Identità nazionale, patriottismo e conservatorismo nel pensiero politico di Tobias G. Smollett

The tercentenary of Tobias George Smollett’s birth (1721- 2021) provides an opportunity to revisit the political ideas that inform his main works. Smollett was one of the most influential historians, novelists, public intellectuals and political polemicists of the British eighteenth century. This essay demonstrates that Smollett as political thinker, who has remained virtually unknown in Italy, that hosts his mortal remains in the English cemetery in Livorno, should be re-evaluated above all for his contribution to the process of the formation of British national identity. This was an ideal that he embraced first as a Scot from the Lowlands, then as a political journalist and historian in London and, finally, as the author of epistolary novels around eighteenth-century Europe. Smollett was a leading intellectual figure of the Age of Enlightenment, who in a climate of general anti-Scottish hostility and heated ideological diatribes offered an ideal prism through which to view the “Britishness”, which, together with the humorous literature and critique of the politics of his time, is the most significant legacy he left us.

Poeta, storico, romanziere, traduttore e medico, Tobias G. Smollett – tra gli esponenti più importanti dell’illuminismo "scettico" scozzese – è stato anche un acuto osservatore politico (pienamente coinvolto nelle battaglie del suo tempo) e un pubblicista animato da una forte vena polemica, scettica e ironica. Da scozzese è stato un fiero sostenitore della “britannicità” e un fautore dell’unità nazionale sotto la corona. Conservatore per temperamento e fautore di una politica basata sulla prudenza e il realismo, Smollett viene qui presentato per la prima volta in Italia nella veste di pensatore politico: disorganico ma acuto, eccentrico ma di indubbia originalità.