Cruel Laughter at the Socially Disadvantaged in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker
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This paper examines the excessive cruelty and violence in Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Despite being interpreted as his most temperate work, the text contains numerous instances of gratuitous cruelty and violence, which often manifest in the form of cruel physical humor directed against the eponymous character, Humphry Clinker, and the eccentric Lieutenant Obadiah Lismahago. I argue that rather than seeing their bodily humiliations as satiric punishments for their alleged follies, they derive from a comic tradition, which Simon Dickie claims took great pleasure from the sufferings of the socially disadvantaged and served to maintain Britain’s social hierarchy in the mid-eighteenth century. By discussing how Smollett specifically targets the physical manifestations of Clinker’s and Lismahago’s poverty (and/or lower social status) in his crude or vicious pranks, I assert that their physical humiliations comprise an integral part of Smollett’s socially conservative project of reasserting the established social order, which he portrays as being threatened by not only the plebeian mob, but more importantly Clinker and Lismahago. However, in using a strategy that ironically resembles the disorder it tries to contain, I suggest Smollett’s ideological project is partly compromised.
Abstract
This paper examines the excessive cruelty and violence in Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Despite being interpreted as his most temperate work, the text contains numerous instances of gratuitous cruelty and violence, which often manifest in the form of cruel physical humor directed against the eponymous character, Humphry Clinker, and the eccentric Lieutenant Obadiah Lismahago. I argue that rather than seeing their bodily humiliations as satiric punishments for their alleged follies, they derive from a comic tradition, which Simon Dickie claims took great pleasure from the sufferings of the socially disadvantaged and served to maintain Britain’s social hierarchy in the mid-eighteenth century. By discussing how Smollett specifically targets the physical manifestations of Clinker’s and Lismahago’s poverty (and/or lower social status) in his crude or vicious pranks, I assert that their physical humiliations comprise an integral part of Smollett’s socially conservative project of reasserting the established social order, which he portrays as being threatened by not only the plebeian mob, but more importantly Clinker and Lismahago. However, in using a strategy that ironically resembles the disorder it tries to contain, I suggest Smollett’s ideological project is partly compromised.
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