Smollett's Britain

By Jeremy Black

Acclaimed British historian examines the layers of craft and insight in Tobias Smollett, and discusses the particular nature of his genius and influence on British culture. Once again, Black acquaints the reader with the full range of a prolific writer's works and offers a backstage tour of the meaning and context of Britain's most beloved stories and story-tellers. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: St. Augustines Press
• Release date: Jan 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781587318542

Jeremy Black

Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter, UK, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, USA.

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Smollett’s Britain

JEREMY BLACK

THE WEIGHT OF WORDS SERIES

ST. AUGUSTINE’S PRESS

South Bend, Indiana

Copyright © 2022 by Jeremy Black

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of St. Augustine’s Press.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022943799

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58731-852-8

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-58731-853-5

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-58731-854-2

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

St. Augustine’s Press

www.staugustine.net

For

Fran and Ian Booth

With thanks for Friendship

Table of Contents

Preface

List of Dates

Abbreviations

1. Introduction

2. British Background

3. Imperial Stories

4. A Writer of All Trades

5. A Novelist Anew

6. Historian and Critic

7. A Journalist of Politics

8. Smollett’s London

9. A Tory Commentator on Society

10. On Foreign Travels

11. A British Tour

Postscripts

Selected Further Reading

Index

PREFACE

Stop, O traveller! If you have ever marvelled at the charms and kindly grace of nature, if you have ever marvelled at a most skilled painter of life, tarry for a short time with the memory of Tobias Smollet [sic], M.D., a man with those excellent qualities which as both man and citizen you should praise and attempt to imitate. He was a very distinguished man who engaged in many literary activities. In a state of happiness peculiar to himself, having committed his life to coming generations, he was snatched away by cruel death at the age of 51. . . .

Translation, from the Latin, of the inscription for the Smollett monument, in part written by Dr Johnson.

Not the most comfortable of commentators on his tumultuous age of the shock of the new, Tobias Smollett (1721–71) was part of a movement of talent that focused on what was to be the greatest empire of history in its key period of ascendance. Using his life and works as a key aid, this study, while throwing light on Smollett’s Britain, also provides us with a way to consider his achievements and values. I offer a fresh and lively review, very much in keeping with the author himself. Using Smollett as a framework for the study of his period, provides an opportunity for the interplay of imagined and experienced Britain.

As also with my comparable works on Shakespeare, Austen, Christie and Fielding, there is a challenge here to the dominant attempt to read the canon in a modish fashion, as well as a wish to probe the values of writers who can be too readily pigeonholed. Smollett’s scabrous content and often vicious style do not match modern sensibilities. Yet, as a doctor-writer should, Smollett could see the skull beneath the skin, and he provides us with a way to offer a reading of Georgian Britain in which an honesty of vision is more important than an elegance of illusion. Smollett’s novels provide almost a kind of journalism, building into a picture of his Britain. This is shown to be more edgy and problematic than is often appreciated.

It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the kind comments of Nigel Aston, Mark Danley, Grayson Ditchfield, Alan Downie, Colin Haydon, Perry Gauci, Bill Gibson, Richard Jones, and Murray Pittock on earlier drafts. None is responsible for any errors that remain, but each has provided valuable support. As before, Katie Godfrey has proved an exemplary editor.

Lastly, it is a great pleasure to dedicate this book to Fran and Ian Booth, with thanks for friendship and wit.

LIST OF DATES

ABBREVIATIONS

(22) single or double numbers in brackets refer to the chapter number.

1. INTRODUCTION

Tobias Smollett was born a younger son of a younger son in lowland Scottish landed society in 1721, into a Britain thrust toward disorder by the crisis of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, a fiscal meltdown that threatened government. This was followed shortly by the challenge of the Atterbury Plot of 1721, an unsuccessful conspiracy in favor of James III (of England) and VIII (of Scotland), the Jacobite (exiled Stuart) claimant to the throne. Smollett’s native Scotland had recently seen a serious civil war in 1715–16: a Jacobite attempt to regain control from the new Hanoverian dynasty, while initially successful, collapsed eventually into total failure. A smaller-scale, shorter and again unsuccessful, rising there in 1719 was accompanied by the landing of Spanish troops.

