SOURCE: "Smollett's Art: The Novel As 'Picture,"' in The First English Novelists: Essays in Understanding, edited by J. M. Armistead, The University of Tennessee Press, 1985, pp. 143-58.

"A Novel," remarked Tobias Smollett in the mock-dedication (to himself) introducing The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), is "a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groupes, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan."¹ These comments represent, in part, the only extended statement Smollett ever made concerning a theory of fiction, and they have usually been dismissed by critics as conventional and trite or as irrelevant to any meaningful understanding of his work. But actually they are quite crucial, for they exactly describe the intentions with which their author approached each of his five novels, different as they all are from one another.

The brief analogy to painting was, in other words, no mere exercise in metaphor. Smollett's conception of his novelistic art may in fact be best illustrated by reference, not to the works of a writer like his contemporary Henry Fielding, whose Tom Jones has been so justly praised for the beauties of its organic design, but to such famous series of dramatic paintings as William Hogarth's Industrious Apprentice and Rake's Progress. In any case, Smollett was a deliberately experimental ² storyteller whose imagination apprehended experience directly in the scattered fragments by which it presented itself to his observing eye. In composing his narratives he sought always for meaningful forms, but he cared little for the conventional laws of causality and process. Instead, he turned his fertile genius enthusiastically to the creation of self-contained episodes occurring in hurried succession, each rendered as a separate dramatic picture of assorted and often wonderfully eccentric character types engaged in abrasive interaction with a fast-moving central personage or (in Humphry Clinker) group of personages.³

One of the chief pleasures in reading Smollett's stories arises from the continual surprises made possible by the fragmentation of their structures. The individual parts of a seemingly erratic Smollett plot, like the scenes in a Hogarth series, do eventually add up to a whole, but by a method more cumulative than linear. There is always resolution at the end, the fulfillment of a "uniform plan." Roderick Random gets his beloved Narcissa; Matt Bramble goes home happy and healthy to Wales. Resolution occurs, however, only after passage through the entire gallery of pictorial episodes has been completed, when what has been observed and powerfully felt is at long last made fully intelligible to reader and protagonist alike. With understanding comes redemption and, finally, the reward of happiness and repose. The endings of Smollett's novels are always providentially contrived and thus fanciful in some degree, though never quite gratuitously so. They identify him as a comic writer who subscribed to, and reflected, a generally optimistic Christian interpretation of history, despite an abiding consciousness of human meanness and moral deformity that often drove him to the riotous cynicism of bitter Juvenalian satire.⁴

Smollett began writing novels when he was still young (Roderick Random came out just two months before his twenty-seventh birthday), though not as the result of some early ambition. He seems to have dabbled in poetry as a boy in Scotland, but his first and fondest hope was for fame as a playwright. When he left home for London in 1739, he had folded away in his pocket a quite inferior tragedy, The Regicide, with which he expected to dazzle the great city. He also carried with him letters of introduction from the two Glasgow surgeons he had served as apprentice, William Stirling and John Gordon. Smollett may have dreamed of literary celebrity, but he needed a livelihood, and surgery was to provide it. Though descended from an old and respected Dumbartonshire family, he was poor. His father, Archibald Smollett, had defied his parents by marrying a penniless woman and had been disinherited. When Archibald died shortly after Tobias's birth in March 1721, he left his wife and children to depend for their livelihood upon the small and uncertain kindnesses of relatives. The future novelist was lucky enough to study at the local grammar school for five or six years and then to attend lectures at Glasgow University. He entered upon his appreticeship in 1737, but a persistent cough determined him to seek a warmer climate, and so he set off for London to pursue a medical career there. And indeed for most of the following decade he did so with some vigor, although with only modest success.

Smollett met with nothing but frustration in his efforts to have The Regicide produced upon the stage. The bitterness of this early failure never entirely left him, partly because he kept Renéwing it over the next several years with periodic fresh assaults upon the good will and judgment of theatrical managers. Finally, after the success of Roderick Random had earned him a certain recognition, he simply published the play by subscription in 1749 and thereafter gave up hope of ever seeing it acted. His unhappy adventure with The Regicide did, however, furnish him with materials for the story of the poet Melopoyn that occupies Chapters 61-63 of his first novel, where Smollett damned those who (so he believed) had mistreated him. Roderick Random draws heavily upon other early experiences of its author, including the vividly remembered misfortunes of his family at the hands of a stingy and hardhearted grandfather. His years with Stirling and Gordon gave Smollett abundant opportunities to observe firsthand the quackery and charlatanism of eighteenth-century medical practice. Stirling and Gordon were themselves gifted and devoted physicians, but many of their colleagues were not. The situation was even worse in London, and Smollett made the deception, hypocrisy, and incompetence of doctors and apothecaries an important subject for satiric treatment in Roderick Random and indeed in all of his novels.

In April 1740, probably out of a desperate need for money, Smollett completed the required examinations and shipped as a surgeon's mate on board the Chichester, an eighty-gun man-of-war registered with the fleet sent out to prosecute the new war against Spain. He was present at Carthagena, where the British navy suffered a bloody and humiliating defeat, and this experience was the obvious source for Roderick Random's adventures as one of the crew of the Thunder. Smollett devoted a substantial portion of his story (Chapters 24-37) to his hero's shipboard days, and his account of the horrors of eighteenth-century sailing life is still considered one of the most graphic and authentic we possess. By 1744, Smollett was back in London, newly married to the daughter of a Jamaican plantation owner and ready to take up once more his vocation as a surgeon and his avocation as a writer. The latter, it appears, occupied his attention in a share disproportionate to the rewards it brought him, at least during the several years preceding Roderick Random. He made no further progress with the fortunes of The Regicide, and the four poems he managed to publish earned him little recognition and less money. Two of these poems, Advice (September 1746) and Reproof (January 1747), are satires in imitation of Alexander Pope. They are negligible things of their kind, but in composing them, Smollett may have gotten the idea for his first novel, which he conceived—as he explained in a letter to his Scottish friend Alexander Carlyle—as a "Satire on Mankind."

