Introduction Take notice, that the Decree of the President of Uzbekistan of 3 October, 2019, No. Dp-5843 “On measures to radically enhance the personnel policy

1.1 The importance of work T.J . SMOLLET
Tobias Smollett
He was best known for picaresque novels such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771),^[1] which influenced later novelists, including Charles Dickens
ⁱⁱⁱ“An Essay on the External Use of Water” “Humphry Clinker” “Peregrine Pickle” “Roderick Random” “The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom” “The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves” “The Reprisal: or, The Tars of Old England” “Travels Through France and Italy”
Tobias Smollett, in full Tobias George Smollett, Smollett is typical of the Scotsmen who in the eighteenth century sought fame and fortune in England because only there was prosperity to be found.
Like Fielding, he came of a good family that could afford him little except a sound education. Then, having been apprenticed to a surgeon, he came to London in the hope of becoming a dramatist; having failed to interest anyone, he solicited a surgeon's commission in the Royal Navy, and went on the ill-fated West Indian expedition of 1740, of which the early chapters of Roderick Random give a vivid account.
When he returned to London, he set up as a doctor whose interest in literature was limited to occasional verse satires. Yet, after only eight months of interrupted work, he produced Roderick Random, and its immediate success set him up as a literary figure, a rival to Fielding who heartily detested him for obvious reasons. Smollett was interested only in telling a story, without regard for any lesson it might teach or for even the fairly lax conventions of the eighteenth century; indeed, his hero, a man of 'modest merit struggling with every difficulty', was an unprincipled scoundrel. Moreover, Smollett was convinced that Fielding had shamelessly plagiarized his work for Tom Jones, and Fielding could well have regarded the other as a pusher, a self-seeker no whit better than Roderick.
Smollett utilized the older, shapeless form of story telling; the hero wandered across the country, encountering all manner of misadventures 'intended as a satire upon mankind'. Each chapter was more or less complete in itself, and the humour neither subtle nor refined. Smollett was always attracted by oddities of speech and eccentricities of action, by farcical situations, loud noises and violent movement. So intent was he on bustle that he had little time for people, and therefore he wrote of stock humorous types, caricatures and grotesques, all usually expressive of spite, envy, conceit, opportunism, all the mean vices, the likes of which are found in the earlier novels of Dickens, his enthusiastic admirer.
The sailors in Roderick Random had been the most life-like and attractive of all the huge cast, and in Smollett's next novel, Peregrine Pickle, he created a sailor equally successful but much more developed as a human being—Commodore Trunnion. The second novel was very much like its predecessor except that it had some coherence and a good deal more genuine fun when it dealt with Mr. Pickle, Peregrine's father, and the occupants of the Garrison. Though still largely caricatures, they were described in detail and possessed a spritely interest in life which communicated itself to the reader. For sheer boisterousness, the Commodore and his friends have few to equal them; as for Peregrine, he is a worse creature than even Roderick Random.
After those two popular novels, Smollett gave up his medical career; he settled down to earn a living as an author prepared to try his hand at any form of literature —histories, political magazines, translations, travel books.
In everything he did he was hasty, prone to anger, highly prejudiced, puffed with his own importance. So rancorous did his critical sense become that when he modelled a later work on the style of Gulliver's Travels, he went farther than even Swift in his fierce disgust of British politics.
Then, like Fielding, his health broke down because of overwork, lack of sufficient money to suit his way of life, and chronic mental disturbances. He, too, sought relaxation and rehabilitation in the south of Europe, and produced a very fine travel book as the result of his experiences. But he was too late to save himself; again like Fielding, he died and was buried abroad.
Smollett came of a family of lawyers and soldiers, Whig in politics and Presbyterian in religion. In 1727 or 1728 he entered Dumbarton grammar school, proceeding from there to the University of Glasgow and apprenticeship to William Stirling and John Gordon, surgeons of that city. His first biographer states that he “attended the anatomical and medical lectures,” and, if his first novel, Roderick Random, may be taken as evidence, he also studied Greek, mathematics, moral and natural philosophy, logic, and belles lettres. He left the university in 1739 without a degree and went to London, taking with him his play The Regicide. A year later he was commissioned surgeon’s second mate in the Royal Navy and appointed to HMS Chichester, which reached Port Royal, Jam., on Jan. 10, 1741. It is probable that Smollett saw action in the naval bombardment of Cartagena (now in Colombia). The expedition was disastrous; he would later describe its horrors in Roderick Random. In Jamaica he met and was betrothed to—and perhaps there married—an heiress, Anne Lassells. He returned to London alone to set up as a surgeon on Downing Street, Westminster, his wife joining him in 1747. He failed to secure a production of The Regicide, but in 1746, after the defeat of the Jacobite rebels at Culloden, he wrote his most famous poem, “The Tears of Scotland.” He had by now moved to cheaper accommodations in Chapel Street, Mayfair, no doubt because, despite litigation, he had managed to recover only a fraction of his wife’s considerable dowry, which was invested in land and slaves. It was in Chapel Street that he wrote Advice and Reproof, verse satires in the manner of the Roman poet Juvenal.
