Travels through France and Italy is a travel book by the Scottish author Tobias Smollett, published in two volumes on 8 May 1766.
The work is written in the form of a series of letters originated in a journey that Smollett, accompanied by his wife, undertook from June 1763 to July 1765, primarily in France but also including a two-month excursion into Italy. The principal destination was Nice, chosen for its reputedly beneficial climate for sufferers of pulmonary complaints. During the journey, Smollett corresponded regularly with acquaintances in Britain; on his return, he revised these letters, supplementing them with historical and archaeological information drawn from guidebooks, and published the result as Travels through France and Italy.
The book was an immediate commercial success, aided by Smollett's existing notoriety as a novelist and controversial journalist. Its frequently acerbic tone, which combined sharp observation with outspoken criticism of French and Italian manners, hygiene, cuisine, religion and society, appealed to a British readership still influenced by the patriotic fervour and Francophobia that followed victory in the Seven Years' War (1756–1763).
The success proved short-lived. In 1768 Laurence Sterne published A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, which presented a far more affectionate view of France and explicitly ridiculed Smollett under the name "Smelfungus". Sterne's immense popularity rapidly eclipsed Smollett's work in public favour, and the latter came to be regarded as the archetype of the splenetic, ill-tempered traveller. Modern scholarship views Travels through France and Italy as a significant example of late 18th-century travel literature. Although its satirical and often prejudiced tone remains conspicuous, critics recognise the acuity of many of Smollett's observations, the vigour of his prose, and the work's importance as a precursor to the epistolary structure he would later perfect in his final novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). The book is also credited with helping to popularise the French Riviera among British travellers; Smollett's extended residence in Nice and his detailed descriptions of the town and its surroundings contributed to its emergence as a fashionable destination, leading later writers to describe him as the "discoverer" or "inventor" of the Côte d’Azur.
Genesis According to Viviès, who in 1999 questioned the significance of the genre chosen by Smollett,
Biographical experiences Smollett travelled on the continent six times but, unlike many 18th-century writers such as Addison, Gray, Walpole, Sterne, Gibbon and Hume, all of whom recorded their observations in detail, Smollett left very few traces of his life on those then-distant lands in his private correspondence. Of the 108 letters included in the most recent edition, only seven complete letters and one fragment are devoted to them. By contrast, the journey and stay of 1763–1765 did not suffer the same fate; this is doubtless because the work is intimately linked to its author's personal life. At the age of forty-two, ill, exhausted by his literary and political battles, and having been forced in February 1763 to cease publication of the weekly amid agitation and insults, where he had supported the unpopular policy of Lord Bute, Smollett, like his wife, became inconsolable at the loss of Elizabeth, their only child, a fifteen-year-old girl affectionately nicknamed Little Boss.
Leaving seemed necessary to revive their bodies, distance their worries, and soften the grief that overwhelmed them. Asthmatic, tubercular, and hypochondriac, Smollett hoped that the Mediterranean sun and the dryness of the air would restore his difficult breathing and that bathing (despite his earlier attacks on the waters of Bath in ) would restore tone to his weakened organism, two objectives that were successfully achieved, since he returned in much better health. The discovery of Nice, then excluded from the Grand TourThe expression "Grand Tour" was coined by Richard Lassels in 1679 in his . It was a prescribed journey, sometimes for health reasons but more often for cultural purposes; prescribed also because its itinerary was fixed in advance, with Greece, Italy, France, and sometimes Germany and Russia as the favoured destinations. that took young aristocrats fresh from their classical studies through France and Italy, a small town of approximately inhabitants according to the traveller's calculations, came about through the recommendation of a physician he met by chance, who had praised its climatic virtues for having cured his own severe bronchial problems.
Furthermore, Mrs Anne Smollett "never ceased begging her husband insistently to take her away from a country where every object served to nourish her grief".
