The Plan of Peregrine Pickle

Abstract

Smollett, like all great writers, is forgiven his failures; it is for his successes he is condemned. Ferdinand Fathom and Launcelot Greaves neither add to nor detract much from his reputation, but certain aspects of Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphry Clinker have won him a critical thrashing as sound as any cudgeling he described. Because these qualities appear with least relief in Peregrine Pickle that novel has been the one most abused. Critics assert that there more than elsewhere Smollett showed himself unable to distinguish between brutality and humor, between a ruffian and a hero. But the most serious charge is the complaint that the novel is completely formless, that the loose picaresque structure, in a measure characteristic of Smollett, is especially offensive here. These commonplaces of Smollett criticism are founded on misconceptions which ignore the nature and purpose of this novel. It will not be difficult to show that Peregrine Pickle, far from being a haphazard collection of episodes, was composed according to a plan that accounts for most of the aspects to which critics object. In particular, Smollett's modification of the picaresque form has not been explicitly stated. When the purpose and the essential structure of Peregrine Pickle are understood, it becomes apparent that the real cause of Smollett's inferiority to the greatest English novelists is neither carelessness regarding form nor inability to tell a blackguard from a hero, but other more important intellectual and spiritual limitations as a satiric novelist.