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The Hidden Bastard: A Question of Illegitimacy in Smollett's Peregrine Pickle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

R. G. Collins
R. G. Collins*
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
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Abstract

In Peregrine Pickle, the extreme hostility of the hero's mother toward him from his earliest days, although an important catalyst in the plot, is never reasonably explained. Her attitude, as well as a number of otherwise ambiguous plot elements, become clear when we deduce that she was pregnant before her marriage. Several clues suggest that Smollett intended until late in the novel to present Peregrine as a bastard but changed his mind as he neared the end. It can be theorized that Smollett feared an accusation of plagiarism in borrowing this detail from Tom Jones, especially after he himself had accused Fielding with reference to Roderick Random. In addition, the life of Richard Savage, particularly as told in Samuel Johnson's elegaic and then-popular biography of his friend, offers many parallels in its story of the unnatural mother and the rejected bastard.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 1 , January 1979 , pp. 91 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 Ronald Paulson, “The Pilgrimage and the Family: Structure in the Novels of Fielding and Smollett,” in Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M. Knapp, ed. G. S. Rousseau and P.-G. Bouce (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 57–78. Subsequent references to this essay are given, by page number, in the text.

2 So far as assessing the art of Fielding and Smollett goes, G. S. Rousseau is probably right in saying that comparisons of Smollett with other writers are useless and even obfuscating. As Rousseau says in a recent article:

In speaking out so obtrusively, I believe that something like an edict ought to be proclaimed forbidding the spectre of the literary formalists ever to be raised again: no more Fielding and Smollett, only “Smollett the curious blender of literary forms,” or “Smollett the experimenter with grotesque possibilities,” or “Smollett the ethical and philosophical vagabond” … or “Smollett and cloacal stuff of social history.” I have in the past tried to make out of Smollett's narratives coherent literary forms, and I could not. Nor could others. (“Beef and Bouillon: A Voice for Tobias Smollett, with Comments on His Life, Works and Modern Critics,” British Studies Monitor, 7 [1977], 16).

This essay is an always interesting, frequently crusty, and generally stimulating assessment of the critical situation with respect to Smollett, pointing out how little fashionable orthodoxies in criticism have succeeded in dealing with him. As pointed out in the lead article, unsigned, of the Johnsonian News Letter (37 [1977], 1-3) Rousseau's article is one of several recent studies that indicate a long-delayed revival of interest in the novelist: “Smollett, indeed, is becoming a battleground for critics, and the fur is beginning to fly.”

3 O. M. Brack, “Towards a Critical Edition of Smollett's Peregrine Pickle” Studies in the Novel, 7 (1975), 361-74.

4 David Hannay, Life and Writings of Tobias Smollett (London: Walter Scott, 1887), p. 89.

5 Lewis Mansfield Knapp, Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1949); Howard Swazey Buck, A Study in Smollett, Chiefly Peregrine Pickle (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1925).

6 Samuel Johnson, Life of Savage, ed. Clarence Tracy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971) is a well-annotated recent edition.

7 All subsequent references to the novel, given in the text by page number, are to the Oxford English Novels edition, Tobias Smollett. Peregrine Pickle, ed. James L. Clifford (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964). Easily the most readily available, this one reproduces the original 1751 edition.

8 Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft. eds., British Authors before 1800: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1965), p. 449.

