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Assoc for Scottish Literature @scotlit@mastodon.scot

Tobias Smollett (1721–1771) was baptised #OTD, 19 March.

George Orwell thought him “Scotland’s best novelist”, “whose outstanding intellectual honesty may have been connected with the fact that he was not an Englishman” (Tribune, 22/9/1944)

1/5

https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/smollett/english/e_ts

#Scottish #literature #Smollett

Mar 19, 2025, 12:16 PM··Web

2boosts·3favorites

**Assoc for Scottish Literature** @scotlit · Mar 19

Mar 19

Assoc for Scottish Literature @scotlit

“a sharp, quirky, funny satirist, relishing the details of the lives of the underprivileged… Grotesquerie, bodily functions, compulsions, addictions and corruptions, are depicted in detail in a social context of unstable movement, forces that can cut across desires, unpredictable friendships, inimical individuals: Smollett’s world is close to Welsh in these regards also.”

Prof Alan Riach compares Smollett to Irvine Welsh

2/5

https://www.thenational.scot/news/16095421.tobias-smollett---scotlands-original-irvine-welsh/

#Scottish #literature #18thcentury

**Assoc for Scottish Literature** @scotlit · Mar 19

Mar 19

Assoc for Scottish Literature @scotlit

Tobias Smollett, Novelist: Brutish or British?

Prof Juliet Shields addresses Tobias Smollett’s exclusion from recent studies of the development of the 18th-century novel

3/5

https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/43514/chapter/364250240?login=false

Abstract
This article addresses Tobias Smollett’s exclusion from recent studies of the development of the eighteenth-century novel. Tracing continuities between Tobias Smollett’s most highly regarded novels, Roderick Random (1748) and Humphry Clinker (1771) and the critically neglected Peregrine Pickle (1750–1751), Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), and Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760–1761), it demonstrates that all of these works represent the experience of being on the margins of elite metropolitan English society. Although Smollett’s novels have been charged with formlessness, this article argues that their “plot” or structuring principle is the marginalized protagonist’s progress toward a British identity. The uncouth humor and physical violence of which critics have complained are simply incidental to that progress, which is never a straightforward trajectory, but which is driven by the protagonist’s repeated and often misguided efforts to infiltrate the inner circles of fashionable English society.

#Scottish #literature #Smollett

**Assoc for Scottish Literature** @scotlit · Mar 19

Mar 19

Assoc for Scottish Literature @scotlit

The Scenic Route to Humphry Clinker

Dr Ronnie Young shows how Smollett’s cantankerous Travels Through France and Italy – a “journal of gripes, snipes and stereotypes” – laid the groundwork for his finest novel

4/5

https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2012/05/the-scenic-route-to-humphry-clinker-smolletts-travels-through-france-and-italy/

The Bottle Imp · May 1, 2012The Scenic Route to 'Humphry Clinker': Smollett's Travels Through France and Italy - The Bottle ImpIn 1763, Tobias Smollett embarked on a two-year trip round France and Italy. The great eighteenth-century novelist, historian, journalist and man of letters had good reason for quitting Britain. His support for the deeply unpopular prime ministership of the 3rd Earl of Bute (from 1762-1763) had left him the target of what he saw as […]

#Scottish #literature #18thcentury