Review: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I studied English literature at university, I deliberately stopped at the 17th century. The more 18th-century novels I read now, the more I realize what I was missing out on, though I might not have appreciated them as much back then. Yes, they're rambling and wordy, both in their individual sentences and overall, and I wouldn't put up with that style in a 21st-century novel, but I make allowances for the period. It still meant that I wasn't always in the mood to read this one, which is why it took me nearly two months to finish.

This is a comedy of characters. Told via letters, which have distinct voices for the different authors and often give markedly different perspectives on the same events, it chronicles the doings of a Welsh squire's family on a journey around Britain. It's also a travelogue, with reflections by the various characters (mainly Squire Bramble) on the good and bad aspects of the places they visit, to the point of satire sometimes on the more fashionable ones like Bath. If there's an overall theme, it's the difference between balanced and healthy prosperity, which increases and spreads through wise management and sensible development, and extravagance, which exhausts and finally consumes itself and leads to ruin and poverty, not only in money but also in character.

As well as being a comedy in the "intended to be funny" sense, it's also a comedy in the sense that it ends with marriages rather than deaths. There are several slowly unwinding plot threads that come together relatively quickly at the end.

The head of the family, Squire Bramble himself, is a querulous hypochondriac who comes off as a misanthrope, until you dig beneath the surface and discover that he's a kind and generous man with a short temper because of his real and imagined illnesses. His health improves towards the end of the book, on his visit to Scotland, about which he enthuses (the author was born there, by what I'm sure is no coincidence). Bramble's unmarried sister Tabitha is a type of 18th-century literature (or perhaps of English literature), the wrong-headed woman who can't be reasoned with. Their nephew is superficially a young coxcomb, but again has more depth to him once you get to know him. Their niece is a naive young woman who has fallen in love with an actor - who may actually be a gentleman going under a false name. Partway through, we get the advent of the title character, Humphrey Clinker (eventually revealed not to be his real name), an honest young man who the squire engages as a servant at a low point in his life. This kind act turns out well for everyone, particularly Clinker and the squire. A coincidence eventually comes to light which connects Clinker to the family in a different way.

Clinker becomes involved in the Methodist movement - then an evangelical awakening within the Anglican church, which appealed strongly to the poor - and his honest piety, leavened occasionally with credulous superstition, is a major feature of his character, treated sympathetically for the most part.

If the book has a fault, it's that there are too many characters to easily keep straight at first, some of whom are written to and others written about, and that you sometimes have to check the end of the chapter to see who's writing, though often you can tell from the voice or from the recipient. As I went on with the book, I became more orientated. The stage machinery is visible occasionally, when one letter-writer avoids retelling a good story that has been told by the previous one, saying "I'll tell you that story when I see you."

The Project Gutenberg version has occasional OCR/scan errors, where words have been mistaken for other legitimate words. Because a couple of the letter-writers provide amusement through their misspellings and malapropisms (to a degree that stretches disbelief sometimes, particularly when it's bawdy through no intent of the letter-writer), and because 18th-century English was often spelled (and punctuated) differently from modern English anyway, and had a lot of vocabulary that we've since lost, it's a pardonable fault. I will send them an email about the obvious substitutions I noticed, though. I know I will have missed some through not recognizing the original word.

Overall, though for modern taste it needs a bit of compression and streamlining, this is an enjoyable look at Britain of the later 18th century, its places, people, and social movements and conditions, and a mostly gently satiric comedy full of memorable characters and absurd incidents. If you enjoy, say, The Pickwick Papers or even Three Men in a Boat , you will probably enjoy this literary predecessor of both of them.

View all my reviews