Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
New American Library (1960), Edition: New Ed, Paperback, 352 pages
Description
William Thackeray called it "the most laughable story that has ever been written since the goodly art of novel-writing began." As a group of travellers visit places in England and Scotland, they provide through satire and wit a vivid and detailed picture of the contemporary social andpolitical scene.
User reviews
LibraryThing member anthonywillard
This is an epistolary novel, that is to say it is entirely in the form of letters written by the characters to their friends and acquaintances. It was published in 1771. It is also a travelogue, a satire of social behavior, a running commentary on the politics and literature of the time, and a
I am always put off by epistolary novels, even though the only one I had read before this was Dorothy Sayers's The Documents in the Case, a brilliant tour de force told all in letters that I enjoyed hugely. Finally overcoming my aversion to the form, I read Humphry Clinker, and found it equally satisfactory. The letters in this case are written by the members of a family touring party during an expedition around eighteenth-century Britain. They start from their estate in Wales, four of them along with various servants, and acquire companions from time to time as they go along. They visit Bath and Bristol, London, various spas in northern England, Edinburgh, the Inner Hebrides, and thence back to Wales. The journey provides occasion for numerous picaresque adventures and matchmaking both humorous and sentimental.
The great bulk of the letters are written by the leading character, Squire Matthew Bramble, and his nephew and ward, Jery Melford, just down from Oxford. Bramble, an irascible curmudgeon and hypochondriac whose kindness belies his grumpiness, corresponds with his friend and physician in Wales; Melford, with an Oxford friend. Both are superb raconteurs, who carry the story along swimmingly in their lengthy epistles, with occasional help, mainly in a burlesque style, from the others. So the story rarely drags, and the different viewpoints provide some irony and humor.
Like any picaresque novel, Humphry Clinker is strong on incident, weak on plot. It is one event after another, like a television series, with the marital intrigues providing whatever overall structure there is. The episodes provide the journalist Smollett with ample opportunities for satire and comment on the social and literary foibles of his time. The initial sequence in Bath and Bristol was a little slow with its scathing view of the valetudinarian tourism that was a feature of the place and time. Also the segment in London was filled with political comment at a level of detail of interest only to historians. Some judicious skipping would have been in order, but I plowed through. Once the party got out of London and back on the road, it was back to the picaresque and a window on another world. Smollett was a Scot, and the lengthy visit to Scotland is the brightest segment of the story, with vivid appreciation for Scottish scenery and society, though not for the stench of sewerless Edinburgh.
So there you have it, a long, leisurely, good-humored, cozy read that I found very rewarding. I read the Oxford World Classics edition, which has an unmemorable introduction and excellent explanatory notes. (As always, leave the intro till after you've read the novel - too many spoilers. Better yet, skip the intro.) Recommended for anyone who likes long novels, light comedy, happy endings all round, and the eloquence of eighteenth-century conversation.
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pitch for tourism in Scotland.I am always put off by epistolary novels, even though the only one I had read before this was Dorothy Sayers's The Documents in the Case, a brilliant tour de force told all in letters that I enjoyed hugely. Finally overcoming my aversion to the form, I read Humphry Clinker, and found it equally satisfactory. The letters in this case are written by the members of a family touring party during an expedition around eighteenth-century Britain. They start from their estate in Wales, four of them along with various servants, and acquire companions from time to time as they go along. They visit Bath and Bristol, London, various spas in northern England, Edinburgh, the Inner Hebrides, and thence back to Wales. The journey provides occasion for numerous picaresque adventures and matchmaking both humorous and sentimental.
The great bulk of the letters are written by the leading character, Squire Matthew Bramble, and his nephew and ward, Jery Melford, just down from Oxford. Bramble, an irascible curmudgeon and hypochondriac whose kindness belies his grumpiness, corresponds with his friend and physician in Wales; Melford, with an Oxford friend. Both are superb raconteurs, who carry the story along swimmingly in their lengthy epistles, with occasional help, mainly in a burlesque style, from the others. So the story rarely drags, and the different viewpoints provide some irony and humor.
Like any picaresque novel, Humphry Clinker is strong on incident, weak on plot. It is one event after another, like a television series, with the marital intrigues providing whatever overall structure there is. The episodes provide the journalist Smollett with ample opportunities for satire and comment on the social and literary foibles of his time. The initial sequence in Bath and Bristol was a little slow with its scathing view of the valetudinarian tourism that was a feature of the place and time. Also the segment in London was filled with political comment at a level of detail of interest only to historians. Some judicious skipping would have been in order, but I plowed through. Once the party got out of London and back on the road, it was back to the picaresque and a window on another world. Smollett was a Scot, and the lengthy visit to Scotland is the brightest segment of the story, with vivid appreciation for Scottish scenery and society, though not for the stench of sewerless Edinburgh.
So there you have it, a long, leisurely, good-humored, cozy read that I found very rewarding. I read the Oxford World Classics edition, which has an unmemorable introduction and excellent explanatory notes. (As always, leave the intro till after you've read the novel - too many spoilers. Better yet, skip the intro.) Recommended for anyone who likes long novels, light comedy, happy endings all round, and the eloquence of eighteenth-century conversation.
