Ehland, Christoph
“Tobias Smollett’s Quixotic Adventures”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 107-126

Despite the fact that there are writers in eighteenth-century England whose texts show a more thorough adaptation, even imitation of Cervantes’s style of narration, Tobias Smollett represents an author whose career and writing is arguably more closely related and indebted to the quixotic adventures than that of many others. Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote – in all probability plundered and compiled from earlier translations by a group of hack writers under his supervision – is as notorious as it is helpful to draw attention to the thinking of the canny Scotsman. His own novels are carefully balancing between various popular forms of literary expression. With regard to the backbone of his narrative argument, however, one finds Smollett’s writing closely related to the tone and outlook of Cervantes’s masterpiece. It is the quixotic rather than the picaresque world-view, which represents for Smollett the strategic cornerstone for an introspection of the anxieties of eighteenth-century Britain on its way to an economically minded civil society.