Domesticating the Picaro: Lazarillo de Tormes in England, 1688–1789

Abstract

Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the first work of Spanish picaresque fiction, maintained a lively presence in England throughout the eighteenth century. This essay focuses on two English versions which radically altered the tale in ways that reflected new developments in English prose fiction. Between 1688 and 1789 the picaro is first transformed into a sentimentalized protagonist who longs for the comforts of domesticity, and then into one who seems to prefigure the heroes of the nascent Bildungsroman. These transformations repeatedly cast Lazarillo anew as a forerunner of the latest trends in novelistic fiction, revealing in the process not just the abiding relevance of this old Spanish tale, but an emergent literary history of the novel that was beginning to coalesce along with the genre itself.