Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker

A gentle peregrination around Britain

I first read Humphry Clinker in 1974, when it was a set text on a memorable undergraduate course that I have written about on my blog here where I am reminiscing about my undergraduate degree at Leeds in the early seventies.

My Folio edition is the one pictured here, illustrated by Derrick Harris. It’s an edition published in 2018, with an introduction by John Sutherland, using Harris’s original illustrations from a previous Folio edition published in 1955. I really like the use of wood engravings to illustrate eighteenth-century texts: there’s something about the angularity and roughness that seems appropriate for picaresque, rollicking adventures. Derrick Harris also illustrated the Folio editions of Fielding’s Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. A comprehensive account of his life and work is available here. Harris’s work reminds me of the Lino cuts of Edward Bawden. Back in the seventies, the Oxford English Novels series, in paperback, featured covers with linocuts by Bawden, and my student copy of Humphry Clinker was in that series. This is Bawden’s cover illustration, much reduced for the house style of the Oxford paperbacks.

(from Edward Bawden, A Book of Cuts (Scolar Press, 1979)

Tobias Smollett, memorably lampooned in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey as “Smelfungus” was a Scottish physician, who turned to writing early in life, and earned his living by his pen ever after. He did spend a brief period as a naval surgeon, and his experiences at sea gave him material for his fiction, especially in Roderick Random. As well as his novels, including Peregrine Pickle and Ferdinand, Count Fathom, he was a prolific journalist, travel writer and translator. His translation of Don Quixote is still in print. Humphry Clinker was his final work, written when he was ill, and residing in Livorno where he had travelled in search of a better climate for his chronic lung condition.

The full title of the novel is The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. The expedition in question is a journey around various locales in England and Scotland, undertaken by the valetudinarian Matthew Bramble, like Smollett travelling for his health. He is accompanied by his sister Tabitha, nephew Jeremy, niece Lydia, and maid Winifred. The character after whom the novel is named does not appear until about a quarter of the way through the text. He is an ostler at an inn, taken on by Bramble on his travels around the spa towns of Britain.

The novel is a gentle picaresque journey, in which the family encounter a series of comic misfortunes. The tale is told in epistolary fashion, with Bramble writing to his doctor, Jeremy writing to his university friend, and Lydia writing to her schoolfriend. Winifred contributes some epistles to the rest of the servants back at the family seat in Wales, Brambleton Hall. Along the way, they encounter a series of comic eccentrics, including the eponymous Clinker, the Scottish veteran Obadiah Lismahago, and various minor characters, whose main function seems to be to give Tabitha a fit of the vapours or to exacerbate Bramble’s ailments. Smollett is excellent at the set piece comic scene, and has plenty of opportunities to display his skill during the course of the narrative. Of course, in the end, all misunderstandings and conflicts are resolved, and couples paired off in traditional comedic fashion.

It’s not difficult to see Matthew Bramble as a version of Smollett himself: both troubled by ailments, rather cantankerous, and fiercely grumpy about the new-fangled customs they encounter. Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy chronicles the small-scale Grand Tour he undertook a few years earlier, and it’s a long diatribe against what he sees as the deliberate obstacles put in his way by the citizens of those countries. Like Bramble, he writes to his doctor, among other correspondents. He fulminates, Bramble-like, against innkeepers, merchants, janitors, postmasters, guides and virtually everyone else who crosses his path. There’s a Folio edition of the Travels, of course, with an introduction by the prolific Christopher Hibbert, illustrated with contemporary engravings. Here’s Smollett, getting into his regular mood before even setting foot on the continent, by describing the conditions on the boat he has hired, for six guineas, to transport him and his party from Dover to Boulogne:

We embarked between six and seven in the evening, and found ourselves in a most wretched hovel, on board what is called a Folkstone cutter. The cabin was so small that a dog could hardly turn in it, and the beds put me in mind of the holes described in some catacombs, in which the bodies of the dead were deposited, being thrust in with the feet foremost; there was no getting into them but endways, and indeed they seemed so dirty, that nothing but extreme necessity could have obliged me to use them. We sat up all night in a most uncomfortable situation, tossed about by the sea, cold, and cramped and weary, and languishing for want of sleep.

Bramble is of a similar frame of mind. Here he is at the start of the journey, complaining to Dr Lewis about the sad decline of Bath:

You must know, I find nothing but disappointment at Bath; which is so altered, that I can scarce believe it is the same place that I frequented about thirty years ago. Methinks I hear you say, ‘Altered it is, without all doubt: but then it is altered for the better; a truth which, perhaps, you would own without hesitation, if you yourself was not altered for the worse.’ The reflection may, for aught I know, be just. The inconveniences which I overlooked in the high-day of health, will naturally strike with exaggerated impression on the irritable nerves of an invalid, surprised by premature old age, and shattered with long-suffering—But, I believe, you will not deny, that this place, which Nature and Providence seem to have intended as a resource from distemper and disquiet, is become the very centre of racket and dissipation. Instead of that peace, tranquillity, and ease, so necessary to those who labour under bad health, weak nerves, and irregular spirits; here we have nothing but noise, tumult, and hurry; with the fatigue and slavery of maintaining a ceremonial, more stiff, formal, and oppressive, than the etiquette of a German elector. A national hospital it may be, but one would imagine that none but lunatics are admitted; and truly, I will give you leave to call me so, if I stay much longer at Bath.

The various mishaps and calamities experienced by Bramble and his family are played out against the backdrop of pump rooms, inns, ballrooms and country houses in a succession of genteel spa towns. In the course of the novel, the Bramble party begin at Bath and visit, among other places, London, Harrogate, York, Scarborough, a series of Scottish towns, highlands and islands, and even my home time, Manchester, which Bramble is impressed with: “I am much pleased with Manchester, which is one of the most agreeable and flourishing towns in Great-Britain; and I perceive that this is the place which hath animated the spirit, and suggested the chief manufactures of Glasgow.” As John Sutherland says in his introduction, “In its entirety, Humphry Clinker offers a snapshot of Britain at the moment when commerce, empire, urbanisation and industrialisation were beginning to change everything.” As much as the picturesque travelogues of the time, this novel stands as an entertaining ‘state of the nation’ piece, given renewed life in this very handsome Folio edition.

Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, introduced by John Sutherland, with wood engravings by Derrick Harris, Folio Society 2018.

Printed on You Long Pure paper at C&C Offset Printing Co Ltd, China, and bound by them in cloth printed and blocked with a design by the artist.