This fighting looked back to earlier struggles in Britain in 1638–51 and 1689–91, as well as to conspiracies and rumors of rebellion. Not only was there no reason to believe that this process would end, but also, in 1745–46, there was to be the major Jacobite rising, the ’45. In this, James’s elder son, Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, appeared to come near to success as he advanced on London. In the event, however, he turned back at Derby in December 1745 and was totally defeated at Culloden in 1746, after which Highland Scotland was brutally harried.

If this was the background to Smollett’s early life, the outcome was to be very different. By the time of Smollett’s death, in 1771 in Leghorn (Livorno) in Tuscany, where he had gone for the sake of his health, Britain was the great maritime power. With the largest navy in the world, it was victor over both France and Spain during the Seven Years War (1756–63; to Americans, the French and Indian War of 1754–63). Initially the war had gone badly for Britain, and there were widespread fears of a French invasion of England,¹ indeed reports that it was occurring.² However, by the time of Smollett’s novel Launcelot Greaves (1760–61), it was possible to mock that idea (17). Spain subsequently came into the war on France’s side, but, instead of swaying the conflict, was heavily defeated in 1762, with British expeditions capturing Havana and Manila.

Ending with the Peace of Paris of 1763, this conflict left Britain dominant in European waters, North America, and the West Indies. Resulting annexations from France and Spain included Canada, Florida, Senegal and St Lucia. Moreover, in 1757–65, Britain became not only the leading European state in India, but also the major power in Bengal, a key area of the Indian economy. British success was driven home anew in the Falkland Islands crisis of 1770–71, in which Spain backed down from the threat of war with Britain over these islands, after France had refused to sustain earlier promises to Spain of support.

This military and international rise, in strength and heft, was matched by a growing transformation in the British economy. Having had important, but only moderate, growth rates up to the early 1740s, the population, economic development, and infrastructure of the country, all then accelerated. There were particular jumps in agricultural production, road-building, and industrial technology. These jumps subsequently led to the use, for all three, of the term revolution. However, that usage should not crowd out important pressures and areas of conservatism, continuity, and only limited change. Indeed, Smollett takes on value in part because he is a guide to the variety of views of the period, while he also depicts characters with highly diverse experiences. In particular, alongside growth, Smollett captured the extent of uncertainty, not least in terms of risk and debt for individuals, so that the same person could have very diverse experiences, with the diversity accentuated by the extent of unpredictability.

The results of growth included greater wealth and credit, as well as increased consumption. The last was a product not only of rising numbers and wealth, but also of a consumerist society in which artifice and show were necessary. Thus, Ferdinand, Count Fathom, the protagonist of one of Smollett’s novels, himself a villain, considers the tricks of doctors trying to establish themselves in London:

. . . means used to force a trade, such as ordering himself to be called from church, alarming the neighbourhood with knocking at his door at night, receiving sudden messages in places of resort, and inserting his cures by way of news in the daily papers, had been so injudiciously hackneyed by every desperate sculler in physic, that they had lost their effect upon the public. . . . (52).

Moreover, the idea of establishing, as a means to reputation, a subscription hospital had lost its effect. The caustic Smollett derided the idea:

even this branch was already overstocked, insomuch that almost every street was furnished with one of these charitable receptacles, which, instead of diminishing the taxes for the maintenance of the poor, encouraged the vulgar to be idle and dissolute, by opening an asylum to them and their families from the diseases of poverty and intemperance: for it remains to be proved, that the parish rates are decreased, the bills of mortality lessened, the people more numerous, or the streets less infested with beggars, notwithstanding the immense sums yearly granted by individuals for the relief of the indigent (52).

