Smollett's Development as a Novelist

Abstract

The only way fully to grasp the dynamics of Smollett's development as a novelist is through examination of his continuing efforts to create a unified art work. Recently, in support of this concern, attention has been drawn to the kinetic nature of his search for form.1 As a further step in a reassessment of Smollett's career, we should see that his quest involved a redefinition of his philosophic attitudes as well as changes of a more purely formal nature. Throughout his career he searched for new modes of expression to mirror his insights about life in a fully coherent work of art; only gradually did he recognize and respond to the inevitability of transforming that insight itself into something more congenial to the novel form and to the historical circumstances that give rise to this genre. In a general way, Smollett's experiments with novel form reveal a movement away from a satiric anatomy largely derived from the picaresque tradition toward a more coherent novel world in which character, plot, and authorial assessment work together in a unified manner. Smollett's evolution thus follows a general trend of his period which came to reject looser forms of fiction in favor of those which were at once more lifelike and coherent. But in emphasizing formal realism, as Ian Watt has pointed out, the novelists of this period raised crucial and persistent problems about matters of aesthetic and moral evaluation. How was one to achieve a tale that was both lifelike and yet an evaluation or moral assessment of that life? How was one to reconcile the different, and apparently opposing, demands of a realism of presentation and a realism of assessment?2 Smollett's solution to this problem, finally, in his last novel cannot be divorced from his search for a philosophical stance on the problem of how we come to know reality. His career can be seen as reflecting a struggle to come to terms with the implications of Lockean epistemology for both his conception of reality and his novel form.