Tobias Smollett
Scottish novelist
in full Tobias George Smollett
baptized March 19, 1721, Cardross, Dumbartonshire, Scot.
died Sept. 17, 1771, near Livorno, Tuscany [Italy]
Main
Scottish satirical novelist, best known for his picaresque novels The
Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine
Pickle (1751) and his epistolary novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
(1771).
Smollett came of a family of lawyers and soldiers, Whig in politics
and Presbyterian in religion. In 1727 or 1728 he entered Dumbarton
grammar school, proceeding from there to the University of Glasgow and
apprenticeship to William Stirling and John Gordon, surgeons of that
city. His first biographer states that he “attended the anatomical and
medical lectures,” and, if his first novel, Roderick Random, may be
taken as evidence, he also studied Greek, mathematics, moral and natural
philosophy, logic, and belles lettres. He left the university in 1739
without a degree and went to London, taking with him his play The
Regicide. A year later he was commissioned surgeon’s second mate in the
Royal Navy and appointed to HMS Chichester, which reached Port Royal,
Jam., on Jan. 10, 1741. It is probable that Smollett saw action in the
naval bombardment of Cartagena (now in Colombia). The expedition was
disastrous; he would later describe its horrors in Roderick Random. In
Jamaica he met and was betrothed to—and perhaps there married—an
heiress, Anne Lassells. He returned to London alone to set up as a
surgeon on Downing Street, Westminster, his wife joining him in 1747. He
failed to secure a production of The Regicide, but in 1746, after the
defeat of the Jacobite rebels at Culloden, he wrote his most famous
poem, “The Tears of Scotland.” He had by now moved to cheaper
accommodations in Chapel Street, Mayfair, no doubt because, despite
litigation, he had managed to recover only a fraction of his wife’s
considerable dowry, which was invested in land and slaves. It was in
Chapel Street that he wrote Advice and Reproof, verse satires in the
manner of the Roman poet Juvenal.
In 1748 Smollett published his novel The Adventures of Roderick
Random, in part a graphic account of British naval life at the time, and
also translated the great picaresque romance Gil Blas from the French of
Alain-René Lesage. In 1750 he obtained the degree of M.D. from Marischal
College, Aberdeen. Later in the year he was in Paris, searching out
material for The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. This work contains a
great comic figure in Hawser Trunnion, a retired naval officer who,
though living on dry land, insists on behaving as though he were still
on the quarterdeck of one of his majesty’s ships at sea.
In 1752 he published “An Essay on the External Use of Water,” an
attack on the medicinal properties of the waters of a popular English
health resort, Bath (he would resume the attack in his later novel The
Expedition of Humphry Clinker). The essay made him many enemies and
little money. His financial difficulties were intensified by his
generosity in lending money to a hack writer called Peter Gordon, who
employed legal stratagems to avoid repayment. Smollett came to blows
with Gordon and his landlord and was sued by them for £1,000 and £500,
respectively, on charges of trespass and assault. In the event, Smollett
was required to pay only small damages. He was now living at Monmouth
House, Chelsea, where he was host to such leading literary figures as
the authors Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, as well as to the actor
David Garrick and John Hunter, a famous surgeon and anatomist. On
Sundays, if one may take a passage in Peregrine Pickle as
autobiographical, Smollett threw his house open to “unfortunate brothers
of the quill,” whom he regaled with “beer, pudding, and potatoes, port,
punch, and Calvert’s entire butt-beer.” He himself seems to have been a
man irascible, pugnacious, infinitely energetic, courageous, and
generous.
The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (now, with The History and
Adventures of an Atom, the least regarded of his novels) appeared in
1753. It sold poorly, and Smollett was forced into borrowing from
friends and into further hack writing. In June 1753 he visited Scotland
for the first time in 15 years; his mother, it is said, recognized him
only because of his “roguish smile.” Back in London, Smollett set about
a commitment to translate Don Quixote from the Spanish of Miguel de
Cervantes, and this translation was published in 1755. Smollett was
already suffering from tuberculosis. Early in 1756 he became editor of
The Critical Review, a Tory and church paper, at the same time writing
his Complete History of England, which was financially successful. This
work relieved the financial pressure that he had felt all his adult
life. A year later, his farce The Reprisal: or, The Tars of Old England
was produced at Drury Lane and brought him a profit of almost £200. In
1758 he became what today might perhaps be called general editor of
Universal History, a compilation of 58 volumes; Smollett himself wrote
on France, Italy, and Germany. His friendship with the politician John
Wilkes enabled him to secure the release of Francis Barber, Samuel
Johnson’s black servant, from the press-gang. But a libel on Admiral Sir
Charles Knowles in The Critical Review led to Smollett’s being sentenced
to a fine of £100 and three months’ imprisonment in the King’s Bench
Prison. He seems to have lived there in some comfort and drew on his
experiences for his novel The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves
(1762), which was serialized in The British Magazine, of which Smollett
became editor in 1760.
Two years later he became editor of The Briton, a weekly founded to
support the prime minister John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute. He was also
writing an eight-volume work entitled The Present State of all Nations,
and he had begun a translation, in 36 volumes, of the varied works of
the French writer Voltaire. Smollett was now seriously ill; attempts to
secure a post as physician to the army in Portugal and as British consul
in Marseille or Madrid were fruitless. In 1763 the death of his only
child, Elizabeth, who was 15 years old, overwhelmed him “with
unutterable sorrow.” He severed his connection with The Critical Review
and, as he said, “every other literary system,” retiring with his wife
to France, where he settled at Nice.
In 1766 Smollett published Travels Through France and Italy, his one
nonfiction work that is still read. It is a satire on both tourists and
those who batten on them, and its jaundiced version of traveling on the
Continent led to Smollett’s appearance as the splenetic Smelfungus in
Laurence Sterne’s novel A Sentimental Journey (1768). He returned to
England in that year, visited Scotland, and at Christmas was again in
England (at Bath), where he probably began what is his finest work, The
Expedition of Humphry Clinker, an epistolary novel that recounts the
adventures of a family traveling through Britain. In 1768, steadily
weakening in health, he retired to Pisa, Italy. During the autumn of
1770 he seems to have written the bulk of Humphry Clinker, which was
published on June 15, 1771.
Smollett is not the equal of his older contemporaries, the novelists
Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, but he is unrivaled for the pace
and vigour that sustain his comedy. He is especially brilliant in the
rendering of comic characters in their externals, thus harking back to
the manner of the Jacobean playwright Ben Jonson and looking forward to
that of the novelist Charles Dickens. By modern criteria, his art as a
satirical novelist is defective, his model being the “picaresque” novel,
relating loosely linked episodes in the life of a rogue hero. But his
panoramic picture of the life of his times is surpassed only by that
given by Henry Fielding, while his account of conditions in the Royal
Navy is especially valuable.
Walter E. Allen
