Tobias Smollett
1721–1771 · Scotland
the restless observer of the eighteenth-century road
Tobias Smollett was born in 1721 at Dalquhurn, near Renton in Scotland. He studied medicine at Glasgow and went to sea as a surgeon's mate in the Royal Navy, experiences he later transformed into fiction full of ships, hospitals, debtors, tricksters and people who could not keep their tempers. In London he attempted a play, practised medicine, wrote journalism, translated, edited and found his first large audience with the picaresque Roderick Random in 1748.
Smollett lived by the pen in a period that made that a precarious occupation. His novels were comic, combative and crowded; his political writing earned him enemies and a prison sentence for libel in 1759. He also edited the Critical Review, a job that put his judgment into print and made personal quarrels almost unavoidable. The illness and grief following the death of his only child, Elizabeth, helped send him abroad in 1763.
Travels Through France and Italy came from that journey, preserving a traveller impatient with bad roads, poor lodgings and received opinion. He died near Livorno in 1771, at forty-nine. His reputation has risen and fallen, but the velocity of his prose and the unruly energy of his characters remain unmistakably his.