It is safe to say that no lengthy work by a major British author (if we except their juvenilia) is so little known, or has been so little studied, as Tobias Smollett's History and Adventures of an Atom (1769). Only a handful of living persons have read it through; and the scholarship devoted to it, aside from brief mention in books or essays and a few short notes in learned journals, consists of three articles, a single chapter or section in each of three books, a recent American dissertation, and a chapter of another.¹It may not be inappropriate, then, to begin by telling the reader, as Fielding did with Tom Jones, what the Atom is like and what it is not like.

In intention the Atom is a savage satirical attack by a son of Pope, Swift, and Rabelais who has been "traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, abandoned by false patrons, and overwhelmed by the sense of a domestic calamity,"² in which Smollett looks back over the previous fifteen years and lashes English conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, English politics and politicians, and "the whole body of the people … equally and universally contaminated and corrupted."³ In execution, the Atom is an allegorical narrative of fantastic events that had taken place in Japan a thousand years previously, dictated to a London haberdasher named Nathaniel Peacock by an all-knowing atom that has resided in the bodies of the greatest figures of the state; the story is interrupted by irrelevant digressions that pour out floods of obscure erudition, couched in a relentlessly helter-skelter style; and it is sauced with imagery that makes it by far the most scatological work in English literature.⁴ It is also (in execution) a rewriting of all those works of Tobias Smollett that had dealt with recent history and (in intention) a release of personal spleen and indignation; it is likewise a turning of his enemies' weapons against them by a man totally freed from the restraints of the historian or the pretended good manners of the polemicist, governed entirely, as he now is, by the desire to destroy through words and by the satirist's savage delight in his own powers.

These last characteristics … somewhat impair the Atom's artistic achievement and blunt its impact on its victims. If the coarseness of its imagery has repelled some readers, more have in all likelihood been daunted by the complexity of the events and the obscurity of some of the persons satirized, as is evident from the "keys" that were appended in manuscript to early copies and in print to modern editions, together with the disconcerting fact that no two keys are perfectly in agreement.

The Atom nevertheless offers its rewards. One of its earliest reviewers complained of "a mixture of indelicacy which though it cannot gratify the loosest imagination, can scarce fail to disgust the coarsest," yet had to concede "great spirit and humour.⁵ The modern reader will be less distressed by the coarseness than by the necessity, if he is to relish the satire, of becoming something of an expert on the history of the Seven Years' War and the personages involved in it. He will be rewarded by discovering anew the extraordinary vigor and fertility of Smollett's comic invention; by the robust enjoyment of knockabout satire; and by the endless variety and richness of the Atom's verbal texture. Smollett wrote the Atom with a saeva indignatio at least equal to Swift's and with more than a little of his genius. Far duller works have been far more admired.

The Seven Years' War and Its Background

… Smollett's views in the Atom on politics, foreign policy, and society are consistent with those which he maintained more cautiously in the Complete History of England, in its Continuation, and (still more cautiously) in the Critical Review.⁴⁷ In his judgment the attrition of royal prerogative since the Glorious Revolution (at least from the perspective of 1764) has gone too far; ministers should be appointed purely for virtue and ability, without regard to party affiliation; both houses of Parliament are shamefully confused, ignorant, venal, and are constantly manipulated by selfish oligarchs; persons without birth or breeding have engrossed most of the effective power in the realm, while the old aristocracy is weak and decadent; the moneyed interests have virtually obliterated the traditional power of the landed gentry; "luxury" has corrupted the fabric of society from top to bottom; and (worst of all) the "mob," comprising almost all persons below the nobility—cowardly, selfish, fickle, stupid, easily led— has been weakly allowed to assert, through sheer force of numbers, a power it ought never to have had.⁴⁸ On the level of specific evils, George II is the next thing to an idiot; his natural tendency to sacrifice the welfare of England to that of Hanover [i.e. during the Seven Years' War], which has resulted in a wasteful war and a crushing burden of debt and which should have been repressed by all lawful means, has been encouraged as an avenue to power, first by the unspeakably silly and inept Newcastle and next by the able but opportunistic and totally unprincipled Pitt, who also relies on the support of the vile "mob." Nearly all the high officials of government are knaves or fools or both. The wise (such as Lord Granville, lord president of the council) choose to do nothing.⁴⁹ Foreign policy is largely concerned with neglecting important matters, wasting money on subsidies to protect Hanover, and supporting the unspeakable Frederick in his wars. Generals and admirals are chosen at random, and are nearly always incompetent; the effective few (such as Wolfe, Clive, Cumming, Hawke, Elliot) are promoted by accident or through influence, and later are often either neglected or ignored, or die in action. George III is amiable but ignorant and inexperienced, Bute is virtuous but foolishly idealistic and conceitedly oblivious to practical politics; the war is ended by bribery (the ratification of the Peace of Paris), and domestic policy has degenerated into a ridiculous tug-of-war between Whigs and Tories, both equally stupid and equally obsessed with personal vanity and vengeance, while Bute, driven out of office, vainly tries to put together a stable government from behind the scenes. Such, in essence, is the Atom. …

Sources and Influences

The Atom is a unique literary work, but it is so in the restricted sense that it is a unique synthesis of ingredients that were far from unique or rare—readily available, in fact, and known to many. The chief strands that form its fabric are these: the narration of the story by an omniscient being that has also been virtually omnipresent; satire handled as "secret history," purporting to reveal the hidden springs and sordid motivations really governing famous persons in happenings known to the public; the narrative placed in a remote country, made to seem verisimilar if fantastic by a wealth of specific detail regarding persons, places, and objects; allegory in which historical events are made ridiculous by reducing them into outlandish or contemptible imagery; irrelevant digressions on esoteric or absurd subjects, involving torrents of obscure pedantry; and ubiquitous scatology.

