Smollett, TOBIAS GEORGE, physician, poet, novelist, journalist, historian, was a Dumbartonshire gentleman, belonging to that upper class of Scottish society—the lawyers and landed gentry—to which Sir Walter Scott also belonged. He was educated for the medical profession, but failed to make a living by it. He drifted into literature, and by it he made a precarious living and a lasting name. For the failure of his life in material success he was himself largely to blame. Handsome, upright, generous, of genuine humour, a pleasant companion on occasions, he yielded from his youth to (among other mischievous propensities) the evil habit of epigrammatic sarcasm on one or other of the company he was in. Proud, vindictive, of hot temper and haughty manner, as sensitive as he was satirical, he was a foreordained failure as a doctor, and foredoomed to quarrels, lawsuits, fine and imprisonment, and money difficulties in general as a journalist. The little poetry he wrote was not of great merit. His history was, as David Hume estimated it, a clever superficial review of the subject. It was the novels that made his name, and three of them maintain it.
Smollett was grandson of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, advocate, member of the Scottish parliament, commissioner of the treaty of Union, and judge in the consistorial court. The fourth son of Sir James and his first wife, daughter of Aulay Macaulay of Ardencaple, was Archibald, who, without his father's sanction and without means to support a wife, married Barbara, daughter of Robert Cunningham of Gilbertfield, a young lady of good family but portionless. Sir James assigned to the imprudent couple Dalquhurn, the second house on the estate, and the few fields around it, on which stand now the villages of Alexandria and Renton. The third child of Archibald and Barbara was Tobias George, born at Dalquhurn, birthday not recorded, baptised on Sunday, March 19, 1721. His father died shortly after, and his grandfather in 1731. Sir James and his successor would seem to have behaved with reasonable kindness to the widow, a clever managing woman, and her three orphan children. Smollett went to Dumbarton grammar-school, was taught Latin well by John Love, and distinguished himself by the luxuriance of his boyish satire. He went to Glasgow College, attended arts and medical classes, and while attending them served an apprenticeship to John Gordon, doctor, apothecary, and very worthy man. It was thus he qualified for medical practice. Subsequently, in June 1750, he obtained the degree of M.D. from Marischal College, Aberdeen. In 1739 he went to London and tried to get The Regicide, a Tragedy, put on the stage. He failed, quarrelled with everybody about it, and published it ten years later with a very foolish preface. He romances about the ill-usage he and it underwent in the story of Melopon in Roderick Random. Smollett was appointed surgeon's mate on board the Cumberland, which sailed in 1740 to join Admiral Vernon's fleet, and took part in the unfortunate expedition to Carthagenia in 1741. He describes that expedition in Roderick Random, and also in a Compendium of Voyages and Travels he published in 1756. His temper could not brook the service; he quitted it in the West Indies and tarried a while in Jamaica, where he met Anne Lascelles, the expectant heiress of 'a comfortable, though moderate, estate in the island.' In 1744 he set up house in London, in Downing Street, afterwards in Mayfair, to look for medical practice. He wrote The Tears of Scotland in a coffee-house in 1746. The same year he published Advice, a Satire—his first publication. Next year he published Reproof, a Satire, and married Anne Lascelles. The Adventures of Roderick Random, written autobiographically, appeared anonymously in 1748, and was at once a great success; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu thought the novel was Fielding's. It was heartless to caricature his grandfather as the Old Judge and Mr Gordon as Potion. In 1750 Smollett visited Paris along with Mr Moore—afterwards Dr Moore, novelist, father of Sir John Moore—and met Mark Akenside there. In 1751 was published, written biographically, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. It too had an instant success. The doctor, who gives an entertainment after the manner of the ancients, is a misrepresentation of Dr Akenside, and the laughable account of the feast is a satire on his pedantic affectation of Athenian manners. Smollett was paid for inserting 'The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, Frances Hawes, Lady Vane,' which are a blot on the novel. He now tried to set up in Bath as a medical man, publishing An Essay on the External Use of Water; it was his last attempt of the kind, and it failed. Returning to London to live by his pen, he fixed his abode in Chelsea, and published The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom in 1753. The robber scene in the