SOURCE: "The Satirist as Point of View," in Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England, Yale University Press, 1967, pp. 208-115.

In the excerpt below, Paulson examines Fielding's David Simple as an example of eighteenth-century novelists' use of characters as satirists within the narrative text.

… [Tobias] Smollett's development shows a number of important facts about satire's situation in the second half of the eighteenth century. He becomes increasingly concerned with the character of the satirist, until in his last novel the evil object has become simply the reflection of a point of view—a symptom of sickness or isolation or a sense of fun. Satire tends to change from a form with a persuasive end to a subject, an attitude which Smollett regards with mixed feelings. In Peregrine Pickle and Ferdinand Fathom the satirist has become a villain, and although Greaves and Bramble are by no means villains, their...