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LibraryThing member leslie.98
I wavered between 3½ and 4 stars for this -- it took me a while to get into the swing of Smollett's style. However, once I did I found this epistolary novel increasingly enjoyable. Even the mis-spellings of the servant Win Jenkins which annoyed me at first became a source of amusement by the end.
LibraryThing member john257hopper
This is an epistolary novel written in 1771, the year the author died. It was one of a number of 18th century novels which were travelogues with rambling plots and colourful characters in sometimes bizarre situations. For the most part, this worked for me, and much of this is very amusing, though
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it dragged in places. One or two of the letter writers' epistles were a bit hard to read due to their idiolect, though this often had an amusing effect. The author of each letter was only stated at the epistle's end, so at first I couldn't tell who it was until I got used to the pattern. Some of the amusement derived from the different letter writers' interpretations of the same events and places. The early part of the novel is set in Bath, which at this time was in the midst of its Georgian transformation into the beautiful and elegant city I love today. The principle letter writer, Matthew Bramble, is scathing about Bath: "The Circus is a pretty bauble, contrived for shew, and looks like Vespasian's amphitheatre turned outside in" and, referring to the then forthcoming Royal Crescent among other new builds, "What sort of a monster Bath will become in a few years, with these growing excrescences, may be easily conceived". His niece Lydia on the other hand considers Bath "an earthly paradise. The Squares, the Circus and the Parades, put you in mind of ...sumptuous places; and the new buildings....look like so many enchanted castles". The expedition of the title progresses east to London, then north, ending in Scotland. It is in Scotland that the author's love of the beautiful landscapes and descriptions of towns comes across as more profound and this section includes the appearance of a real life relative of Smollett. Ironically, Humphry Clinker is a very minor character who appears only about a quarter of the way in, and is an eccentric coachman and servant of Bramble, though his role eventually turns out to be more significant. The ending, after the travellers' much quicker return down south, is somewhat abrupt and involves a set of ridiculous coincidences so typical of 18th and 19th century novels. I'm glad I read this, and enjoyed it, though got bogged down in a few places especially in the first half. Show Less
LibraryThing member bookswamp
Epistolary , picaresque novel (look up wikipedia!), first published in 1771.
Deeply funny and satiric adventures of the stableman Humphrey on his travels mit Matthew Bramble and his family.
Deeply funny and satiric adventures of the stableman Humphrey on his travels mit Matthew Bramble and his family.
LibraryThing member edella
William Thackeray called it "the most laughable story that has ever been written since the goodly art of novel-writing began." As a group of travellers visit places in England and Scotland, they provide through satire and wit a vivid and detailed picture of the contemporary social and political
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scene. Show Less
LibraryThing member buffalopoet
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
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!
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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!
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LibraryThing member stillatim
Given how briefly the best authors dedicated themselves to it, realism exerts far too much influence over our reading habits. Beware, when you pick up a Smollett, for here there is no character development, no tight plot, no interest--despite what the back of the book says--in faithfully depicting
Humphrey Clinker is, rather, a weird mash-up of Horace and Juvenal's satires, eighteenth century travel literature, and story collections like the Canterbury Tales. It's an epistolary something or other, but 'novel' doesn't quite seem to capture it. The best analogue, though, might be: it's a really good sitcom, in which an ensemble cast goes through a series of incidents, with very little connection to each other, and the final episode is, well, just the end, rather than a nice conclusion.
Who are the letter writers? Bramble is a Juvenalian satirist, complaining at great length about medicine, parvenus, the city and tourism. He could also (an uneducated guess) be a model Austen's Mr Bennett, since he combines his satirical grumpiness with much 'man of feeling' generosity. Melford is a Chaucerian story-teller, whose (anachronism alert!) campness and general lack of interest in the ladies must excite all sorts of queer-theorising. Melford's sister Lydia seems to have wandered in from a very boring Richardson novel. And yet the plot, such as it is, hinges on her. Bramble's semi-illiterate, man-chasing sister Tabitha is wonderfully awful. The yet more illiterate servant Jenkins gives Smollett a chance to make endless fun ("We were yesterday three kiple chined, by the grease of God, in the holy bands of mattermoney") of both his world and the romantic plot itself.
If you come to this expecting Austen (or even Fielding), you'll be greatly disappointed. If you come to it expecting an eighteenth century version of Family Guy, you'll probably be very amused. In other words, to all the one and two star reviewers: this isn't a bad book of realism. It's an excellent work of its own kind. I blame your teachers.
"I should renounce politics the more willingly, if I could find other topics of conversation discussed with more modesty and candour; but the daemon of party seems to have usurped every department of life. Even the world of literature and taste is divided into the most virulent factions, which revile, decry and traduce the works of one another." Bramble, p 136.
