Grand tour

Tobias Smollett's novels have been on my list of things to get around to reading, so when I found this edition of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker in a local used bookstore I took the plunge. An epistolary novel told "in different voices," it was Smollett's last novel, and the editor of this volume, Howard Mumford Jones, considers it his masterpiece. It concerns a middle-aged Welsh landowner, Matthew Bramble, who makes a slow circuit of England and Scotland leading in tow his disagreeable, husband-hunting sister Tabitha, their wide-eyed niece and nephew, and a few servants. Bramble is a hypochondriac bachelor who hates crowds and finds much to grumble about in English social life, architecture, and hygiene, but he's ultimately soft-hearted and unpretentious. As he and the other members of the party send their individual accounts back home, we're treated to contrasting views of the delights or inconveniences of Bath, London, and other parts, until they all cross the border into Scotland, where Bramble's health miraculously takes a turn for the better. There are mishaps and romantic entanglements along the way, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a serious of improbable revelations and three weddings. Oh, and a character named Humphry Clinker does in fact appear, eventually.

There's a good deal of genial low comedy throughout the book, including some fairly vicious pranks and at least four separate incidents of accidental indecent exposure. (This was, after all, the period that produced Rowlandson's Exhibition Stare Case.) Much verbal fun is had with the inability of Tabitha to spell English correctly ("Don't forget to have the gate shit every evening before dark") and with the lack of sophistication of her maid Winifred Jenkins (who twists "metamorphos'd" into "matthewmurphy'd" and says of the Highlanders, observantly, that "they speak Velch, but the vords are different"). It's not all drollery, however; Smollett has interesting things to say about husbandry and political economy, and his affection for his native Scotland is evident.

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The original Everyman's Library was founded in 1906 by J. M. Dent with a declared goal (which it eventually surpassed) of publishing affordable editions of more than 1,000 titles in various fields, though English literature would predominate. The Arts & Crafts-influenced design of the earliest volumes, featuring ornate floral decorations on the spine and endpapers, is too busy for my taste (and the books have tended to fall apart over time); the modernist redesign in 1935, featuring the dust-jacket emblem by Eric Ravillious shown above, is more to my liking. By the 1970s additional redesigns had bled out the visual appeal of the books, and the advent of Penguin Classics and other paperback lines made them obsolete. The rights to the hardcover series were ultimately acquired by Random House, which relaunched it in a completely different format and with a narrower range of titles. The current Everyman's Library is a commendable undertaking, but one can't magine it publishing, as J. M. Dent did, eight separate volumes of Hakluyt. There is a comprehensive history of the Dent Everyman's Library (including a link to a list of titles) at Collecting Everyman's Library: 1906-1982.