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As we have seen, Isaiah Pettigrew of Bone Street, Cordasco's candidate for the authorship of Smollett's Don Quixote, proved to be an insubstantial ghost--his name and local habitation returned to airy nothing by the exposure of the forged letters. Linsalata, however--convinced that Smollett knew no Spanish and therefore at a loss to explain the occurrence of passages in the translation that correct Jarvis's inaccuracies--solved the puzzle to his own satisfaction by attributing the work to an entire workshop of phantom scribblers whom he supposed to be in Smollett's employ.[23]

Given the contradiction between Smollett's alleged incompetence and the frequent felicities of the translation as he found it, Linsalata's hypothesis was perhaps not unreasonable --especially in light of the fact that Smollett, in the late 1750s, is known to have supported just such a band of hackney authors whose company amused him and whose small talents he put to use

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in the various, often voluminous, literary projects he was engaged in: projects such as his Complete History of England in 11 volumes (1757-58) and its Continuation in 5 volumes (1760-65). It is Shebbeare again, Smollett's enemy, who first mentions his "hack school" in a mock-advertisement dated from Smollett's house in Chelsea, 26 November 1757:

Besides himself he has under him several journeymen-authors, so that all those who chuse to have a subject fitted up from the most sublime down to a common advertisement, may be commodiously furnished at his house, where specimens of his works may be seen every day . . . .[24]

More reliable testimony of the scribbling satellites that circled round Smollett at this time comes from his friend Alexander Carlyle, who, in his autobiography, recalls meeting Smollett for dinner at Forrest's Coffeehouse, Chelsea, in 1758:

He was now become a great man, and being much of a humorist, was not to be put out of his way. Home and Robertson and Smith and I met him there, when he had several of his minions about him, to whom he prescribed tasks of translation, compilation, or abridgment, which, after he had seen, he recommended to the booksellers.[25]

This may well be the same circle of literary "myrmidons," as Carlyle calls them--they were five in number, all "curious characters"--whom Smollett himself would later immortalize in Humphry Clinker.[26]

There is, however, no evidence connecting Smollett with this club of hireling authors until well after publication of his Don Quixote early in 1755. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that he produced that work on his own. Since Smollett did not gather his authors around him until some time after he moved to Chelsea from the Strand in June of 1750, Linsalata (who mistakenly placed the move in 1752) assumed that "no serious work was done on Don Quixote" until after that date.[27] Smollett himself, however, points to a different period of composition. In advertisements for the translation that ran in the Public Advertiser during March 1754, he assured potential subscribers that "the Work was begun and the greatest Part actually finished four Years ago."[28] By this reckoning the bulk of the translation must have been written during the period from the latter months of 1748 to March 1750, before Smollett established himself in Chelsea. It was in June 1748 that he contracted to produce the work, and before the year was out he had made substantial progress on it. This seems a reasonable inference from the publisher's announcement in November 1748 that the translation was "Preparing for the PRESS"--an announcement repeated

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nearly a year later, in September 1749.[29] Other business, undertaken because he needed money, prevented Smollett from keeping up the expeditious pace with which he began the work; and, since he had been paid in advance for it, there was no urgency about finishing.[30]

During the six years and more that passed between his contracting to do the translation and its publication, Smollett engaged himself in an astonishing number of other projects of every description: translations of Le Sage's Gil Blas (October 1748) and The Devil upon Crutches (1750), as well as Voltaire's Micromegas (1752); an opera Alceste (c. 1748-49), a tragedy The Regicide (1749), a comedy The Absent Man (1750); the novels Peregrine Pickle (1751) and Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753); a medical treatise On the External Use of Water (1752), as well as two volumes of Dr. William Smellie's Treatise on midwifery (1751, 1754) which Smollett prepared for the press. These productions, and much more besides, attest to the pressures of Smollett's straitened circumstances during this period. It is unlikely he had the money, even if we suppose he had the inclination, to farm out the translation of Don Quixote for others to make a hash of. Not until the spring of 1754, when he published his proposals to subscribers, did he have the incentive to put all else aside and finish the work. This is the situation he described to Dr. Macaulay in a letter of 11 December 1754:

For my own part, I never was reduced to such a dilemma as I am now brought into; for I have promised to pay away tradesmens' bills, to a considerable amount, by Christmas; and my credit absolutely depends upon my punctuality. Nay, I am put to very great straits for present subsistence as I have done nothing all the last summer but worked upon Don Quixotte, for which I was paid five years ago.[31]

The spectacle of Smollett's frenetic literary activity during this period accounts readily enough for the delay in completion of the translation, which obviously was not being carried forward by other hands. Smollett's own statements point to what actually happened. Having been paid in advance for the translation, he worked at it more or less steadily until, some time in 1750, he had completed "the greater Part" of it. Then, in need of money, he set the translation aside to undertake fresh projects; not until the summer of 1754 is there evidence of his resuming the work in earnest to fulfill the agreement with his publishers made six years earlier.

Two passages from Peregine Pickle (1751), chapters ci-cii, seem directly relevant to the theory of Smollett's "hack school." In the first, Smollett treats with scorn precisely the kind of figure Linsalata would make him out to be: the literary entrepreneur who resorts to the cynical expedient of producing books--and translations in particular--by job lot:

[Pickle] had, in his affluence, heard of several authors, who, without any pretensions to genius, or human literature, earned a very genteel subsistence, by undertaking work for booksellers, in which reputation was not at all concerned. One (for example) professed all manner of translation, at so much per sheet, and actually kept five

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or six amanuenses continually employed, like so many clerks in a compting-house; by which means, he was enabled to live at his ease, and enjoy his friend and his bottle, ambitious of no other character than that of an honest man, and a good neighbour.[32]

A few pages later in the narrative, Smollett introduces an author of a different character, though again a translator, whose case resembles his own soon after he declared his intention to translate Cervantes' masterpiece--an announcement that prompted rival booksellers to issue new editions of the competing translations by Jarvis and Motteux.[33]

. . . another gentleman exhibited a complaint, signifying, that he had undertaken to translate into English a certain celebrated author, who had been cruelly mangled by former attempts; and that, soon as his design took air, the proprietors of those miserable translations had endeavoured to prejudice his work, by industrious insinuations, contrary to truth and fair dealing, importing, that he did not understand one word of the language which he pretended to translate. (p. 645)

Smollett, as we will see, had reason to resent the insinuation that he neither knew Spanish nor wrote the translation of Don Quixote that appeared under his name in 1755. That he was ready enough, in producing that work, to avail himself silently of a variety of printed sources will also become clear, and will surprise no one who is acquainted with authorial practice of the period. But by the standards of his day the work was his own, not that of a "hack school."[34] In 1763 Smollett obliged Richard Smith of New Jersey by sending him a brief account of his life. Prominent in what he called "a genuine List of my Productions" included in the letter is "A Translation of Don Quixote." Notable, too, is the indignation with which he denied the charge that was levelled at him in his own time and in ours: "I am much mortified to find it is believed in America that I have lent my name to Booksellers; that is a species of Prostitution of which I am altogether incapable."[35]