SATIRISED AS “SMELFUNGUS” by Laurence Sterne in A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), the first great Scottish writer of the Union, Tobias Smollett (1721-71), is now largely forgotten. Unlike Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Smollett’s picaresque talents have faded from public consciousness, and his poetry, journalism, drama and historical writing even more so. Moreover, if he was not so overlooked, he would now be cancelled because part of his family’s modest prosperity derived from the Caribbean wealth, including slaves, brought in with his wife.
And yet Smollett left a series of excitable novels which provide an account of his Britain, one that is shown to be more edgy and problematic than is generally appreciated. Smollett’s scabrous content and often vicious style do not match modern sensibilities, but, as a doctor-writer should, Smollett could see “the skull beneath the skin”. He provides us with a way to offer a reading of humanity in which an honesty of vision is more important than an elegance of illusion.
The trajectories of Smollett’s novels reflected his concerns. Characters who end up in a successful position, with appropriate status, have frequent falls en route, and each is a matter of serious alarm. Indeed, the frequency of reversals can create a somewhat hallucinatory, of the hardship arising from a misapplied inheritance, but that only goes to show the very vulnerability of gentry status.
