A short life of the author
Tobias Smollett was the most ferocious novelist of the eighteenth century — a writer whose picaresque comedies were filled with beatings, brawls, swindles, seductions, shipwrecks, and bodily functions described with a clinical frankness that shocked polite readers and delighted everyone else. His novels are engines of comic violence and satirical rage, propelled by a furious energy that makes the genteel Richardsonian tradition look anaemic. If Samuel Richardson perfected the novel of sentiment, and Henry Fielding perfected the novel of moral comedy, Smollett perfected the novel of physical experience — the body in all its appetites, indignities, and vulnerabilities.
From Scotland to the Navy
Tobias George Smollett was born in Dunbartonshire, Scotland, in 1721, the grandson of a Whig laird. He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow without taking a degree and in 1739 went to London with a tragedy, The Regicide, that he never managed to have performed — a failure that left him permanently bitter toward theatrical managers and literary patrons. He joined the Royal Navy as a surgeon’s mate and served in the disastrous expedition against Cartagena de Indias in 1741, an experience that furnished him with the naval scenes that are among the finest passages in his fiction.
He settled in London, married Nancy Lascelles (a Jamaican creole heiress), and practised medicine while writing. He received his MD from Marischal College, Aberdeen, in 1750 but was never financially secure from medicine. Writing was his livelihood.
The Picaresque Novels
The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), Smollett’s first novel, was an immediate success. Modelled on Le Sage’s Gil Blas, it follows its Scottish hero through a series of adventures — naval service, quack doctoring, poverty, romantic misadventures, and eventual prosperity — told in a brisk, energetic first-person narrative that draws heavily on Smollett’s own experiences. The naval chapters, which depict the horrifying conditions aboard a man-of-war with the authority of an eyewitness, are among the best maritime writing in English fiction before Patrick O’Brian.
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) is longer, more extravagant, and even more violent. Its hero is a wealthy young man whose practical jokes escalate from schoolboy pranks to acts of genuine cruelty. The novel contains the interpolated “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,” a scandalous autobiographical narrative by Lady Vane that caused a sensation upon publication.
The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) attempted something different — a novel about a genuine villain, a confidence man of Continental origins who preys on English society. The novel failed commercially but is now recognised as an important precursor of the Gothic novel, particularly in its scenes of terror in a dark forest.
Humphry Clinker
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), published three months before Smollett’s death, is his masterpiece and one of the great comic novels in English. It is an epistolary novel — told through the letters of five members of the Bramble family as they travel through England and Scotland — and the multiple perspectives allow Smollett to create a richly comic portrait of British life in which the same events are perceived entirely differently by different characters.
Matthew Bramble, the irascible but warm-hearted Welsh squire, is Smollett’s finest creation — a man whose misanthropy barely conceals a deep benevolence, and whose letters about the filth, noise, and vulgarity of Bath and London are masterpieces of comic invective. The novel’s humour is broader and warmer than anything in Smollett’s earlier fiction, and its structure — the journey as a device for social observation — influenced the development of the English novel from Sterne to Dickens.
Other Work and Influence
Smollett was also a prolific journalist, editor, historian, and translator. His translation of Don Quixote (1755) remained the standard English version for over a century. His History of England (1757–1758) and its continuation were popular though not scholarly. He edited The Critical Review (1756–1763), one of the most influential literary periodicals of the period. His Travels through France and Italy (1766), a cantankerous account of his European journey, provoked Laurence Sterne to satirise him as “Smelfungus” in A Sentimental Journey.
Collecting Smollett
The Adventures of Roderick Random (J. Osborn, London, 1748, 2 volumes) in first edition is a key eighteenth-century novel. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (W. Johnston, London, 1771, 3 volumes) is the masterpiece and the most desirable Smollett title. His translation of Don Quixote (1755) is collected both as a translation and as a fine example of eighteenth-century book production.