The Tobias Smollett Tricentennial

Born 300 years ago, the great Scottish author, editor, satirist, historian, poet, and surgeon Tobias Smollett (1721-1771). To place him the scheme of things: he comes after Swift and Defoe (whose gifts he sort of combines in his own writings); was a rough contemporary (though younger) of Fielding,Sterne, and Dr. Johnson; was slightly older than Goldsmith; and influenced later figures like Thackeray, Dickens, and Eliot.

Unusual for the time, and still pretty unusual though hardly unknown, Smollett was by training originally a medical doctor. He was a naval surgeon for many years, saw action in the Caribbean, his home for a time. While in the islands, he married the daughter of a wealthy Jamaican landowner, thereby acquiring property, and unfortunately, slaves. He incorporated some of his real-life adventures, recounted humorously, in his first novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), a picaresque and entertaining romp that firmly established him as one of the major writers of his age. A distinguishing features of his writing is its ribaldry. In later years he would translate and edit editions of both Cervantes and Voltaire — there are strong elements of those authors in his writing, along with Swift’s. He goes much bluer than contemporaries like Fielding and Goldsmith, sometimes to a startling degree. His subsequent novels were The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, (1762), The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769), The Expedition of Humphry Clink (1771).

Meanwhile, the success of Roderick Random allowed for the 1749 publishing of his tragic play The Regicide; or, James the First, of Scotland, penned a decade earlier. In 1757, his comedy The Reprisal; or, The Tars of Old England became the only one of his plays to be produced.

Smollett was the editor of David Hume’s four volume History of England, published 1757-58, and added his own, fifth volume, published in sections 1760-65. His other best known non-fiction work was Travels Through France and Italy (1766) which chronicles his and his wife’s continental peregrinations following the death of their only child, a teenage daughter. It functions secondarily as a humor work, somewhat at Smollett’s expense, as he is so nasty and xenophobic in all his observations and dealings with the people he meets along the way! Smollett also edited several magazines, wrote other historical works, and minor poems and satires. he clearly had enough grasp of French and Spanish to translate from those languages, and also spoke Scottish Gaelic.

For 14 further Scottish scribes go here.