Tobias Smollett - Scotland's original Irvine Welsh

He was born in Renton, Dunbartonshire, was apprenticed to a doctor in Glasgow when he was 14, attended Glasgow University, and became a surgeon’s mate in the navy, travelling to the Caribbean. In 1744, he settled in London, where Samuel Johnson was pontificating, George Handel was composing and David Garrick was managing theatres and acting in them. Smollett began his writing career with a play, The Regicide, but when that was turned down by Garrick, he wrote political satire, trying his hand at whatever he could. It is his series of picaresque novels that remain most fresh.

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The first of these, Roderick Random (1748), is a riotous comedy about sailors on the British expedition to the West Indies in 1739-41 and distinguishes Smollett as both a great comic novelist and a great novelist of the sea. Sample the humour. In Chapter 13, Roderick and his friend Strap reach an inn, sup and retire, but their slumber is interrupted by “a monstrous overgrown raven” with “bells at its feet” which “gave us several dabs with its beak through the blankets, hopped away, and vanished”. Soon after, an old man enters “with a long white beard that reached to his middle” and “a certain wild peculiarity in his eyes and countenance, that did not savour of this world”. He cries “with a voice that did not seem to belong to a human creature, ‘Where is Ralph? Where is Ralpho?’,” Hearing distant bells, he trips away, leaving our narrator “almost petrified with fear”.

Strap speculates that the raven was the soul of someone damned (“his fears had magnified the creature to the bigness of a horse, and the sound of small morris bells to the clinking of massy chains”) and the old man the spirit of someone murdered long ago, whose assassin evidently was named Ralph, and that the old man must have been licensed to torture his murderer, appearing in raven-shape. In the morning, of course, they discover the old man was the landlord’s father who, in his senility, enjoyed the company of his pet, a tame raven. It’s a momentary episode in an episodic novel, but shows something of Smollett’s disdain for gullibility and superstition.

Smollett could be bad-tempered, vigorously outspoken and offensive. He quarrelled with many influential people and fell foul of a senior navy man, Admiral Knowles, who prompted him to produce a fantastic piece of invective. Knowles, Smollett wrote, was: “An admiral without conduct, an engineer without knowledge, an officer without resolution, and a man without veracity ... An ignorant, assuming, officious, fribbling pretender; conceited as a peacock, obstinate as a mule, and mischievous as a monkey.”

The admiral sued and Smollett was fined £100 and sentenced to three months in prison, but he had his revenge in The Adventures of an Atom (1769), in which a whole world of political authorities is satirised. He never admitted to being its author, for good reason.

In it, an atom enters the brain of a citizen and records its impressions of politicians it has known. There’s a prime minister who every day enjoys his “posteriors” being kicked by the emperor while having “an orgasm of pleasure” as he has his “perineum” licked by bishops and cabinet members with bristly beards. Another politician, “Quamba-cundono”, is sent north to put down a rebellion by the Ximians. This is the Duke of Cumberland, the Butcher of Culloden and post-Culloden infamy. The Ximians, the Scots, are to be crucified, eviscerated, boiled in oil and have their livers eaten by southerners. The humour is brutal, rising from a depth of outrage barely controlled by the literary speed, fluent felicity and the hot swipe of Smollett’s satire.

A musical play, Alceste (ostensibly a classical tragedy), was to have been set to music by Handel but when Smollett offended the manager of Covent Garden it was rejected. Smollett’s biographer, Jeremy Lewis, tells us that no text of the play survives, and that Handel is supposed to have said of Smollett: “That Scotchman is ein tam fool; I vould have made his vork immortal!”

Works of more lasting value were to come, however: Smollett’s translation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote helped establish the great Spanish novel in English-language literary consciousness, and his writing and editing periodicals engaged him in the most explosive arguments and contentious issues of his time. His Complete History of England (1757-58) was revisionary and closely tuned into the moment, the word “England” standing for the turn to “Britishness” which Smollett’s south-bound career acknowledged.

