T. Smollett

Tobias Smollett (1721–1771) was a Scottish novelist, born near Dumbarton, who trained as a surgeon in Glasgow and served in the Royal Navy during the disastrous attack on Cartagena in 1741, an experience he turned into the shipboard chapters of his first novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random. He wrote picaresque fiction in the manner of Le Sage, including Peregrine Pickle, and finished with his gentlest book, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, published a few months before his death in Italy. He also translated Don Quixote and Gil Blas, edited a quarrelsome magazine and wrote a history of England. Dickens read him as a boy and never forgot it.