Tobias Smollett - Complete Works of Tobias Smollett

The Complete Works of

TOBIAS SMOLLETT

(1721-1771)

Contents

Delphi Classics 2012

Version 1

The Complete Works of

TOBIAS SMOLLETT

By Delphi Classics, 2015

Complete Works of Tobias Smollett

First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Delphi Classics.

Delphi Classics, 2012.

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The Smollett Memorial, close to where the writer was born in Dalquhurn, Renton, Scotland

The memorial today

Latin inscription on the Smollett Monument

Originating in sixteenth century Spain, the genre of the picaresque novel was hugely popular throughout Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This prose fiction work is usually written in the first person and recounts the adventures of an often roguish anti-hero, normally of lower class, as he travels from place to place. The episodic structure of this form, frequently satirical in tone, is held together by the protagonists adventures and misadventures. Several of Smolletts novels have been classed as picaresque and the first is The Adventures of Roderick Random, which was published in 1748 and printed for J. Osborn in Paternoster-Row, London.

In his preface to the novel, Smollett acknowledges his debt to two foreign picaresque novels, Cervantes Don Quixote and Alain-Rene Lesages Gil Blas, which he had recently translated into English. The Adventures of Roderick Random was also based on Smolletts own experiences as a naval-surgeons mate in the British Navy. He explained his purpose in writing the novel as wishing to represent modest merit struggling with every difficulty to which a friendless orphan is exposed, from his own want of experience, as well as from the selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind.

Set in the 1730s and 1740s, the novel introduces Roderick Rory Random, who is the son of a Scottish gentleman and a lower class woman. The novel recounts his life and experiences and the adventures that befall him as he travels the world, accompanied by a loyal servant, in search of wealth and of course a wealthy heiress for a wife. His fathers family reject him and, left penniless, he is forced to live on his wits and charm as he travels from Scotland to London and further afield encountering rogues and scoundrels on the way. During the course of the novel he is press-ganged, shipwrecked, kidnapped by smugglers and imprisoned in the Marshalsea and becomes a surgeon aboard ship and finally he discovers his longlost father and eventually marries his true love, Narcissa.

Smolletts powerful prose, the variety of amusing incidents and his creation of eccentric and comic characters was matched by his almost documentary realism when describing scenes aboard the man-of-war, Thunder. He is considered to be the founder of the sailor character in English fiction. Writers like Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott admired Smolletts comic writing and their own works were inspired by this popular eighteenth century novelist.

The Adventures of Roderick Random was a considerable success on its publication. Modern readers may be disappointed by the trite ending and also the brutality and selfishness of Random, which may offend our more delicate sensibilities. Nevertheless it remains a powerful and entertaining novel.

Tobias Smollett as a young man

The first editions title page

Of all kinds of satire, there is none so entertaining and universally improving, as that which is introduced, as it were occasionally, in the course of an interesting story, which brings every incident home to life, and by representing familiar scenes in an uncommon and amusing point of view, invests them with all the graces of novelty, while nature is appealed to in every particular. The reader gratifies his curiosity in pursuing the adventures of a person in whose favour he is prepossessed; he espouses his cause, he sympathises with him in his distress, his indignation is heated against the authors of his calamity: the humane passions are inflamed; the contrast between dejected virtue and insulting vice appears with greater aggravation, and every impression having a double force on the imagination, the memory retains the circumstance, and the heart improves by the example. The attention is not tired with a bare catalogue of characters, but agreeably diverted with all the variety of invention; and the vicissitudes of life appear in their peculiar circumstances, opening an ample field for wit and humour.