SOURCE: "Appearance and Reality in Humphry Clinker," in Smollett: Author of the First Distinction, edited by Alan Bold, Vision and Barnes and Noble, 1982, pp. 209-27.

In the following essay, Jack contends that Smollett uses the epistolary form in Humphry Clinker to provide a picture of reality that is truer because it is seen from a "variety" of viewpoints rather than simply through the eyes of a single narrator.

It was Robert Giddings who suggested that the one moral point made in Humphry Clinker concerned the difference between appearance and reality. He did not himself develop upon this thesis and indeed indicated that Smollett 'seems for the most part unaware of it'.¹ But an overtly didactic approach to the theme would have been completely out of place in a work which makes its comments much more subtly.² I believe that various possible oppositions between appearance and reality are explored...