Anglocentric as that seems, however, Smollett’s sympathies remained with Scotland. He was acutely aware of the anti-Scottish prejudices rife in the London where he lived, and spoke out and wrote in protest against the bloody cruelty of the Duke of Cumberland and his troops in the aftermath of the massacre of Culloden. In the History, he wrote that after Culloden, the Highlanders were “either shot upon the mountains, like wild beasts, or put to death in cold blood, without form of trial; the women, after having seen their husbands and fathers murdered, were subjected to brutal violation, and then turned out naked with their children, to starve on the barren heaths”. The Hanoverian victory was “the triumph of low, illiberal minds, untinctured by humanity” and prompted only “grief and horror”. He scorned those who approved Cumberland, including the dons of St Andrews University, who elected him to be their Chancellor, and respected the Jacobites, old men facing their execution with noble disdain, or exiles in Europe, poignantly described in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751).

Smollett’s most lasting poems are “Ode to Leven Water”, which recollects the arcadian terrain of his childhood, and “The Tears of Scotland”:

While the warm blood bedews my veins,

And unimpair’d remembrance reigns,

Resentment of my country’s fate

Within my filial breast shall beat;

And, spite of her insulting foe,

No sympathizing verse shall flow;

“Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn

Thy banish’d peace, thy laurels torn.”

Smollett’s novels are his most lasting work. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle was a satire on the grand European tour, taking in Paris, where the scoundrel hero fights a duel and is imprisoned in the Bastille, in the pursuit of his true love, Emily Gauntlet (for whom he has to run, as it were). Caricature and speed are the novel’s methods, comedy its sustenance, and it offers a panoramic vision of 18th-century European politics and society. Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) was such a success that he gave up surgery. His journal Travels in France and Italy (1766) is bitterly farcical, critical, shrewd and sharp, an account of a tour he made of the continent in search of better health. His last novel was written in Italy in the last two years of his life, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771).

This is the major work, the tale of a family’s journey through England and Scotland, with the subjects of sex, national characteristics, politics, religion, social convention and various forms of politesse, all looming into focus and lurching away again. Satire flourishes throughout. The novel takes the form of various letters from the different characters in the group, each with a different perspective on the same event and with differing literacy skills, and includes an encounter with a certain Dr Smollett in London. The method builds up a sophisticated, many-sided picture of human character typified by the commerce between the idiosyncrasies of people and their common needs.

It is a demonstration of what desires bring people together, and a celebration, quick, funny, unexpected, of what constitutes differentiating aspects among individuals, men and women, old and young, their forms of language, social expectations and the economic strata of the nations they come from. Ostensibly an endorsement of the new British state it is arguably an exposé of its impossibility, a careful anatomisation of the incompatible components of the priorities of humanity and the burgeoning imperial ethos with which the Anglocentric British nationalism so familiar today was burdening the citizens – or rather, the subjects – of the quite recently and brutally United Kingdom. Moreover, it is very funny.

Smollett mixes the racy and rancid, the shocking and indignant, the socially committed and humanly sympathetic, the frenetic and the determined. Not so far from Irvine Welsh as might at first appear.

Tobias Smollett, Ode to Independence

This poem was published in Glasgow in 1773, two years after its author’s death. This is how it begins:

Thy spirit, Independence! let me share,
Lord of the lion-heart and eagle-eye;
Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare,
Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.
Deep in the frozen regions of the north,
A goddess violated brought thee forth,
Immortal Liberty, whose look sublime,
Hath bleach’d the tyrant’s cheek in every varying clime.

[And, after giving various examples of freedom’s resistance to tyranny, this is how the poem ends.]

Nature I’ll court in her sequester’d haunts,
By mountain, meadow, streamlet, grove, or cell,
Where the poised lark his evening ditty chaunts,
And Health, and Peace, and Contemplation dwell.
There Study shall with Solitude recline,
And Friendship pledge me to his fellow swains,
And Toil and Temperance sedately twine
The slender cord that fluttering life sustains;
And fearless Poverty shall guard the door,
And Taste unspoil’d the frugal table spread,
And Industry supply the humble store,
And Sleep unbribed his dews refreshing shed;
White-mantled Innocence, ethereal sprite!
Shall chase far off the goblins of the night,
And Independence o’er the day preside,
Propitious power! my patron and my pride!