Black Forest, from that story of a gambler and swindler, has been the prototype of many such, and is a literary masterpiece. About this time an action was raised in the Court of King's Bench against Smollett for caning a person named Gordon. The verdict was in his favour, but the law-costs embarrassed him. In 1755 his translation of Don Quixote, which is still read, was favourably received. He became in 1756 editor of The Critical Review, a High Church and Tory monthly. Countless troubles to the editor culminated in 1759, when Admiral Knowles brought an action against the Review, and Smollett was fined £100 and sent three months to the King's Bench Prison. In 1756 he also began a Complete History of England from the time of Julius Cæsar's invasion down to 1748. He wrote the four quarto volumes in fourteen months, finishing the work in December 1757. This effort brought on chest disease and a scorbutic affection; he never enjoyed good health again. After coming out of prison he wrote a continuation of the history down to 1764, which is better known than the Complete History; for in Hume and Smollett's History of England the narrative of events from 1689 to 1760 is Smollett's. From all this labour on history he is 'said to have cleared £2000.' In 1757 his farce, Reprisals, or the Tars of Old England, was put on the stage by Garrick. Smollett toiled at compiling a universal history and translating Voltaire. The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, an English Don Quixote, appeared as a serial, 1760-61, in the British Magazine, a sixpenny monthly, and was published separately in 1762. Like all the novels Smollett wrote, it is weak in construction, but lacks neither vivacity nor wit. He edited The Briton, 1762-63, a weekly paper in support of Lord Bute's administration, received no reward, and was routed from the newspaper field by the North Briton, the organ of his former friend, John Wilkes. In April 1763 Elizabeth, his only child, died of consumption. He left England in June, sojourned on the Continent more than two years, and published in 1766 the still readable Travels through France and Italy. The same year he, broken in health, visited Scotland—his second visit since he left as a lad—and while in Edinburgh stayed with his mother and widowed sister. His health benefited by this journey, but on his return south it broke down again. He left England in 1768 to seek recovery in a warmer climate. He had the year before solicited a consulship at Nice or Leghorn—the only favour he ever asked from government—was refused it, and went to live in Italy, relying on his wife's small and always uncertain income and on his pen. He wrote the Ode to Independence about this time. The History of the Adventures of an Atom, a prose satire, in which political leaders are broadly caricatured under fictitious names, was published in 1769. In a village, called Monte Novo, near Leghorn, Smollett wrote, in weakness and much pain, the last and best of his novels, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, written in epistolary form. The 'Ode to Leven Water' occurs in it. It was published in 1771; and Smollett just lived to hear the first rumours of its success. He died, September 17, 1771, aged fifty-one, and was buried in the English cemetery, Leghorn. If he had lived four years longer he would have inherited the family estates; as it happened, he left his widow quite unprovided for. Her small income from the West Indies by and by failed entirely, and there was a benefit performance in the Theatre Royal of Edinburgh in her behalf when she was destitute twelve years after his death. The novels which have become classics are the three in which Smollett himself is adumbrated as, respectively, the Scottish Roderick Random, the English Peregrine Pickle, and the Welsh Matthew Bramble.
Plays and Poems, with Memoir (1 vol. 12mo. 1784). Miscellaneous Works, first collected by David Ramsay of the Edinburgh Evening Courant; humorous frontispieces by Rowlandson; meagre life (6 vols. 8vo. Edin. 1790; does not contain Adventures of an Atom).
Miscellaneous Works, with Memoir, by Robert Anderson, M.D., carefully edited (6 vols. 8vo. Glasgow, 1796); Expedition to Carthage added to 2d edition (6th ed. 1820). Works, with Memoir, by John Moore, M.D. (8 vols. 8vo. Lond. 1797), carelessly edited; memoir valuable owing to personal intimacy. Miscellaneous Works, with Memoir, by Thos. Roscoe (1 vol. large 8vo. Lond. 1840; many editions—latest, 1878; New York, 1857, 6 vols. 12mo.). Sir W. Scott's Biographical Prefaces, published separately (2 vols. 12mo. Paris, 1825). Life and Selections, by Robert Chambers, LL.D. (1867). Life, by D. Hannay ('Great Writers' series, 1887). Works, carefully selected—the three classical novels, the plays, the poems—with Life and Notes by the present writer; Notes fill up blanks left by Smollett (1877). See also Hazlitt's Comic Writers, Thackeray's Humourists, and Life by Oliphant Smeaton (1897).