Biography/Adam Sisman: Tobias Smollett's 50-year life (1721-1771) spans the middle years of the 18th century, and much of our sense of that period comes from his novels.
They give us pre-industrial England in all its ripe, raw, rumbustious richness: a noisy, dirty, smelly place, in the process of becoming the wealthiest country in the world. It was an era of boom and bust, of men on the make and others on the road to ruin, of opulence and squalor.
The energy of the period crackles from the pages of Smollett's novels. Though the books are long, their pace rarely slackens. His picaresque plots twist and turn, lurching through ludicrous scenes, sudden reverses and unlikely coincidences; there is nothing subtle about their structure. Nor is there about the humour, which is coarse - there is no other word for it - the humour of smutty puns and cruel practical jokes, of leaking chamber-pots and loud farts. Smollett's England was populated by naive yokels, worldly clerics, bellowing squires, lisping macaronis, quack doctors, highwaymen, card-sharps, sea-dogs, saucy wenches and dangerous ladies. His heroes are cheated, robbed, pissed upon, seduced, stripped, shipwrecked and imprisoned - before coming into unexpected inheritances and winning the hands of sweet-faced girls at the last.
Some of this seems to have happened to Smollett himself. Like so many impoverished young Scotsmen in the years following the 1707 Act of Union, he decided to seek his fortune in London, and at the age of 18 he made his way south. Appointed a surgeon's mate aboard HMS Chichester, he sailed to the West Indies, where he was lucky enough to win the heart of a young woman from a prosperous family of planters (and slave-owners). He returned to England and, boosted by his wife's wealth, set up a practice in fashionable Downing Street in 1744. His first novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), made his name. Eight further novels followed over the next two decades. Though he subsequently qualified as a doctor, he was able to retire from medicine in his early 30s and settle in a handsome Chelsea house, thanks to the success of his writing.
Of course, it wasn't as easy as that. Smollett had to endure many slights and setbacks along the way, and these no doubt exacerbated his prickly temperament. His latest biographer, Jeremy Lewis, himself a freelance writer and journalist, is particularly good on this aspect of Smollett's career. He acknowledges Smollett as "a kindred spirit, in that he inhabited a world with which I was all too familiar". Smollett was, he writes, "even by authorial standards, unusually thin-skinned, sniffing out insults where none existed and hot in revenge . . ."
His failure to interest theatre managers in his play, The Regicide, drove him "almost mad with anger and resentment". Smollett's story, Lewis concludes, is a "useful antidote for those with romantic illusions about the literary life".
At his peak, Smollett may have earned between £600 and £800 a year from his writing - at a time when Dr Johnson estimated that a man might live simply in London for a mere £30. But Smollett worked very hard for his money. As well as his novels, he undertook almost every other kind of writing, including his Complete History of England, four volumes amounting to 2,600 quarto pages, which is thought to have earned him at least £2,000. Lewis highlights Smollett's amazing versatility and impressive industry: "He was the quintessential 18th-century man of letters, writing novels, poems, histories, polemics and reviews, editing collections of travel writing and the standard work on obstetrics, founding and editing three magazines, and ruining his health in the process; his novels abound with self-important, scheming, indigent hacks, and the familiar complaints about the parsimony of publishers, the lowering effect of hackwork, the impossibility of refusing a commission, and the need to meet deadlines."
One of the problems about writing a biography of Smollett is that so little is known of much of his life. There are long periods of which no record survives, and the conscientious biographer (as Jeremy Lewis is) has to resort to phrases such as "he probably . . . he may have been . . . no doubt he . . ."
We don't know, for example, what Smollett studied at university, or whether he ever met the painter with whom he had so much in common, William Hogarth. In the absence of other evidence, the temptation for the biographer is to trawl the novels for clues. Surely Smollett must have experienced some of the same adventures as Roderick Random in his journey to London, for example? Much to his embarrassment, Smollett found himself victim to the assumption that his novels must be disguised autobiography, especially as they were written in the first person. Readers encountering the real Smollett were often surprised to find him polished and urbane, not the rough, coarse character they had expected. It has to be admitted that Smollett (perhaps mischievously) muddied the waters. He put his own thoughts and opinions into the mouths of his narrators, and introduced a character into Humphry Clinker (the hospitable "S-------") obviously modelled upon himself. Even more remarkably, he dedicated The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom to "Dr S*******", "as a testimony of my particular friendship and esteem".
Jeremy Lewis, the author of a well-received biography of Cyril Connolly and two hilarious volumes of autobiography (one of which includes an account of his studies at Trinity College Dublin), is modest in his claims for this book. As Oliver Goldsmith wrote of Smollett's History of England, he does "not pretend to have discovered any hidden records, or authentic records that have escaped the notice of other writers". This is avowedly the work of an enthusiast, who wants his subject to be better known. As such, it succeeds admirably, being clearly and entertainingly written, informed by a sympathetic understanding, and peppered with robust and sensible judgements.
Adam Sisman's last book, Boswell's Presumptuous Task, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and awarded the 2002 National Book Critics Circle award for biography. He is working on a book about the friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge
Tobias Smollett By Jeremy Lewis. Jonathan Cape, 336pp. £20