Smollett, Tobias (1721–1771)

SMOLLETT, TOBIAS (1721–1771)

SMOLLETT, TOBIAS (1721–1771), Scottish novelist, translator, and periodicals editor. Smollett is perhaps best known as the author of the hugely successful picaresque novel Roderick Random (1747), as an editor of the monthly magazine The Critical Review, and the patriotic periodical The Briton (1762–1763), and the xenophobic travel book Travels through France and Italy (1766), which details his own experiences of traveling in Europe. He was born Tobias George Smollett in Dumbarton, the son of a Scottish laird, attended Glasgow University to read medicine, and was subsequently apprenticed to a surgeon to learn the trade. In 1741 he traveled to the West Indies as a surgeon's mate in the navy, where he met his wife, Anne Lassells, the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner in Jamaica. He returned with her to London in 1744 to establish himself as a surgeon in Downing Street.

Smollett's career as a surgeon did not flourish. In order to supplement his income, and to satisfy an urge that had inspired him to produce the play The Regicide in 1739, he undertook editing, translating, and, subsequently, writing. In 1746 he produced "The Tears of Scotland," a poem in support of Scottish tolerance after the Jacobite uprising of 1745. As a Scot and lifelong supporter of the British union, Smollett was not afraid to court controversy or to be outspoken in his opinions. Indeed, he declared in the preface to his first novel that his "avowed purpose" in writing was to arouse "generous indignation against cruelty and injustice" wherever possible.

Smollett anonymously published his first novel, Roderick Random (2 volumes), in 1747 to enormous public and critical approval. As a picaresque tale, a form that Smollett himself believed to be best for a novel, Roderick Random has a rambling structure detailing the life of a hapless, outcast naval surgeon seeking his fortune and a wife, who ultimately emerges at the end of the novel wealthy and married, despite an eventful and at times violent series of events. Following Smollett's success with this novel, he wrote two more tales in a similar style, including The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (2 volumes, 1751 and 1758), which contained many savage caricatures of contemporary figures, including Henry Fielding; and The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (2 volumes, 1753), the story of a charming but treacherous con man in search of a fortune. Neither of these tales enjoyed the success of his first novel, however, leading him to engage in other literary ventures in addition to writing novels.

In 1755, Smollett translated Cervantes's seventeenth-century romance Don Quixote, and, in the following year, cofounded The Critical Review, which, though not a commercial success, ran for seven years and placed Smollett at the heart of literary London. In the late 1750s, Smollett turned his attention to nonfiction and published A Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages (7 volumes, 1756) and his own A Complete History of England (4 volumes, 1757–1758), which sold well and made him financially secure. His fourth novel, The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, appeared serially in The British Magazine in 1760.

In the 1760s, after he had suffered with consumption (tuberculosis) for a number of years, Smollett's health began to deteriorate. Despite his ill health, however, he embarked on a new project, The Briton, a pro-union periodical that he wrote and edited in the years 1762–1763, but that was eventually killed off by a rival publication, the satirical North Briton, edited by John Wilkes. In the same year that his periodical was taken off the press, his only child died suddenly, and Smollett headed for France and Italy, hoping the change of climate would restore both his mind and body. Returning to London in 1765, he published the story of his journey through Europe as a series of anonymous letters in Travels through France and Italy (1766), a book that was condemned for its xenophobic portrayal of the French, and prompted Laurence Sterne to rename its author Smelfungus in 1768, but also admired for its frank reporting of his own experiences and his detailed observations of life in the French town of Nice. Smollett returned to France in 1768. Before his death in Livorno in 1771 he wrote and published two further novels, the anonymous and bizarre The History and Adventures of an Atom (1786) and, perhaps his most respected work, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), a comic epistolary novel that tells the story of a family's tour through Great Britain.

See also Burney, Frances ; Defoe, Daniel ; English Literature and Language ; Fielding, Henry ; Jacobitism ; Scotland ; Sensibility ; Sterne, Laurence .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom. Edited by Paul-Gabriel Boucé. London, 1990.

——. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in which are included Memoirs of a Lady of Quality. Edited by James L. Clifford. London and New York, 1969.

——. The Adventures of Roderick Random. Edited by David Blewett. London, 1995.

——. A Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages. 7 vols. London, 1756.

——. A Compleat History of England. 4 vols. London, 1757–1758.

——. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Edited by Angus Ross. London, 1977; reprinted 1985.

——. Fénelon's Adventures of Telemachus. 2 vols. London, 1776. Translation.

——. The History and Adventures of an Atom. Edited by O. M. Brack. Athens, Ga., 1989.

——. Le Sage's Adventures of Gil Blas. 4 vols. London, 1749. Translation.

——. The Letters of Tobias Smollett. Edited by Lewis M. Knapp. Oxford, 1970.

——. The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves. Edited by Peter Wagner. London, 1988.

——. Poems, Plays, and The Briton. Edited by O. M. Brack. Athens, Ga., 1993.

——. The Present State of all Nations. 8 vols. London, 1764.

——. Travels through France and Italy 2 vols. London, 1766.

Smollett, Tobias, with Thomas Francklin. The Works of M. de Voltaire. 38 vols. London, 1761–1774. Translation.

Secondary Sources

Bourgeois, Susan. Nervous Juyces and the Feeling Heart: The Growth of Sensibility in the Novels of Tobias Smollett. New York, 1986.

Douglas, Aileen. Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body. Chicago, 1995.

Grant, Damian. Tobias Smollett: A Study in Style. Manchester, U.K. and Totowa, N.J., 1977.

Kelly, Lionel, ed. Tobias Smollett: The Critical Heritage. London, 1987.

Rousseau, G. S. Tobias Smollett: Essays of Two Decades. Edinburgh, 1982.

Spector, Robert Donald. Smollett's Women: A Study in an Eighteenth-Century Masculine Sensibility. Westport, Conn., 1994.

Wagoner, Mary. Tobias Smollett: A Checklist of Editions of his Work and an Annotated Secondary Bibliography. New York, 1984.

Alison Stenton