The greatest comedy of letters ever written. Tobias Smollett's final novel presents the same road trip through Georgian England six times over, through six wildly unreliable voices, and the result is magnificent chaos. The hypochondriac Squire Bramble sees gout, fog, and quack doctors everywhere; his sister Tabitha hunts for husbands with alarming urgency; their niece Lydia dreams of romance; and young Jeremy records it all with rakish glee. When the simple, virtuous Humphry Clinker enters their orbit, the family's pretensions crumble into delightful disorder. Each letter contradicts the last, what one celebrates, another deplores, and from these collisions emerges something true about human nature: we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. Smollett's satirical eye spares no one: the aristocracy, the medical profession, the spa-town beau monde, all receive his merciless wit. The body itself becomes comic territory. This is 18th-century literature at its most alive, messy, and funny.
