The Expedition of Humphry ClinkerSmollett, T. (Tobias)
General
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
Smollett, T. (Tobias)
Epistolary fiction; Great Britain -- Fiction; Travelers -- Fiction
This is the agreeable potation, extolled by the Londoners, as the finest
water in the universe--As to the intoxicating potion, sold for wine, it
is a vile, unpalatable, and pernicious sophistication, balderdashed with
cyder, corn-spirit, and the juice of sloes. 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 Oporto. 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, till 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
potherbs 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
halfpence, in order to improve their colour; and yet nothing is more
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’s-market; which in fact, is neither lamb nor mutton,
but something betwixt the two, gorged in the rank fens of Lincoln and
Essex, pale, coarse, 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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