Tobias Smollett's literary reputation properly rests upon his achievements as a great novelist who in the eighteenth century helped pioneer and establish the novel as one of the most important forms of literary expression in the past three hundred years. The five novels he published in his lifetime raised him into the company of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne as one of the preeminent founders of the English novelistic tradition. But putting his novels against the total number of printed words for which Smollett was in one way or another responsible in his lifetime will reveal that Smollett's novels are a somewhat small part of his total output as a man of letters. Scientific writer, historian, art and literary critic, reviewer, political propagandist--these are only a few of the roles Smollett assumed while busily turning out material for London booksellers from the mid 1740s...