Roderick Random
– Tobias Smollet
Whenever I think of the category “18
th century
novel,” I quake at the thought of undertaking a thousand-page epistolary novel
like
Pamela. But I’m enough of a
reading snob to want to read what nobody else reads, length be d----d. Plus, an
encomium dedicated to Tobias Smollett by
George Orwell,
whom I prefer more as a critic than a novelist, made a deep enough impression
to be filed away in my sieve-like memory. So,
Roderick Random, Smollett’s first novel, published in 1748, it was.
I suspicion that Smollett is infrequently read
these days because Roderick Random
has all the qualities of the picaresque novel, a form that, in our more
easily-perturbed days, after hours of yoga and sensitivity training sessions,
we don’t know how to take. For instance, our titular hero becomes a valet for a
learned lady, whose brain, her maid reveals, is subject to nutty obsessions:
[S]ome months ago, she
prophesied the general conflagration was at hand, and nothing would be able to
quench it but her water, which therefore she kept so long, that her life was in
danger, and she must needs have died of the retention, had they not found an expedient
to make her evacuate, by kindling a bonfire under her chamber window and
persuading her that the house was in flames: upon which, with great
deliberation, she bade them bring all the tubs and vessels they could find to
be filled for the preservation of the house, into one of which she immediately
discharged the cause of her distemper.
Indeed, the knock-about humor is rough, calling to mind
the gusto that Dickens put into describing how poor Oliver Twist was hit,
battered, thumped and thrashed and kids in
Bleak House getting their heads caught in wrought-iron fences. The mockery, horse-play, and violence make us taboo-leery
post-moderns gasp in dismay. We can see where Dickens got his relish for plainly describing the grotesque and shifty:
This member of the faculty was aged fifty, about five feet high, and ten round the belly; his face was as capacious as a full moon, and much of the complexion of a mulberry: his nose, resembling a powder-horn, was swelled to an enormous size, and studded all over with carbuncles; and his little gray eyes reflected the rays in such an oblique manner that, while he looked a person full in the face, one would have imagined he was admiring the buckle of his shoe
The farce is very 18
th-century in that
at night roadside inns invariably involve guests getting into the wrong bedroom
by accident or design and fornicators getting it on with or without the full
informed consent of the fornicatee.
The morality-free satire bites and stings, pierces and
hacks as it takes on nepotism, arbitrary authority, conscience-free malice, deceit,
not to mention the old standbys hypocrisy, greed, lust, and stupidity. Life
isn’t fair, not anywhere, especially not school, for our hero, for anybody:
I was often inhumanly scourged
for crimes I did not commit, because having the character of a vagabond in the
village, every piece of mischief whose author lay unknown, was charged upon
me.—I have been found guilty of robbing orchards I never entered, of killing
cats I never hurted, of stealing gingerbread I never touched, and of abusing
old women I never saw.—Nay, a stammering carpenter had eloquence enough to persuade
my master, that I fired a pistol loaded with small shot, into his window;
though my landlady and the whole family bore witness, that I was a-bed fast
asleep at the time when this outrage was committed.—I was flogged for having
narrowly escaped drowning, by the sinking of a ferry-boat in which I was
passenger.—Another time for having recovered of a bruise occasioned by a horse
and cart running over me.—A third time, for being bit by a baker’s dog.—In
short, whether I was guilty or unfortunate, the vengeance and sympathy of this
arbitrary pedagogue were the same.
Our hero is a typical main character for a
picaresque. Roderick Random is a young Scotchman of humble origins and a spotty
medical education who must get by on his wits, connections, and petty
criminality. Rory has a faithful
retainer like Sancho Panza, Hugh Strap, a barber, as his name implies. The characters are mainly types and
caricatures, with names that sum them up like Mr. Vandal and Lord Strutwell. The
caricatures cover everybody from cheating innkeepers to quack pharmacists. The characters are clear-cut in the naval
chapters. The sailors Morgan (the Welsh surgeon), Uncle Bowling, Cpt. Oakum, Dr.
Mackshane, Jack Rattlin, all live and breathe while the gay (in our sense) Capt. Whiffle and his favorite Mr.
Simper faint in horror at the smell of tobacco.
Smollett sets the characters in in a variety of
realistic-feeling settings. Smollett was trained in medicine and like all
doctors, got hardened to bad smells and gory sights. Rory is press-ganged and
ends up in the cockpit of the warship Thunder.
We descended by divers ladders
to a space as dark as a dungeon, which, I understood, was immersed several feet
under water, being immediately above the hold. I had no sooner approached this
dismal gulph, than my nose was saluted with an intolerable stench of putrified
cheese and rancid butter, that issued from an apartment at the foot of the
ladder, resembling a chandler’s shop, where, by the faint glimmering of a
candle, I could perceive a man with a pale, meagre countenance, sitting behind
a kind of desk, having spectacles on his nose, and a pen in his hand.
Written in the first person, plot there is not there,
more like narrative strands worked into a mesh, weaving up one writer’s tapestry of the rowdy ripping
18th century with all its corruption, racketeering, privateering,
slave running, poverty, prostitution, brutal wills, the Marshalsea debtor's
prison, impressment, political and arts patronage, and the dark origins of
modern medicine and pharmacy. Now we know why the Victorians were so uptight – they
were fleeing in horror and disgust from the loud licentious 18th century. And
its medieval squalor and dirt:
[W}hen I followed him with the
medicines into the sick berth, or hospital, and observed the situation of the
patients, I was much less surprised that people should die on board, than that
a sick person should recover. Here I saw about fifty miserable distempered
wretches, suspended in rows, so huddled one upon another, that not more than
fourteen inches 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.
A picaresque novel like Roderick Random seems terrible long, too, so readers might tremble
like I do at the prospect of Pamela.
Worry not. The multi-syllabic discourse is daunting at first, but the sheer fun
and – let’s face it – dreadfulness of the adventures will grow on blasé readers
like us. We’ve read Cormac McCarthy, we can handle Smollett.
A bigger problem
is that nowadays few of us can picture a tie-wig and bobwig. Nor are we really
strong on French and Latin tags. My only
advice on both issues is the miracle of search engines –sure, it’s an extra
step but you will be the only kid on the block that can distinguish a pigtail
wig and a periwig. Or upon seeing Putin’s President on TV you will impress
everybody worth impressing by appropriately whipping off “Semper avarus eget”
(greed is never satisfied).
Anyway, I’m glad I read it. It was a lot of fun. A sloop
is sinking so sailors, expecting to die, go on a rampage in order to check out
of this vale of tears as drunk as skunks. Naturally. A sailor breaks into the
purser’s rum locker with an axe:
At that instant the purser
coming down, and seeing his effects going to wreck, complained bitterly of the
injustice done to him, and asked the fellow what occasion he had for liquor
when, in all likelihood, he would be in eternity in a few minutes. “All’s one
for that,” said plunderer, “let us live while we can.” “Miserable wretch that
thou art!” cried the purser, “what must be thy lot in another world, if thou
diest in the commission of robbery?” “Why, hell, I suppose,” replied the other,
with great deliberation, while the purser fell on his knees, and begged of
Heaven that we might not all perish for the sake of Jonas.
Being a brute, I like satire that is as savage as
A Modest Proposal. If nothing
else read it to get a bead on where Dickens, Melville and Thackeray were coming
from. I confess, however, that I’m
unsure if I’m going to read other novels by Smollett.
