Recommendations
Books Like Humphry Clinker
Best books to read after Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett
Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker is the most accessible and most comic of his novels — a multi-perspective epistolary tour of Britain through five very different letter-writers, organized with warmth and affection for the varieties of human nature. These recommendations extend the experience through Smollett's other novels and through epistolary fiction in the eighteenth-century tradition.
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Roderick Random
by Tobias Smollett
Smollett's 1748 picaresque novel about a Scottish physician's adventures across Britain and Europe is the direct predecessor to Humphry Clinker — darker in tone and less genial, but showing the full range of Smollett's satirical and picaresque gifts.
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Peregrine Pickle
by Tobias Smollett
Smollett's 1751 novel about the adventures of Peregrine Pickle is his longest and most ambitious — more savage in its social satire than Humphry Clinker, but equally comprehensive in its portrait of British social life. An essential part of the Smollett reading experience.
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Tom Jones
by Henry Fielding
Fielding's 1749 comic novel is the contemporary rival to Smollett in the eighteenth-century English novel — less satirical, more genial, and organized around a single narrator rather than multiple letter-writers, but equally panoramic in its portrait of English life.
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Les Liaisons Dangereuses
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The French contemporary of Humphry Clinker in the epistolary tradition — both novels use the multiplicity of letter-writers to show the same events from radically different perspectives. Where Smollett's multiple voices are comic, Laclos's are sinister, and the contrast defines the range of what the epistolary form could do.
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A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain
by Daniel Defoe
Defoe's 1724-26 non-fictional tour through Britain is the journalistic predecessor to the fictional tour in Humphry Clinker — the same itinerary, similar social observation, but organized as journalism rather than comic fiction. Reading both gives the fullest portrait of eighteenth-century Britain in prose.
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Notes from a Small Island
by Bill Bryson
Bryson's 1995 account of his farewell tour of Britain — before leaving for America after twenty years in the UK — is the twentieth-century version of Humphry Clinker's comic tour: the same affectionate irritation with Britain's quirks, the same eye for the variety of the English landscape and character.
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Clarissa
by Samuel Richardson
Richardson's monumental epistolary novel is the contemporary rival and contrast to Humphry Clinker in the epistolary tradition — serious, psychologically intense, and tragic where Smollett's novel is comic, light, and happy. Reading both shows the full range of what the form could do in the eighteenth century.
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Pamela
by Samuel Richardson
Richardson's founding epistolary novel is the predecessor to both Smollett's use of the form and Fielding's satirical response to it — the text that made the epistolary novel the dominant form of eighteenth-century English fiction and that provoked the literary debate that produced both Joseph Andrews and Humphry Clinker.
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