SOURCE: "Sentimental Misogyny and Medicine in Humphry Clinker," in Studies in English Literature, Vol. 37, No. 3, Summer 1997, pp. 615-36.

In the following essay, Weed argues that in Humphry Clinker, Smollett depicts some negative effects of commercialism on human society, including rendering men effeminate, causing illness, and the leading to the overall unbalancing of masculine society.

On one level, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) presents its readers with a cast of scraggly, wryly drawn "originals" roaming Britain, including the tatterdemalion Humphry Clinker himself, the quixotic Obadiah Lismahago, and the curmudgeonly Matthew Bramble. It also, however, provides a rare eighteenth-century portrait of England as a "body politic."¹ The connection between an individual's physical health and moral well-being, for example, an issue often discussed in criticism of the novel, also correlates to the health of the nation's social body, which, in the novel's view, is diseased and in need of a cure...