The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
A bad-tempered Welsh squire takes a tour of Britain for his health and writes letters about it, while his family and servants write their own accounts of the same journey. The letters disagree with one another, and the comedy comes from the gap between them.
Smollett uses the form to send up Bath, London, Scotland and the new fashion for spas, and he gives the servants letters as vivid as their masters'. Winifred Jenkins's spelling is not just a joke; it is one of the earliest attempts in English fiction to render a working-class voice from the inside.
Public-domain status
First published in 1771. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Tobias Smollett died in 1771, so this work has been free to republish there since 1842.
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