This new work was written hurriedly—"begun and finished," Smollett wrote to Carlyle, "in the Compass of Eight months, during which time several Intervals happened of one, two, three and four Weeks, wherein I did not set pen to paper."⁶ At the close of all this frenzied activity, The Adventures of Roderick Random was published in two duodecimo volumes on 21 January 1748; and it proved an immediate and enduring favorite with the public. Three editions totaling 6,500 copies (a very large number in those days) had appeared by November 1749; thereafter the novel was translated into German (1754) and French (1761), while it continued to be reprinted and read in a dozen English editions throughout the remaining years of the eighteenth century. The most resplendent of these, issued in London in 1792, was adorned by the illustrations of Thomas Rowlandson. Eventually, the fame of Smollett's book spread all over Europe, and indeed only a very few other English novels of its early period (one of them was Smollett's own Humphry Clinker) managed to equal or exceed Roderick Random in general popularity.

No doubt the extraordinary appeal of Smollett's novel derived in part from his ability to join in a fresh combination the attractions of several different kinds of familiar narrative: rogue or picaresque "biography," the imaginary voyage, the sentimental novel of love and intrigue, the romance of disinheritance and discovery. In its eclecticism, Roderick Random closely resembles the work of its author's nearest rivals, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. It is important to remember that in the mid-eighteenth century the modern novel was still in its formative stages, and every major writer of fiction (and some not so major) was engaged in experiments involving the re-creation of conventional materials into what Richardson called a "new species of writing."⁷ Like Fielding, Smollett was deeply influenced by Cervantes, whose immensely popular Don Quixote he signed on to translate sometime during the year 1748.⁸ His most immediate model for the story of Roderick Random, however, was the celebrated History and Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, by Alain René LeSage, an episodic picaresque tale of roguish escapades that had for several decades enjoyed an enthusiastic following in translation from the French. As it happens, Smollet was preparing a brand-new English version of Gil Blas while Roderick Random was regaling its first readers, and he may actually have begun this task before sending his own book to the printer.⁹ We may be sure that LeSage's lively story was in Smollett's mind, along with his own recently published verse satires, during those "Eight months" of furiously sporadic writing in 1747 when he happened upon his real talent as a novelist.

Despite his acknowledged admiration for Gil Blas, Smollett makes it plain in the preface to Roderick Random that he means to depart significantly from the example of LeSage. Gil Blas, he observes, is hardly credible as a moral agent: the fictional environment through which he travels is projected as too neutral, and there is little in his character to command anyone's sympathetic identification. Or, as Smollett himself puts it, the "conduct" of LeSage's picaro "prevents that generous indignation, which ought to animate the reader, against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world."¹⁰ Roderick struggles through life in a pattern of fits and starts, ups and downs, and seemingly aimless wandering that superficially resembles the course of Gil Blas's adventures, and the two characters are much alike in their raw instincts for survival, their resourcefulness, and their function as outsiders who become instruments of satire. Both Smollett and LeSage seem deeply conscious of the long tradition of picaresque narrative, extending back to the Spanish prototype in The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), as a species of satiric writing against the chaos and destruction with which a corrupt society threatens the individual. Smollett, however, introducs a dimension of moral idealism into his version of the picaresque, which is typically so limited by cynicism as to preclude all possibility of such idealism. Roderick, a "friendless orphan" beset by "his own want of experience" as well as the "selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind,"¹¹ is not only a vehicle of satire but also the object of Smollett's severe judgment for his understandable yet punishable failure to recognize the world's dark "apparitions" for what they are and for his consequent near-descent into self-destruction.¹²

Roderick Random is actually built upon a foundation of paradox, and in its tentative way it anticipates the later Bildungsroman, or "education" novel. Experience beleaguers one so violently and mercilessly, it appears, that pain and continual hardship inevitably seem to constitute the only reality that matters, just as a response in indignation and cynicism seems the only alternative to passive submission and thus absorption. Chance governs the world, which is without hope. The episodic structure of Roderick Random, with its long pauses over unpredictably disparate incidents and the characters who play them out dramatically with the hero, enforces this sense of things. But unrestrained indignation negates moral identity, for it is the surest means to helpless identification with what is being scourged.¹³ Nothing less than reliance on the ideals of love, Roderick must learn, can redeem the self and ensure release from the threat of ensnarement.

The pattern of providential interventions in Roderick Random and the final, complete transformation of its fictional world affirm Smollett's belief in the ultimate precedence of a moral reality that provides the only meaningful framework for human happiness, indeed for the preservation of personal integrity. Smollett was no fool; he knew that even the most determinedly pious do not always thrive in real life. There is a strong element of the Christian fable in Roderick Random, as there is to one extent or another in all of Smollett's novels—and in many others of his day besides (Robinson Crusoe, for example, and Pamela, and The Vicar of Wakefield). Smollett's story, we may say, is an intricately detailed metaphor defining the very meaning of human redemption from the thralldom of wordly evil. In this respect, Roderick Random bears strong resemblances to Fielding's more famous Tom Jones.¹⁴ Fielding's world is potentially as dark and perverse as Smollett's, and his wayward hero, like Roderick, must rise into self-knowledge from a nadir of misfortunes and personal failure before he can enjoy the reward of marriage to his beauteous heroine. But there the resemblances end. Fielding provides a buffer against villainy in the voice of his playful ironic narrator, and he never permits the reader to forget that his "history" is a work of careful artifice, a deliberate "Creation" that proclaims in its every device the ordering power of comic and providential vision. Smollett, in effect, turns the imaginary world of a Fielding upside down and inside out. His angle of vision is very different; it does not allow for much protection of his characters or his reader against irruptions of stupidity or meanness or violence in the fictional environment.

