The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

One of those 'old friend' books that gets read each year - an episodic travel adventure that leaves me both with a smile on my face, and a still-unrequited desire to tour northern England and Scotland. Told in a series of letters (an epistolary novel), we follow the 18th-century version of a summer vacation road trip, headed by with misanthropic, gouty Welsh country gentleman Matthew Bramble. The traveling party includes Bramble's desperate-to-marry sister, Tabitha; his nephew Jery, a recent college graduate and twenty-something party animal; and his niece Liddy, seventeen, fresh out of boarding school and fainting with love. Letters from these four back home, along with bonus letters from Tabitha's young maidservant, Win Jenkins, provide different views of the same events while the family makes its way through Bath, London, northern England and Scotland.

The Humphrey Clinker of the title is picked up early in their adventures as a manservant and serves as a catalyst throughout - Smollett's title character never pens a letter himself, but plays as prominent a role in the others' letters as he does in the plot. The letters themselves are descriptive, ribald, sarcastic, and in the cases of Tabby's and Win letters, packed with obscene malapropisms - and above all, usually hilarious. Smollett didn't put himself out developing complex plot architecture, or even a plausible ending (the unlikely coincidences rival a Shakespeare romantic comedy), but that's not what you read Humphrey Clinker for - you read it for pleasure and for laughs, which is probably what the readers of the time, emerging from Cromwell's humorless rule, were looking for. The bonus character, Smollett's beloved Scotland, is probably developed more fully and beautifully than any of the actual characters traveling through it. Enjoy! ( )

This book was really funny, and it's amazing that it was written in the 18th century! A lot of things that happened to the various characters are still valid today.
As the book is written in the form of letters, by the different characters to people more or less close to them, it's a great way to 'get to know' them.
Some things were truly hilarious, and the way the characters describe each other made me laugh hard several times. ( )

Tobias Smollett’s last and greatest novel, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, is a both a satire and a travelogue. It is an epistolary novel with five letter-writers, all part of a family group that makes an eight-month tour of the island of Great Britain.

Matthew Bramble, the leader of the expedition, is a gouty Welsh gentleman, a confirmed bachelor who admits to being a libertine in his youth, and something of a hypochondriac. His health is the reason for the trip, and the letters he writes are to his doctor, who is also his closest friend. Bramble is a bit of a misanthrope, or at least likes to appear to, but his innate humanity and generosity never fail to show through. “If the morals of mankind have not contracted an extraordinary degree of depravity, within these thirty years,” he writes, “then I must be infected with the common vice of old men.”

Bramble’s sister, Tabitha, likewise never married, is a selfish, miserly spinster whose narrow-mindedness is always set in contrast to the broader views of her brother. Her nephew writes on one occasion that she “found new matter of offence; which, indeed, she has a particular genius for extracting at will from almost every incident in life.” She writes back to the family housekeeper constantly reminding her to keep the servants under control and not to lose count of the spoons.

The most perceptive observer of the group is Bramble’s nephew, Jery Melford who reports with wry detachment on the family’s foibles to his friend back at Oxford. In London Jery associates with both literary and political circles, reporting in astonishment on the corruption and hypocrisy he finds in both.

Jery’s younger sister Lydia enters the scene already stricken with love for a mysterious actor who calls himself “Wilson,” but who confesses this is neither his real name nor his true station in life. This Wilson will appear in various guises throughout the journey, sending the fragile Lydia into a faint and her protective brother into a raging fury.

Lastly there is Tabitha’s young maid Winifred Jenkins, whose struggles with spelling in her letters to her friend back in Wales provide the novel's funniest moments. Of her visit to London she writes: “And I have seen the Park, and the paleass of Saint Gimses, and the king's and the queen's magisterial pursing, and the sweet young princes, and the hillyfents, and pye bald ass, and all the rest of the royal family.” She later asserts she is not given to “tailbaring,” and righteously proclaims “that by the new light of grease, I may deify the devil and all his works.”

So who is Humphrey Clinker? He is a young man the family hire on the road between Bath and London to replace a dismissed footman. He’s so poor that the rags he wears don’t even properly cover his behind (bare buttocks, as you can see, are a recurrent gag in the novel). But Clinker, a devout Wesleyan, becomes the moral center of the group, and changes each of them the longer they are around him.

As a travel narrative, the novel focuses on three locales: Bath, London, and Scotland. The first two are treated satirically, with the family members giving accounts contrasting as widely as their temperaments. To young Lydia they are sparkling jewels of social delight. To her uncle they are Sodom and Gomorrah. But the tone changes when the group reaches Scotland, the author’s native land. “The people at the other end of the island know as little of Scotland as of Japan,” Jery asserts, and Smollet sets out to rectify that ignorance with an extensive and loving description of urban and rural scenes, lowlands and highlands, and the people therein. Near the end of the novel there is this excellent observation: “Without all doubt, the greatest advantage acquired in travelling and perusing mankind in the original, is that of dispelling those shameful clouds that darken the faculties of the mind, preventing it from judging with candour and precision.”

The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker is a warm and funny novel, and many of the author’s observations on politics, public health and human nature are as applicable today as they were in 1771. Anyone who likes the novels of Charles Dickens or the travel narratives of Mark Twain will find that this was their prototype. ( )

“[Smollett’s] most praised book, Humphrey [sic] Clinker ,… is no longer worth reading” George Orwell, “Tobias Smollett, Scotland’s Best Novelist”, Tribune 22-Sep-1944 in Collected Essays and Journalism: 1944-1945. But he continues - "Smollett’s real masterpieces are Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle.” ( )

I am a mug for bashed up old yellowbacks with fading and loose boards such as this one. How man railway carriages did this grace?