SOURCE: "Peregrine Pickle and the Present Moment of Consciousness," in her Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, The University of Georgia Press, 1992, pp. 119-36.

In the following excerpt, Kraft examines the historiocity and the sense of the present rather that the past in Smollett's second novel.

… Tobias Smollett's second novel, Peregrine Pickle, like all novels, is interested in the relationship between fictional and historical narrative, and it offers the necessary—that is, the personal—corrective to the historical—that is, the official and public—narrative.¹ Not that Peregrine Pickle, or any novel, for that matter, is primarily concerned with the structuring of a historical moment. In fact, the present, not the past, is the novel's moment, for, unlike historical narrative, the novel insists on its own contemporaneity, regardless of its temporal setting.² While the novel may recognize its participation in a moment that will become historical, its...