Death of a novelist

On this day in 1771 - exactly 240 years ago, in other words - the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) died in Italy. Like Henry Fielding, another of the eighteenth-century founders of the English novel, he had travelled to the Mediterranean in search of health: as a sufferer from tuberculosis, it was felt that he would benefit from the warmer, drier climate. Like Fielding, if he found any respite it was brief: the disease killed him there and he is buried in Livorno. Thus far, Smollett's is a familiar story of a disease well-documented in our holdings, but he is relevant to the Library not merely as a patient: he was also a medical man, serving when a young man as a naval surgeon's mate and taking part in the disastrous Cartegena expedition to the Caribbean in 1741. Although, from the 1750s onwards, he earned his living chiefly by his pen - and his universal reputation among his contemporaries for irascibility suggests that bedside manner would not have been one of his strengths - he remained in touch with the world of medicine and would have been well placed to note, with foreboding, the progress of his disease.

We have only one item by Smollett in our archives and manuscripts collection, a letter held as MS.7887/7, but it comes at an interesting point in his career. It dates from 1749, when Smollett had just published his first novel, Roderick Random, and begun to establish himself as a writer. Smollett's novels are unjustly neglected these days, despite the fact that he fully deserves his place in the quartet of great names that followed Defoe and set up modes of the novel in English that shaped it for the next century (the others in this quartet would be Fielding, Richardson and Sterne). His splenetic satires and grotesque characters are not to everyone's taste. The Victorians in particular regarded Smollett as very strong meat indeed - Dickens was a fan, but at the same time regarded his work as marred by the coarseness of an earlier, less polished era. All of which is, essentially, code for the fact that Smollett never met a chamber-pot joke that he didn't like; broad farce with brimming jordans is a staple of his comedy, something that became impossible in the mid-nineteenth-century novel (and renders his work problematic for Sunday afternoon costume-drama adaptations).

In the letter held in the Wellcome Library, Smollett writes to the great anatomist William Hunter (a fellow Scot) that he is shortly to visit Paris, and would appreciate being put in touch with anyone that Hunter knows there. We thus see a small light on the genesis of Smollett's next novel, Peregrine Pickle, which was to appear in 1751. Just as Roderick Random had drawn on Smollett's experience by sending its hero on the Cartagena expedition, so his next novel sent the hero and his entourage to Paris. It is to be hoped that not too much of it was drawn from the life. In Paris, Pickle sees the sights in conjunction with a vain, gullible, xenophobic English painter named Pallet, possibly based on Hogarth, whose linguistic skills stretch no further than "No parly Francy. Damn your chattering! Go about your business, can't ye?" In maybe the most characteristic scene of the novel, Pallet - who has been tricked into attending a ball in women's clothing, for complicated reasons! - finds himself in anguish with a full bladder and eventually, "compelled to yield to the urgent dictates of necessity", follows some male guests into the gentlemen's toilet and, hitching up his skirts, "discharge[s] the source of his vexation in the presence of them all, crying in his own excuse, 'By your leave, by your leave. Egad! necessity has no law.'"

Strong meat indeed for the Victorian palate, and unsuprisingly there has been no move towards a Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Smollett. On the anniversary of his death, though, think about this medical novelist and maybe make a resolution to read one of his works. Failing that, we have at least equipped you with a phrase to use in awkward social situations (for example, squeezing your way along a line of theatre seats after the perfomance has started): just adjust your wig like a true-born eighteenth century Briton and cry out "By your leave, by your leave. Egad! necessity has no law."

Images:
1/ Portrait of Tobias Smollett: engraving after Sir Joshua Reynolds. One of many pictures of Smollett to be found in Wellcome Images.
2/ MS.7887/7, letter from Smollett to William Hunter.

A lesser-known side of Marie Stopes

The Library has recently added to the catalogue a copy of Marie Stopes' little-known first (and only) novel, Love's Creation, published in 1928 under the rather transparent pseudonym of 'Marie Carmichael' (Stopes' mother's maiden name was Carmichael and her own full name was Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes). The copy was Stopes' own and is inscribed with her address inside the front cover.

Stopes is, of course, well-known for her best-selling works on marriage and birth control and related topics in sexual enlightenment. A few people have heard of her poetry (which was turned down for publication by Faber, politely but firmly, by T. S. Eliot) or of her plays, several of which achieved production, or of the film, Maisie's Marriage, which she scripted in order to convey the birth control message to a wider audience.

Love's Creation, however, remains a unique venture, at least in terms of having actually achieved publication. The copy in the Wellcome Library is a first edition, although it is probably truer to say the only edition as there were no reprints and no demands by publisher or literary agent to produce a successor, since it sold poorly. Neither did it gain critical recognition, being largely dismissed, when reviewed at all, with a brief notice rather than extensive critical discussion. One notice indeed described it as 'old-fashioned', and this seems not unjust when we consider that other works appearing on the literary scene in 1928 included Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, and Aldous Huxley's Point Counterpoint. Mary Abbott, a friend of Stopes, suggested in a letter to her that the furore around Hall's novel of lesbian advocacy might have had a knock-on impact on libraries and booksellers, making them cautious of anything that might turn out to be scandalous, but this seems rather improbable as an explanation for the popular and critical apathy which greeted Love's Creation.

Since Stopes was working on versions of the novel that eventually appeared in 1928 for a period of some twelve years, it presumably had some particular personal significance for her, given the many other demands on her time and energies. Although she at one time had considered embodying the ideas about marriage that eventually became her best-selling manual Married Love in fictional form, Love's Creation does not appear to be the fictional version of her message to 'young husbands and all who are betrothed in love'.

The novel begins with the arrival of a female scientist in a laboratory previously all male. While one might hope that this might become the largely untold tale of a woman in science, it soon turns into the romance between Lilian and her colleague Kenneth. Shortly after their marriage, Lilian dies in a road accident. A second strand of the plot is the story of her younger sister, Rose Amber, and her disastrous marriage. Meanwhile, the widowed Kenneth throws up his university position in favour of travel for scientific purposes (his experiences very closely mirror Stopes' as recounted in her Journal from Japan, 1910). Its depiction of the characters and roles of women and men seems strangely conventional given Stopes' own pioneering career and achievements. It depicts one marriage abruptly terminated by accidental death and one made hellish by the husband's pathological jealousy (this may well draw on Stopes' experiences in her first marriage). While the ending promises a future union along the lines set out in Married Love, such an ideal is nowhere presented fictionally within the novel. The story is also, for a realist work, curiously unanchored in history: it is never clear whether the action is taking place before or after the Great War, which is never mentioned. There is also an entire chapter putting forward a 'large cosmic theory' through the mouth of Kenneth. Stopes, who was capable of producing non-fictional works which were and are extremely readable and which early readers found compelling, had less success when it came to telling a story.

It seems probable that very few people have ever read this novel: I only did so when I was invited to contribute a chapter on Stopes - 'Uniting Science and Sensibility: Marie Stopes and the Narratives of Marriage in the 1920s' - to the essay collection Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers 1889-1939 edited by Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai (University of North Carolina Press, 1993). It remains, however, a historical curiosity and a sidelight on the complex character of Marie Stopes.