A Film Canon

Peregrine Pickle plays like a far cruder response to Tom Jones' central challenge - to build audience identification with a potentially unsympathetic, or at least not wholly sympathetic, protagonist. However, whereas Fielding builds identification cumulatively, gradually integrating a series of potentially alienating traits and acts into Jones' sympathetic centrality, Smollett builds it cyclically, presenting his hero in alternating states of reprehensibility and heroism, empowerment and abjection, virility and emasulcation, all of which correspond to the various intellectual (ancients and moderns, law and justice) and geographical (England and the Continent, city and country) dichotomies around which the narrative is somewhat simplistically structured. That said, the most basic mechanism of identification - repeatedly making the reader privy to a trick, scheme or strategem which Pickle is playing upon some unsuspecting victim - is also, for the first third, the most profound, insofar as Smollett injects a surplus of cruelty into these acts that pathologises identification itself, imbuing all Pickle's subsequent 'redemptions' with a mild distaste. Unfortunately, these schemes gradually degenerate from a physical to a discursive register, eventually settling into a pale imitation of Fielding's more self-consciously moralistic exposure of affectation. Combined with two interpolated, extensive, and irrelevant 'memoirs', this repetition and attenuation precludes exactly the kind of tight narrative structure required to rein in Smollett's turgid, if delightfully misanthropic, prose style, as will occur in Humphry Clinker. In the end, it feels as if Pickle's 'narrative' is little more than a pretext for Smollett to attack and satirise every eighteenth-century institution - and personage (the proliferation of disguised names making the memoirs especially confusing) - that has offended him, with the result that Fielding's elegant compromise between panoramic and microcosmic registers is frequently subordinated to the latter, generating a tedious, indiscriminate sprawls of legal, political and autobiographical detritus.