Tobias Smollett and the Ramble Novel

This chapter explores the current image of mid-eighteenth-century fiction, considering the work of Tobias Smollett. No author sits less comfortably with, especially the emphasis on the politeness and sensibility of mid-century British culture, and no author is less amenable to feminist perspectives, than Smollett. Closer attention to this most unlikable author provides a better understanding of some of the most confounding incidents in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and early sentimental fiction. The chapter then examines Smollett's major novel, Peregrine Pickle (1751), a text that moves almost systematically through the everyday comic situations of its age. Every season throughout the 1750s and 1760s brought ten or twelve new ‘lives’ and ‘histories’, each of them using a skeletal plot and a rudimentary central character to unify a string of broad comic incidents. These texts were often called ramble novels, after the names of so many central characters and their careless progress through the world.