Smollett, Tobias
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- Smollett, Tobias
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(1721 - 71), novelist, of Dumbarton; Glasgow U.; m. 1747 Nancy Lascelles of Jamaica (d. Leghorn 1791); d. Leghorn.
1764 - 5 [dep. Dover Jun. 1763; Nice] Genoa (Sep. 1764), Lerici, Pisa, Florence, Siena, Viterbo, Rome (late Sep.), Florence, Genoa (Nov. 1764)
1769 - 71 Lucca, Pisa, Florence (by 5 Jun. 1769), Pisa (Feb. 1770), Leghorn (spring 1770), Lucca (Aug.), Pisa (Aug.), Leghorn (d. 17 Sep.)
Smollett's Travels through France and Italy [1766] recounts his experiences abroad in a series of 41 letters, of which eight concern Italy.1 Their content is garrulous and entertainingly philistine. Smollett and his wife were not in the best frame of mind when they set out from Dover in June 1763; their only child had just died, Smollett was suffering from the onset of consumption and The Briton, the periodical he was editing, had folded. Middle-aged, Smollett scorned the orthodox grand tourists, 'raw boys, whom Britain seemed to have poured forth on purpose to bring her national character into
contempt' [xxix; letter nos. in Smollett's Travels].
He and his wife settled in Nice for a year before spending two months in Italy from the beginning of September 1764. They sailed to Genoa and Lerici with Anne Curry (for whom Mrs Smollett was acting as chaperone) and a 'Mr R.' of Nice. They travelled overland to Pisa and Florence and by the end of September they were in Rome where they stayed several weeks before returning to Florence and back to Nice. The Travels supply much classical history and description, but it is relieved by original perceptions of works of art. Having proclaimed that he was no connoisseur, Smollett did not
hesitate to say he found no beauty in the Venus de Medici whose attitude was 'aukward and out of character' [xxviii] and Michelangelo's Last Judgment produced 'the same sort of confusion that perplexes my ear at a grand concert, consisting
of a great variety of instruments: or rather, when a number of people are all talking at once' [xxxiii]. Raphael's
Transfiguration he would cut in two [xxxiii]. Modern architecture failed to please. The churches and palaces were too crowded with petty ornaments and 'such an assemblage of useless festoons, pillars, pilasters and their architrave
entablatures' [xxx]. While St Peter's Square was altogether sublime, Bernini's Baldacchino magnificent, and the symmetry and proportion of St Peter's 'so worthy of applause', the altar of St Peter's choir was 'a heap of puerile finery, better
adapted to an Indian Pagod, than to a temple built upon the principles of Greek architecture'[xxxi]. The Colosseum was
the most stupendous work of its kind, but the Pantheon looked like 'a huge cockpit, open at the top' [xxxi]. He viewed painting with a strong Protestant prejudice, and regretted that so many pictures were devoted to the 'shocking subjects of the martyrology', such as 'Laurence frying upon the coals' (whom he referred to with equal disrespect in another context
as being 'broiled like a barbecued pig') [xxxi].
His comments on the Italian people were not unduly flattering; he thought Italian women 'the most haughty, insolent, capricious and revengeful females on the face of the earth', and he would rather 'be condemned for life to the gallies, than
exercise the office of cicisbeo' [xxvii]; 'the hostlers, postilions, and other fellows hanging about the post-houses in Italy,
are the most greedy, impertinent, and provoking' [xxix]. Smollett warned young travellers in Rome 'to be upon their guard against a set of sharpers (some of them of our own country) who deal in pictures and antiques'; it was odd that 'the moment [the English] set foot in Italy, they are seized with the ambition of becoming connoisseurs in painting, musick, statuary, and architecture' and the adventurers of this country 'do not fail to flatter this weakness for their own advantage'
[xxix]. He described the social ritual of the English in Rome: on arrival 'you receive cards from all your country folks' who 'expect to have the visit returned the next day, when they give orders not to be at home; and you never speak to one
another in the sequel' [xxix]. At the end of his Italian expedition Smollett recalled how he had suffered a 'great number of hardships, which I thought my weakened constitution could not have bore; as well as to violent fits of passion, chequered, however, with transports of a more agreeable nature; insomuch that I may say I was for two months continually
agitated either in mind of body, and very often in both at the same time' [xxxv]. A subsequent visit overland from Nice
to Turin in February/March 1765, described in letter xxxviii, is now considered a fiction.
Smollett's health did not improve and he and his wife again set out for Italy in 1769, to seek a cure at the baths of Lucca and Pisa. On 5 June 1769 Smollett witnessed the marriage of Anne Curry to George Renner in Florence.2 In February 1770 Horace Mann was consulting him in Pisa over the identity of Junius.3 In the spring of 1770 he hired a villa, 'Il Giardino', just outside Leghorn in 'a most romantic and solitary Situation', where Dr John Armstrong visited him in May.4 In the autumn he wrote most of Humphry Clinker, perhaps his greatest novel. In January 1771 he described himself as 'so dry and emaciated that I may pass for an Egyptian mummy',5 and in August he was at the baths in Lucca and Pisa.6 He died on 17 September and was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Leghorn (where his monument was erected in 1773).7 He had sat for his portrait to an unknown Italian painter (NPG) and an anonymous miniature (priv. coll.) once belonged to George Renner, who subsequently acted as Smollett's agent in Leghorn. His widow, whose health was also delicate, stayed on in Italy living with the Renners in Leghorn; her circumstances were not comfortable and she lost her estate in the West Indies through a fire in 1782.8 She died in Leghorn on 30 January 1791 (and lies buried in the same grave as Mrs Renner).9 George Renner had died in 1790.
1. See F. Felsenstein, intro. to Travels through France and Italy, [1979], and L.M. Knapp, Smollett, 254 - 8, 279 - 99. 2. Felsenstein (at n1), 378n5. 3. Wal.Corr., 23:189. 4. Smollett, Letters, ed. L.M. Knapp, no.104. 5. Ibid., no.106. 6. Ibid., no.107. 7. Leghorn Inscr., 57. 8. See L. Melville, Life and Letters of Smollett, 269. 9. Leghorn Inscr., 6.