9 Not a great deal of Smollett's correspondence for the earlier years has survived, so we know relatively little from that source about specific books that he was reading. To suppose that he was unacquainted with the Life of Savage, however, is much like assuming that Jane Austen was unaware of the Napoleonic Wars despite her family association with the Royal Navy. As in the famous line from Thoreau's Journal, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” Again we may resort to logic (which, while it sometimes deceives, always does so harmoniously); from a wealth of possible material, we need only consider the cross-relationships of Savage and Smollett with two of the greatest names of the time. As Knapp points out at length (pp. 62–69 et passim). the two early satires by Smollett, Advice (1746) and Reproof (1747), clearly reflect “their great indebtedness in purpose, content, and method, to the later satires of Pope… . [The Epilogue to the Satires] in particular seems to have been Smollett's model for Advice and for Reproof: these poems are remarkably similar to Pope's in their general satiric content; in their attack on specific persons; and in their device of … a dialogue between the poet and his friend. In fact, the general tone of Smollett's satires is very close to Pope's. What could be more natural than that the young Smollett should have taken as his model the author of the Dunciad, who had died in 1744?” (In his own Life of Pope, written later, Samuel Johnson contented himself with a single critical comment on The Epilogue to the Satires; it is a quote from Richard Savage.) Further, the only poet that Smollett praises in his satires at this time is Pope, although he refers to an astonishing total of some fifty persons, thus indicating a very wide general acquaintance with contemporary literature and politics. Later, in The Complete History of England, he hailed Pope as “the prince of lyric poetry, unrivalled in satire, ethics, and polished versification” (Knapp, pp. 62, 216). Incontestably the idol of the young Smollett, Pope was himself the most famous of Savage's many well-known friends, who ranged from the impecunious Sir Richard Steele to the generous Queen Caroline. The Pope-Savage connection was public in every sense: Savage was Pope's remittance man in Grub Street, while Savage vigorously defended Pope in print, apparently helped him on the satirical footnotes to the Dunciad Variorum of April 1729, and, in 1732, in the Preface to his A Collection of Pieces in Verse and Prose Which Have Been Published on Occasion of the Dunciad, he acted either as Pope's spokesman or as a mask for him in defining a high moral purpose for the famous satire. Through his last years, Savage received much financial aid from Pope and is referred to frequently and fondly (though with regret for his incorrigibly dissolute ways) in Pope's correspondence. In fact, when Johnson came to write his Life of Pope, he drew heavily on Richard Savage's accounts of his friendship with the poet: “One sees traces of Savage throughout the account of Pope,” as George Sherburn has noted (The Early Career of Alexander Pope [New York: Russell & Russell, 1934, 1963], pp. 14–15). In brief, Savage, whatever questions might be raised about his integrity, was certainly well known, even notorious, a serious enough contender for the laureateship to receive a consolation pension from the Queen, and his relationship with Pope was a matter of record in the literary wars of the years preceding his death in 1743.

Pope died in 1744; in that year, Johnson published his tribute to his fallen friend, the Life of Savage, and the young but comfortably matched Tobias Smollett was well established in a substantial residence in fashionable Downing Street, presumably sopping up observations on the large number of contemporary figures to whom he would make reference in his own satires a year or two later. The Savage biography was Johnson's first major work, and as John Wain puts it. “Certainly it was a succès d'estime, and in 1744 as today, those who were gripped by it were gripped very hard indeed” (Samuel Johnson [London: Macmillan, 1974], p. 114). At this same period, precisely like Johnson with Irene, Smollett was carrying The Reprisal around to anyone who might help him get the play produced; the two men approached the same theatrical managers and sought help from the same aristocratic patrons. A further point: in 1748, when the second edition of the Life of Savage was published, both Smollett and Johnson are known to have been intimate friends of William McGhie. a Scottish physician. “A man after my own heart” was Smollett's description, and he planned a pleasure trip with McGhie to Oxford and Blenheim in June 1748. McGhie was a member of a club organized by Johnson earlier that year for weekly meetings at the King's Head. McGhie “was a learned, ingenious, and modest man; and one of those few of his country whom Johnson could endure. To say the truth, he treated him with great civility and may almost be said to have loved him.” (Sir John Hawkins, Works of Samuel Johnson, i, 232-33; quoted by Knapp, pp. 81–82.)

