The Gaze of the Social Scientist: Scotland as South in Smollett's Humphry Clinker

This chapter examines Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) in terms of the concept of “global south”. In this epistolary novel, a group of five people gathered around Welsh Squire Matthew Bramble travels across the United Kingdom, making their way from London and its satellite bath towns to Edinburgh and Glasgow. It is argued that Smollett fashions the main character Matthew Bramble as an observer of the social and cultural manners of Britons, one whose views are informed by the Scottish Enlightenment concept of sympathy elaborated by Adam Smith and David Hume. In doing so, this chapter contends, Smollett seeks to offer a detached perspective on the advantages and disadvantages experienced by Scotland after the 1707 Act of Union. By having Bramble’s views interact with the more radical ones held by characters like Scottish patriot Lismahago, Smollett is eventually able to convey a complex, multifaceted view of eighteenth-century Scotland as “global south”, meant as a society which stands in a subaltern position to the hegemonic “north” represented by London.