Tobias Smollett By Jeremy Lewis

Will a new biography spur a revival of interest in the works of Tobias Smollett? D J Taylor hopes so

'The English humorists!" V S Pritchett once exclaimed, with rather daunting candour. "Through a fog compounded of tobacco smoke, the stink of spirits and the breath of bailiffs, we see their melancholy faces." Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) was a Scotsman by birth - his grandfather turns out to have been one of the architects of the 1707 Act of Union - but Pritchett's collection of Grub Street irregulars would be radically diminished by his absence. To read more than a few paragraphs of his voluminous output is to be plunged headlong into a reeking 18th-century sub-world full of rakish swindlers and their bold-eyed mistresses, where every man's aim is seduction and every woman's marriage, and the most common sound in a London street is the smash of a loaded chamber pot breaking on the cobbles.

"We have been jeered, reproached, buffeted, pissed upon and at last stripped of our money," Roderick Random, the hero of Smollett's first novel, apostrophises his arrival in the London of George II, "and I suppose, by and by, we shall be stripped of our skins." Notwithstanding the occasional bout of worm's-eye moralising, this, more or less, is the authentic Smollett atmosphere.

The plot of Roderick Random (1748) is worth summarising at length as an example of the kind of materials in which Smollett dealt. His mother dead and father vanished, our hero is dragged up by a disagreeable old Scottish grandfather. Rescued by a seafaring uncle, who obligingly flogs his bullying schoolmaster as a parting shot, the boy is apprenticed to a local surgeon whom he blackmails into putting up the money for a trip to London. After a series of picaresque adventures, involving highwaymen, prostitutes and mistaken identities, Roderick and his faithful companion Strap turn up in the capital where, as a couple of impressionable Scotsmen, they are easy prey for a lively collection of fraudsters and card-sharps. Having bribed his way into a job as a naval surgeon, Roderick serves on the disastrous Cartagena expedition of 1741, returns to England, falls in love with an heiress but is kidnapped and smuggled over to France where he ends up fighting on the wrong side in the battle of Dettingen. Back home once more, he undergoes an astonishing series of vicissitudes, including a spell in a debtor's prison, joins another naval expedition on his uncle's ship, meets "Don Rodrigo", a wealthy merchant who is revealed as his long-lost father, and concludes his labours in the arms of his beloved Narcissa. Strap, meanwhile, attaches himself to Narcissa's maid, Miss Williams, who for good measure turns out to be a reformed prostitute.

As Jeremy Lewis demonstrates in this enthusiastic biography, Roderick Random is not exactly a self-portrait, and yet there are enough similarities between Smollett and his fictional creations to lend the world of his novels a dreadful sense of conviction. The mid-18th century was the great age of the Scottish diaspora: the teenaged Smollett who migrated south with an unactable play in his luggage was highly representative of his time. Although employed as a navy surgeon - the West Indian scenes in Roderick Random where weevils throng the ship's biscuits and fever rages below decks are drawn from the life - he could never subdue his literary ambitions. Permanently hard-up and famously thin-skinned - he was sent to jail for three months for libelling Admiral Knowles - he spent the next quarter century scratching out a subsistence living on the margins of polite literature, ruining his health along the way, before dying at Livorno, long leagues distant from his beloved Scotland, at the comparatively early age of 50.

Even by the standards of the 18th century, Smollett's output was prodigious. Of the three novels that remain in print, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) is a quarter of a million words long and includes an irrelevant "Kiss 'n' tell" memoir supplied by a notorious period good-time girl named Lady Vane. But fiction represents only a fraction of his vast oeuvre. The latter included a multi-volume Complete History of England, translations of Voltaire and his fictional master Cervantes, a medical treatise on the efficacy of sea-water, and much else besides. Judged from its moral angle, the atmosphere of Smollett's fiction is extraordinarily simple. As Roderick reflects at one point, "I have found, by experience, that... there is no wretch so ungrateful as he whom you have most generously obliged, and no enemy so implacable as those who have done you the greatest injury." Although he values personal loyalty - his relationship with Strap is practically feudal in its mutual devotion - and has a textbook notion of "honour" (largely as an excuse to fight duels) Roderick, like Peregrine and the denizens of Smollett's final book The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), is characterised by his complete lack of moral scruple. He cheerfully enlists under the French flag at Dettingen - something that would have appalled the readers of a century later - without giving the matter a thought, and his attempts to revenge himself for perceived slights are practically pathological in their violence.

At the same time, these bedrock standards of human behaviour give Smollett a surprising amount of elbow room. Somehow his portrait of a metropolitan world where no footman will open a door and no government official grant an audience without first accepting a backhander seems more devastating for the sheer matter-of-factness with which the business is conducted. "This is what life is like," Smollett seems to be saying, and to believe that you can succeed in the cut-throat environment of Georgian London without a full purse and a sharp eye is simple idiocy. In much the same way, he is notably frank about sex: Roderick catches a venereal disease at one point, and there is a riotous account of the homosexual ship's officer Captain Whiffle who perfumes himself with lavender, inspects oncoming sailors through an eye-glass and nearly faints at the smell of tobacco.

Although some pungent correspondence survives, there is little detailed information about Smollett's life, and Lewis cheerfully admits that he is merely glossing the standard accounts. His forte, consequently, is a series of spirited gleanings from the back-alleys of 18th-century history, and much useful information on particular culverts - obstetrics, contemporary literary life and so on - into which his subject strayed. But he is good on what he called the tensions of Smollett's professional life, and in particular the dilemmas imposed by his nationalism.

By instinct and upbringing, Smollett was a Scottish Enlightenment Whig and a supporter of the Union which his grand- father had helped bring about, yet he was also permanently aggrieved by the anti-Scots prejudice of the Jacobite years: one of his earliest literary successes was a poem bewailing the slaughter of Culloden. Set down on the continent, on the other hand, he immediately transformed himself into John Bull en vacance, endlessly lampooning the frightful foreigners (he was an early critic of French sanitation) and thanking God for the amenities of English life: it was the experience of reading his caustic Travels Through France and Italy (1766) that led Laurence Sterne to nickname him "Smelfungus".

Since Smollett's death his reputation has led a queer kind of subterranean existence, never quite falling out of favour and yet never quite achieving the status of a Fielding (with whom he conducted bitter quarrels) or a Richardson. Effectively banned from the Victorian reading lists on account of his indecency, he nonetheless survives in - to name only a couple of associative glances - Dickens' memories of his childhood reading and and some stray mentions in Middlemarch, and it is difficult to imagine that Thackeray (who name-checks him in Vanity Fair), Marryat or Surtees would have written in quite the same way without him. Perhaps the strongest mark in his favour, as Lewis acknowledges in his list of 20th-century fans, is the way in which every so often there emerges another critic - an Orwell, a Pritchett - who sees the point of Smollett and is prepared to champion him in the face of what must be admitted as some pretty considerable failings. In his coarse and imaginative way, he was truer to the spirit of his time than many a loftier-minded practitioner without the thud of the bailiff's boots at the door to goad him on.