Smollett

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

TOBIAS GEORGE, an English novelist, born in March, 1721, the son of Archibald Smollett, of Dalquhurn, Dumbartonshire, Scotland, and his wife, Barbara Cunningham. He was educated in Dumbarton and at Glasgow University, where he studied medicine. After some years of an apprenticeship with a Dr. John Gordon, he went to London, where he sought to find patronage for a tragedy his, he shipped as surgeon on H.M.S. Cumberland, and served in the operations against Carthagena. He accompanied the fleet to Jamaica, where he met Nancy Lascelles, a creole beauty, whom he married in England about 1747. Leaving the navy, he settled as a surgeon in Westminster, and became a favorite of the taverns and coffee-houses on account of his talent for story-telling. But he made little of his practice, and, turning to literature, he published in 1758 "Roderick Random," a picaresque novel, modeled on "Gil Blas" and including a good deal of autobiography. It was well received, and its profits enabled him to publish his youthful tragedy, "The Regicide." His second novel, "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle," appeared in 1751, and was even more successful, though it was disfigured by many coarse attacks on his personal enemies, and had an unsympathetic hero. He now made another unsuccessful attime at Bath, but gained save material for future satire, especially on the medical profession. With his return to London in 1753, he gave himself up to literature, and produced "Ferdinand Count Fathom," which shows an increase in power. He spent extravagantly, and in the effort to get money made a lively but inaccurate version of "Don Quixote" (1755). After a visit to Scotland he became the chief director of the new "Critical Review" (1756), the severity of which brought a number of reprisals on his head; and in 1757, he published a "History of England" in four volumes. After a period of hack work for the booksellers, in the course of which he served three months in prison for slandering an admiral in the "Critical Review," he joined the staff of the new "British Magazine" (1760) in which appeared "Sir Launcelot Greaves," a weak imitation of "Don Quixote." Two years later he became editor of the "Briton," a weekly periodical started in defence of Lord Bute, which evoked Wilkes's notorious "North Briton." In 1763, Smollett, having lost his only child, ill, in debt and harassed by enemies, decided to leave England with his wife, and for two years made his home at Nice. After a tour of Italy he returned to London and published his "Travels." A visit to Scotland, where he was made much of in the then brilliant society of Edinburgh, and to Bath, improved his health for a time, and he produced in 1769 his coarse satire, "The History and Adventures of an Atom," dealing with politics in England during the previous fifteen years. At the end of the year he went to seek health at Lucca and Pisa, where he wrote his masterpiece, "Humphrey Clinker." Meantime he was growing weaker, ng weaker, and on Sept. 17, 1771, he died in his villa near Leghorn.