SOURCE: "'The Vortex of the Tumult': Order and Disorder in Humphry Clinker," in Studies in Scottish Literature, Vol. XXIII, 1988, pp. 239-53.

In the following essay, Krishnan contends that not only the images or concepts of order and disorder but also the very terms order and disorder themselves contribute to Smollett's organization and structuring of the novel Humphry Clinker.

The various readings of Smollett's Humphry Clinker—as a comic romance, as a study of primitivism and progress, or as a satire on eighteenth-century life and scene, just to mention a few—have served only to reconfirm the vitality and variety of Smollett's comic inventiveness in his best and most popular work.¹ Smollett's use of various imagery of heaven and hell, monsters, animals, and his frequent references to excrement and nudity, have also been examined, with interesting results.² The novel's basic premise—Matthew Bramble's search of a "cure" to his...