Tobias Smollett |
About Tobias Smollett
An Interview with Tobias Smollett
More About Tobias Smollett
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Tobias Smollett (1721-71) was the very model of everything that made 18th-century London
life so enjoyable. Born and educated in Scotland, he trained to become a surgeon and settled
in Jamaica. During the War of Jenkins' Ear he was involved in the catastrophic British naval
assault on Cartagena, an event he immortalized in his very funny first novel Roderick
Random (1748). He tried and failed to balance a medical career and a literary one,
eventually settling in London and turning out less good novels, journalism and history. Yet
he was one of the extraordinary group around Sterne, Goldsmith and Garrick and was, with
Fielding, one of the masters of the comic picaresque novel which would so influence Dickens.
In 1766 he published one of the great travel books, Travels in France and Italy,
which single-handedly launched the genre of the splenetic, xenophobic and unreasonable
Briton abroad. Humphry Clinker, his masterpiece, was published just before his death.
Find Books by Tobias Smollett
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| Author Image: Tobias Smollett - AKG London |
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