Roderick Random, Rasselas and the Currents of Fancy

Abstract

At the end of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s eccentric hero exiles himself not only from his countrymen but from all of humankind. Having been a self-styled ambassador between radically different cultures, and a sometimes open-minded student of moral relativism, he becomes instead a mad hermit who, in refusing the society of his fellow humans, also severs the potential for commercial and cultural exchanges between Britain and the countries he has discovered. Swift’s satire reverses the enlightenment teleology in which patriotism, commerce and humanity converge. As mid-century social conservatives, Smollett and Johnson take up this inverted trajectory in the context of both official and popular attitudes to war and imperialism in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the era that saw Britain drawn into several international conflicts over trade and territory, including the War of Jenkins’s Ear and the Seven Years War. Neither, like Swift, sees mercantilist globalism as incurably tied to the corruption of humanitarian principles and ultimately of both psychic and social order. In fact, Smollett identifies a strong balance of trade as the source of security for Britain’s social, as well as economic, interests, while Johnson sees in commerce the potential for the growth of cosmopolitan feeling. But, like Swift, both recognize a breed of so-called ‘patriotic’ moderns with little but their own interests at heart as the regrettable progeny of imperial and commercial expansion.