Financial situation
Thomas Seccombe points out that Smollett, who had neither mentor, pension, inheritance nor property of any kind, was one of the first English writers to earn his living as an adult entirely by his pen. Ten years after arriving in London, he prided himself on spending lavishly and "protecting" a crowd of so-called writers, that is, the less fortunate or less talented,According to Samuel Johnson’s , who had lived there early in his career, the term originally meant "originally the name of a street... much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called grubstreet". The modern image of the street was popularised by Alexander Pope in his Dunciad. The street no longer exists, but "Grub Street" is still used to describe writers producing low-quality literature. with little regard for his own accounts. This forced him to borrow repeatedly, as the six or seven hundred pounds sterling his writings brought him annually were not enough to sustain this lavish daily life.
Driven by the need to produce through forced nights, Smollett edited the literary review , the general-interest magazine , and the political weekly . His denunciatory opinions brought him trouble, in particular a three-month imprisonment from November 1760 to February 1761 in King's Bench Prison, together with a fine of , a considerable sum at the time. A subsequent quarrel with his former friend John Wilkes added further charges and vexations that finally undermined both his physical and mental equilibrium. To these were added the illness of the wife he adored and, as the final blow, the death of the couple's beloved child.
Trip abroad Besides the other circumstances, the doctors’ prescription had been categorical: Smollett had to head south to a dry and sunny climate. However, the novelist also set off with the firm intention of making financial profit from his wanderings, hence the long descriptive letters written at every stage and addressed to his doctor friends or other acquaintances, practically without distance, with scenes and conversations taken live. The planned destination was Montpellier, regarded as the best resort in Southern Europe, a route that the peace of 1763 had just reopened. Smollett had already travelled several times aboard ships of the Royal Navy as a naval surgeon. His experiences, partly reused in The Adventures of Roderick Random, had been harsh: storms, punishments, sights of war, especially the expedition to Cartagena. He was therefore hardly predisposed to view the world with a neutral eye or to describe it in rosy terms; his state of mind was not that of a passing holidaymaker ready to appreciate at once the novelty of sounds, scents and tastes. Cheerful and jovial in his youth, he had gradually changed, to the point that, on his return to Scotland in 1755, his mother had struggled to recognise him. The same fiery temperament remained, but now prone to exasperation, rather grumpy, sardonic and critical. Like Mr Jacob Brattle in Anthony Trollope’s , Smollett tended to brood over the ills with which fortune had afflicted him, finding himself in a state that medicine described as splenetic. For him, the Grand Tour therefore presented itself not as a privilege but as a necessary chore and, he hoped, perhaps lucrative, but whose discomforts irritated him, which made him from the outset, as Thomas Seccombe writes, an quite ready to appreciate nothing.
Nevertheless, the magic of travel is not entirely absent from the book; the Maison Carrée in Nîmes or the Pont du Gard are described with enthusiasm; the passage recounting the entry into the Eternal City, or the detail of the meals discussed in the coach, are not far from panegyric. Most of Smollett's correspondents belonged to the medical profession and were above all Scottish; among them were John Armstrong, William Hunter, George Macaulay and John Moore, an authority on travel in Europe and author of the novel . This creates in Smollett a tendency to dwell on health problems, symptoms and humours, as Fielding had done regarding his dropsy in Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. Thus, and in many other ways, Travels through France and Italy provides numerous keys to understanding its author's personality: it is the work of a scholar, an observer of history and geography, a lover of etymology who helped lexicalise many foreign terms into the English language.
Text The first edition of Travels through France and Italy was published on 8 May 1766 by R. Baldwin of Paternoster Row in London; it consisted of two leather-bound volumes in octavo format, sold for ten shillings. Modern editions generally reproduce the text of the Clarendon edition published in November 1979, incorporating all the corrections made by Smollett after his return, as they appear in his manuscript deposited at the British Library under the reference C. 45. D. 20. 21. The variants resulting from these corrections are explained in the notes of the Clarendon edition.
Itinerary and commentary Smollett presents himself as the narrator, using the first-person narrative, singular or plural, depending on whether he is referring to himself or also to his entourage. Thus, his dispatches belong to three genres: epistolary, travel narrative and autobiographical, the latter characteristic being relatively emphasised, as the comments reveal his moods and gradually sketch a portrait of the man. On the other hand, he maintains complete anonymity regarding the recipients of his letters, who therefore remain unknown.
Recipients and sequence of letters