Even in Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Count Fathom, and Sir Launcelot Greaves—all of which (like Fielding's novels) employ third-person narrators to relay their respective stories of roguery, villainy, and comic quixotism—the representation of experience focuses on the way it is registered by the consciousness of the character who must live it and eventually arrive at some interpretation of it. Smollett is by no means a psychological novelist in the twentieth-century sense of the term, but he proves much more interested than Fielding in capturing the sometimes crazily textured immediacy of life's felt hardships, perplexities, and rewards. In Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker, two novels in which he relies on the carefully particularized voices of imagined characters as the instruments of transmission, the effects of immediacy are uncommonly powerful. Roderick Random, because it projects so convincingly the illusion of an angry "autobiographical" account of personal suffering and misjudgments, has actually fooled many readers (among them several modern critics) into believing that Roderick is a self-portrait of his author, whose performance in the work (some say) so lacks detachment and so confuses the relationship between narrator and audience that it must be judged at least a partial failure.¹⁵

There can be no doubt of Smollett's emotional identification with his hero, whose experience does in numerous details exactly coincide with his own; and it is likely that the strength of that identification influenced the course of his narrative, even promoted the improvisational qualities of certain richly textured and extended episodes. But it might be argued from a strictly technical standpoint that in Roderick Random, as in Defoe's novels or the epistolary narratives of Richardson, the author has retreated to a position of near-invisibility behind the completed product of his creative energy, whatever its sources, leaving his readers to a difficult process of participation and discovery as the principal means toward understanding the story and their own responses. If Smollett had chosen to preserve the anonymity under which he originally published his first work of fiction, or if we knew even less than we do about the facts of his troubled childhood and youth, then the issue of authorial distance might never have arisen to deflect criticism away from a proper consideration of what the text of Roderick Random actually means and what it achieves as an innovative and enduring early example of novelistic art.

In any event, the moral ambiguity and the complications of reader response that Smollett attempted in Roderick Random go far beyond anything to be found in picaresque tales like Gil Blas and Lazarillo, not to mention the hundreds of popular rogue and criminal biographies that also form part of the background for the novel.¹⁶ One generally knows how to take LeSage's rather transparent first-person narrator, or the eponymous Lazarillo, but there is much less certainty with Roderick. His character as a modestly virtuous young fellow of respectable birth and education predisposes the reader in his behalf (or so Smollett hoped, as he said in his preface), but the increasing violence with which he avenges himself upon a world that viciously attacks his idealism and good nature simultaneously promotes a vicarious pleasure and compels judgment.

In Chapter 20, when Roderick so brutally flogs and strips the wretched villain Captain O'Donnell, he does so out of a combination of mischief and uncontrollable fury, and his actions at least verge upon the criminal. What reader, however, does not share in the satisfaction Roderick feels? Yet what reader does not also recognize that by returning O'Donnell's meanness in kind, Smollett's young hero has sunk to his base level and must therefore be righteously repudiated? Righteousness is not always so easy to sustain as it is here, however. Often—during the episodes on board the Thunder, for example—Smollett deliberately endangers the members of his audience by trapping them into a unity of feeling with the increasingly cynical Roderick, causing a loss of distance that threatens to implicate the reader in the hero's failings, his desperation, his self-destructive rage. This novel does not make it easy for us to keep our balance.

Much of the dramatic and moral point of Roderick Random is to show how perversely seductive the wicked world can be and how awesome its power over the individual will. The price of the modern ideal of individualism, as Smollett and so many of his contemporaries were already beginning to understand, is a condition of lonely insignificance in the midst of a disordered, bewildering, and sometimes terrifying unknown. "I am old enough," Smollett wrote to David Garrick at the age of forty, "to have seen and observed that we are all playthings of fortune."¹⁷ Roderick is a kind of modern Everyman figure, as his generalized last name suggests. But Smollett particularizes his hero's experience and intensifies our sense of his frightened loneliness by making him a Scotsman (like his author, of course) who, deprived early of the stability of a loving family, becomes the victim of ridicule and abuse in the deeply hostile environment of England. London and, later, the scenes of Roderick's naval adventures serve as almost overwhelming images of modern life in all its bustling inhumanity, grotesqueness, and uncertainty. The people in Roderick's world often seem not quite human. They are monstrosities of avarice, pride, and hypocrisy with names like Lavement, Gawky, Quiverwit, Whiffle, Wagtail, Badger, and Straddle; or, just as often, they are bestial figures with grasshopper legs or canine fangs.¹⁸ Small wonder, then, that reality as Roderick encounters it seems not whole and safe but fragmented, portentous and threatening, void of compassion and love, disfigured.

