ABSTRACT
The popular Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett drew on his own time in the naval service in his successful first novel, 1748’s The Adventures of Roderick Random. A picaresque tale, it relates the exploits of a young Scottish surgeon. In one sequence, the hero, Roderick Random, is pressed into the navy – forcibly conscripted – and himself serves as a sea surgeon, just like the author had. When there, he comes under the command of Captain Whiffle. Whiffle is an early and influential example of what would prove to be a popular literary type: the queen. The captain is a sumptuously dressed, made-up, perfumed, and shrieking fop who comes aboard with a retinue of suspicious characters, including his personal surgeon, with whom he shares “a correspondence” that is “not fit to be named.” Readers at the time would have understood Whiffle’s dress and deportment as effeminate, Frenchified, and unambiguous signs of “unnatural” inclinations.
