SOURCE: "Tobias Smollett," in Great English Novelists, George W. Jacobs & Co., 1908, pp. 87-107.

In the following essay, Holbrook surveys Smollett's life and career, concluding that Smollett, while neither essential to the development of English literature nor particularly original as a writer, nevertheless did contribute somewhat to the growth of the novel as a genre.

Of the early masters of the English novel, Tobias Smollett is the least original and on the whole the least satisfying. But his work was by no means without some considerable influence on the literary taste of his time. His novels are entirely derivative, harking back to the picaresque mode of narrative, whose greatest English exemplar was Defoe, and admittedly based upon the finest of all specimens of this particular form of fiction—the satirical narratives of Spain. Into the framework thus adopted Smollett contrived to instill the restless and combative qualities of his...