For all his close attentiveness to the real "facts" of eighteenth-century English life, Smollett was no literary "realist." Roderick's experience of the world partakes of nightmare. Smollett projects this quality of his vision on the very first page of the story with a description of the horrid dream that came to the hero's mother just before her son's birth and her own melancholy death. In the dream Mrs. Random was "delivered of a tennis-ball," which the devil (her midwife) instantly knocked into oblivion, leaving her "inconsolable" until suddenly she beheld it return "with equal violence, and earth itself beneath her feet, whence immediately sprung up a goodly tree covered with blossoms."¹⁹ The old sage who interprets the dream sees in it—rightly as it turns out—a happy conclusion, but also predicts the mercurial pattern of "dangers and difficulties" the child will have to live through. The dream is an involuntary act of prophecy on the part of the mother, and its image of the devil slamming her "offspring" so violently about exactly foreshadows not only the subsequent buffetings of the hero in a darkly evil world but also the nightmarish qualities of that world as he will learn to see it.

By this same device of the dream, Smollett establishes the identity of Roderick as a traveler whose motion is to be perpetual until at last it ceases, as the wise sage said it would, with a resolution in "great reputation and happiness." Percy G. Adams has shown, more convincingly than anyone, how the journey was adopted as a paradigm—a powerful metaphor, really—by Smollett and many other eighteenth-century novelists, who used it to organize their own understanding of experience and to shape their imaginative representations of its meaning.²⁰ Roderick's path of life is to take him through a succession of encounters with nightmarish "apparitions" in a progress that is partly willed but in the main profoundly directionless, simply because circumstance possesses the power to deflect individual volition. If the end of his journey signifies the perfection of understanding and thus of moral will, then the passage toward that conclusion must inevitably be a tortuous one.

Roderick's lack of real direction ensures great diversity in his adventures. It is of course his persistent presence—manifested in his intensive language, in his role as moral agent, in his restless movement toward decline and finally reward—that provides the unifying center of Smollett's novel. We may trace Roderick's movement, and at the same time exemplify the complex and vividly represented disarray of his world, by simply looking at three or four episodes spaced through his story. Roderick's miseries begin in earnest when he is only a boy, as do his outraged reactions to them. Orphaned, he is sent to school by the mean-spirited patriarch of his family in a condition of ragged wretchedness; there he is flogged when not ignored, and provoked into pranks and mischief, but he advances in his studies anyway—and is punished for it. To prevent him from writing letters begging relief from his grandfather, the schoolmaster "caused a board to be made with five holes in it," and, as Roderick tells us out of painful memory, through it "he thrust the fingers and thumb of my right hand, and fastened it by a whipcord to my wrist."²¹ Roderick breaks free of this cruel restraint only by using it against the head of a schoolmate who insults his poverty. Daily brutalized at school, he fares no better on play days at home, where his cousin (now, instead of Roderick, the grandfather's heir) delights in setting his hunting dogs upon him.

With the sudden appearance of the blustering, goodhearted Tom Bowling, one of this novel's more memorable examples of the eccentric sailing man, Smollett inaugurates a pattern that will include several providential interventions in behalf of his hero. The effects of Bowling's rescue and his beneficence are not long felt, however. Roderick thrives for a time at the university where his uncle installs him, but a reversal of fortune casts him upon his own devices. Now comes the first of Smollett's many pictures of grotesque subhumanity in the person of Mr. Launcelot Crab, the corrupt, drunken, and incompetent surgeon who—almost in a parody of Bowling's earlier gesture of avuncular kindness—extricates Roderick from the horrors of approaching want and despair by taking him on as an assistant. The figure of this man, as Roderick describes it, redoubles the suggestiveness of his surname (we may note also the irony carried by his Christian name) and provides an exact definition of his character. He is "about five foot high, and ten around the belly"; his face is fat and round "as a full moon, and much of the complexion of a mulberry," and it is adorned by an enormous nose "resembling a powder-horn" and "studded all over with carbuncles." This remarkable countenance is completed by a pair of "little grey eyes" that reflect the light of day in such an oblique way that when Mr. Crab looks straight ahead, he appears to be "admiring the buckle of his shoe."²²

The portrait of Crab is a caricature, of course; as such, it succeeds by a strategy of distortion and reduction. What Crab represents, real enough to be sure, is made less dangerous by being thus formed into a ridiculous picture of itself, and Roderick is as able as the reader to laugh at and dismiss him. But as the smug lad is about to find out, nearly the whole world is populated by such grotesques, and they will gradually multiply and surround him. During his progress to London, Roderick meets a sizable collection of misshapen or perverse oddities aboard the wagon on which he hops a ride. His fellow passengers include a "brisk airy girl," obviously a prostitute, oddly dressed and brandishing a whip; a limping, hollow-eyed, wrinkled, toothless old usurer whose long nose and peaked chin approach one another like "a pair of nut-crackers" when he speaks; a thin, small, baboonlike "lady's woman" named Mrs. Weazel; and the amazing captain, her husband, whose bombast masks his cowardice and whose ludicrous appearance Smollett captures in one of the funniest descriptions in the entire novel. Weazel, as Roderick remembers him, was "about five foot and three inches high, sixteen inches of which went to his face and long scraggy neck; his thighs were about six inches in length, his legs resembling spindles or drumsticks, two feet and an half, and his body, which put me in mind of extension without substance, engrossed the remainder;—so that on the whole, he appeared like a spider or grasshopper erect."²³

In this cluster of ridiculous and affected characters, Smollett develops a composite portrait of mankind, occasioned by an adaptation from one of the oldest conventions of storytelling and travel narrative, the journey by coach—here, comically, a wagon; and the portrait is presently elaborated by means of the equally ancient convention of riotous misadventures at an inn.²⁴ For now, Roderick remains capable of amused detachment in his responses, as does the reader; his language is graphic and his vision distorting, but there is no rage because he has not yet entered fully into the utter darkness of the world's troubling reality. The sign that he is approaching it comes during a comic interlude in Chapter 13, when he and his loyal companion Strap lie trembling in their bed as the "terrible apparition" of a tame raven wanders aimlessly through deepest night and into their room at a wayside inn. "I verily believed we were haunted," Roderick recalls; the "violent fright" left him "petrified with fear" and tormented his sleep.²⁵

