This week’s post on fiction is about two novels which occupy an important place in the history of 18th century fiction and are the earliest examples of ingenious skill and mastery of the craft of fiction. Both the novels belong to the picaresque tradition of which ‘Don Quixote’ is the most famous example.
Humphrey Clinker is an epistolary novel where in the two main characters Mr. Matthew Bramble and Mr Jerry Melford narrate to their friends, their experiences and adventures along with their impressions and views about the world in general and certain people in particular (not the lesser about their own kinsfolk) in a series of letters. The chronological time is nearly a year as they embark from the shire on a prolonged trip to Bath to London and from there to the northern parts of Britain and thence to Scotland. The troop as such consists of 6 members who through their picaresque travels are regularly in correspondence with the others, making observations on people and life.
Although like most Victorian or pre-Victorian era novels, the novel ends in a proper denouement, the unraveling of all the different strands and the unexpected discovery of certain facts (like Mr. Clinker being the son of Sir Matthew) ending to the mutual satisfaction of all concerned, the novel is a commentary on the times and practices of Smollett’s England. Smollett’s penchant for satire, his over arching criticality about things and people and the pervasive pessimism expressed through Mr. Bramble initially, are surmounted later by the piety and simplicity of Humphrey, the simple love and affection of Lydia and the unadorned conviviality of Mr. Dennison and his family. The candor and the brazen frankness of the novelist’s descriptions: farts and faeces being of peculiar interest, nearly borders on the scatological. His phrases are colorful and vivid. His description of life in London and Scotland must rank as equal to, if not better than Dickens and the other great masters of fiction.
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones is a comic epic with weighty issues. For long after I read it, I felt that the characters were swimming in my mind. I was struck by the author’s stamina and poise. What an effort it must have been! As he calls it an epic, he does justice to the title. It is a real tome and has several punches and thrills for the delight of the reader. Reading it takes an extraordinary effort. The hero is Tom Jones, a bastard, who is taken in as his own son by Squire All worthy. He is a lusty, impulsive young man whose persona is handsomeness itself. He has a soft heart towards the fair sex and indulges in a few sexual innuendos, even damaging his relations with his beautiful angel; his lover Ms Sophia Western.
For his various acts of disobedience and some smart villainy on the part of the other nephew Mr. Blifil, Jones is sent out or banished from Mr. All Worthy’s presence. Hence he embarks on a series of adventures in his peregrination so to say where a number of characters keep coming and going, narrating their tale to the reader. In shaping their fortunes Jones has a say.
The author’s scheme is the exposing of all hypocrisy, and the baseness of human nature which even as it espouses noble causes has only selfish pursuit in mind. The pace of the novel is exhilarating, as events and characters keep tumbling in and out, and the patient pen of the author unravels or tightens each intricacy of the plot. This is one of the first novels to be selected under ten greatest novels by Somerset Maugham.
Both the novels are landmark novels in the history of English fiction as they epitomise elementary aspects of fiction like characterisation, irony,satire and dramatisation to be followed to great effect by later novelists like Charles Dickens and W.M. Thackeray. (To be continued)