Scotophilia and Humphry Clinker: The Politics of Beggary, Bugs, and Buttocks

Abstract

Many scholars have commented on Horace Walpole's words about Humphry Clinker: 'a party novel, written by the profligate hireling Smollett, to vindicate the Scots and cry down juries.' Behind Walpole's hyperbole lies fact: Smollett's attempt to wean the English from their inveterate animus against his native land. Habitual scorn had turned into active hatred, fanned by party writers opposed to the court, during the years of Lord Bute's influence, the earlier 1760s. This concentrated attack, I propose, established an agenda for the irenic Humphry Clinker (1771) by setting forth a number of topics, charges against the Scots, which Smollett tried to annul or, if possible, to turn to his own persuasive advantage. I am led to this general hypothesis by joining two facts. The first, from the novel itself, sticks in the memory of every reader. When the titular hero comes upon the scene, he is so ragged that his buttocks show through his clothes, thus amusing Jery, entrancing Winifred, and outraging Tabby. He has also been ill and hungry, 'his looks denote famine,' and Tabby sums him up as 'a filthy tatterdemalion ... [who will] fill the room full of vermin: a 'mangy hound' (Jery, 24 May). The second fact does not stick in the memories of present-day readers but, I suggest, stuck at least in the unconscious memories of readers in Smollett's day. It is that, although Humphry is of English birth, the anti-Scots propaganda ofthe 1760s made bare buttocks, beggarliness, mange, and filth standard accusations against 'North Britons.'