Word: smollett
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Britain's literary great flocked to Bath. So did every social climber. Eighteenth Century Author Tobias Smollett, for one, sometimes looked with bilious eye at "what is called the fashionable company at Bath . . .† The number of people, and the number of houses continue to increase; and this will ever be the case, till the streams that swell this irresistible torrent of folly and extravagance shall either be exhausted or turned into other channels, by incidents and events which I do not pretend to foresee...
...Patients. Two events (unforeseen by Smollett) changed Bath. One was a series of German "Baedeker" air raids, aimed at Britain's historical landmarks, which damaged or destroyed 19,000 buildings in Bath, and made the town overcrowded again. The other was the advent of Britain's Labor government. Minister of Health Aneurin ("Nye") Bevan decided that suitable hospital cases could get free spa treatment under his National Health scheme. The Health Ministry found that it was not going to be easy to decide who was "suitable." A mere yen to go down to a spa like the rich...
...Even the wives and daughters of low tradesmen," said one Smollett character, "who, like shovel-nosed sharks, prey upon the blubber of those uncouth whales of fortune, are infected -with the same rage of displaying their importance; and the slightest indisposition serves them for a pretext to insist upon being conveyed to Bath, where they may hobble country-dances and cotillons among lordlings, squires, counselors, and clergy...
Pritchett is most at home writing about the English tradition of picaresque heroes and prurient heroines. The 17th and 18th Centuries, he believes, produced literary techniques which later novelists have been wise to adopt. Smollett developed the physical realism and "chamberpot humor" which characterizes much of Joyce. Richardson introduced the "principle of procrastinated rape [which] is said to be the ruling one in all the great best-sellers." Fielding, Pritchett says, is the granddaddy of them all: in his work the reader can not only "pick out the perennial characters of the main part of English fiction, but . . . many...
Almost everyone who has read The Chambered Nautilus knows that the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes was a doctor. But not many know or remember that John Keats, Oliver Goldsmith, Friedrich Schiller, Tobias Smollett, George Crabbe, Robert Bridges, Francis Thompson, and Lieut. Colonel John McCrae (In Flanders Fields) were also medical men. So was Thomas Dunn English, the man who wrote Ben Bolt. Most of these writers were doctors only incidentally, and almost none of their poems in the anthology refer to medicine (exception: Holmes's The Morning Visit...