ABSTRACT
In its eponymous hero, Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) presents an orphan prone to physical comedy; Clinker is a bumbling servant defined by his “natural aukwardness and the flutter of his spirits” and his tendency to drop china dishes, lose his periwig, see ghosts, and jump into water fully clothed. 1 But, for all of his seeming silliness, Smollett’s orphan participates in serious conceptual debates concerning the social position of the orphan and his or her social mobility. 2 For example, one of Clinker’s most remarkable practices is his Methodist preaching, which is successful enough to gather attentive crowds, entertain criminals held in prison, and almost convert the women in the family he serves. 3 While Clinker’s Methodism has been noted, the inspiration for Clinker’s enthusiastic preaching has been left little analyzed: Clinker explains that his “devotion” had been “kindled” by George Whitefield, and that “he was confirmed in this new way, by the preacher’s sermons, which he had bought and studied with great attention” (139–40). Whitefield, a British minister credited with starting the Great Awakening in America, was famed for his mesmerizing sermons and equally famed for his founding of an orphan-house in Savannah, Georgia; indeed, the two are inextricably linked, as Whitefield preached in order to inspire donations to his orphanage. Whitefield ensured that his activities would be admired by authoring a series of journals that traced his itinerant preaching across England and America and charted the growth of his orphanage. Clinker not only copies Whitefield’s preaching, but mimics his international travel by attending to the Bramble family as they journey through Wales, England, and Scotland. At the heart of Smollett’s novel, then, is a fictional orphan who is inspired by a factual orphan-sponsor, translates that famed orphan-sponsor’s religious enthusiasm into all manner of comic bodily excesses, and mimics that orphan-sponsor’s itinerant preaching in his own picaresque-like journey. In its depiction of Clinker, Smollett’s novel taps into a larger cultural understanding of the importance of the orphan as a figure of possibility; Smollett’s purposely multilayered depiction of the orphan uses that figure to discuss, debate, and depict—often in graphic bodily terms—how the individual’s social mobility, freedom, self-expression, morality, and charity can be practiced.
