Tobias Smollett: Novelist
Jerry Beasley's Tobias Smollett: Novelist fills a large gap, being the first book in almost twenty-five years to devote itself to a straightforward reading of all of the Scottish author's novels. Of course, there have been several other excellent recent studies of Smollett's novels, including Robert Spector's Smollett's Women (1994), Aileen Douglas's Uneasy Sensations (1995), and John Skinner's Constructions of Smollett (1996). However, as Beasley correctly points out, all of these rely on their own "somewhat narrowly conceived thesis" (4), i.e., they bring a particular theoretical and interpretative agenda to their readings of Smollett's texts. In contrast, Beasley's book is the first since Paul-Gabriel Boucé's The Novels of Tobias Smollett (1976) to simply perform a series of close readings of the author's five novels. Of course, Beasley's claim is to some extent disingenuous since, as early as the first chapter on Roderick Random, he reveals that the theoreticians he feels closest to are Joseph Frank and Mikhail Bakhtin. Nevertheless, his readings of these novels are refreshing in trusting the texts, following them chronologically and open-mindedly, and coming to a coherent interpretation of Smollett's oeuvre.
For Beasley, the most important aspect of Smollett's writing is that it is pictorial, meaning that he presents a series of scenes or episodes only loosely connected by a progressive narrative, but that work together to form the entire picture of the novel. These scenes come in two main varieties--individual portraits and social tableaux--and are linguistically framed in a way that is strongly reminiscent of William Hogarth's series of prints. As a matter of fact, throughout Tobias Smollett Beasley persistently points out similarities between parts of Smollett's novels and specific Hogarth pictures.
In the individual portraits, Smollett frequently uses the technique of "characterization by style" in order to sketch a picture of the person quickly, accurately, and recognizably. As Beasley explains, the portraits are frequently satires, caricatures, or grotesques, with Smollett preferring the latter two pictorial modes. Smollett "reserves the stronger grotesque for characters … who are to be condemned, or otherwise repudiated through severely judgmental laughter, and caricature for those … whose failings or eccentricities are merely amusing, to be gently laughed at and joyously celebrated as evidence of the rich diversity of life and character, for which Smollett had a deep appreciation" (45). In the social tableaux, he presents microcosms of British society, frequently in systems of opposition, but also arrests the movement of the narrative to produce a stop-and-go storytelling similar to a series of pictures.
According to Beasley, Smollett's visual style is complemented by an emphasis upon spatial relations. In other words, he is not so much interested in following a character through a diachronic narrative progression as in presenting that character as part of a synchronic segment of British society. With this technique in mind, it is no longer so surprising that Smollett's novels mostly have romance endings unmotivated by the story--they are expressions of his belief that there is little hope of happy endings in real life, or coherent conclusions to pictorial novels written in a spatial form.
As Tobias Smollett proceeds through character analyses and assessments of the conclusions of the novels, it becomes clear that in spite of these similarities across his oeuvre, Beasley sees important differences between all of Smollett's novels. After setting a paradigm in Roderick Random, Smollett experiments with the third-person narrative voice and lengthy interpolations in the undisciplined Peregrine Pickle. In addition to having an unusual protagonist, Ferdinand Count Fathom is different because of the use of deliberate anachronisms which "constitute [Smollett's] most extensive experiment with relations between fiction and the real world it purports to represent" (126). Sir Launcelot Greaves is a departure from Smollett's normal scheme of characterization because for the first time Smollett portrays a morally good protagonist, and because he published his novel in serial form--the first major British novelist to do so. Humphry Clinker, finally, is a critical triumph because it unifies a complex and complimentary range of epistolary voices.
As these evaluations indicate, Beasley has no trouble judging his material in a way that has become unfamiliar in contemporary criticism. While it is refreshing to hear Peregrine Pickle called a "failure" (82), the appraisals become more murky when Ferdinand Count Fathom and Sir Launcelot Greaves are called "his most Hogarthian" (141) and "the most Hogarthian of all of Smollett's novels" (182), respectively. Beasley also gets carried away in his assumptions about readers, for instance when he asserts that "any alert reader of Smollett's day would have instantly understood" (129) a certain point or that "none of Smollett's first readers could have doubted" (174) a reference to Hogarth; certainly these are overly general statements made without any supporting historical evidence.
The individual interpretation that seems most debatable is that of Sir Launcelot Greaves. When Beasley criticizes the novel for being too preachy (158), he is not recognizing its fundamental generic situation as a parody of a sentimental novel in the mode of Richardson and the later Fielding. His statement that the novel contains relatively few historical references by Smollett's standards (156) reveals a narrow understanding of the term history, and the claim that Greaves "is himself not a divided character" (156) seems to discount large parts of the novel.
These minor flaws are part of a larger pattern in the book: while Beasley recognizes in Smollett's writing "a daring attempt to escape the limitations of novelistic convention as defined by Richardson [and] Fielding" (149), he does not always acknowledge specific devices used to challenge the two authors' conventions such as those in Sir Launcelot Greaves. Another problem is Beasley's insistence on reading "only" Smollett the novelist. Fortunately, however, this is a self-imposed limitation that Beasley rarely observes, making frequent reference, for instance, to Smollett's parallel careers as a historian and doctor.
Nevertheless, Tobias Smollett: Novelist is an eminently readable and enjoyable study of the perhaps most important novelist immediately to follow Richardson and Fielding. Beasley's greatest achievement is to explain why critics have misunderstood and undervalued Smollett in the past--because they have applied Richardson and Fielding's classicist standards to him--and to offer a better model for reading Smollett as a pictorial novelist writing in a spatial mode. His distinction between caricatures and grotesques in Smollett's novels finally clarifies how the author manages to allow his readers to laugh benevolently at some of his creations without having to give up his scathing social criticism in the process. Beasley's recognitions and interpretations of individual portraits and social tableaux are incisive and insightful, and Smollett's relationship to Hogarth needed the close investigation this book provides. Tobias Smollett: Novelist will certainly set the tone of discussion of its subject for the next twenty-five years.
