Shadow of Enlightenment: Optical and Political Transparency in France 1789-1848 Book

Smollett's travel journal - written in epistolary form to an imaginary acquaintance back in England - is like a series of abominably bad Yelp reviews. One auberge after another is the dirtiest, most disgusting lodging he has ever seen or stayed at, until the next auberge, which is also the worst. The beds are covered with vermin, the sheets are filthy, he often sleeps atop boxes wrapped in his great coat. The food is barely edible, the natives grimy and lazy, the women pot-bellied. The chaises constantly break down on the stony or muddy roads. Blacksmiths have to be hired to forge new axles. There is the bane of traveling in this era, when horses must be changed at every post. If there are not fresh horses, the exhausted horses must be rested for hours. Smollett expends thousands of words on the relative costs of each manner of conveyance he is considering (chaise, calesse, cambiatura, felucca, etc.), as well as of lodgings and food. Every porter, innkeeper, coachman, boatman, guide, doctor, and vendor, he suspects, is trying to swindle him (given his naturally bilious temper, you can hardly blame them) and he would feel justified in caning them. For a man married to an heiress, he certainly is tightfisted.

He borrows heavily from the guide books of the day in order to describe landscape features, climate, or architecture, but his art criticism is his own, as when he recommends that Raphael's Transfiguration be cut in half and opines that Michelangelo's Pietà is displeasing. "The figure of Christ is as much emaciated, as if he had died of a consumption: besides, there is something indelicate, not to say indecent, in the attitude and design of a man's body, stark naked, lying upon the knees of a woman."

There are charming spellings and grammars. "Rain up to our ancles," mattrasses, cloaths, taylors, chymistry, crouded, intirely, aukward. "...it did not appear that [the waters] had ever been drank by the antients."

An interesting side note is that since Smollett was going to be sojourning at Nice for 18 months, he had brought a large number of books with him, which were detained in Boulogne in order to be sent to Amiens for examination to make sure there was nothing in them "contrary to the Religion or the state of France." The books included his twelve novels, Don Quixote in two languages, the works of Shakespear [sic] and Congreve, five foreign language dictionaries, 58 volumes of ancient and modern history, eight volumes of British history, 25 volumes of Voltaire, and more.