Only one influence followed him into life from the sunny island of Jamaica. He there wooed and won Miss Anne or Nancy Lascelles, a young Kingston heiress. When he returned to London, he returned as an engaged man. In one of his unpublished letters, he expressly states that he was not married until 1747, when Miss Lascelles came to England. But, on the other hand, there is evidence in Jamaica that some sort of ceremony was performed before Smollett left the island in the end of 1743. However this may be, Smollett’s Wanderjahre or years of wandering were now over. He settled down straightway to do the work Heaven laid to his hand, with all the energy that in him lay.
CHAPTER IV
THE WEARY TRAGEDY—SHIFTS TO LIVE
No sooner had Smollett returned to London than he resumed negotiations with reference to his ill–fated tragedy. Authors are proverbially blind to the true merits of their literary progeny. As each fond father’s geese are swans, so, in the youthful Tobias Smollett’s eyes, fresh from conquest in the matrimonial arena, this decided objection to have anything to do with his play could only result from national antipathy against the Scots. ‘My luckless tragedy is suffering for Bannockburn,’ he remarked on one occasion to Mallet. Our vanity will seize on any reason rather than the right one to save our amour–propre. Undoubtedly, Rich, Gifford, and Lacy’s treatment of Smollett was far from generous, nor was Garrick wholly free from blame. They should have declined the play at once. Let us take the better view of it, however, and ascribe their action to a mistaken desire to save the peppery Scotsman’s feelings. Better a hundred times if he had received the plain, unvarnished truth about that wretchedly crude production at the outset. A few pangs of wounded vanity, a curse or two at the Southron’s lack of critical insight, and Tobias probably would have buried or burned his MS. and forgotten all about it in another year, while in the long–run his common sense would have come to see the justice of the managerial decision. But for several years after his return from Jamaica his expectations were raised and his hopes excited by vague promises and vaguer hints as to what ‘we will do next year.’ The consequence of all this manœuvring was, that Tobias, with that obstinate national pride characteristic of him, conceived that in some occult way patriotic prestige was bound up in his publishing, by hook or crook, a production so long withheld from a presumably expectant public by Southron jealousy. More follies have been perpetrated under the guise of patriotism than through all the vices combined. Let us detail the finish of a foolish business. After Roderick Random had rendered him famous, Smollett, imagining that all he wrote or had ever written would be eagerly devoured by an undiscriminating public, published The Regicide by subscription. Ten years afterwards he cursed his indiscretion in no measured terms. The wisdom of thirty became the folly of forty; and some time during the last two years of his life, according to tradition, he committed to the flames two or three dozen copies of the ill–digested tragedy that had entailed on him so much trouble and brought him so little reputation.
Meantime, the worthy Tobias was oppressed with the all–absorbing problem wherewithal to live. Rumour credited him with marrying an heiress. Rumour, as usual, lied. If our ex–surgeon’s mate, whose philosophy of life at that period seemed summed up in Horace’s famous injunction, ‘Get money, honestly if you can, but without fail get money,’ expected that in marrying Miss Nancy Lascelles he was purchasing the fee–simple of future years of affluence and ease, never man was more deceived. Let us credit the estimable Tobias, however, with a moral code more elevated than that. Albeit in the years to come Miss Nancy found she had not married a blood–relation of the patient Job’s, and he, that passionate West Indian ‘heiresses’ are not the ideal wives for hard–working literary men, on the whole the marriage was as happy as are three out of every five contracted in this working–day world. But the fortune of Miss Nancy, being invested in sugar plantations and such accessories as are necessary for the efficient production of this necessary staple of food, was, alas! difficult of realisation, and in the end only rolled upon the already heavily–burdened husband a quiverful of lawsuits. It was the old story! The lawyers got the cash, the litigants—the unspeakable pleasure of paying for their law with the object of their law–suit. Thus did Miss Nancy’s fortune disappear!
From March 1744, when he returned to London, until January 1748, when Roderick Random was published, Smollett’s movements are involved in obscurity. Only by means of meagre references in his own letters, and chance allusions to him in those of such friends as, in days to come, having carved their names in the Temple of Fame, had, in consequence, the somewhat doubtful honour of having their lives written, are we able to glean aught about his existence at this period. He was only a lad of some three or four–and–twenty years, unknown, friendless, and left to fight the great battle of life for himself. Little wonder is it, then, if, among the half–million inhabitants constituting the population of the British metropolis about the middle of the eighteenth century, the young Scots surgeon felt himself lost—as though he had been cut off from every kindly face and sympathetic voice. He probably was beginning to form those connections with booksellers which led him, before many years were over, to degenerate into a mere money–grubbing hack, not above doing a little literary ‘sweating,’ by obtaining high prices for work which he got executed by his slaves of the quill on terms much lower. But of that in its place. Certain it is that during these four years Smollett must have derived an income, and, what is more, a moderately good income, from some source. His letters prove that. From one addressed to his early friend, Richard Barclay, and dated London, May 22, 1744, we quote the following autobiographical facts:—‘I am this minute happy in yours, which affords me all the satisfaction of hearing from you, without the anxiety naturally flowing from its melancholy occasion, for I was informed of the decease of our late friend by a letter from Mr. Gordon, dated the day after his death. All those (as well as you, my dear Barclay) who knew the intimacy between us must imagine that no stroke of fate could make a deeper impression on my soul than that which severs me for ever from one I so entirely loved, from one who merited universal esteem, and who, had he not been cut off in the very blossom of his being, would have been an ornament to society, the pride and joy of his parents, and a most inestimable jewel to such as were attached to him as we were by the sacred ties of love and friendship.... My weeping muse would fain pay a tribute to his manes, and were I vain enough to think my verse would last, I would perpetuate his friendship and his virtue. I wish I was near you, that I might pour forth my heart before you, and make you judge of its dictates and the several steps I have lately taken, in which case I am confident you and all honest men would acquit my principles, however my prudentials might be condemned. However, I have moved into the house where the late John Douglas, surgeon, died, and you may henceforth direct for Mr. Smollett, surgeon, in Downing Street, West.... Your own,
Ts. Smollett.
N.B.—Willie Wood, who is just now drinking a glass with me, offers you his good wishes, and desires you to present his compliments to Miss Betty Bogle.—T. S.’