A key instance of consumerism was the rise in the culture of print, with particular increases in the scale and sophistication of both book and periodical production. Driven by the opportunities of the market, rather than by government sponsorships, new types of publication came forward during Smollett’s lifetime, notably the magazine; while others became more prominent, especially the newspaper and the novel. This culture of print rested on anonymous purchase, by large numbers of readers, either directly or via libraries; and, in general, the individual patron was not significant for such works. Moreover, demand was in part developed through advertising, whether directly, as in newspapers, or indirectly, as in book reviews and, in particular, the presentation of authors, in part by these means, as in effect brands.

Literature, like politics, was much debated, and in a variety of milieux. Indeed, the critical Test on 18 June 1757 referred to shallow coffee-house graduates. In Humphry Clinker, Smollett has Matthew Bramble, the figure of maturity and wisdom, write:

I have observed, for some time, that the public papers are become the infamous vehicles of the most cruel and perfidious defamation: every rancorous knave – every desperate incendiary, that can afford to spend half a crown or three shillings, may skulk behind the press of a newsmonger, and have a stab at the first character in the kingdom, without running the least hazard of detection or punishment.

These characteristics contributed to a literary world at once dynamic and intensely competitive. It was the world in which Smollett operated once he had decided that he did not wish to rely simply on medicine. This was the subject he had studied at the University of Glasgow, and one that he subsequently practised in both the navy and, for longer, in London.

Very dependent on consumerism in the shape of the purchase by others of his works, in order to provide his finances, support his lifestyle, and rescue him from incessant money problems and frequent debt, Smollett, however, was also deeply concerned about consumerism. In particular, echoing but also developing an established theme, and the frequent resort of the moralist, he repeatedly decried luxury and therefore conspicuous consumption. To him and others, luxury was a religious as well as a moral issue. Thus, Howell Harris asked his fellow Methodist George Whitefield whether drinking tea imperilled his soul. For Smollett, as for others, luxury was an individual as well as a collective problem, and one seen across all ranks of society. In his view, one that was widely held, luxury was a consequence of dissatisfaction, pretence, and, in particular, aspirations toward social mobility, and also a cause of them. As such, luxury represented a breach in the standard balance of values that was so important to individual and social harmony, a breach that was the consequence of untrammelled individualism, and notably so in the form of conceit. It was moral as well as social, private as well as public, metropolitan as well as provincial, and more potent and threatening because of these many links.

This hostile moral view of luxury was a profoundly conservative approach, one in which Smollett displayed scant confidence in the public. Such a lack was normal as far as attitudes toward the mob were concerned. Smollett, however, was also profoundly uneasy about urban life as a whole, and especially its reliance on show, and on the means as well as goal, of consumerism. Luxury was seen as a source of a sapping of national character and integrity.

At the same time, Smollett, like many Tories, was hesitant about the aristocracy, which, especially in its senior ranks, was largely Whig in this period, and much of which exemplified luxury, both in lifestyle but also politically, not least in terms of manipulating elections. Smollett’s views in this respect were very similar to those of George III (r. 1760–1820), a Tory by sympathy, who instinctively disliked what he saw as the vices of the aristocracy, notably gambling, drunkenness and womanizing. In an established instance of ruralism, one that looked back to the classics, Smollett, like George III, relied on the landed gentry rather than their social superiors, but Smollett was worried even about the gentry.

The trajectories of Smollett’s novels reflected his concerns. Characters who end up in a successful position, with the appropriate and necessary status, have frequent falls en route, and each fall is a matter of serious alarm. Indeed, the frequency of reversals in fortune can create a somewhat hallucinatory impression in the novels. It is not low life that faces these uncertainties and hardship, but those who are rightly gentry. As with Henry Fielding, there is the particular addition, especially in Smollett’s novel Roderick Random, of the hardship arising from a misapplied inheritance, but that only goes to show the very vulnerability of gentry status.

