Smollett, Tobias George

(1721-1771)

   Scottish poet, the son of Sir James of Bonhill, Dumbartonshire, he attended Glasgow University and was an apprenticed surgeon. He left the university in 1739 without a degree and in 1740 was commissioned surgeon's second mate in the Royal Navy on HMS Chichester and saw action in the West Indies. In London he set up as a surgeon on Downing Street, Westminster, where he wrote his famous poem "The Tears of Scotland" memorializing the Battle of Culloden, 1746. In 1750 he obtained the degree of M.D. from Marischal College, Aberdeen. He died at his villa in Leghorn, Italy, where he was buried. His novels made him famous and financially secure. Two of them are The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762), which was serialized in The British Magazine, of which Smollett became editor in 1760. He also wrote the Complete History of England (1757-1758) and Travels Through France and Italy (1766). Some of his poems: "A Pastoral Ballad," "Adieu, Ye Streams That Smoothly Flow," "Advice: A Satire," "Burlesque Ode," "Come, Listen Ye Students of Ev'ry Degree," "Independence," "Thy Fatal Shafts Unerring Move."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. Microsoft Encarta 2006 (DVD). Microsoft Corporation, 2006. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse. David Nichol Smith, ed. Oxford University Press, 1926. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Works of Tobias Smollett: Poems, Plays, and the Briton. University of Georgia Press, 1993.