Bruce, Donald

Boston. 1965. Houghton Mifflin. 1st American Edition. Bookplate in Front,Otherwise Very Good in Dustjacket . 240 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature Scotland England Literary Criticism 18th Century. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Few serious appreciations of Smollett have ever been written. Through the nineteenth century, critics tended to dismiss his writings as low, coarse and brutal. And even in our own age recognition has been slow in coming. Rehabilitation is more than due to one of the great authors of the English language, and it is this task that Donald Bruce performs magnificently in RADICAL DOCTOR SMOLLETT. Mr. Bruce shows how Smollett has been much underestimated - as a man, as a satirist and reformer, and even as a novelist. To Mr. Bruce, Smollett's ‘large intellect, his manliness, his unusual honesty and penetration, all his qualities cry out for recognition and justice.' In his early chapters Mr. Bruce considers the intellectual climate and the state of knowledge in Smollett's age, and their influence on him: his acquaintance with eighteenth-century medicine and with the Determinist philosophers - both of which led to his study of ‘the operations of the animal economy' and his espousal of a materialist psychology. Mr. Bruce goes on to demonstrate how Smollett's novels reflect his belief that crime and sexual immorality grew out of the debilitating plutocratic social structure of the period. As Smollett saw it, circumstances, often malign, condition all conduct and character. Thus Smollett, though nominally a Tory because he hated the Whigs, was a radical critic of the unequal distribution of wealth and the evils of privilege. The Church, too, he attacked as part of the corruption of the age - and even for existing at all. Smollett was consciously a novelist with a purpose, who regarded as his function not only the provision of entertainment, but also the inspiring of ‘that generous indignation which ought to animate the reader against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world.' inventory #24785