The Smollettian View of Life

Abstract

It is a textbook commonplace that Tobias Smollett's novels are episodic-in other words, that attention is concentrated on individual episodes and they unfold, rather than on unfolding of a novel length plot. Nevertheless, critics who undertake to find a synthesizing force in Smollett's novels invariably seek it in place where it is least likely to reside-the temporal structure (or plot) of work. Thus Robert Giddings can call Peregrine Pickle the story of a young man's moral decline and eventual return to life from a period of imprisonment, a better, because a wiser man and be correct, yet not come close to describing experience of reading Peregrine Pickle.1 All of Smollett's novels follow a rudimentary scheme of development such as Giddings describes (poverty to respectability, crime to repentance, separation to reunion), but to name these schemes is not to touch is central in these books. The truth is that reader is simply not interested in whether Peregrine will finally deserve Emilia, or secure his patrimony, or be transformed into a better person-what does interest reader, and Smollett, are dynamics of each individual scene at moment in which it occurs. When reading a novel by Smollett, our thought is rarely how did this come to be? or what is going to happen? but what is happening right now, and am I to take it? This kind of novel is hard to deal with critically. It can be represented simply as a string of episodic adventures held together only by character of adventurer himself (the picaresque); or it can be abstracted to fit our customary notion of holds a novel together (temporal development); or it can be examined within limits of a preconceived philosophical framework, so that Roderick Random, for instance, becomes a study of Reason and Passion.2 All of these approaches are to a certain degree useful; all provide a particular kind of insight into Smollett's work. But none is completely satisfying-directed on novels as broad and various as Smollett's, such narrowed illumination often obscures more than it reveals.