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Sasha's Reviews > The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
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"The pills are good for nothing," fumes the heroic hypochondriac Bramble in one of your better opening sentences, and we're off on a picaresque tour of all the cliches of the 1700s and 1800s. Featuring such greatest hits as:
- Ridiculous coincidences!
- People who turn out to be of higher birth than they seem!
- Casual anti-Semitism, racism, sexism and classism!
- Duels!
- Fainting!
Published in 1771, it was influential to writers of the 1800s and especially influential to Dickens, whose alter ego David Copperfield at one point lists his favorite literary characters and most of them are from Smollett. You can see the influence: Smollett has a flair for caricatures, although Dickens has more of one.
It's an epistolary - of course it's an epistolary - and Smollett uses that structure to show the same events from several different points of view. That's a cool idea, but Smollett can't execute it well enough to keep it interesting. The maid, for example, has one joke: the misuse of words like "suppository" to dirty effect. It gets old even to a 13-year-old like me.
And yet it's all sortof likable. Don Quixote shows up, or close enough. And there's this, from a quack doctor: "Every person who pretended to nauseate the smell of another's excretions, snuffed up his own with particular complacency." So that's maybe the first recorded instance of the maxim that everyone likes the smell of their own shit. And (like my shit) the book is not great, but pleasant enough.
Clinker himself is a minor character, introduced late, which confused me enough that I had to stop 20% through and confirm I was reading the right book. The major characters are:
- Mr. Bramble, the hypochondriac from above;
- His sister Tabitha Bramble, fast becoming a spinster of no return and desperate to marry;
- Her maid Winifred Jenkins, she of the one joke;
- The Bramble nephew Jery Melford, a pleasant but rowdy young man;
- His sister Lydia, who's fallen in love with some dude or other.
They ramble around the Island, especially Scotland, which the Scottish Smollett would like to tell you all about, and then guess what happens in the end? (view spoiler)
- Ridiculous coincidences!
- People who turn out to be of higher birth than they seem!
- Casual anti-Semitism, racism, sexism and classism!
- Duels!
- Fainting!
Published in 1771, it was influential to writers of the 1800s and especially influential to Dickens, whose alter ego David Copperfield at one point lists his favorite literary characters and most of them are from Smollett. You can see the influence: Smollett has a flair for caricatures, although Dickens has more of one.
It's an epistolary - of course it's an epistolary - and Smollett uses that structure to show the same events from several different points of view. That's a cool idea, but Smollett can't execute it well enough to keep it interesting. The maid, for example, has one joke: the misuse of words like "suppository" to dirty effect. It gets old even to a 13-year-old like me.
And yet it's all sortof likable. Don Quixote shows up, or close enough. And there's this, from a quack doctor: "Every person who pretended to nauseate the smell of another's excretions, snuffed up his own with particular complacency." So that's maybe the first recorded instance of the maxim that everyone likes the smell of their own shit. And (like my shit) the book is not great, but pleasant enough.
Clinker himself is a minor character, introduced late, which confused me enough that I had to stop 20% through and confirm I was reading the right book. The major characters are:
- Mr. Bramble, the hypochondriac from above;
- His sister Tabitha Bramble, fast becoming a spinster of no return and desperate to marry;
- Her maid Winifred Jenkins, she of the one joke;
- The Bramble nephew Jery Melford, a pleasant but rowdy young man;
- His sister Lydia, who's fallen in love with some dude or other.
They ramble around the Island, especially Scotland, which the Scottish Smollett would like to tell you all about, and then guess what happens in the end? (view spoiler)
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Reading Progress
March 4, 2015
–
Started Reading
March 4, 2015
– Shelved as:
2015
March 4, 2015
– Shelved
March 4, 2015
– Shelved as:
novel-a-biography
March 7, 2015
– Shelved as:
rth-lifetime
March 7, 2015
–
Finished Reading
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Wendy
(new)
Mar 07, 2015 05:07PM
I need to get around to some Smollett. I don't know what sold me more, the physician quote about excretions, or the insane coincidences. No wait, it's totally the fainting! I love me some fainting. Seriously though, you really know how to sell these old musty-looking tomes.
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There are some utterly embarrassing elements in this otherwise decent book review. The reviewer speaks (as so many do these days) as if the Brits invented 'casual racism'. This is the dizzy limit in 'casual ignorance', I say. Because its really just a preposterous form of cheap 'scapegoating'. Hey, 'casual racism' was certainly old even before the time of Hammurabi. And it will certainly outlive all of us. So why paint the Brits as the originators? Why paint Smollett as somehow 'at fault'? Keep this BS out of good book reviews, please.
^ Lol who the fuck is this dude
