Transcribed from Tobias Smollett's " Humphry Clinker " - a hilarious 18th C account of life in the grand metropolis.

Some things ne'r change.

***

With the sharp sensitivity of " a man without skin" Tobias Smollett humorously attacked the frivolity and foibles of eighteenth-century England. Humphrey Clinker is his mirthful tale of a tour by coach and four through cities and countryside. as misadventure follows misadventure, each character reveals his true self by giving his own conflicting view of the incidents, places, and people encountered along the way. The result is an entertaining and realistic picture of that wonderful age when gentlemen duelled, ladies swooned, and servants rose from rags to riches.

**

....continued from the previous post;

... This is the agreeable potion, extolled by the Londoners, as the finest water in the universe - As to the intoxication potion, sold for wine, it is a vile, unpalatable and pernicious sophistication, balderdashed with cyder, corn spirit and the juice of sloves. In an action at law, laid against a carman for having staved a cask of port, it appeared from the evidence of the cooper, that there were not above five gallons of real wine in the whole pipe, which held above a hundred, and even that had been brewed and adulterated by the merchant at Orporto.

The bread I eat in London, is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes; insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.
The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration; but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter than the meal of corn; thus they sacrifice their taste and their health, and the lives of their tender infants, to a most absurd gratification of a mis-judging eye; and the miller or the baker is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession.

The same monstrous depravity appears in their veal, which is bleached by repeated bleedings, and other villainous arts, til there is not a drop of juice left in the body, and the poor animal is paralytic before it dies; so void of all taste, nourishment and savour, that a man might dine as comfortably on a white fricassee of kid -skin gloves, or chip hats from Leghorn.

As they have discharged the natural colour from their bread, their butchers' meat and poultry, their cutlets, ragouts, fricassees and sauces of all kinds; so they insist upon having the complexion of their pot-herbs mended, even at the hazard of their lives.

Perhaps, you will hardly believe they can be so mad as to boil their greens with brass half-pence in order to improve their colour; and yet nothing more is true - Indeed without this improvement in the colour, they have no personal merit. They are produced in an artificial soil; and taste of nothing but the dunghills, from whence they spring.

My cabbage, cauliflower and 'sparagus in the country, are as much superior in flavour to those that are sold in Covent Garden, as my heath mutton is to that of St.James market, which, in fact, is neither lamb nor mutton, but something betwixt the two, gorged in the rank fens of Lincoln and Essex, pale, course, and frowzy - As for the pork, it is an abominable carnivorous animal, fed with horse-flesh and distillers' grains; and the poultry is all rotten, in consequence of a fever, occasioned by the infamous practice of sewing up the gut, that they may be the sooner fattened in coops, in consequence of this cruel retention.

Of the fish, I need say nothing in this hot weather, but that it comes sixty, seventy, fourscore, and a hundred miles by land carriage; a circumstance sufficient without any comment, to turn a Dutchman's stomach......

**

TBC in Part 3 - tune back soon ye bloggers!