I cannot read Smollett anymore. I have heard about the making of a definitive text of his work and I can't see how it makes any difference considering the depravity of his rotted mind. After reading these novels I wander through the titles of the chapters of his books and see nothing but revenge, revenge, revenge. For no reason at all people are hurt and humiliated, even skinned; even those who help him to perpetrate the fun. Jokes about hunchbacked people and lame matrons. Pissing for no reason at all (I would prefer the honest crudity of The English Rogue). Can you really call him a novelist of amusement? Can you honestly say there is one moment of pleasure in the whole of Smollett?Yes, I can.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Smollett
An anonymous "distinguished eighteenth-century scholar," quoted by G.S. Rousseau in "Beef and Bouillon: Smollett's Achievement as a Thinker," Tobias Smollett: Essays of Two Decades (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1982), pp. 80-123 (at 89):