Thus the nightmare begins, and it gathers intensity as Roderick arrives in London, where he encounters meanness and often physical deformity in the face of nearly everyone he meets. The story reaches an early climax during the scenes laid on board the Thunder, following Roderick's maddening attempts to fathom the twisted image of the bureaucratic naval establishment. The world of the ship, with its assortment of sick, mutilated, filthy, idiosyncratic, splenetic, depraved, and malicious humanity, is a microcosm, vividly pictured in a hellish version of the convention already employed in the earlier episode of the wagon, its grimness relieved only by the presence of Thomson and Morgan, the latter another of Smollett's unforgettable sailing men. Here the darkness concentrates itself, as do the heartlessness and violence of this world. When Roderick descends below deck to the sick berth, he adjusts his eyes and looks in horrified astonishment upon the putridness, the vileness, the manifestations of unimaginable cruelty and unspeakable indifference he finds there. "Here," he cries out in an almost audible burst of anger,

I saw about fifty miserable distempered wretches, suspended in rows, so huddled one upon another, that not more than fourteen inches of space was allotted for each with his bed and bedding; and deprived of the light of the day, as well as of fresh air; breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere of the morbid steams exhaling from their own excrements and diseased bodies, devoured with vermin hatched in the filth that surrounded them, and destitute of every convenience necessary for people in that helpless condition.²⁶

This description throbs with energy and feeling, just as the verbal picture startlingly projects its sensual details. Words like distempered wretches, suspended, huddled, noisome, morbid steams, devoured, and vermin call direct attention to themselves, and convey for Roderick an emotional response as violent as the scene itself.

Language is for Smollett a tricky but trustworthy, if not always fully conscious, signifier of the inner self. Sometimes its effects are comical or even farcical, as in the case of the inadvertent sexual malapropisms of Tabitha Bramble, the man-hungry but outwardly prudish old spinster of Humphry Clinker. Roderick's language, from the beginning of his story, steadily increases the frenzy of its response to multiplying absurdities, outrages, and dangers; it actually registers the process by which the world threatens to re-create him in the image of its own dark, fragmented, scarifying madness. There is a paradox here. Roderick's language makes real, in sometimes painfully detailed pictures, the chaotic nightmare of his life; but it also serves—much more reliably than his actions alone could do—as an index of the progressive disintegration of his moral self, of the gradual and almost total loss of his moral identity.²⁷

The shipboard scenes display with ghastly clarity the world's great power to destroy. The officers of the Thunder, in collusion with the surgeon Mackshane, have created the scene witnessed in the sick berth, they are moral if not physical grotesques, and they soon make Roderick a victim of their mindless cruelty. On a trumped-up charge of mutiny, they chain him to the poop deck, where he lies in a condition of utter isolation and helplessness during a ferocious bombardment. Bespattered by the brains and entrails of his mates, he loses all discretion, bursts into hysterics, and bellows forth an almost elemental cry of "oaths and execrations."²⁸ From this point forward, Roderick is no longer capable of detachment. His loneliness grows upon him when he is left beaten and naked upon the shore and at first can find no one to relieve his almost unbearable distress. At last (significantly, it is at the very mid-point of his story) he encounters Mrs. Sagely and then the exemplary Narcissa, but he is by then so broken and embittered that he cannot find the path that would unite him with the ideals of benevolence and beauteous virtue they represent.

The restorative image of Narcissa, "amiable apparition" that she seems when Roderick first looks upon her,²⁹ does remain with him, and its hold upon his imagination tightens continuously. But his journey into self-absorbing and self-destructive cynicism takes him further and further away from his heroine, until despair finally leaves him prostrate in prison. Meanwhile, Smollett continues to throw his hero into adventures that portray human nature in its progressively more sordid variety. Better acquainted with the "selfishness and roguery of mankind" as a result of his painful experiences at sea, Roderick considers himself no longer very liable to "disappointment and imposition."³⁰ Yet when he travels to France, he is immediately duped by a lusty, hard-drinking, foul-smelling Capuchin friar—a "thick brawny young man, with red eye-brows, a hook nose, a face covered with freckles; and his name was Frere Balthazar"³¹—who takes all his cash. After spending a few weeks as a soldier in the French army, Roderick luckily runs into Strap, from whom he has been long separated, and accepts his old friend's offer of money to set up as a gentleman; the two companions then return to England in quest of a fortune. In a round of balls and assemblies and excursions to the theater, Roderick is deceived by courtesans, sneered at by dandies, and finally seduced into the company of a set of wild young coffeehouse riffraff—Bragwell, Banter, Chatter, Slyboot, and Ranter.

