He had neither patron, pension, property, nor endowment,
inherited or acquired.
Yet he took upon himself the burden of a
large establishment, he spent money freely, and he prided himself
upon the fact that he, Tobias Smollett, who came up to London
without a stiver in his pocket, was in ten years' time in a
position to enact the part of patron upon a considerable scale to
the crowd of inferior denizens of Grub Street. Like most people
whose social ambitions are in advance of their time, Smollett
suffered considerably on account of these novel aspirations of
his. In the present day he would have had his motor car and his
house on Hindhead, a seat in Parliament and a brief from the
Nation to boot as a Member for Humanity. Voltaire was the only
figure in the eighteenth century even to approach such a
flattering position, and he was for many years a refugee from his
own land. Smollett was energetic and ambitious enough to start in
rather a grand way, with a large house, a carriage, menservants,
and the rest. His wife was a fine lady, a "Creole" beauty who had
a small dot of her own; but, on the other hand, her income was
very precarious, and she herself somewhat of a silly and an
incapable in the eyes of Smollett's old Scotch friends. But to
maintain such a position - to keep the bailiffs from the door from
year's end to year's end - was a truly Herculean task in days when
a newspaper "rate" of remuneration or a well-wearing copyright
did not so much as exist, and when Reviews sweated their writers
at the rate of a guinea per sheet of thirty-two pages. Smollett
was continually having recourse to loans. He produced the eight
(or six or seven) hundred a year he required by sheer hard
writing, turning out his History of England, his Voltaire, and
his Universal History by means of long spells of almost incessant
labour at ruinous cost to his health. On the top of all this
cruel compiling he undertook to run a Review (The Critical), a
magazine (The British), and a weekly political organ (The
Briton). A charge of defamation for a paragraph in the nature of
what would now be considered a very mild and pertinent piece of
public criticism against a faineant admiral led to imprisonment
in the King's Bench Prison, plus a fine of £100. Then came a
quarrel with an old friend, Wilkes - not the least vexatious
result of that forlorn championship of Bute's government in The
Briton. And finally, in part, obviously, as a consequence of all
this nervous breakdown, a succession of severe catarrhs,
premonitory in his case of consumption, the serious illness of
the wife he adored, and the death of his darling, the "little
Boss" of former years, now on the verge of womanhood. To a man of
his extraordinarily strong affections such a series of ills was
too overwhelming. He resolved to break up his establishment at
Chelsea, and to seek a remedy in flight from present evils to a
foreign residence. Dickens went to hibernate on the Riviera upon
a somewhat similar pretext, though fortunately without the same
cause, as far as his health was concerned.
Now note another very characteristic feature of these Travel
Letters. Smollett went abroad not for pleasure, but virtually of
necessity. Not only were circumstances at home proving rather too
much for him, but also, like Stevenson, he was specifically
"ordered South" by his physicians, and he went with the
deliberate intention of making as much money as possible out of
his Travel papers. In his case he wrote long letters on the spot
to his medical and other friends at home. When he got back in the
summer of 1765 one of his first cares was to put the Letters
together. It had always been his intention carefully to revise
them for the press. But when he got back to London he found so
many other tasks awaiting him that were so far more pressing,
that this part of his purpose was but very imperfectly carried
out. The Letters appeared pretty much as he wrote them. Their
social and documentary value is thereby considerably enhanced,
for they were nearly all written close down to the facts. The
original intention had been to go to Montpellier, which was
still, I suppose, the most popular health resort in Southern
Europe. The peace of 1763 opened the way. And this brings us to
another feature of distinction in regard to Smollett's Travels.
Typical Briton, perfervid Protestant of Britain's most Protestant
period, and insular enrage though he doubtless was, Smollett had
knocked about the world a good deal and had also seen something
of the continent of Europe. He was not prepared to see everything
couleur de rose now. His was quite unlike the frame of mind of
the ordinary holiday-seeker, who, partly from a voluntary
optimism, and partly from the change of food and habit, the
exhilaration caused by novel surroundings, and timidity at the
unaccustomed sounds he hears in his ears, is determined to be
pleased with everything. Very temperamental was Smollett, and his
frame of mind at the time was that of one determined to be
pleased with nothing. We know little enough about Smollett
intime. Only the other day I learned that the majority of so-
called Smollett portraits are not presentments of the novelist at
all, but ingeniously altered plates of George Washington. An
interesting confirmation of this is to be found in the recently
published Letters of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe to Robert
Chambers. "Smollett wore black cloaths - a tall man - and extreamly
handsome. No picture of him is known to be extant - all that have
been foisted on the public as such his relations disclaim - this I
know from my aunt Mrs. Smollett, who was the wife of his nephew,
and resided with him at Bath." But one thing we do know, and in
these same letters, if confirmation had been needed, we observe
the statement repeated, namely, that Smollett was very peevish.
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