Stinks and Germs

Last year I was invited to join a friend’s book group. I plodded through the book they’d chosen that week – a particularly ghastly and badly written effort by some minor celebrity – and naturally expressed my distaste at their meeting. Why had they chosen such rubbish? I thought book groups were meant to stretch the mind. And so they suggested, as I thought myself so clever, that I should choose their next book.

I chose my favourite – The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett, his last book, written in 1766 just before he died. How could anyone fail to love it? What a treat they would have, I thought, reading Smollett’s exquisite prose, laughing like drains at his ferocious wit and humour, shuddering with horror at his vivid and minutely observed reports of eighteenth-century daily life. How fascinating to have another century evoked so convincingly that you could almost smell it. But they didn’t like it. I can’t think why. Perhaps it was too coarse or its form too complex – Jeremy Lewis, Smollett’s biographer and great admirer, describes it as ‘an epistolary novel involving five letter-writers’. Or perhaps the ladies of the book group have no taste, because Humphry Clinker deserves to be read, over and over again. I first read it at the age of 16 in Ruislip Library, haven of tranquillity and treasure-trove of classic gems, surrounded by green lawns and herbaceous borders, next to a small duck pond, all encircled by a low wooden fence. Such libraries no longer exist – peaceful outside, complete silence inside. No children fiddling around and squabbling, no computers, no mobiles going off, and on its shelves the entire works of Fielding, Swift, Sterne and Smollett. For a sullen girl who was finding her mother and suburban Ruislip close to unbearable, here was the perfect means of escape. I could leave the 1950s and enter another far more thrilling world, and not just for the length of an ordinary book, but for volume after volume: four of Fielding’s Amelia and Tom Jones, three of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, four off to sea with Smollett’s Roderick Random, several more of his Peregrine Pickle and Ferdinand Count Fathom, but best of all, three of Humphry Clinker. Humphry is only a minor character, a ‘sick and destitute’ young man, ‘queer and pathetic’, dressed in rags, whom the elderly, splenetic Matthew Bramble takes pity on and employs as postilion on his travels around England and Scotland. Bramble is travelling en famille, with his sister Tabitha and her maid, Winifred Jenkins, and his niece and nephew, Liddy and Jery Melford. As they all write to various acquaintances, we read five contrasting accounts of the travels: coarse and saucy, naïve, idealistic, worldly, fiercely critical and outraged. Bramble can’t wait to get out of Harrogate, with its dirty beds and ‘dismal bagnio’. His nephew Jery finds the town so agreeable ‘that [he] left the place with some regret’. To Bramble, Bath is a living hell, to his niece Liddy it is all ‘gaiety, good humour, and diversion’. Smollet’s brilliant ruse makes it perhaps the most balanced travel book ever written. For me, Bramble is the star of the book, and it is to his letters to his friend Dr Lewis that I return repeatedly to read about what I like to think of as the real-life eighteenth century. Did you think a Bath ball of the period was a charming and sophisticated event? Think again. To Bramble it was a ‘languid, frivolous scene . . . in fouled air, circulating through such a number of rotting, human bellows’. When everyone rose as one for the country dancing, it proved too much for him.

All of a sudden, came rushing upon me an Egyptian gale, so impregnated with pestilential vapours, that my nerves were overpowered, and I dropped senseless upon the floor . . . Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank arm-pits, sweating feet, running sores and issues; plasters, ointments and embrocations . . . asafoetida, musk, hartshorn, and sal volatile; besides a thousand frowsy steams which I could not analyse. Such, O Dick! is the fragrant ether we breathe in the polite assemblies of Bath.