As he sinks ever deeper into riotous iniquities, Roderick grows more susceptible to the world's false appearances and more desperate in his responses to them. His pursuit of the vapid Melinda Goosetrap and her fortune of £10,000 drives him to the gaming tables to support its costs, nearly involves him in a duel with a crazy rival named Rourk Oregan, and at last leaves him defeated, humiliated, and vengeful. He almost rushes into marriage with a mysterious inamorata—a "wrinkled hag turned of seventy!" whose "tygeress"-like advances when at last they meet set his bowels in a convulsion and his feet in speedy motion.³² The "lewd and indecent" seductions of the sodomite Earl Strutwell, even more hideously than the garlicky pantings of the lusty spinster, define the world as a place going entirely and everywhere mad in its perversity, in the process (it seems) canceling all possibility of fertile, fulfilling love. At "this day," says the leering Strutwell most alarmingly to Roderick, the practice of pederasty "prevails not only over all the east, but in most parts of Europe; in our own country it gains ground apace, and in all probability will become in a short time a more fashionable vice than simple fornication."³³

In the midst of such precisely vivified moral darkness, the image of Narcissa increases in its brightness, even while Roderick's desperate course veers from it at a widening distance. His attempt upon the fortune and the person of one Miss Snapper, the sickly, misshapen, conniving daughter of a rich Turkey merchant, almost brings him to permanent misery. Like the grizzled septuagenarian from whom Roderick has very recently fled in revulsion, Miss Snapper is obviously a foil to Narcissa; should he unit with her in marriage, he would symbolically become one with all that she stands for in her physical and spiritual deformity. Roderick meets this remarkable creature during one of his author's finely executed coaching episodes, this time along the road to Bath. The collection of humanity in whose company he finds himself represents yet another close pictorial grouping of varied character types, among them a blustering soldier, a grave matron, and a shifty lawyer. Miss Snapper herself is drawn with great exactness, and her obsessed suitor does not find her entirely displeasing, though her head bears a certain resemblance "to a hatchet, the edge being represented by her face," and though she is both large-breasted and humpbacked.³⁴ Roderick abandons his schemes against this fair lady only after he accidentally meets Narcissa once again in the assembly rooms at Bath. This is another providential occurrence, but not the reversal a lesser novelist might have made of it. When the two lovers are separated by Narcissa's brother, Roderick dashes headlong into the last extremities of self-destructive despair. Back in London, he casts his lot with Fortune, turns gambler, swindles a tailor to finance his reckless play, and is arrested and flung into prison.

Throughout these long episodes, as Roderick tries repeatedly and always unsuccessfully to create riches from nothing so as to secure a meaningless future, he becomes more and more not only the helpless wanderer but a foolish and guilty one. His actions shift from the physical riotousness of his earliest days to concentrated deviousness; his language, far from losing its energy and intensity, adds density and subtlety as it reflects his increasing entanglement in the cobwebby sordidness of a darkening world. His crony Banter suggests the scheme that ends in his arrest, and the rationalization by which Roderick leads himself to undertake it is couched in the words and rhythms of subdued frenzy. The language here lacks the overt violence that pulses through the passages describing the horrors of life on board the Thunder, but in its fitful twistings it reveals an even more troubled and troubling kind of inner conflict. Banter's wickedly clever proposal, Roderick recalls,

savoured a little of fraud; but he rendered it palatable, by observing, that in a few months, I might be in a condition to do every body justice; and in the mean time, I was acquitted by the honesty of my intention—I suffered myself to be persuaded by his salvo, by which my necessity, rather than my judgment, was convinced; and … actually put the scheme in practice.³⁵

The blatant criminality of this enterprise, only half acknowledged if at all, is hinted at in Roderick's reversals upon the words justice, acquitted, and honesty, while his use of the military term salvo suggests the brutality of this culminating assault of the world's artillery of evil against him. Conquered at last, he submits.

The prison where Roderick finds himself next, like the city and the microcosm of the ship, is closely particularized as a revealingly bleak image of the world at large, and it completely encloses him along with his fellow criminals—and victims. His energy gone, and his resilience with it, Roderick no longer possesses even the language to express his grief, despair, and loss. The failed and suffering poet, Melopoyn, furnishes the expression he needs by reading aloud one of his elegies in imitation of Tibullus, but the experience leaves Roderick so weakened and distraught that he takes to his bottle, sleeps, and then wakes "in the horrors," his imagination haunted with "dismal apparitions."³⁶ Later, the interpolated tale of Melopoyn's terrible misfortunes, in an echo of the earlier history of Nancy Williams (Chapters 22-23), calls forth from Roderick a response in generosity and sympathy by reminding him that the troubles of others may be greater than his own. This long interlude, despite its obvious references to Smollett's disappointments with The Regicide, is thus not a merely gratuitous intrusion of personal vindictiveness. Roderick's response to Melopoyn helps to justify the redemption that is to follow, though it does not precipitate it. Still hopeless, Roderick grows altogether "negligent of life," loses his appetite, and degenerates into "such a sloven" that by the morning of his deliverance he has been for two months "neither washed, shifted nor shaved."³⁷ The punishment inflicted upon Roderick for his failings is severe, but it is at last enough. When his uncle reappears miraculously to renew his faith in the power of human affections, he is "transported" at the sight; his relief is as complete as it is sudden, and happy resolution—a new journey toward discovery of his father in the New World, marriage to the constant Narcissa, joyous retirement to idyllic Scotland—follows swiftly. In the end, by an "amazing stroke of providence,"³⁸ the chaotic, dark, hideously evil world of Roderick Random is re-created into an ordered, serene paradise of love, light, and beauty. Roderick proceeds from a language of indignation and self-negating despair to a language of ecstasy, and the reader becomes fully conscious—perhaps for the first time—that this retrospective story, told in the past tense, has achieved its often astonishing effects of immediacy by the contrastive visual faculties of Roderick's memory. The "dismal apparitions" of his nightmare existence, their power to control him dissolved, are like the airy figures of dreams, now receded from the center of his consciousness, which has recovered them in such striking pictures. They are as illusory as the rule of Fortune, or Chance, while the "amiable apparition" Narcissa, emblem of the providential love Roderick had once denied at his peril, represents all that is real and enduring. "Heaven," this faithful girl had knowingly written to Roderick at the crucial moment just prior to his arrest, will surely contrive some "unforeseen event in our behalf,"³⁹ and she was right.

