SOURCE: "Satiric Method and the Reader in Sir Launcelot Greaves," in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 2, January 1994, pp. 169-88.

In the following essay, Punday refutes the prevailing view that Sir Launcelot Greaves is a failure as a satire. He asserts instead that in this novel, Smollett deliberatelyly manipulated the romantic literary conventions of his time with satiric intent, and that this would have been recognized by his contemporary readership.

Tobias Smollett is best known for his picaresque social satires, such as Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphry Clinker. Critics have generally considered Sir Launcelot Greaves a failed experiment, an unhappy mixture of his characteristic mode with chivalric romance conventions.¹ Although Smollett seems to use his hero as a satiric mouthpiece whose exemplary nature implicitly criticizes the age,² critics have considered the clash between romantic and picaresque world views a major fault in the novel and its satiric methods.

This...