It's a profound shame that the reputation of Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) seems to be waning. A few generations ago, he was part of the...
133 months ago

The first great Scottish writer of the Union, Tobias Smollett (1721-71), is now largely forgotten. Unlike Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Smollett's picaresque...
13 months ago

Tobias Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) contains one of the rare sympathetic portrayals of a Jewish character in eighteenth-century fiction.
31 months ago

John Mullan enjoys a new life of Tobias Smollett as Jeremy Lewis brings the exuberant satirist back into view
253 months ago

Tsundoku, Japanese for the tendency to buy books and let them pile up around the house unread. When I stumbled across it, I felt as if someone had reached...
38 months ago

You wait ages for a Tobias Smollett anniversary then two come along at once. March this year brought us the 300th anniversary of his birth,...
36 months ago

George Cruikshank (1792-1878), Roderick Random's Encounter with Captain Weasel, 1859. Oil on board. Museum objects collection.
146 months ago

While visiting the rare-book collection at the University of Virginia in the late 1970's, Carlos Fuentes happened on a 1755 edition of...
462 months ago

Tobias Smollett was a Scottish satirical novelist, best known for his picaresque novels The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The...
3 weeks ago

Would it surprise you to know that people were fighting over “literary” vs. “popular” fiction at least as long as 271 years ago?
2 months ago