Book description
With an essay by Harold Bloom.
'What is the society of London, that I should be tempted, for its
sake, to mortify my senses, and compound with such uncleanness as my
soul abhors?'
Smollett's savage, boisterously funny lambasting of
eighteenth-century British society charts the unfortunate journey of
the gout-ridden and irascible squire Matthew Bramble across Britain,
who finds himself everywhere surrounded by decadents, pimps, con-men,
raucousness and degeneracy - until the arrival of the trusty
manservant Humphry Clinker promises to improve his fortunes. Populated
with unforgettable grotesques and written with a relish for earthy
humour and wordplay, and a ferocious pessimism, Humphry Clinker
is Smollett's masterpiece.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
Tobias Smollett (1721-71) was the very model of everything that made
18th-century London life so enjoyable. Born and educated in Scotland, he
trained to become a surgeon and settled in Jamaica. During the War of
Jenkins' Ear he was involved in the catastrophic British naval assault
on Cartagena, an event he immortalized in his very funny first novel
Roderick Random
(1748). He tried and failed to balance a medical career and a literary
one, eventually settling in London and turning out less good novels,
journalism and history. Yet he was one of the extraordinary group around
Sterne, Goldsmith and Garrick and was, with Fielding, one of the masters
of the comic picaresque novel which would so influence Dickens. In 1766
he published one of the great travel books,
Travels in France and Italy
, which single-handedly launched the genre of the splenetic, xenophobic
and unreasonable Briton abroad.
Humphry Clinker
, his masterpiece, was published just before his death.
