Smollett was born at Dalquhurn, now part of Renton in present-day West Dunbartonshire, Scotland, and baptised on 19 March 1721 (his birth date is estimated as 3 days previously).

Smollett attended Dumbarton Grammar School and then was educated at the University of Glasgow, where he studied medicine and eventually qualified as a surgeon.

[citation needed] Others state that his career in medicine came second to his literary ambitions at the age of 18,[2] and it was not until 1750, that Smollett was granted his MD degree at the University of Aberdeen.

On their return to Britain, at the end of his Navy commission, Smollett established a practice in Downing Street but his wife did not join him until 1747;[2] they had a daughter Elizabeth, who died aged 15 years about 1762.

[4] The Adventures of Roderick Random was modelled on Le Sage's Gil Blas and despite its scandalous content covering 'snobbery, prostitution, debt and hinting at homosexuality', it was published[2] in 1748.

[5] Smollett became considered as a 'man of letters'[2] and associated with such figures as David Garrick, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith,[2] and Samuel Johnson,[2] whom he famously nicknamed "that Great Cham of literature".

[2] He also published The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769), which gave his opinion of British politics during the Seven Years' War in the guise of a tale from ancient Japan.

In 1768, the year he moved to Italy, Smollett entrusted Robert Cunninghame Graham of Gartmore with selling off the slaves he still owned in Jamaica.

Having sought a cure at Bath,[citation needed] he retired to Italy, where he died in September 1771 and was buried in the Old English Cemetery, Livorno.

On the plinth is a Latin inscription written by Professor George Stuart of Edinburgh, John Ramsay of Ochtertyre and Dr Samuel Johnson.

[8] There is also a plaque at his temporary residence in Edinburgh, just off the Royal Mile at the head of St John's Street, where his wife lived after his death until at least 1785.

John Bellairs referenced Smollett's works in his Johnny Dixon series, where Professor Roderick Random Childermass reveals that his late father Marcus, an English professor, had named all his sons after characters in Smollett's works: Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphry Clinker, and even "Ferdinand Count Fathom", who usually signed his name F. C. F. Childermass.

In Hugh Walpole's fifth novel Fortitude, the protagonist Peter refers to Peregrine Pickle as a text that inspired him to document his own memoirs.