On September 17th 1771, Tobias Smollett, Scottish novelist and playwright, died.
Smollett was an author and translator during the Scottish Enlightenment who lodged in Edinburgh with his sister at St John’s Pend on the Royal Mile.He was a tremendously popular author of what are broadly termed ‘picaresque’ novels of the late eighteenth century: The Adventures of Roderick Random, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle , The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom and most famously The Expedition of Humphry Clinker.
He also translated Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quixote in , championing the book in the English-speaking world through his popularity as a picaresque author.
Smollett was born of a good family in Dunbartonshire, 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. The most noteworthy of his Juvenalian verse satires, Advice and Reproof, merely furthered his growing reputation as a quarrelsome Scotsman outraged by the refined vices of London.
For our Outlander fans, the books that is, in The Fiery Cross, Lord John Grey sends Jamie a copy of the newly published “The Expedition of Humphry Clinker” by Tobias Smollett. Further in that same book, Fraser’s Ridge library has another of Tobias Smollett’s works “The Adventures of Roderick Random“ and in A Breath of Snow and Ashes, Smollet is also mentioned.
Smollett is one of the 16 Scottish writers and poets depicted on the lower section of the Scott Monument in Princes Street, as in the second pic. He appears on the far left side of the east face. He also has a monument to his honour in beside Renton Primary School, Dunbartonshire, as well as a mention on the plaque in the second pic, St John's Pend is an opening on Canongate on The Royal Mile, that leads through to St Johns Street.
