The most obvious difference between “The Expedition Of Humphry Clinker” and Tobias George Smollett's other work is undoubtedly that, in “Roderick Random” and “Peregrine Pickle”, the title characters are the narrators. In this novel, the title character doesn't even appear on the scene until about a quarter of the way through. In most other ways, this is a fairly typical English novel, only funnier.
In the late 18th century, when “Humphry Clinker” appeared, many English novels took the epistolary format – that is, it consists of a series of letters from the main characters to various other people. The writers of these letters are members of the Bramble family – patriarch Matthew, his sister Tabitha, nephew Jeremy, niece Letty – and certain of their servants. They live on an estate in Wales, but they are not at home during the events of this story; the novel finds them traveling to Bath, London, and various locations in Scotland, largely for Uncle Matthew's health. He suffers from gout, and oddly enough that does not make him the most irritable of the bunch. That distinction seems to belong to Tabitha, who makes a nuisance of herself to everyone else because of her demanding temper while she's trying to snag a husband.
Clinker, none of whose letters appear here, is a man of the lower socioeconomic class whom Matthew and Tabitha pick up en route and take on as Matthew's personal servant. Turns out that he has a secret that even he is unaware of, but in any case he may be the most useful person in this group, going so far as to save the lives of several of the party from a coach that floods when a dam cracks.
As in any classically-structured story, certain things do change from the beginning of this tale to the end, although there's no particular plot here. The events have to do largely with the Bramble party's miscellaneous adventures, most of them funny – this novel has in fact been called the funniest one Smollett wrote.
More important, of course, is the attitude of the miscellaneous travelers to the things they see and experience. Uncle Matthew is so insistent on the superiority of his home country to everything he goes through that you have to wonder why he bothered with this trip. Aunt Tabby is such a fussbudget that she drives everyone around her crazy. Nephew Jery spends a great deal of time complaining about his relatives. Niece Letty is timid enough to find everything terrifying. After a while, thankfully, the travelers come to appreciate their surroundings and the people they meet, at least somewhat.
The big advantage of the epistolary structure is that we get four or more opinions of their experiences, which can make all those versions terrifically amusing to read. The disadvantage is that all the adventures get to us at one remove – we read them all in letters written, in some cases, several hours after the events described. You get accustomed to that distance from the events pretty quickly, but it can still be a little annoying.
Fortunately, for all their moaning and groaning, the members of this party reveal themselves by the end of the novel to be mostly generous and fair-minded. So you can go into “Humphry Clinker” with full permission to laugh at their flaws and the difficulties those flaws get them into, knowing that there will be plenty to appreciate them for later on.
I still don't quite understand why Humphry Clinker is the title character, though, nor what makes this whole business his “expedition”.
Benshlomo says, Humor frequently comes from the humanity of the people you meet.
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