Smollett’s extraordinary love of dilating on noisome smells and noisome sights, that intense affection for the physically nauseous, which he shared with Swift, is rather less marked in “Roderick” than in “Humphrey Clinker,” and “The Adventures of an Atom.”  The scenes in the Marshalsea must have been familiar to Dickens.  The terrible history of Miss Williams is Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress done into unsparing prose.  Smollett guides us at a brisk pace through the shady and brutal side of the eighteenth century; his vivacity is as unflagging as that of his disagreeable rattle of a hero.  The passion usually understood as love is, to be sure, one of which he seems to have no conception; he regards a woman much as a greedy person might regard a sirloin of beef, or, at least, a plate of ortolans.  At her marriage a bride is “dished up;” that is all.

Thus this “gay writing” no longer makes us gay.  In reading “Peregrine Pickle” and “Humphrey Clinker,” a man may find himself laughing aloud, but hardly in reading “Roderick Random.”  The fun is of the cruel primitive sort, arising merely from the contemplation of somebody’s painful discomfiture.  Bowling and Rattlin may be regarded with affectionate respect; but Roderick has only physical courage and vivacity to recommend him.  Whether Smollett, in Flaubert’s deliberate way, purposely abstained from moralising on the many scenes of physical distress which he painted; or whether he merely regarded them without emotion, has been debated.  It seems more probable that he thought they carried their own moral.  It is the most sympathetic touch in Roderick’s character, that he writes thus of his miserable crew of slaves:  “Our ship being freed from the disagreeable lading of negroes, to whom indeed I had been a miserable slave since our leaving the coast of Guinea, I began to enjoy myself.”  Smollett was a physician, and had the pitifulness of his profession; though we see how casually he makes Random touch on his own unwonted benevolence.

People had not begun to know the extent of their own brutality in the slave trade, but Smollett probably did know it.  If a curious prophetic letter attributed to him, and published more than twenty years after his death, be genuine; he had the strongest opinions about this form of commercial enterprise.  But he did not wear his heart on his sleeve, where he wore his irritable nervous system.  It is probable enough that he felt for the victims of poverty, neglect, and oppression (despite his remarks on hospitals) as keenly as Dickens.  We might regard his offensively ungrateful Roderick as a purely dramatic exhibition of a young man, if his other heroes were not as bad, or worse; if their few redeeming qualities were not stuck on in patches; and if he had omitted his remark about Roderick’s “modest merit.”  On the other hand, the good side of Matthew Bramble seems to be drawn from Smollett’s own character, and, if that be the case, he can have had little sympathy with his own humorous Barry Lyndons.  Scott and Thackeray leaned to the favourable view:  Smollett, his nervous system apart, was manly and kindly.