Author · 13 titles

Tobias Smollett

Tobias Smollett (1721–1771) wrote picaresque novels of sailors, scoundrels, and a Scotland on the make. A surgeon before he was a novelist, he never lost the medical stare: bodies, ships, and social climbers observed without perfume. Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphry Clinker made English fiction louder, ruder, and more mobile. The comedy is rough; the letters in Clinker still feel like a nation talking to itself. With 13 titles in our catalogue, Smollett remains the novelist who proved that adventure could be diagnostic as well as funny.

All contributors