Tobias Smollett

1721-1771

Tobias George Smollett, a novelist and a journalist, was born in Dunbartonshire, in WesternScotland. After a grammar-school education, he became a Glasgow surgeon's apprentice, at the age of 15 and attended medical lectures at the University, where he acquired a local reputation as a writer of earthy satires. When he was 18 he sat off for London to try his hand at literature: his stock in trade was the manuscript of a tragedy. The Regicide, which he found, did not excite the London theatre managers. The outbreak of the naval war with Spain in 1739 created a sudden need for ship's doctors and Smollett, momentarily discouraged with literature sailed on Chichester as a surgeon's second mate. After participating in the bloody battle at Cartagena in 1741-1742, he was released where he remained for some time. He returned to England in 1744 with ambitious plans for a medical career, but although he practised for several years both in London and in the neighboring village of Chelsea, he was not a great success as a doctor. Thus he drifted gradually back into literature. In his first novel, "Roderick Random'" (1748), he transformed his naval experiences into vigorous picaresque fiction - the novel was intended, he explained, as "a satire upon mankind": "Peregrine Fickle", another lusty satiric novel, followed in 1751.

The work is a series of episodes concerning the adventures of rascally hero, Peregrine Pickle, on the Continent and in England. Smollett's humor and satiric skill are very much evidence, but the principal merit of the book is in its excellent characterization.

A rapid writer with a family to support. Smollett laboured for thenext 12 years as a journalist and publisher's hack. [23] He was a proprietor and editor of "The Critical Review', and produced a hasty four-volume "History of England". In addition he was responsible for the translation of the writings of Voltaire, a geographical reference work, and several digests of travels.

In 1771 his masterpiece appeared, "The Expedition of Humphry Clincer", a satiric novel in epistolary form, presenting the peripatetic-search for health of an irascible Welsh invalid, Matthew Bramble, who is accompanied on his travels by a comical retinue of relatives and servants. It is primarily Humphry Clinker, that has secured Smollett a permanent place among the other eighteen century masters of fiction, Defoe, Richardson. Fielding and Sterne.