The Later Career of Tobias Smollett

"The present study is not a biography; nor does it represent a complete examination of everything which Smollett wrote after 1753, the date which I have chosen to mark the beginning of Smollett's "later career". Most of this study is limited to waht appears to be the most important and the most neglected aspect of Smollett's later career - an aspect linked with a dominant intellectual trend of the eighteenth century. It has long been noted that Smollett's later creative works, 'Travels through France and Italy', 'Adventures of an atom', and 'Humphry Clinker', are radically different from his earlier creative works, 'Roderick Random', 'Peregrine Pickle', and 'Ferdinand Count Fathom'. It has also been noted, much less frequently, that his prose style underwent a considerable change in the later works. But the causes and exact nature of these changes have barely been suggested. Between 1753 and 1766 Smollett published no creative work except 'Sir Launcelot Greaves', some small pieces of verse and the short farce, 'The reprisal'; and it has long been known taht these years of his life were chiefly occupied by manifold literary drudgery: compiling, editing, translating, reviewing, pamphleteering. But the nature and extent of these labors have never been adequately investigated. These gaps in our knowledge of Smollett are intimately related. A study of Smollett's literary drudgery reveals the fundamental causes and helps to ascertain the nature of the changes found in Smollett's later creative works. A study of Smollett's compilations, in particular, helps to connect the later creative works with the contemporary trend toward the accumulation and synthesis of facts, historical, topographical, and scientific. In the gradual movement towards classification and synthesis of knowledge, Smollett's work as editor and compiler proves to be of prime significance. This trend also appears to have a strong connection with the peculiar prose style known as "Johnsonian"." -- preface, p. [vii].