Smollett's readers have sometimes complained that the providential maneuverings with which he concluded Roderick Random weaken the work, wreck its consistency of texture, surprise too much, and finally are just too trivially conventional to be convincing or effective.⁴⁰ There is some merit in the objection to the suddenness of the novel's ending, and Smollett may actually have rushed the composition of his last chapters, bestowing upon them less care than he had given to earlier portions of the narrative. Nevertheless, the resolution he provided is vital to his overall design, and it is deliberately anticipated from his very first page, which records the mother's dream. The bright presence of Bowling, Strap, Thomson, Mrs. Sagely, and Narcissa contributes importantly to the preparations for the eventual triumph of all that they represent. Without the comic and providential ending, Roderick's experience would (from Smollett's point of view at least) lack all relevance to the human problem of sustaining moral identity in a worldly context of intensifying and confusing secularity—a context without a center, so to speak. Roderick's autobiographical narrative, taken as a whole, expresses his clear-eyed, full, secure understanding of the accumulated facts of entropic reality and their deeply felt, scarifying threats—now past—to his survival; and the reader knows that his redemption, more suffered for than earned, came in part as a consequence of his fixation upon the transcendent image of the matchless Narcissa. The "picture" of this "lovely creature," Roderick remarks during the account of his prison experiences, "was the constant companion of my solitude."⁴¹ The necessarily radical transformation of Smollett's fictional world and of his Everyman hero proclaims with dramatic urgency the vast distance dividing most of society from restorative idealism, while it also imaginatively adumbrates—in the manner of the Christian fable—the much greater wrenching of the whole creation by which, Smollett believed, Providence would at last redeem the miserable failures of mankind and restore the perfections of Eden.⁴²

Roderick Random achieves its striking rhetorical effects precisely because its structure provides so purposefully diffuse a picture of the rampant disorder of life, wrought into order by benevolent authorial interposition. Despite its comic resolution and its echoes of Christian orthodoxy, however, Smollett's novel develops a deep and unmistakable ambiguity in its approach to the nostalgic ideals of faith. By a rapid-fire sequence of scattered episodes portraying the world's harshness, its indifference to moral life, and most of all its shattering uncertainty, Roderick Random verges on a vision of existential absurdity and is thus in some ways very modern. Its portrait of a hero who is in important respects an anti-hero likewise anticipates conceptions of character made familiar in the works of such recent writers as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, and John Barth.⁴³ Surely these are among the reasons why Smollett's first novel continues to be read and why it is currently attracting more admiring attention than at any time since the days immediately following its original publication.…

Notes

¹The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed. Damian Grant (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), 2.

² Space will not permit full development of this point here, but the reader may wish to consult the following for some useful observations concerning Smollett's connections with and interest in the painterly arts: Milton Orowitz, "Smollett and the Art of Caricature," Spectrum 2 (1958), 155-67; George M. Kahrl, "Smollett as a Caricaturist," in Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M Knapp, ed. G.S. Rousseau and P.-G. Boucé (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), 169-200. Hogarth was Smollett's contemporary, and his visual art of caricature was at the time a relatively new thing in England. Smollett and others were keenly interested in appropriating it as a verbal art. Given the striking pictorial qualities of Smollett's novels, it is not surprising that he attracted the enthusiastic attention of great illustrators like Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank, both of whom provided splendid drawings to accompany major editions of his works. In this same general connection, it ought to be mentioned that the dramatic qualities of the pictorial episodes in Smollett's novels, like the many allusions to plays (especially those of Shakespeare) scattered through them, importantly reflect his lifelong interest in the theater. See Lee M. Ellison, "Elizabethan Drama and the Works of Smollett," PMLA 44 (1929), 842-62.

³ I have elsewhere discussed at length the importance of Smollett's theoretical statement in Ferdinand Count Fathom and its implications for his narrative structures: see "Smollett's Novels: Ferdinand Count Fathom for the Defense," PLL 20 (1984), 165-84.

⁴ For contrasting but complementary views of Smollett's episodic structures and comic endings, see Philip Stevick, "Smollett's Picaresque Games," in Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays, 111-30; Paul-Gabriel Boucé, The Novels of Tobias Smollett (London: Longman, 1976), esp. ch. 8.

⁵The Letters of Tobias Smollett, ed. Lewis M. Knapp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 6. For a full account of Smollett's early years and their importance to the beginnings of his career as a novelist, see Knapp, Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1949). I have relied on this authoritative biography for many of the details of Smollett's life introduced throughout the present discussion.

⁶Letters, 8.

⁷Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 41.

⁸ Smollett's Spanish was not fluent, and he was slow to finish this translation, which did not appear in print until 1755.

⁹ Smollett's translation of Gil Blas, published in October 1748, is still considered the best that has ever been done. The four volumes of LeSage's work were published in France between 1715 and 1735, and English versions followed quickly (from 1716 to 1736, with reprints thereafter).

¹⁰The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), Preface, xxxv. I have used this World's Classics paperback edition of Roderick Random because it is both reliable and readily available. For the convenience of any reader who may have another text in hand, I refer in subsequent citations to chapter (or, as here, to the preface) as well as page numbers.

¹¹ Preface, xxxv.

