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“... modern world. The literature of Romanticism seized on the work in order to discuss itself. Smollett’s translation of 1755, now reissued, pre-dated this capture, and perhaps it may be said that the translation assisted a romantic reading of Cervantes which it was also equipped to avert. His opinion of the work, expressed a little earlier in the ...”

“... and King James VI, Scottish authors were swamping the booksellers’ lists. Meanwhile, in England, Tobias Smollett complained that ‘Genius is lost, Learning undervalued, and Taste altogether extinguished.’ What Wedderburn meant by a ‘standard of language’ was a literary style that did not betray its locality, and Smith, bred up at Oxford, wrote ...”

“... themselves with the medical pretensions of spas or with the derisive accounts by visitors like Tobias Smollett and Christopher Anstey. They are sober accounts of planning, financing and building, of the labours of improvement commissioners; they offer analyses of population and of the proportion of masters to servants, along with statistics of ...”

“... vessel that eventually killed the poet. There was, however, profit as well as peril in anonymity. Tobias Smollett was almost certainly the author of an unsigned complimentary review of his own Complete History of England. An unattributed notice in the London Chronicle which praised a work by James Boswell as ‘a book of true genius’ was written by ...”

“... plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates detailed scrutiny. It may be worth asking how Lever (born 1806) contrived to predate Jane Austen. If Spender wants to double her ...”

“... product. Anything that smacks of engineered social change for the many seems to bring out the Tobias Smollett in the incumbent mayor. It was at a masked ball for bankers that Johnson characterised the Occupy London protesters as ‘hemp-smoking, fornicating hippies in crusty little tents’. The expensive and so far limited attempt to bring back a ...”

“... in the randomness of the world and fascination with the patterns that appear in the chaos – is Tobias Smollett. Perhaps the most striking of Pynchon’s reactions against the legacy of the Victorian novelists is his treatment of children, especially in Gravity’s Rainbow. He doesn’t merely defetishise them as vessels of mystical innocence; he ...”

“... repellent Frenchmen salivating at the sight of a good honest English joint of beef. And so did Tobias Smollett, who sent one of the characters in his novel Ferdinand Count Fathom prowling vainly through Paris in search of the same totemic meat. ‘A true-born Englishman,’ this hero declared, ‘needs not be afeard to shew his face, nor his backside ...”

“... Hackney’, a hack writer offering his services on the basis of proven seditious abilities. Tobias Smollett prefaced The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) with reassurances from a fictional bookseller that nothing but good could come from an actionable publication. ‘If you should be sentenced to the pillory, your fortune is made … As for ...”

“... any descriptions of Barber’s physical appearance. Johnson gives us a hint, in a letter quoted by Tobias Smollett in 1758. He describes the teenage Frank as a ‘Lad of a delicate frame’. He also says he is ‘sickly’, and ‘subject to a malady in his Throat’, and though these belong to a particular occasion, we know that in later years Barber was ...”

“... wanting to make them tell us something about the times, is that they come from the same source: Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771). The novel written in letters, puts alongside one another the reports of the splenetic but good-hearted hypochondriac Matthew Bramble, seeing wherever he looks in Georgian London the flotsam of ...”