ABSTRACT
John Barrell is a Marxist critic with well-developed interests in land scape poetry and the visual arts. He combines social criticism with an acute sense of how it can derive from an attention to literary forms and conventions. An issue which unites much of his criti cism, including the essay below, is the problem of perspective. That is, a writer's conviction that society is coherent, is itself a fiction, a product of a specific ideology, since it is actually a conglomerate of competing interests. The fantasy of coherence in the mid eighteenth century is made possible by two devices: the idea that the gentleman, or some such disinterested figure, can step back to frame a picture of society from a convenient distance; and the idea of a 'common language' which resists the localism and particularity of regional dia lects. Roderick Random exemplifies these principles. The book describes an enormous range of callings and languages, all of which are rep resented almost pictorially or statically. Roderick's vigorous mobility (by contrast) is one feature of the plot allowing Smollett to create the illusion that his hero is a gentleman who can comprehend British society as a unified and organic whole.
