The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)

Voorkant
Read Books, 1 jan 2006 - 384 pagina's
Humphry Clinker, Smollett's last novel, published a few months before he died in 1771, is generally regarded as his greatest work, although it may not have been read quite so widely as Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle. Humphry Clinker now finds a place beside them in an edition to which Professor Howard Mumford Jones, of Harvard, contributes a special Introduction and Mr. Charles Lee nearly two hundred Notes. These notes deal more fully than has been done before with real people and places, contemporary events, and fashions and throw considerable light on the social background of the story. While one may classify Hunphry Clinker as both an epistolary novel and picaresque romance, to be set beside Clarissa Harlowe and Tom Jones, it has qualities which are all its own and reminds the modern reader of later books (a little of James Joyce's Ulysses) as well as earlier. The quality on which its reputation rests was stated by Thackeray in his English Humorists: 'What man who has made his inestimable acquaintance will refuse his most cordial acknowledgements to the admirable Lieutenant Lismahago! The novel of "Humphry Clinker" is, I do think, the most laughable story that has ever been written since the goodly art of novel writing began. Winifred Jenkins and Tabitha Bramble must keep Englishmen on the grin for ages yet to come and in their letters and the story of their loves there is a perpetual fount of sparkling laughter.'

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Over de auteur (2006)

Smollett, the only major eighteenth-century English novelist whose work can seriously be called picaresque, came to the writing of novels with a strong sense of Scottish national pride (an alienating element in the London of the 1750s and 1760s), a Tory feeling for a lost order, horrifying experiences as a physician, and a fierce determination to make his way in the literary world. Prolific in a variety of literary forms, he was particularly successful as a popular historian, magazine editor, translator of Cervantes (see Vol. 2), and author of novels about adventurous, unscrupulous, poor young men. His work is marked by vigorous journalistic descriptions of contemporary horrors, such as shipboard amputations or the filthy curative waters of Bath; by a flair for racy narrative often built on violence and sentiment, and for comedy that often relies on practical jokes and puns; and by a great gift for creating comic caricatures. His peppery Travels through France and Italy (1766) was something of a spur to Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey, in which Smollett is referred to as Dr. Smelfungus, who "set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he passed by was discolored or distorted---He wrote an account of them, but 'twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings." Smollett's most notable novels are Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle Pickle (1751), Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762), which set a precedent by first being serialized in his British Magazine (January 1760--December 1761), and especially The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), a relatively mellow work that follows the travels of Matthew Bramble, an excitable Welshman, from his home through chaotic England to idyllic Loch Lomond and back. Bramble himself finds what Smollett had irrecoverably lost---his health---as well as a son from his youth. Smollett died in 1771, the year of the novel's appearance, in Leghorn, Italy, and is buried in the English cemetery there.

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