Eric Idle confessed in a recent documentary to a certain pride that the character of Mr. Creosote remains “offensive” and “gross” for audiences thirty years after the release of The Meaning of Life. Tobias Smollett’s notorious exercise in scatology in his novel Peregrine Pickle, “The Feast of the Ancients,” retains its shock value over two hundred years later. Scatological humor of this ilk surpasses the desire only to shock as an end in itself, which suffers from rapidly diminishing returns. In Juvenalian tradition, it exposes varying degrees of corruption and injustice in the starkest and most visceral way, losing little impact over time. Food is the ideal vehicle for Smollett; characters must swallow realities which are hard to stomach, literally as well as physically. This paper focusses on Tobias Smollett’s varying metaphorical uses of degraded and degrading food as literary shorthand for imbalances in power and conflicts between stakeholders in societies in miniature, which are a noteworthy feature of the Smollett novel. This paper will focus mainly, though not exclusively, on the ship’s company in Roderick Random who fight for palatable rations, and the band of would-be Grand Tourists in Peregrine Pickle, who struggle to keep down a classically-inspired meal. It aims to show how Smollett utilizes food to literary and sociopolitical effect, reflecting perceived sources of discord in the Georgian state and the popular artistic and intellectual Enlightenment, respectively.
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