SMOLLETT, TOBIAS GEORGE (I 72 I—I 7 71) , British novelist, was born in Dalquhurn, Dumbartonshire. His father Archibald (youngest son of Sir James, the laird of Bonhill, a zealous Whig judge and promoter of the Union of 1707) died in 1723. Tobias was sent to Dumbarton school, and, after qualifying for a learned profession at Glasgow university, was apprenticed in 1736 to a surgeon in that city. At the age of eighteen he crossed the border to conquer England with a tragedy, The Regi cide, based on Buchanan's description of the death of James I.
The story of the journey is told in the early chapters of Roder ick Random. The failure of the play—certainly the worst thing he ever wrote—became the stock grievance of Smollett's life. No one would read it, and he would have starved had he not secured a position as surgeon's mate on H.M.S. "Cumberland," and served during the whole of the siege of Cartagena in 1741. The fleet returned to Jamaica, where Smollett fell in love with the daughter of a planter, Nancy Lascelles, whom he married on returning to England. He set up as a surgeon in Downing street, but with little success, and he soon began to devote his attention to writing fiction. His first novel Roderick Random (1748) re counts a life of varied adventure in the company of a servant. The author draws on his adventures on the English highway and in the cockpit of a king's ship, revealing the seaman to such pur pose that, as Scott says, every one who has written about the navy since seems to have copied more from Smollett than from nature. There was no author's name on the title of the two small volumes of Random; it was actually translated into French as being by Fielding. But Smollett went to Paris to ratify his fame, and published his derelict play as "by the author of Roderick Random." Smollett still designed to combine medicine with authorship, for in June 175o he obtained the degree of M.D.; and after a visit to Paris published in 1751 his second novel, The Adven tures of Peregrine Pickle, which was a resounding success, both in England and France. It is no exaggeration to say that the tideway of subsequent fiction is strewn on every hand with the dissecta membra of Smollett's happy phrases and farcical inven tions; but this novel is marred to an even greater extent by inter polations and personal attacks than its predecessor. His third
novel, Ferdinand Count Fathom, appeared in 1753, by which time the author, after a final trial at Bath, had abandoned medi cine for letters, and had settled down at Monmouth House, Chelsea. The squalor and irony of the piece repel the reader, but it is Smollett's greatest feat of invention, and was the model of all the mystery and terror school of fiction commencing with Radcliffe and Lewis. It was not particularly remunerative, and his expenses seem always to have been profuse. He was a great frequenter of taverns and entertained largely.
To sustain these expenses Smollett organized big and sale able "standard" works for the booksellers, contracting them out to his "myrmidons." He edited Don Quixote, a new literary periodical the Critical (Feb. 1756) by way of corrective to Griffith's Monthly Review, and organized a standard library His tory of England, and a seven-volume compendium of Voyages, for which he wrote a special narrative of the siege of Cartagena. In 1758 he projected and partly wrote a vast Universal History, and in January 1760 he brought out the first number of a new sixpenny magazine, the British, to which he contributed a serial, the mediocre Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves. By these Herculean labours as a compiler Smollett must have amassed a considerable sum. For the extravaganza, The Reprisal, or the Tars of Old England he received £200. In 1762 Smollett edited the Briton. He had already been ridiculed, insulted, fined and im prisoned in the Marshalsea. He was now to support the North British favourite of George III. in the press, not we may reason ably suppose without substantial reward. Yet after incurring all this unpopularity, Smollett was thrown over by his chief, Lord Bute, on the ground that his paper did more to invite attack than to repel it.