SOURCE: "History, Humphry Clinker, and the Novel," in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 4, No. 3, April 1992, pp. 239-55.

In the following essay, Mayer argues that Smollett's use of history in Humphry Clinker makes it not only his best and most coherent novel, but also the only one of his works that inarguably deserves to be defined as a novel.

Smollett's fictional narratives often seem to be texts at odds with themselves. A large literature has grown up around the question of what they are—satires, picaresque tales, and romances being among the most popular, but by no means the only, candidates.¹ For some critics the application of one or more of these generic labels to Smollett's narratives amounts to an assertion that those texts ought not to be considered novels.² Critics have also decried the "methodlessness" of Smollett's fiction, and such complaints have often been another way of commenting on the...