The Works of Tobias Smollett
7 total works
This work brings to life Tobias Smollett's fourth novel, ""The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves"". This version includes more accurate text and critical information. It also includes an examination of ""Sir Launcelot Greaves"", the first illustrated serial novel, in relation to the engravings by Anthony Walker. The most attractive of his heroes, Sir Launcelot is virtuous and strange, and he is surrounded by a Smollettian menagerie whose various jargons are part of this novel's linguistic virtuosity and satire. Sir Launcelot's character is an English naturalization of Quixote. Although Sir Launcelot is not the object of Smollett's satire, an idealistic madness is central to both characters. In Smollett's work, the theme of madness is integral to the relationship between self and society as the work ponders both the constitution of madness and the alternatives to revenge.
Roderick is combative, often violent, but capable of great affection and generosity. His father had been disinherited and has left Scotland leaving his son penniless. After a brief apprenticeship to a surgeon, the innocent Roderick travels to London where he encounters various rogues.
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
by Tobias Smollett, Thomas R. Preston, and O. M. Brack
Published December 1954
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett's last published novel and most celebrated work, appeared in June 1771, three months before the author's death. A classic in the history of the English novel, it takes the form of a collection of letters written by various members of Mr. Matthew Bramble's family (for whom Humphry Clinker is a general servant) during their eight months of travel in England and Scotland in the 1760s. The wanderings of the Bramble party result in a series of amusing adventures and episodes, unfolding within the main plot in which the eccentric and contentious characters--originals as Bramble's nephew calls them--discover the sources of true happiness.In this work, Smollett realized two long-standing artistic goals--a harmonious fusion of satire and comedy and, through the deliberate intertwining of historical and contrived details, a portrayal of the world as constructed from both fiction and fact. In achieving the latter, Smollett was aided by the novel's form, for the epistolary style of travel books in his day set a precedent for the extensive commentary on incidents, experiences, people, and places in Humphry Clinker and allowed him to relate the same stories through multiple points of view.Much of the continuing appeal of the novel can be traced to the gossipy insights found in its mass of historical, biographical, economic, political, social, geographical, and topographical details. One meets, for example, Smollett's version of such historical personages as William Pitt, James Quin, and the Duke of Newcastle, as well as fictionalized versions of Smollett's own friends and enemies. Even minor characters are often taken directly from history. In addition, the book includes numerous quotations from and allusions to the Bible, earlier and contemporary literature, the Book of Common Prayer, medical matter, and proverbial lore.This edition of Humphry Clinker includes illustrations by George Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson and is the first scholarly edition to feature a comprehensive introduction, exhaustive textual editing, and detailed notes that cite passages from Smollett's nonfictional works and the works of his contemporaries to analyze the mass of allusions and references in the novel. Thomas R. Preston's introduction discusses the composition, publication, and early reception of Humphry Clinker, the crucial importance of money in the narrative and its revelation of character, and Smollett's use of language and dialect.
The hero of "Ferdinand Count Fathom" (1753) is a monster of treachery and fraud. Fate and coincidence play a large part in his picaresque progress through England and Europe, and much of the narrative is written in a mock-heroic style. This critical study explains the literary and historical background of the 18th-century world in which the book was written.
The first novel by a major English writer that is devoted to a thoroughgoing portrait of villainy, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom chronicles the life of an aberrant criminal character. Filled with striking satiric thrusts at the legal, medical, and military establishments of mid-eighteenth-century Europe and England, the novel reveals Tobias Smollett's capacities as a commentator on contemporary life.
First published in 1753, Ferdinand Count Fathom is an experimental work that explores the relations between history and fiction and introduces, for the first time in the English novel, episodes of Gothic melodrama. Too long neglected and never before available in a carefully prepared scholarly edition, Ferdinand Count Fathom may now be read, understood, and appreciated against the literary and historical background of the eighteenth-century world.
