Find in Library

The clergyman is a central figure of the eighteenth-century English novel, whether as a theoretician of laughter or as a character confronted with the laughter of others. Latitudinarian sermon-writers like Isaac Barrow drew a limit between acceptable, legitimate laughter, based on the idea of ridicule, and more subversive forms of laughter, whose targets are the hunchbacks and cripples of jestbook humour as well as ‘persons of high dignity’ (Barrow). Novelists like Fielding, Smollett, Sterne and Goldsmith explore narrative situations in which men of the cloth are confronted with derisive laughter. They do so not so much to indulge a personal, anticlerical animosity against the profession as to explore the limits of a humour that is, very often, the flirtation with a moral taboo. Each novelist offers his own personal narrative treatment of the topos of the derided parson, ranging from third-person theatrical representation to first-person introspection, remaining always careful, paradoxically, to preserve the dignity of the cloth.