The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, and: The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (review)

Tobias Smollett seems destined to remain on the fringes of the British literary canon. Despite a jam-packed career that included forays into nearly every genre, in his own day he never won lasting acceptance from the Johnsonian literary mainstream. Posthumously, the Romantics marginalized him for being too moralistic, the Victorians snubbed him for being too crude, and the modernists patronized him for being too undisciplined. Even the emergence of more historically sensitive forms of criticism made little room for Smollett, with Ian Watt's seminal The Rise of the Novel giving him only the most glancing of treatments. Indeed, contemporary critics have not been much more accommodating, the latest example being Smollett's lamentable absence from Terry Eagleton's new The English Novel: An Introduction.

Why does Smollett always seem to be on the outside looking in? Generically speaking, the answer may lie in his unfashionable preference for romance over realism. With their wandering plots, coarse physical comedy, and "flat" characters, Smollett's novels have always fitted awkwardly into canons and classrooms alike. (The exception that proves this rule is Humphry Clinker, the most tightly structured, least bawdy of Smollett's fictions.) Indeed, as long as the main line of development of the eighteenth-century novel is viewed as the slow but inexorable movement from the fantastic and ideal (Behn) to the quotidian and satiric (Austen), Smollett will continue to seem like the odd man out. Only when the above-mentioned linear narrative of the novel's rise is abandoned or reconfigured, as in Deidre Lynch's recent The Economy of Character, can Smollett be seen to participate in the novel's multiple lines of development in the eighteenth century. Viewed in this light, Smollett's true contribution to literary history becomes clear: he took the European genre of the picaresque romance, left for dead by most reputable authors at the time, and resuscitated it for a new generation of British readers.

As the two books under review here demonstrate, Smollett was probably more familiar with the conventions of European romance than any other British author of his day. Indeed, he was clearly under the influence of Cervantes' comic masterpiece (which is both romance and romantic satire) when he published his first novel, Roderick Random, in January 1748. Already at work on a translation of Le Sage's equally formative Gil Blas (which would be published the following October), less than six months later Smollett agreed to begin what would turn out to be his masterpiece of European translation: The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote. As Mary Helen McMurran has recently reminded us, the marketplace for literary translation in eighteenth-century Britain was hot: translations of French novels and romances constituted up to one-third of the published works in any given year (McMurran, "National or Transnational? The Eighteenth-Century Novel," in The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], 53). Like his reputation, Smollett's translation of Cervantes has seen both good times and bad; after being warmly received by his contemporaries, it was subsequently attacked for being vague, inaccurate, and even plagiarized. This new edition should put these charges to rest and restore the initial high standing of the work. Since most of the notes gloss Smollett's translation rather than Cervantes' text, I would not recommend it for first-time readers of Don Quixote; for those wishing to experience Cervantes' text as many eighteenth-century British readers would have encountered it, however, this is the perfect edition. The text, edited by O.M. Brack, Jr, is crisp and clear, and adequate attention is paid to most...