Identification of the exact sources of these satiric strategies must rest upon conjecture, but Smollett left abundant traces of his working methods as he composed the Atom … [the] Atom may justly be seen as a vast patchwork of quotations from, versions of, and allusions to passages in the later works of Smollett's career, running from the time when he launched the Critical Review in 1756 to the publication, in 1765 and 1766, respectively, of the fifth volume of his Continuation of the Complete History of England and of his Travels. Smollett had also translated Don Quixote; and he may well have been thinking, as he composed his satire, of Cervantes' famous simile of the back side of a fair tapestry, seemingly ugly and distorted with its knots, lumps, projecting threads and grotesque figures, but nevertheless revealing how the tapestry (in this case, Britain 1754-68) is really put together.⁵⁶

Smollett's work during this period, with the single exception of his novel The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, was as an editor, historian, compiler, and polemicist, and his duties obliged him to read and absorb an enormous mass of heterogeneous material on every conceivable subject from patristic theology to snuff. He could not have written more than a portion of the reviews in the Critical, but he must at least have skimmed every page of it; and if a given review deals with history, science, medicine, or fiction we are safe in assuming that Smollett wrote it, or carefully checked it if he did not write it. Thus, by invoking Occam's razor and discarding farfetched explanations in favor of the simplest and most obvious ones, we may reliably account for the materials generating Smollett's distinctive forms of satire in the Atom. …

Attribution

So far as can be determined from the documents that have been preserved, Smollett never acknowledged that he had written the Atom and never referred to it in his correspondence. This fact has led to a certain amount of confusion concerning its attribution to him, since scholars are often chary of proceeding in such cases without the firmest evidence, and since, perhaps because of its outrageous tone and ubiquitous scatology, the Atom has been given very little detailed study. Thus Lewis Knapp, the leading Smollett scholar of our time, was hesitant to pronounce unequivocally for Smollett's authorship; thus several decades ago a fabricated "Smollett letter" asserted that he had not written it; and thus the only extensive study of the question, at about the same time, ventured only to say that it "seems reasonably safe to conclude" that Smollett wrote the Atom."⁸ But the firmest evidence is not wanting. It is both internal and external; and while we still lack an affidavit of authorship in Smollett's hand, nothing further remains to be desired to corroborate the attribution of the Atom to him. …

Abbreviations

Knapp Lewis Mansfield Knapp, Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949).

Letters The Letters of Tobias Smollett, ed. Lewis M. Knapp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).…

Martz Louis L. Martz, The Later Career of Tobias Smollett (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942)

Sekora John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).…

Notes

¹ These are: James R. Foster, "Smollett and the Atom," PMLA 68 (1953): 1032-46; Martz, 90-103; Arnold Whitridge, Tobias Smollett (Brooklyn: privately printed, 1925), 56-79; Damian Grant, Tobias Smollett: A Study in Style (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1977), 56-59, 175-77; Henry B. Prickett, "The Political Writings and Opinions of Tobias Smollett" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1952), 308-37; Wayne J. Douglass, "Smollett and the Sordid Knaves: Political Satire in The Adventures of an Atom" (Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 1976). See also two more recent articles by [Robert Adams Day] "The Authorship of the Atom," Philological Quarterly 59 (1981): 183-89; "Ut Pictura Poesis? Smollett, Satire, and the Graphic Arts," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 10, ed. Harry C. Payne (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 297-312.

² Smollett's words at the opening of his first letter in the Travels (p. 2).

³ Lismahago's words in Humphry Clinker, as repeated in a letter from Matthew Bramble to Dr. Lewis, Tweedmouth, July 15.

⁴ This statement is made with full knowledge of the poems of Swift and Pope and of Sir John Harington's earlier Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), and of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (nominated for that honor by the London Times Literary Supplement, 5 May 1978, p. 493, col. 2), to say nothing of Mailer's Ancient Evenings.

⁵Gentleman's Magazine 39 (April 1769): 205.…

⁴⁷ The evidence for this statement is carefully analyzed and discussed in Prickett, "Political Writings," 318-28.

⁴⁸ For examples of these opinions in Smollett's works see Sekora, 146-53.

⁴⁹ John Carteret became Earl Granville in 1744 on the death of his mother, who was Countess Granville in her own right. On Granville's career see Basil Williams, Carteret and Newcastle (London: Frank Cass, 1966).…

⁵⁶ In reviewing The Peregrinations of Jeremiah Grant, the West Indian, CR [Critical Review] 15 (January 1763): 18, Smollett remarks: "We cannot call it a faithful copy, … but submit to the reader, whether the likenesses may not be compared to the wrong side of a tapestry, on which the figures do not appear to the best advantage…" See Basker, 228, 271. The image is from the prologue to part 2 of Don Quixote; see the translation of Samuel Putnam (New York: Viking, 1949), 1028, n. 29. We should number among those works relevant to the Atom large portions of the Universal History … for which Smollett's editorial effort involved much rewriting—perhaps as much as one-third of the "Modern Part," including the sections on the German Empire and Japan; see Martz, 8, and Martz, "Tobias Smollett and the Universal History," Modern Language Notes 56 (1941): 1-14.…

…¹¹⁸ See Knapp, 280-83; see also the review (by Allen T. Hazen and Lillian de la Torre) of a book by Francesco Cordasco, Philological Quarterly 31 (1952): 299-300; and see Foster, "Atom," 1046.…