Interpretation, Commercialisation, and Eighteenth-Century Frontispieces: Tobias Smollett

Abstract

ABSTRACT Tobias Smollett's works were among the most frequently illustrated in the eighteenth century. Smollett's eclectic output encountered equally diverse types of illustration that both accompanied these works and inhabited their own independent creative identity. Frontispieces occupy a unique place within this wider context. This article investigates two main points: first, booksellers deemed Smollett a saleable author, deserving of potentially expensive illustrated additions that enhanced his works' circulation on a competitive book market; second, these illustrations were considered useful visual tools in deciphering the verbal text, with frontispieces serving their own specific introductory function. Two types of publication by Smollett—his translated texts, Gil Blas (1748) and Don Quixote (1755), and original prose fictions, Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751)—and their earliest frontispieces (by Francis Hayman, Henry Fuseli, and an anonymous artist) shed new light on Smollett's early reception, and on the wider forms and functions of eighteenth-century frontispieces.