Travels through France and Italy
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Travels through France and Italy is travel literature by Tobias Smollett published in 1766.
After suffering the loss of his only child, 15-year-old Elizabeth, in April of 1763, Smollett left England in June of that year. Together with his wife, he traveled across France to Nice. In the autumn of the next year, he visited Genoa, Rome, Florence and other towns of Italy. After staying in Nice for the winter he returned to London by June 1765.
In the following year, he published an account of his Travels through France and Italy. It is among the most entertaining books of travel ever written, and a veritable mine of mostly very accurate information concerning the natural phenomena, history, social life, economics, diet and morals of the places described. Smollett had a lively and pertinacious curiosity, and, as his novels prove, a very quick eye. He foresaw the merits of Cannes, then a small village, as a health-resort, and the possibilities of the Corniche road. The chief interest of the book, however, for the general reader, lies in its unsparing revelation of the author’s character.
The writing is characterized by spleen, acerbity and quarrelsomeness. Smollett’s fierce engagements with innkeepers, postillions and fellow-travellers; his profound contempt for foreigners, now fortified by first-hand observation; his scorn of the Roman catholic faith and ceremonies, of duelling, of such domestic arrangements as the cicisbeo, of petty and proud nobility, of a hundred other French institutions and ways; and the shrewd sense and the keen eye for shams which fortify all his violent prejudices, combine to make the book a masterpiece in description and ironic criticism of men and manners. Not that he was wilfully blind to merit or beauty; he has good words, now and then, even for a foreign doctor. But he was determined to see everything with his own eyes; and, being a sick man and splenetic, he saw everything, from politics to statues and pictures, with an eye more or less jaundiced. Laurence Sterne, who met Smollett in Italy, hit off the truth, with his usual pungency, in the portrait of Smelfungus in A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, which was written in part as an answer to Travels.
[edit] Sources and external links
- Travels through France and Italy, available at Project Gutenberg.
- Travels through France and Italy, volume XI of The Works of Tobias Smollett, edited by William Ernest Henley, Scribner's sons, 1900. Introduction by Thomas Seccombe. From Google Books.
- Frank Felsenstein, ed. (1999), Travels through France and Italy, Oxford World's Classics, ISBN 0-19-283634-X. Introduction. 60-pages of footnotes.
- "Travels through France and Italy". II. Fielding and Smollett. Vol. 10. The Age of Johnson. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907–21).