"...now, all these enormities might be remedied with a very little attention to the article of police, or civil regulation; but the wise patriots of London have taken it into their heads, that all regulation is inconsistent with liberty; and that every man ought to live in his own way, without restraint-- Nay, as there is not sense enough left among them, to be discomposed by the nuisance I have mentioned, they may, for aught I case, wallow in the mire of their own pollution." Bramble, 154.
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society. Humphrey Clinker is, rather, a weird mash-up of Horace and Juvenal's satires, eighteenth century travel literature, and story collections like the Canterbury Tales. It's an epistolary something or other, but 'novel' doesn't quite seem to capture it. The best analogue, though, might be: it's a really good sitcom, in which an ensemble cast goes through a series of incidents, with very little connection to each other, and the final episode is, well, just the end, rather than a nice conclusion.
Who are the letter writers? Bramble is a Juvenalian satirist, complaining at great length about medicine, parvenus, the city and tourism. He could also (an uneducated guess) be a model Austen's Mr Bennett, since he combines his satirical grumpiness with much 'man of feeling' generosity. Melford is a Chaucerian story-teller, whose (anachronism alert!) campness and general lack of interest in the ladies must excite all sorts of queer-theorising. Melford's sister Lydia seems to have wandered in from a very boring Richardson novel. And yet the plot, such as it is, hinges on her. Bramble's semi-illiterate, man-chasing sister Tabitha is wonderfully awful. The yet more illiterate servant Jenkins gives Smollett a chance to make endless fun ("We were yesterday three kiple chined, by the grease of God, in the holy bands of mattermoney") of both his world and the romantic plot itself.
If you come to this expecting Austen (or even Fielding), you'll be greatly disappointed. If you come to it expecting an eighteenth century version of Family Guy, you'll probably be very amused. In other words, to all the one and two star reviewers: this isn't a bad book of realism. It's an excellent work of its own kind. I blame your teachers.
"I should renounce politics the more willingly, if I could find other topics of conversation discussed with more modesty and candour; but the daemon of party seems to have usurped every department of life. Even the world of literature and taste is divided into the most virulent factions, which revile, decry and traduce the works of one another." Bramble, p 136.
"...now, all these enormities might be remedied with a very little attention to the article of police, or civil regulation; but the wise patriots of London have taken it into their heads, that all regulation is inconsistent with liberty; and that every man ought to live in his own way, without restraint-- Nay, as there is not sense enough left among them, to be discomposed by the nuisance I have mentioned, they may, for aught I case, wallow in the mire of their own pollution." Bramble, 154.
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LibraryThing member stephengoldenberg
Not as good as Henry Fielding but if you like Fielding you'll probably like this. Written entirely in letters, typical of 18th century novels, it's fascinating as a travelogue of mid-18th century England and Scotland as well as being very knockabout funny in places. All the eventual coincidences
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are ridiculous but can be taken as part of the fun. Show Less
LibraryThing member BeaverMeyer
This is the worst book I've ever had to read. I hate the English 18th cent. epistlary novels to begin with. Clarissa was almost equally dreadful. But this book turned my brain into mush. I wouldn't wish this book on my worst enemy.
LibraryThing member Porius
smollett was, however, less fortinate; and in 1763, "traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, abandoned by false patrons," he left england and spent 2 yrs. on the continent, of wch. his travels (1766) forms a memorable record. return and occassinal residence in bath brought no better fortune. in
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1768 he departed for no. italy and lived near leghorn till his death in 1771. please his shade by reading one or more of his works. Show Less
LibraryThing member jon1lambert
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?
LibraryThing member wrk1
A comic look at some of 18th-century England and Scotland. A novel in letters, the voices and personalities of each character are quite distinct and entertaining--an astute and benevolent curmudgeon, an educated young man with good intentions, a love-struck young woman raised in the restrictive
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English way of the time, a spinster aunt somewhat addled by her loneliness and her second-class status, and several servants in various positions. A pure comedy, everyone gets what they want in the end. Show Less
LibraryThing member Prop2gether
I listened to this on a Libravox shared reader version, and it was highly entertaining. Different readers were the characters, so it was far easier to follow than just the written version. I did enjoy the tale (even if Humphry Clinker is a somewhat peripheral character--who knew?).
LibraryThing member leslie.98
I wavered between 3½ and 4 stars for this -- it took me a while to get into the swing of Smollett's style. However, once I did I found this epistolary novel increasingly enjoyable. Even the mis-spellings of the servant Win Jenkins which annoyed me at first became a source of amusement by the end.
LibraryThing member Gypsy_Boy
A long epistolary novel about a journey made in the 1770s from Wales through England and Scotland and back home again. The letters are written by six family members; funny (different views of the same incidents), insightful, clever, wise…and long. Given the variety of places they visit, there is
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a lot of commentary on contemporary politics and manners. Once again, I read a classic and discovered why it’s a classic. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Language
Original publication date
1771
Physical description
352 p.
ISBN
0451002849 / 9780451002846
Other editions
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett (Paperback)
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett (Paperback)