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Chapter 3 explores what François Ewald has called the “insurantial imaginary,” the ways in which the technology of insurance shaped imaginative writing in the eighteenth century. Though the examples here are primarily from fiction, the chapter also looks at serial fictions that were published in the newspapers that were issued by London insurance companies, serials that thematize the issues of risk and the aleatory that insurance technology was designed to mitigate. The chapter also discusses the mid-century novels of Tobias Smollett as theorizing the comparative riskiness of people and things, a comparison that was becoming particularly urgent as the slave trade made the distinction between the human person and an article of property a matter that insurance law had to determine.

This chapter explores the current image of mid-eighteenth-century fiction, considering the work of Tobias Smollett. No author sits less comfortably with, especially the emphasis on the politeness and sensibility of mid-century British culture, and no author is less amenable to feminist perspectives, than Smollett. Closer attention to this most unlikable author provides a better understanding of some of the most confounding incidents in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and early sentimental fiction. The chapter then examines Smollett's major novel, Peregrine Pickle (1751), a text that moves almost systematically through the everyday comic situations of its age. Every season throughout the 1750s and 1760s brought ten or twelve new ‘lives’ and ‘histories’, each of them using a skeletal plot and a rudimentary central character to unify a string of broad comic incidents. These texts were often called ramble novels, after the names of so many central characters and their careless progress through the world.

This chapter considers the literary representation of union by way of three case studies: Jonathan Swift’s ‘The Story of the Injured Lady’ (written 1707, published 1746), Thomas Finn’s ‘The Painter Cut’ (1810), and Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771). Their polemical energy notwithstanding, the allegories of Swift and Finn also display tensions and articulate contradictions typifying the eighteenth century’s figurations of union. These complications may be explained in part as defences against possible prosecution, but they also imply mixed feelings about nationalist commitment, and an awareness of the conceptual or practical incoherence of unitary national identity. Smollett takes such tendencies to their extreme in his masterpiece Humphry Clinker, which juxtaposes multiple conflicting perspectives on union, and plays ironically on the anti-union rhetoric of Fletcher of Saltoun. He fashions the novel, a generation before Scott, as a genre uniquely equipped to address national identity in all its mobility and multiplicity.

This chapter looks at the novel in the 1750s. The genre had started the decade with its reputation riding high on the remarkable success of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748–9), Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random (1748), and especially Tom Jones (1749) by Henry Fielding. In the immediate aftermath of the last work, it was almost obligatory for other fiction writers to pay tribute to the great Fielding in their prefaces. However, the trade in new fiction remained in a drought. The average over the 1750s was around twenty-three new novels per year, ranging from a high of thirty in 1754 to a low of sixteen in 1758, compared with an average twenty-eight per annum for the 1760s.