Humphry Clinker: Character Analysis

Tobias Smollett’s final novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, follows five letter writes as they travel through England and Scotland for a vacation. Throughout the picaresque novel, characters are constantly thrown into situations as they venture into town after town, meeting new characters and creating comedic episodes. At the time Smollett was writing this novel, the Age of Sensibility was coming to fruition. Sensibility is a style of writing which relied heavily on the sensitivity to feelings and sensations of the world around the author or characters. The characters in Humphry Clinker express their feelings through writing letters to their friends or acquaintances back home. Tabitha Bramble and her maid Winifred Jenkins stand out as

She’s coming from a scandal at her boarding school, and is considered to be the most inexperienced of the group. Her sensibility is much more emotion driven, as is usually attributed to women. Lydia faints in Hot Wells while she and her uncle are entertaining a man who reveals himself to be her suitor Wilson. Her letter declares “I was so surprised, and so frightened that I fainted away” the emotion of her suitor finding her despite the overwhelming objections were too much for Lydia to handle and thus she fainted (32). She has Win Jenkins follow Wilson after he leaves, and Lydia’s letter to her friend is filled with expressions that convey her sensibility for emotion. “If there is nothing unsuitable in the match, they won’t be so cruel as to thwart my intentions- O what happiness would then be my portion!”, her language suggests the acute emotion that she is feeling upon the meeting of the man she loves (33). The less Lydia sees of Wilson, the more depressive her writing becomes. Approximately three weeks after her episode at Hot Wells, Lydia writes to her same companion “I begin to be visited by strange fancies, and to have some melancholy doubts; which, however, it would be ungenerous to harbor without further inquiry” (68). She is plagued by her love for Wilson, and it affects her mental being in the way it would only the most sensitive