This picaresque tale, first published in 1751, was Tobias Smollett's second novel. Following the fortunes and misfortunes of the egotistical dandy Peregrine Pickle, the novel is written as a series of brief adventures with every chapter typically describing a new escapade. The novel begins with Peregrine as a young country gentleman. His mother rejects him, as do his aloof father and his dissolute, spiteful brother. Commodore Hawser Trunnion takes Peregrine under his care and raises him. Peregrine's upbringing, education at Oxford, and journey to France, his debauchery, bankruptcy, jailing, and succession to his father's fortune, and his final repentance and marriage to his beloved Emilia all provide scope for Smollett's comic and caustic perspectiveon the Europe of his times. As John P. Zomchick and George S. Rousseau note in the introduction, ""by contrasting the genteel and the common, the sophisticated and the primal, Smollett conveys forcefully the way it felt to be alive in the middle of the eighteenth century.""
The introduction provides an overview of the composition and publication history of Peregrine Pickle and discusses the novel's critical reception over time by such figures as Lady Luxborough, Sir Walter Scott, Joseph Conrad, and George Orwell. The text of the novel uses the first edition of 1751 as copy-text while recording the second edition's substantive variants. Included are illustrations by Thomas Rowlandson, Richard Corbould, and George Cruikshank, as well as frontispieces designed by, and engraved in the style of, Henry Fuseli. A complete textual apparatus concludes the volume.
The introduction provides an overview of the composition and publication history of Peregrine Pickle and discusses the novel's critical reception over time by such figures as Lady Luxborough, Sir Walter Scott, Joseph Conrad, and George Orwell. The text of the novel uses the first edition of 1751 as copy-text while recording the second edition's substantive variants. Included are illustrations by Thomas Rowlandson, Richard Corbould, and George Cruikshank, as well as frontispieces designed by, and engraved in the style of, Henry Fuseli. A complete textual apparatus concludes the volume.
In "The History and Adventures of an Atom", a London haberdasher relates extraordinary tales of ancient Japan as dictated to him by an omniscient atom that has lived within the bodies of great figures of state. Intended "for the instruction of the British ministers", the work is a savage allegory of England during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), draping kings and politicians, domestic and foreign affairs, in an intricately detailed, endlessly allusive veil of satire. Its commentary laced with vitriol, this book combines the concerns of the author's historical and political writings with the often fantastic expression of a mind unleashed in the world of fiction. Creating from the details of Japanese history an ingenious catalogue of English places and personalities - from the upstart ruler "Taycho", whose graspings for power resemble William Pitt's, to a god of war called "Fatzman" who suggests the grotesquely obese Duke of Cumberland - Smollett also draws on the imagery of the period's scurrilous political cartoons.
In addition to presenting portraits of George II, George III and their cabinets, and chronicling the rise and fall of Pitt, Newcastle and Bute, the atom reports on events in the American colonies, battles in the Continental and global wars, and the domestic crises of 1763-1765. Smollett criticizes the moneied interests of London and the clamorous voice of the underclass "mob"; ridicules George II's disastrous support of Frederick the Great's costly military campaigns; and expresses the prophetic fear that Great Britain, extending its possessions too far, might sink under its own weight. Edited and introduced by Robert Adams Day, this edition provides prepared text, historical annotations and a key to personages and places. Day establishes the authorship of the long-disputed work, placing it within the context of Smollett's writings and opinions, his times and literary world.
In addition to presenting portraits of George II, George III and their cabinets, and chronicling the rise and fall of Pitt, Newcastle and Bute, the atom reports on events in the American colonies, battles in the Continental and global wars, and the domestic crises of 1763-1765. Smollett criticizes the moneied interests of London and the clamorous voice of the underclass "mob"; ridicules George II's disastrous support of Frederick the Great's costly military campaigns; and expresses the prophetic fear that Great Britain, extending its possessions too far, might sink under its own weight. Edited and introduced by Robert Adams Day, this edition provides prepared text, historical annotations and a key to personages and places. Day establishes the authorship of the long-disputed work, placing it within the context of Smollett's writings and opinions, his times and literary world.