Tobias Smollett

Scottish · 1721 to 1771

Born at Dalquhurn, on the River Leven in present-day West Dunbartonshire, Scotland, and baptised on 19 March 1721, Tobias George Smollett was the fourth son of Archibald Smollett, laird of Bonhill, who died when the boy was about five. He was educated at Dumbarton Grammar School and the University of Glasgow, where he trained as a surgeon. In 1739 he walked to London carrying a tragedy, The Regicide, which no one would stage; failing the theatre, he took a commission as a naval surgeon aboard HMS Chichester and sailed to the West Indies, serving through the disastrous 1742 assault on Cartagena, a misery he later poured into his fiction. He married a Jamaican heiress, Anne Lascelles, and set up a London practice. The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), a brawling, semi-autobiographical picaresque, made his name, followed by The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) and The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753). He translated Don Quixote (1755), edited The Critical Review, and served three months in prison for a libel against an admiral. His long, lucrative A Complete History of England (1757-1765) repaired his finances. After the death of his only child, Elizabeth, at fifteen, he travelled abroad in failing health and wrote Travels Through France and Italy (1766), whose splenetic temper earned Laurence Sterne's nickname for him, Smelfungus. It was Smollett who dubbed Samuel Johnson "that Great Cham of literature." His last and finest book, the epistolary comedy The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, appeared in 1771. He died that September near Livorno, Italy, worn down by an intestinal illness, at the age of fifty, and was buried in the Old English Cemetery there.