The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Oxford World's Classics)

I read it for a class and it was an excellent book :D very funny and bawdy. I would recommend!

It's a romp and a very beautifully epistolary one--plus hilarious, plus bawdy, plus... just read it.

Revisited Humphrey Clinker after a number of decades and found it just as enjoyable. Eighteenth Century literature not to everyone's taste but having found many references to Smollett in Peter Ackroyd's Biography of London I was inspired to read Clinker again. Not disappointed.

Wonderful. Highly amusing. But you do have to get used the epistolary style (it's all people writing to one another, often about the same event seen from a different perspective). I found the most interesting section was that dealing with Scotland, showing little has changed since the 1770s, at least as far as polite but firm sentiments of self-detirmination go. Like Scott's 'Rob Roy', the eponymous hero only appears halfway through and features only fleetingly in the main thrust of the story.

"Humphrey Clinker" was one of those novels I had heard about but never read and thus began reading it with the rather modest expectation of "filling a gap". In fact it's a brilliant read: funny, fresh and filled with quirky insight. It's one of those novels that brings you face to face with the real texture of life in 18th century England but does it with comic panache. The epistolary form can be rather cumbersome but the portrait of Matthew Bramble (supposedly Smollett's self-portrait) - warm/weak, flawed/humane - does eventually give the novel focus and shape. ps Humphrey Clinker doesn't even appear in the first hundred pages.

Smollett's mixture of disgust, low farce, acute intelligence, and savage indignation makes for a precursor to the Pickwick Papers - but a precursor with real guts. Dickens was later to produce the polite, sanitised version, which can still make one laugh. Smollett's panoply of eccentrics, villains, innocents, is the full-blooded original and all the more powerfully funny for that.

Ever so clever, well written, and even though I read a lot, this was just too hard going.