Call me a snob, but I really like taking ancient guide books when I travel around Europe.  Mind you, it can let you down. Our 1911 guide to ‘Dublin and Environs’ led Jane and me to head out of the capital to admire the Poulaphuca Falls. “As it is within easy reach of Dublin by rail, the cascade is a favourite resort of the people of Dublin in the pleasant summer time”, we read.  But when we entered the bar of the local hotel, ordered a Guinness and said we were hoping to see the Falls in question everyone froze and stared at us, till the owner told us that his great-grand-daddy had sold the Falls and all its water to the Dublin Electricity Company.

For an important birthday last year, Jane gave me a very special present: a Martin Randall holiday in the ‘Heart of Italy’. We had the services of the delightful and erudite Antonia Whitley to guide us through the treasures of Arezzo, Perugia, Orvieto and other smaller towns of Umbria, Tuscany and the Marches. But Jane and I had our own additional guides: the Folio edition of Tobias Smollet’s ‘Travels through France and Italy’, plus a 1909 Baedeker and my invaluable 1954 Italian Phrase Book.

Smollett, best known for his alliterative novels, The Adventures of Roderick Random’ and ‘Peregrine Pickle’, was described by one visitor to his Chelsea house as ‘a surly Scotchman’.  ‘Surly’ he certainly showed himself to be in the course of his travels, but he was generous, too; excessively perhaps.  Every Sunday (as I learn from Christopher Hibbert’s excellent introduction) his house was open to any ‘unfortunate brothers of the quill’ who happened to be in need of refreshment. They were provided with ‘beef, pudding, potatoes, port, punch and Calvert’s entire butt-beer’.

And when, in 1763, exhausted by overwork and distraught at the death of his ‘darling little Bess’ at the age of 15  - and his wife urged him to ‘convey her from a country where every object served to nourish grief’ - he set off not just with her but with two other ladies for whom he was acting as guardian.

His grumbling started even before he had crossed the Channel.

Dover is commonly termed a den of thieves; and I am afraid it is not altogether without reason it has acquired this appellation. The people are said to live by piracy in time of  war; and by smuggling and fleecing strangers in time of peace: but I will do them the justice to say, they make no distinction between foreigners and natives.  Without all doubt a man cannot be much worse lodged and worse treated in any part of Europe; nor will he in any other place meet with more flagrant instances of fraud, imposition and brutality.

After having bribed his way through customs and given monstrous tips to the people charged with loading their goods on board the packet boat, he found himself

in a most wretched hovel.  The cabin was so small that a dog could hardly turn in it, and the beds put me in mind of the holes described in some catacombs, in which the bodies of the dead were deposited, being thrust in with the feet foremost; there was no getting into them but endways, and indeed they seemed so dirty that nothing but extreme necessity could have obliged me to use them.

And when they finally disembarked in Boulogne, having re-bribed and over-tipped their way to the recommended inn, they found that all the beds were occupied and they had to sit in a cold, damp kitchen for two hours before a room became available in what turned out to be

such a bad specimen of French accommodation that my wife could not help regretting  even the inns of Rochester, Sittingbourne and Canterbury; bad as they are, they certainly have the advantage, when compared with the execrable auberges of this country, where one finds nothing but dirt and imposition. One would imagine the French were still at war with the English, for they pillage them without mercy.

Once they had found somewhere to rent, Boulogne turned out to be quite a pleasant town, where he stayed for several weeks.  And, indeed, there were a number of things he had to admire, both in France and Italy (including the ‘neat and charmingly situated’  village of Cannes).  But these were far outnumbered by the people and  places which set him off spluttering with rage.  All he has to say of Siena, for example is that they were

indifferently lodged in a house that stank like a privy, and fared wretchedly at supper.

Following which he is ill-treated by a hostler, leading to an extraordinary diatribe in which he claims that

the hostlers, postilions and other fellows hanging about the post-houses in Italy, are the most greedy, impertinent and provoking. Happy are those travellers who [unlike Smollett] have phlegm enough to disregard their insolence and importunity: for this is not so disagreeable as their revenge is dangerous.  An English gentleman at Florence told me that one of those fellows, whom he had struck for his impertinence, flew at him with a long knife, and he could hardly keep him at sword’s point.  All of them wear such knives and are very apt to use them on the slightest provoc-ation. But their open attacks are not so formidable as their premeditated schemes of revenge; in the prosecution of which the Italians are equally treacherous and cruel.

Smollett rarely took what he considered to be ill behaviour lying down. We read of him telling a coachman that

he was an impertinent rascal, and, as he still hesitated, I collared him with one hand, and shook my cane over his head with the other. It was the only weapon I had .. for I had left my sword and musquetoon in the coach.

Later, when faced with an obstreperous innkeeper, he

desired the cameriere to bid his master bring the bill, and to tell him that if it was not reasonable, I would carry him before the commandant. In the meantime I armed myself with my sword in one hand and my cane in the other. The innkeeper immediately entered, pale and staring, and when I demanded the bill, he told me, with a profound reverence, that he should be satisfied with whatever I myself thought proper to give.

Such behaviour led one contemporary reader of the book, the author of Observations on the Customs and Manners of the French Nation, to wonder that Smollett had ever got home alive  to tell the tale.

But the French and Italians - the main butts of Smollett’s anger and contempt - might have been mollified to read what the ‘surly Scotchman’ had to write about the callow British tourists he encountered on his travels:

The moment they set foot in Italy, they are seized with the ambition of becoming connoisseurs in painting, musick, statuary, and architecture; and the adventurers of this country do not fail to flatter this weakness for their own advantage. I have seen in different parts of Italy, a number of raw boys, whom Britain seemed to have poured forth on purpose to bring her national character into contempt: ignorant, petulant, rash, and profligate, without any knowledge or experience of their own, without any director to improve their understanding, or super-intend their conduct. One engages in play with an infamous gamester and is stripped perhaps in the very first partie; another is pillaged by an antiquated cantatrice; a third is bubbled by a knavish antiquarian; and a fourth is laid under contribution by a dealer in pictures.  Some turn fiddlers, and pretend to compose: but all of them talk familiarly of the arts, and return finished connoisseurs and coxcombs, to their own country.

When Smollett himself returned, and published this account of his peregrinations the following year, his fellow writers pounced. Laurence Sterne condemned him as a ‘choleric Philistine’ and promptly set about writing the admirable A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy as an antidote.

Despite this, the book sold well. But Smollett, who had hoped that his two years away would do wonders for his health, never really recovered. He set out again for Italy where, on the Ligurian coast, he managed to write The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, which many people believe to be his finest novel.  Having sent off the manuscript to his publisher, he prepared himself for death, his final words - to his beloved wife - being, ‘All is well, my dear’.