called "America. Each of the couples ... successively whirls round in a circle, till all are in motion; and the dance seems intended to shew how emigration catches, till a whole neighbourhood is set afloat." Johnson laments that "all that go may be considered as subjects lost to the British crown; for a nation scattered in the boundless regions of America resembles rays diverging from a focus."⁴ Like Johnson, who finds that "oppression might produce a wish for new habitations," Smollett ascribes this massive exodus at least in part to English punitive policies in the wake of the Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745, policies which de-cultured Highlanders by disarming them and depriving them "of their ancient garb ... the government could not have taken a more effectual method to break their national spirit" (277).⁵ Unlike Johnson, who fears that "nobody born in any other parts of the world will choose this country for his residence,"⁶ Smollett believes that proper economic incentives can indeed repopulate the Highlands: "Our people have a [End Page...