Smollett, Tobias George 1721-71
Scottish novelist

Born on the farm of Dalquharn in the Vale of Leven, Dunbartonshire, he was educated at Dumbarton Grammar School and Glasgow University, where he took a degree in medicine. He moved to London in 1740 to find a producer for his tragedy, The Regicide (1749) but, failing to do so, sailed as surgeon's mate in the expedition to Carthagena against the Spanish in 1741. Three years later he settled in London, and began to practise as a surgeon, but writing was his real interest. His first novels Roderick Random (1748), modelled on Alain Lesage's Gil Blas (1715), and Peregrine Pickle (1751), describe the adventures in love and war of an unprincipled hero. He translated Cervantes' Don Quixote in 1755, but his attempt to imitate him in Sir Launcelote Greaves (1762) is less successful. In 1753 he settled in Chelsea, editing the new Critical Review, which led to his imprisonment for libel in 1760, and writing his History of England (3 vols, 1757-58). After being ordered abroad for his health, he wrote the caustic record Travels in France and Italy (1766), followed in 1769 by a coarse satire on public affairs, The Adventures of an Atom. Humphrey Clinker (1771), which is more kindly in tone and still a favourite, was written in the form of a series of letters from and to members of a party touring England and 'North Britain'. He spent the last years of his life abroad, and died in Livorno, Italy.

Bibliography: L Melville, The Life and Letters of Tobias Smollett (1976)