The devious Ferdinand, Count Fathom, by far the most disturbing of Smollett’s protagonists, is referred to as a great latitudinarian . . . in point of morals and principle (7). Such an approach, with the description classically linked to religious preference, would be anathema to Tories who tended to be more clear in their Church of England orthodoxy and to be wary of anything that appeared to suggest a lack of commitment. Nevertheless, Smollett’s Toryism was different to that of most of his English contemporaries. He did not really share the commitment to the Church of England of the English Tories, for whom the defence of that Church was a major purpose, and was not interested in acquiring such a pose. In his career, Smollett might represent Britishness, but there was no Britishness in religion beyond Protestantism, not only because of the difference in established churches between England and Scotland, but also due to a marked lack of sympathy between English Anglicans and Scottish Presbyterians, the two established churches. Arguably, the position of Dissenters in England worked against common Protestantism and (through exposing them to Scottish university education) reinforced their cross-border links and the Scottish suspicion of Anglicanism. As a Scot and a doctor, Smollett was doubly a marginal figure.

Smollett had relatively little to say in his fiction about religion or churches, and has no character to match Fielding’s Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews. Smollett is relatively tolerant, not least of Humphry Clinker, a Methodist and, therefore, not usually a focus of Tory acceptance. Clinker is a would-be Methodist reformer of a fallen world, but not a canting villain, and Methodism in practice only takes a moderate role in the novel.

Even in the case of Tory clerics, with whom he could have been expected to be sympathetic, Smollett keeps his distance. In Peregrine Pickle, Jacob Jolter, the name possibly a pun on jolt or jolthead, for a dolt or blockhead, is chosen as tutor for the protagonist:

a man of exemplary piety, and particularly zealous for the honour of the church of which he was a member, having been many years in holy orders, though he did not then exercise any function of the priesthood. Indeed, Mr Jolter’s zeal was so exceedingly fervent, as, on some occasions, to get the better of his discretion; for, being an high-churchman, and of consequence a malcontent, his resentment was habituated into an insurmountable prejudice against the present disposition of affairs, which, by confounding the nation with the ministry, sometimes led him into erroneous, not to say absurd calculations; otherwise, a man of good morals, well versed in mathematics and school-divinity, studies which had not at all contributed to sweeten and unbend the natural sourness and severity of his complexion (17).

Indeed, Jolter is presented as having flawed political maxims . . . violent prejudices, ludicrous vanity, awkward solemnity and ignorance of mankind (18), as well as pursuing a chambermaid and therefore a hypocrite. Jolter repeatedly proves an apologist, even extreme apologist, for France and its system of government; thus earning contempt not only from Pickle but also from the reader. Linked to this stance, Jolter, moreover, has Jacobite leanings. This further condemns the apologism for France, and is condemned by it, a frequent interrelationship in political discussion in the period. As such, Smollett was a Hanoverian Tory, and not a Jacobite woman.

English religious practice does not meet with Smollett’s approval. Going to chapel, Monimia:

according to the laudable hospitality of England, which is the only country in Christendom where a stranger is not made welcome to the house of God . . . emaciated and enfeebled as she was, must have stood in a common passage during the whole service

had a humane gentlewoman not opened the pew in which she sat (49). In this period, pews (benches of seating in churches) were often privately-owned.

More positively, the joined roles of religion, culture and social prestige were seen in a local report in the Worcester Journal of 14 September 1749:

Yesterday being the first day of the triennial meeting, here, of the Three Choirs (Worcester, Gloucester, and Hereford) there was a most grand and numerous appearance, at the cathedral, in the morning; and the collection amounted to £121 17s 6d – A sermon, suitable to the occasion, was preached by the Reverend Mr Hughes; and the musical pieces were well-chosen, and admirably well performed – The company at the concert and ball in the evening, at the Guild Hall, was surprisingly numerous and exceeding brilliant.