In 1748 Smollett published his novel The Adventures of Roderick Random, in part a graphic account of British naval life at the time, and also translated the great picaresque romance Gil Blas from the French of Alain-René Lesage. In 1750 he obtained the degree of M.D. from Marischal College, Aberdeen. Later in the year he was in Paris, searching out material for The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. This work contains a great comic figure in Hawser Trunnion, a retired naval officer who, though living on dry land, insists on behaving as though he were still on the quarterdeck of one of his majesty’s ships at sea.
In 1752 he published “An Essay on the External Use of Water,” an attack on the medicinal properties of the waters of a popular English health resort, Bath (he would resume the attack in his later novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker). The essay made him many enemies and little money. His financial difficulties were intensified by his generosity in lending money to a hack writer called Peter Gordon, who employed legal stratagems to avoid repayment. Smollett came to blows with Gordon and his landlord and was sued by them for £1,000 and £500, respectively, on charges of trespass and assault. In the event, Smollett was required to pay only small damages. He was now living at Monmouth House, Chelsea, where he was host to such leading literary figures as the authors Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, as well as to the actor David Garrick and John Hunter, a famous surgeon and anatomist. On Sundays, if one may take a passage in Peregrine Pickle as autobiographical, Smollett threw his house open to “unfortunate brothers of the quill,” whom he regaled with “beer, pudding, and potatoes, port, punch, and Calvert’s entire butt-beer.” He himself seems to have been a man irascible, pugnacious, infinitely energetic, courageous, and generous.
The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (now, with The History and Adventures of an Atom, the least regarded of his novels) appeared in 1753. It sold poorly, and Smollett was forced into borrowing from friends and into further hack writing. In June 1753 he visited Scotland for the first time in 15 years; his mother, it is said, recognized him only because of his “roguish smile.” Back in London, Smollett set about a commitment to translate Don Quixote from the Spanish of Miguel de Cervantes, and this translation was published in 1755. Smollett was already suffering from tuberculosis. Early in 1756 he became editor of The Critical Review, a Tory and church paper, at the same time writing his Complete History of England, which was financially successful. This work relieved the financial pressure that he had felt all his adult life. A year later, his farce The Reprisal: or, The Tars of Old England was produced at Drury Lane and brought him a profit of almost £200. In 1758 he became what today might perhaps be called general editor of Universal History, a compilation of 58 volumes; Smollett himself wrote on France, Italy, and Germany. His friendship with the politician John Wilkes enabled him to secure the release of Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson’s black servant, from the press-gang. But a libel on Admiral Sir Charles Knowles in The Critical Review led to Smollett’s being sentenced to a fine of £100 and three months’ imprisonment in the King’s Bench Prison. He seems to have lived there in some comfort and drew on his experiences for his novel The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762), which was serialized in The British Magazine, of which Smollett became editor in 1760.
Two years later he became editor of The Briton, a weekly founded to support the prime minister John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute. He was also writing an eight-volume work entitled The Present State of all Nations, and he had begun a translation, in 36 volumes, of the varied works of the French writer Voltaire. Smollett was now seriously ill; attempts to secure a post as physician to the army in Portugal and as British consul in Marseille or Madrid were fruitless. In 1763 the death of his only child, Elizabeth, who was 15 years old, overwhelmed him “with unutterable sorrow.” He severed his connection with The Critical Review and, as he said, “every other literary system,” retiring with his wife to France, where he settled at Nice.
In 1766 Smollett published Travels Through France and Italy, his one nonfiction work that is still read. It is a satire on both tourists and those who batten on them, and its jaundiced version of traveling on the Continent led to Smollett’s appearance as the splenetic Smelfungus in Laurence Sterne’s novel A Sentimental Journey (1768). He returned to England in that year, visited Scotland, and at Christmas was again in England (at Bath), where he probably began what is his finest work, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, an epistolary novel that recounts the adventures of a family traveling through Britain. In 1768, steadily weakening in health, he retired to Pisa, Italy. During the autumn of 1770 he seems to have written the bulk of Humphry Clinker, which was published on June 15, 1771.
The novelists Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, but he is unrivaled for the pace and vigour that sustain his comedy. He is especially brilliant in the rendering of comic characters in their externals, thus harking back to the manner of the Jacobean playwright Ben Jonson and looking forward to that of the novelist Charles Dickens. By modern criteria, his art as a satirical novelist is defective, his model being the “picaresque” novel, relating loosely linked episodes in the life of a rogue hero. But his panoramic picture of the life of his times is surpassed only by that given by Henry Fielding, while his account of conditions in the Royal Navy is especially valuable.