But Smollett's
Griefs Were More Serious Than What An Unkind Reviewer Could
Inflict.
He had been fined and imprisoned for defamation.
He had
been grossly caricatured as a creature of Bute, the North British
favourite of George III., whose tenure of the premiership
occasioned riots and almost excited a revolution in the
metropolis. Yet after incurring all this unpopularity at a time
when the populace of London was more inflamed against Scotsmen
than it has ever been before or since, and having laboured
severely at a paper in the ministerial interest and thereby
aroused the enmity of his old friend John Wilkes, Smollett had
been unceremoniously thrown over by his own chief, Lord Bute, on
the ground that his paper did more to invite attack than to repel
it. Lastly, he and his wife had suffered a cruel bereavement in
the loss of their only child, and it was partly to supply a
change from the scene of this abiding sorrow, that the present
journey was undertaken.
The first stages and incidents of the expedition were not exactly
propitious. The Dover Road was a byword for its charges; the Via
Alba might have been paved with the silver wrung from reluctant
and indignant passengers. Smollett characterized the chambers as
cold and comfortless, the beds as "paultry" (with "frowsy," a
favourite word), the cookery as execrable, wine poison,
attendance bad, publicans insolent, and bills extortion,
concluding with the grand climax that there was not a drop of
tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to Dover.
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