In turn, the Leeds Intelligencer of 17 October 1769 reported:

On Thursday and Friday last, the Oratorios of Judas Maccabaeus and the Messiah [both by Handel] were performed in Trinity Church, for the benefit of the Infirmary in this town, with the most exact regularity, and to the satisfaction of very polite and crowded audiences.

Whatever his doubts about the Church of England, Smollett has one of his figures discover both Protestantism and religious tolerance in his epiphany. Thus, as part of the sorting-out that is the concluding chapter of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, Smollett has Don Diego resolve to turn Protestant in order to be able to marry Madam Clement, a Huguenot, adding I am fully satisfied that real goodness is of no particular persuasion, and that salvation cannot depend upon belief, over which the will has no influence (67). This is apparently Smollett speaking.

The need for awareness, if not reform, was widely expressed. There were also specific moments of crisis. The devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755 resulted in Britain in many calls for repentance as well as compassion: Richard Tucker, sometime Mayor of Weymouth, wrote to his son Edward, then at university: A dreadful sudden call has lately happened to thousands in a neighbouring kingdom, and the same fate may attend others when the Great Governor of the World [God] pleases.³ The following February, there were full churches in London on the day of fasting called for the Lisbon outbreak and for the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. More mundanely, Catherine Talbot, who came from a clerical family, recorded in her journal in 1744: Have some notion of a fever: perhaps only fancy. Providence protect me!⁴

A sense of mankind on the edge of a menacing natural world was widespread. Animals and disease were the major aspects of this menace. For example, the Worcester Journal of 7 September 1749, in light of two recent fatal viper bites, carried details on how to deal with them. Rabies was a persistent problem. That year, a deadly cattle disease proved another instance of menace. In some spheres, there were advances. Thus, Read’s Weekly Journal in its issue of 3 January 1756, reported the inoculation for smallpox of James Buller and most of his family, which encouraged tenants and neighbors to do the same. That was a benign item, but there were no such defences in most fields.

For some, religion was an aspect of the threatening environment. Aside from being part of the constitution, anti-Catholicism was an important aspect of British culture, although there is no evidence for the 1753 claim by the Sardinian envoy that the government wished to see fewer Catholics in the country.⁵ Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy encouraged him to express anti-Catholic sentiments and represented his principal engagement in print with a religious topic. Referring, for example, to English girls sent to a Boulogne nunnery, he added:

The smallness of the expence encourages parents to send their children abroad to these seminaries, where they learn scarce any thing that is useful, but the French language; but they never fail to imbibe prejudices against the Protestant religion, and generally return enthusiastic converts to the religion of Rome. This conversion always generates a contempt for, and often an aversion to, their own country. Indeed it cannot reasonably be expected, that people of weak minds, addicted to superstition, should either love or esteem those whom they are taught to consider as reprobated heretics (3).

In his Considerations on the Present State of the Controversy between the Protestants and Papists of Great Britain (1768), Francis Blackburne, Archdeacon of Cleveland, quoted approvingly from Smollett’s Travels: of the ingenious and entertaining Dr Smollet [sic] in his descriptions of convents at Boulogne which turned out enthusiastic converts to the religion of Rome.⁶ Anti-Catholicism was probably the only opinion that the radical Blackburne shared with Smollett who, somewhat surprisingly, and totally inaccurately, had been described to Theophilus Lindsey as educated among the Jesuits and is a concealed Papist.⁷

At the same time, alongside his more general critical stance, Smollett’s stay in Boulogne enables him to offer a variety of images of Catholicism. One of the Capuchin monks there is held responsible for illegitimate births,⁸ a classic theme in anti-Catholic, indeed anti-clerical, abuse; while the bishop, in contrast, is referred to as a prelate of great piety and benevolence, though a little inclining to bigotry and fanaticism (3), the linkage of the two apparently contradictory factors being of great interest. Pickle also