Scottish Authors > Tobias George Smollett Novelist 1721-1771

Smollett was a less prolific novelist than Scott, and his books are not as readable as Stevenson's, but he was the first Scottish novelist and he has never been surpassed. Indeed, Smollett can be said to have prefigured the Scottish fiction of the nineties of the twentieth century - the fiction of Irvine Welsh and his contemporaries, descriptive of low life as it really is. It is unlikely that critics nowadays would malign an author for satire which made readers writhe, or for the grotesqueness of his imagery, but Smollett was upbraided for this, and, even, for his use of researchers in wide-ranging works of non-fiction. Smollett was an original whose worth has rarely been properly acknowledged, not least because his contemporaries, Fielding, Richardson and Sterne, were in the same class as he was, but also because he was an Anglo-Scot, whose countrymen have never identified with him in the same way as they identified, for example with the other exile Stevenson.

He was born in 1721 at Dalquhurn in Renton, Dumbartonshire, and educated at the University of Glasgow. His early life was strongly hinted at in his first successful comic novel, Roderick Random (1748); both his learned schoolmaster in Dumbarton, and his first employer in Glasgow are satirised in it. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a Glasgow doctor, and lived in a back attic in Gibson's Land in the merchant city of the Glasgow tobacco barons.

He became a surgeon's mate in the navy and, later, in 1744, began practice as a surgeon in the London of Johnson, Garrick and Handel. His first literary work was an historical play called The Regicide about James I which he conceived in Glasgow. It was refused by Garrick, who was never quite forgiven, and others.

He then turned to political satire, but it was his picaresque novels that made him famous. Roderick Ransom is a vigorous, coarse comedy about sailors' lives during the British expedition against Cartagena in the West Indies in the War of Jenkins' Ear of 1739-41 (one of the most farcical episodes in British history). It places Smollett in the first rank as a novelist of the sea. He met and married his beloved wife in the West Indies, and encountered Robert Graham of Gartmore, a lifelong friend, there. The expedition to Cartagena later landed him in gaol for libel, when Admiral Knowles published a pamphlet defending his competence in a disastrous raid on Rochefort, and Smollett drew attention to his defects in one of the finest pieces of sustained invective in the English language.

Smollett was his own worst enemy and succeeded in offending many people. Never quite well, he had a short temper and was free with plain insults, and, worse, bitter irony. He quarrelled with Rich, the manager of Covent Garden and, as a consequence, his masque Alceste to music by Handel was never performed. The composer is reported as saying "Dat Scot is ein tam fool; I could have made his vork immortal!". However, his friends included Dr Alexander Carlyle and Dr John Moore, his first biographer, both of whom found much to delight them in the irascible author.

Several other episodic novels, full of grotesque characters and broad satire, among them The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), a well-regarded satire on the Grand Tour, and Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) came next and were so successful that Smollett abandoned his practice of surgery. As a doctor he was a great advocate of spas and one of the first to promote sea bathing. Indeed, he was an early tourist, and it is a matter for great regret that he did not write up his occasional visits to Scotland because what is often regarded as his finest work is Travels in France and Italy (1766), a witty and perceptive journal of a tour in search of good health late in life.

However, his last novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), written initially during the last two years of his life, told in a series of letters, is about the travels of a family through England and Scotland and deals with sex, politics and religion in resorts for gentlefolk. The Scottish passages are probably based on his long visit in 1766 when he saw his sister in Edinburgh, and his old friends in Edinburgh and Glasgow. They are particularly funny and display his real affection for his native land. There is a shrewd portrait, too, of "Doctor Smollett" in Chelsea, surrounded by minor authors and hangers-on.

Smollet's comic inventiveness influenced Sheridan, Dickens and Thackeray, and Scott paid tribute to his impact on him, pointing out Smollett's ability to make readers laugh out loud. Smollett's other books include a Complete history of England (1757-58), which was popular and financially successful, The Present state of all nations, a world geography, notable for its time, and The History and adventures of an atom (1769), a coarse satire on English public affairs.

Smollett played a part in Britain's first Scottish administration, that of the Earl of Bute. After editing the Critical review (1756-63), he produced The Briton (1762-63) a government propaganda sheet, which more than met its match in the opposition's North Briton, edited by Wilkes. He also translated the French picaresque romance Gil Blas by Le Sage and the Spanish classic Don Quixote. His poetry includes The Tears of Scotland, a heartfelt lament for Culloden, and his Ode to Leven Water, celebrating the famous river which flowed past his childhood home.

Smollett died an invalid near Leghorn in Italy in 1771. His monument in Renton, a fine Tuscan column with a Latin inscription partly by Johnson, is worth visiting as it is the focal point of a number of sites associated with him described mainly in Humphry Clinker. His sister's house at the head of St John Street in Edinburgh has a plaque. Smollett's Scotland by Louis Stott deals with these and other localities. The most recent biography is Louis Knapp's Tobias Smollett (1949). Smollett's principal novels are readily available in paperback.

Louis Stott

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