The Expedition of Humphry Clinker By Tobias Smollett (1771)IT IS A family holiday like no other. Squire Matthew Bramble, righteous and possibly inclined to hypochondria, is intent on visiting old friends. He sets off from Brambleton Hall in Wales on a hectic odyssey across England and up to Scotland. With him are his appalling, somewhat desperate spinster sister, Tabitha, and the squire's likeable grown wards, nephew Jery and niece Lydia (or Liddy) Melford, fond siblings.
Each of the tourists prove keen letter writers, dispatching vivid accounts of their travels, and at times, their woes, to their respective friends. Accompanying the party is Aunt Tabitha's illiterate maid servant, Winifred Jenkins, a female given to wild affections and even wilder fits of spelling. As one of the earliest examples of a road novel, and the gifted Scot, Tobias Smollett, does make several nods to an even earlier road novel Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), Humphry Clinker is not only dazzling, insightful Georgian social history, it also remains screamingly, insanely funny.
Richardson and Fielding had pioneered the epistolary form but it was Smollett who really opened it out by increasing the number of writers and with them the contrasting versions of the same events. The squire whose letters to Lewis his friend and doctor dominate the narrative, provide the fullest, most opinionated account of the places visited. But young Liddy is caught up in a romantic dilemma of some ambivalence. Her determined swain pursues her across the country and, indifferent to the scenery and much else besides, she breathlessly reports every sigh pertaining to her secret romance to a school pal.
Meanwhile, her brother Jery sustains a running commentary to his college friend Phillips. Wry and ironic, Jery is a witty, often merciless observer who is particularly amused by his Aunt Tabitha's efforts to secure a man. Mindful of his sister's honour, Jery challenges Lydia's admirer to a duel.
Smollett shrewdly establishes and sustains the individual voices, allowing each character to emerge fully formed through the ways in which they express themselves to their intimates. The squire, initially preoccupied with supplying intellectual discourse to Lewis, enjoys interludes of philosophical awareness. He is alert to his surroundings and remarks on the changes time had made on places he has not seen for years.
Jery is different. Here is a young man living in the moment. The squire's voice is reflective, his nephew's tone brilliantly suggests the impression of a man laughing so hard he can barely keep his pen steady. Aunt Tabitha, owner of the vicious dog Chowder, sends off sharp missives to her housekeeper back at Brambleton, while Winifred keeps her fellow servant Molly up to date. Travelling through the Britain of George III has its physical perils; horses fall lame or lose shoes. Carriages break down, become stuck in mud, slide into rivers and overturn. Events often overtake the travelogue. The party meets up with an unfortunate victim of a miscarriage of justice - one Humphry Clinker.
Fate intervenes. Thomas the postilion is bitten by Chowder. Clinker is engaged as a replacement and quickly confirms his loyalty, even to the point of "rescuing" the squire from swimming as well as from more serious plights. Interestingly, Clinker, an enigma of near saintly simplicity if many talents - from shoeing horses to preaching - never writes a letter. Nor does the eccentric Scot Lismahago, who eventually weds Tabitha. Revelations and marriages abound in this picaresque romp of exuberant genius completed by Smollett months before his death at the age of 50.
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