I assume there is a good deal of Smollett in Matthew Bramble and, as a person of ‘uncommon sensibilities’ myself, I sympathize like mad with them both. Nowadays we scrub away at invisible germs with anti-bacterial cleansers, but poor Smollett had to face stinks and germs of every sort. Worse, he was a doctor, and so was acutely aware of the unhygienic conditions and general filth that surrounded him. No wonder he/Bramble was horrified to see, as he stepped into the water in the King’s Bath, ‘a child, full of scrofulous ulcers, carried in the arms of one of the guides . . . Suppose the matter of those ulcers, floating in the water, comes in contact with my skin, when the pores are all open . . .’ He also suspected, having considered the plumbing, that the drinking water might be contaminated with water from the bath, and so ‘medicated with . . . abominable discharges of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies, parboiling in the kettle below’. How I love the horror of it all, and Smollett’s rich and vibrant vocabulary: frowsy lodgings, pert and impudent boys, nectareous tides of milk and cream, villainous materials, impertinent multitudes, vitriolic scum, ulcerated chops, coxcombs and other bespangled, dropsical, belaboured, mawkish, discomposed, balder-dashed objects or creatures. For me this is the seductive charm of the eighteenth century: its ravishingly beautiful surface – exquisite architecture, divine music, superlative prose – beneath which lay a horrendous pit of filth, disease, depravity, poverty and cruelty. It had everything that our modern media can produce, but with added depth, beauty, taste and superb jokes. Jeremy Lewis, who, like me, seems to have been a rather odd and tormented teenager, loved it from his youth, for similar reasons. ‘Rude and Arcadian all at once,’ he writes, ‘it combined a liking for lavatory jokes with decorum and formality, brimming chamber pots with periwigs and tasselled canes, brutality and coarseness with a gift for graceful living that has never been equalled since.’ Perhaps this mixture was too much for the ladies of the book group. It was certainly too much for the prissy Victorians, and that in itself should be a recommendation. What a treat they missed, for however vile Smollett’s subject, his prose is sublime. It seems to build up, in an elegant sequence of increasingly voluptuous waves, brimming with outrage, until it eventually culminates in a beautifully controlled landing, as if on a pin-head, on the object of his criticism. Here he goes, observing London’s milk:

the produce of faded cabbage leaves and sour draff, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco-quids from foot passengers, overflowings from mud-carts, spatterings fromcoach wheels . . . the spewings of infants who have slabbered in the tin measure, which is thrown back in that condition among the milk, for the benefit of the next customer; and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the pasty drab that vends this pernicious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid.

I have homed in on the general filth of the time, but Smollett had a much broader, almost prophetic view. He was horrified by the rise of the nouveaux riches, the swelling ‘tide of luxury’, the growth of London’s population, and by the ghastly results of that growth. What used to be ‘open fields producing hay and corn [are] . . . now covered with streets’, he complained, via Bramble. ‘If this infatuation continues for half a century, I suppose the whole county of Middlesex will be covered with brick.’ His nightmares have come true. Thank heavens he can’t see it now. To him, even then, London was an ‘overgrown monster . . . a dropsical head’, sucking all the nourishment from the rest of the country. He deplored the ‘tide of luxury’ epitomized by the city, the ‘grand source of . . . corruption’, where ‘all is tumult and hurry’. To Bramble, ‘the whole nation seem[ed] to be running out of its wits’. He much preferred the countryside, where temperance, fresh air and heavenly breakfasts prevailed: goat’s cheese, honey, oatmeal cakes and bannocks in the Highlands, where the travellers slept on ‘a very agreeable couch of . . . fresh heath, pulled up by the roots’. ‘The country is amazingly wild,’ writes Bramble. ‘Verdant islands . . . seem to float upon its surface, affording the most enchanting view. . . Everything here is romantic beyond imagination.’ Sadly, travel through the Monmouthshire countryside was marred by the story of Bramble’s old friend Baynard, whose ‘termagant’ wife had wrecked his thriving 200-acre farm, made a ‘bog of the whole plantation’, and was driving him ‘at full speed on the high road to bankruptcy and ruin’. The book is stuffed with such dramas, and with startling coincidences involving Bramble’s entire entourage: a brush with death when the coach overturns, Clinker’s arrest and imprisonment for highway robbery, Bramble’s secret past, the ‘ogling correspondence’ between sister Tabitha and Lismahago, Liddy’s relentless suitor, and Winifred Jenkins’s encounter with true love. I shan’t tell you whether they all end happily. But despite his general fury, disapproval and disgust, Bramble’s/Smollett’s compassion shines through. How poignant is Bramble’s meeting with a group of old friends in a Bath coffee-house,

so long separated, and so roughly treated by the storms of life. . . We consisted of thirteen individuals; seven lamed by the gout, rheumatism or palsy; three maimed by accident; and the rest either deaf or blind. One hobbled, another hopped, a third dragged his legs after him like a wounded snake, a fourth straddled betwixt a pair of long crutches, like the mummy of a felon hanging in chains . . . It was a renovation of youth; a kind of resuscitation of the dead.

Luckily, for those of us who choose to read Humphry Clinker, Smollett can be resuscitated time and again. He may have been a lifelong hypochondriac who died too young, aged 50, but at least his work will live on healthily – for centuries, if I have anything to do with it.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 23 © Michele Hanson 2009