Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) is best known today as a novelist, but in the eighteenth-century, he was regarded as a historian and critic. In this book, Richard J. Jones explores the diversity of Smollett's journalistic and literary writings and establishes new connections between Smollett's work and writers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The book takes as its focal point Smollett's visit to Nice, between 1763 and 1765, and the account he wrote of it in Travels through France and Italy (1766). This account is usually seen as a "travel narrative" but Jones argues that it should be read as a "pocket encyclopedia" in the tradition of Voltaire. Jones divides his study into sections on medicine, fine art, the theater and history. In doing so, he offers a productive juxtaposition of authors, texts and contexts, presenting Smollett as a writer whose Scottish (and particularly Glaswegian) identity informed his involvement in a wider European Enlightenment.

This book deals with changing conditions and conceptions of authorship in the long eighteenth century, a period said to have witnessed the birth of the modern author. Challenging claims about the public sphere and the professional writer, it engages with recent work on print culture and the history of the book and takes up such under-treated topics as the forms of literary careers and the persistence of the Renaissance “republic of letters” into the “age of authors.”

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the work themselves.