Biography

Of the major 18th-century novelists and satirists, the British author and physician Tobias George Smollett (1721-1771) is most clearly identified with the picaresque tradition of novel writing.

The variety and extent of Tobias Smollett's interests, his phlegmatic Scottish nature, the grossness and bite of his satires, and the keenness of his caricatures distinguish the man and his works. The acts of shocking violence and brutality and the coarseness of language that Smollett incorporated into his novels set him off from the three other principal English novelists of the mid-18th century: Samuel Richardson, best known for his massive and powerful epistolary novel, Clarissa; Henry Fielding, the satirist and novelist of English manners most frequently remembered for Tom Jones; and Laurence Sterne, whose experiments with structure in Tristram Shandy produced a work unique in the fiction of the period. Like his contemporary, friend, and fellow physician Oliver Goldsmith, Smollett earned his living primarily as a professional writer rather than from his medical practice.

Early Life

Smollett was born of a good family in Dunbartonshire, Scotland, on March 19, 1721, the third child of Archibald and Barbara Smollett. He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow during the 1730s, but he did not receive his formal medical degree from Marischal College, Aberdeen, until 1750. After a brief term as an apprentice surgeon in Glasgow in 1739, Smollett moved to London in order to pursue his literary ambitions. Financial necessity led him to take a post as surgeon's mate aboard H.M.S. Chichester in 1740. His grim exposure to life in the Royal Navy provided him with many of the vivid scenes of life at sea that he later incorporated into Roderick Random and other novels.

Smollett returned to London from the West Indies briefly in 1742, but he soon sailed back to Jamaica, where he married Anne Lassalls, an heiress, probably in 1743. In 1744, at the same time that he was trying to establish a medical practice in London, Smollett began to publish a series of minor poems and attempted unsuccessfully to have his first play, an ill-starred tragedy entitled The Regicide, produced. Of the occasional odes that Smollett published between 1744 and 1747, the best was his movingly patriotic The Tears of Scotland (1746). The most noteworthy of his Juvenalian verse satires, Advice (1746) and Reproof (1747), merely furthered his growing reputation as a quarrelsome Scotsman outraged by the refined vices of London.

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