Tobias Smollett in the Enlightenment: Travels through France, Italy, and Scotland

Tobias Smollett (1721-71) is best known today as a novelist whereas in the eighteenth century he was primarily regarded as a historian and critic. In Tobias Smollett in the Enlightenment, Richard J. Jones explores the diversity of Smollett’s journalistic and literary writings and establishes new connections between Smollett’s work and writers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Taking as his focal point Smollett’s visit to Nice, between 1763 and 1765, and the account he wrote of it in Travels through France and Italy (1766), Jones argues that Smollett’s account should be read as a pocket encyclopedia in the tradition of Voltaire, rather than as a conventional travel narrative. Discussing Smollett’s engagement with medicine, fine art, the theater and history, Jones offers a productive juxtaposition of authors, texts and contexts, presenting Smollett as a writer whose Scottish (and particularly Glaswegian) identity informed his involvement in a wider European Enlightenment.