It seems inconceivable that, in the relatively close quarters of the London literary world of the 1740s, pursuing much the same activities and involved with the same persons, with two editions of the Life of Savage appearing in four years, Smollett could have remained ignorant of what Reynolds and many others considered Johnson's then finest achievement (Wain, p. 114). Smollett, whose own novels contain far more of contemporary literary politics than do those of any other major novelist of his time, was highly sensitive to literary gossip, social intrigue, and biographical anecdote: Peregrine Pickle itself has hundreds of pages devoted to Lady Vane's life, the Annesley Case, the career of Daniel McKercher. and the patronage practices of both Chesterfield and Lyttelton. At that, while he undoubtedly did read it, Smollett did not even need the Johnson Life of Savage for a knowledge of the wastrel poet's relationship with his alleged mother, since, in addition to Savage's own trumpeting of his illegitimacy, at least two widely read biographies by friends had appeared earlier as attempts to enlist sympathy for him. (See Stanley V. Makower, Richard Savage: A Mystery in Biography [1909; rpt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1972]. A later and more authoritative biography is that of Clarence Tracy, The Artificial Bastard: A Biography of Richard Savage [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1953].) Smollett, without doubt, knew the story of Savage.

10 The author's characteristically ironic tone here seems to account quite effectively for a few passages further along in the narrative where we are told that Mrs. Pickle conquered her fondness for her oldest child (pp. 56, 62), when in fact the most positive reaction she has had toward him has been indifference and a stated belief that any favorable reports of him have been the exaggeration of schoolmasters fawning for their own interests.

11 In Moll Flanders, which appeared twenty-nine years earlier, this device is the one used by Moll's first seducer in marrying off the pregnant girl to his unwitting younger brother.

12 G. S. Rousseau, “Pineapples, Pregnancy, Pica, and Peregrine Pickle,” in Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Essays Presented to Lewis M. Knapp, pp. 79–110.

13 It is, I think, a little unkind of Paulson to say that she “satirizes Trunnion's pose as ‘Hannibal Tough’ [when] she exposes his cowardice by craving three black hairs from his beard” (p. 63). Even brave men may well quail at having a round-bellied young woman pull out a beard hair by hair.

14 Since she has not seen him in years and, just a few days before, had indifferently turned over formal guardianship of the boy to Trunnion, any question of actual sorrow over the loss of her son is outside possibility.

15 For a modern biography of the eccentric poet, see Tracy's The Artificial Bastard (cited in n. 9).

16 Since there is no actual account of Miss Appleby before the “courtship” by Gameliel, other than references to her and her father's eagerness to accept the marriage proposal, and no final revelation of the illegitimacy of Peregrine, there is no need for the author to name a shadow character as the real father, as did Fielding.

17 Michael Rosenblum. “Smollett as Conservative Satirist,” ELH, 42 (1975). 556-79.

18 This potential danger would account, too, for the fact that, while Smollett clearly knew of the existence of Tom Jones and even made reference to it in Peregrine Pickle, he did not at that time attack it. Both Howard Swazey Buck (pp. 50–51, 113) and Knapp (p. 131) attribute Smollett's failure to do so to his not yet having “read it with care,” to use Knapp's phrase. But it was readily available and widely talked about for all of the preceding year, and Smollett's view of Fielding was already an intensely personal one. Logically, he read the immediately successful Fielding work in fairly short order. But if. as it seems, he was imitating Tom Jones in important ways, he would have been foolish, indeed, to spotlight the action by a public attack on his own source in the very book in which such borrowing could be identified. He held his peace for another year, until Fielding's mocking of him in Amelia and in the Covent-Garden Journal (7 Jan. 1752) gave Smollett an excuse for firing off the Habbakkuk Hilding broadside. Offered for sale within a week or so of the Covent-Garden Journal piece, Habbakkuk Hilding may, in fact, have been already in draft and held in readiness for just such a counterattack. Again, while definitive proof of Smollett's authorship of Habbakkuk Hilding is not possible, apparently no serious Smollett critic ignores it, and it is included in the outdated but not yet superseded W. E. Henley edition of The Works. Like P.-G. Bouce (The Novels of Tobias Smollett [London and New York: Longmans, 1976], pp. 21, 37), I find it harmonious with the style of Adventures of an Atom, while the views expressed neatly fit Smollett's situation.