Smollett and The Atom

Extract

In biographical sketches written before 1800 both Dr. Robert Anderson and Dr. John Moore considered the History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) as unquestionably the work of Tobias Smollett. In fact, almost from the day of its publication to the present nearly everyone has regarded this burlesque history as the hot-tempered Scot's mocking farewell salute to English politics and politicians. Yet in all this time no valid external evidence proving or disproving the authorship has been found. For this reason, and perhaps others, some uncertainty about it has developed. Lewis M. Knapp in his authoritative Tobias Smollett (1949, pp. 281–283) finds that the Adventures of an Atom contains “in its method and material much that is Smollettian” and is “obviously what Smollett felt like writing at that time,” but calling attention to the lack of external evidence, asks, “Is it, indeed, possible that Smollett did not write the Atom at all?”