¹² For fuller discussion of Smollett's adaptations from the picaresque, see my essay, "Roderick Random: The Picaresque Transformed," College Literature 6 (1979-80), 211-20. See also Robert Alter, "The Picaroon as Fortune's Plaything," in Rogue's Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), 58-79; Alice Green Fredman, "The Picaresque in Decline: Smollett's First Novel," in English Writers of the Eighteenth Century, ed. John H. Middendorf (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971), 189-207; Richard Bjomson, "The Picaresque Hero as Young Nobleman: Victimization and Vindication in Smollett's Roderick Random," in The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 228-45.

¹³ Smollett knew this firsthand. His mock-dedication to Ferdinand Count Fathom alludes directly to his personal tendencies toward uncontrollable rage and cynicism, and acknowledges his anxiety over their potential injury to his character; much of his adult life was devoted to restraining these impulses. It is in its echoes of this private struggle, more than in its specific references to Smollett's actual experience, that Roderick Random may be meaningfully understood as an autobiographical work. Roderick, of course, is not his author, as Smollett himself makes plain in a letter to Alexander Carlyle written shortly after the book's publication (Letters, 7-9).

¹⁴ In Smollett's view, there were other resemblances besides, too striking to be accidental, and they angered him. Tom Jones was published in February 1749, just thirteen months after Roderick Random, and Smollett believed that Fielding had plagiarized the character of Partridge from his own Strap. Later, he would be equally convinced that Fielding had stolen the idea for the Miss Matthews of Amelia (1751) from Roderick Random's Nancy Williams. Despite superficial similarities, Fielding's characters differ importantly from Smollett's, and there was no real reason for such suspicions except perhaps the younger writer's insecurity over his newcomer's position in the literary world of London.

¹⁵ Ronald Paulson, for example, finds this lack of detachment a source of Smollett's failure to make a successful transition from Augustan satirist to novelist; see Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), 165-78 and passim.

¹⁶ I have traced this background at considerable length in my Novels of the 1740s (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1982), ch. 4.

¹⁷Letters, 98.

¹⁸ The apologue prefixed to the fourth edition of the novel (1754, dated 1755) is a modified beast fable that emphasizes the subhuman qualities of some of Smollett's characters—and some of his contemporary critics as well.

¹⁹ Ch. 1, p. 1.

²⁰ See Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1983). George M. Kahrl, in Tobias Smollett: Traveler-Novelist (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1945), has demonstrated at great length how deeply Smollett's abiding interest in travel and travel literature affected the style and structure of his novels.

²¹ Ch. 2, p. 5.

²² Ch. 7, p. 26.

²³ Ch. 11, pp. 49-50.

²⁴ See Adams, Travel Literature, ch. 8, for full discussion of these two important conventions or (to use Adams's own term) "motifs."

²⁵ Ch. 13, p. 61.

²⁶ Ch. 25, p. 149.

²⁷ For varied discussion of the general question of Smollett's style, see Albrecht B. Strauss, "On Smollett's Language: A Paragraph in Ferdinand Count Fathom," in Style in Prose Fiction: English Institute Essays, 1958, ed. Harold C. Martin (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), 25-54; Philip Stevick, "Stylistic Energy in the Early Smollett," PQ 64 (1967), 712-19; Damian Grant, Tobias Smollett: A Study in Style (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1977). Strauss finds the failures of Smollett's sentimental language very revealing with respect to his real talent for the language of hyperbole and emotional violence; Stevick and Grant stress Smollett's stylistic exaggerations and virtuosity as chief attractions in his works, though they understate the importance of intensive language as a means of character definition. Grant argues further that in Smollett, style is almost everything; plot, episodes, and characters are in themselves relatively uninteresting.

²⁸ Ch. 29, p. 168.

²⁹ Ch. 39, p. 219.

³⁰ Ch. 41, p. 235.

³¹ Ch. 42, p. 240.

³² Ch. 50, pp. 303, 305.

³³ Ch. 51, p. 310. Earlier, Roderick had described the effeminate Captain Whiffle of the Thunder as guilty of a passion "not fit to be named" (ch. 35, p. 199). Robert Adams Day has recently suggested that Smollett's often repeated antagonism to homosexuality, together with his obsessive interest in scatological humor and word play on the subject of bodily functions, gives rise to a suspicion that he himself may have harbored some latent homosexual tendencies; see "Sex, Scatology, Smollett," in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1982), 225-43.

³⁴ Ch. 54, pp. 326-27.

³⁵ Ch. 60, p. 372.

³⁶ Ch. 61, p. 377.

³⁷ Ch. 64, p. 397.

³⁸ Ch. 66, p. 416.

³⁹ Ch. 60, p. 371.

⁴⁰ Robert Alter, for example ("The Picaroon as Fortune's Plaything," 76), complains that the conventional happy ending, with its obvious contrivances, defeats the novel's development as an exercise in picaresque satire. The problem with this objection is its failure to acknowledge that Smollett deliberately set out to write a variation upon the picaresque.

⁴¹ Ch. 64, p. 397.

⁴² Smollett was no orthodox Christian, or so his writings suggest. Actually, we know very little about his personal theology. Still, it is clear that he shared with many of his contemporaries a belief in the providential ordering of the world and in the scriptural guarantee of ultimate redemption for the Christian part of mankind; see Thomas R. Preston, Not in Timon's Manner: Feeling, Misanthropy, and Satire in Eighteenth-Century England (University: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1975), 2, 69-120. For fuller treatment of the transformation occurring at the end of Roderick Random, see my Novels of the 1740s, 122-25.

⁴³ Barth, in fact, provided a most interesting (if unscholarly) afterword for an edition of Roderick Random issued some years ago in a popular paperback series (New York: New American Library, 1964). This edition is now regrettably out of print.…