The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.
§ 11. John Thomas Smith
Among the books on life in London during the end of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth centuries, one other demands notice, A Book for a Rainy Day, or Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766–1833, by John Thomas Smith. John Thomas Smith, who was born in a hackney coach on the way from Earl street, Seven Dials, to Great Portland street, on a June evening in 1766 and died in April, 1833, was an artist, a writer and a Londoner, and wrote a life of his father’s master, the sculptor Nollekens, which is unmatched for malicious candour and vivid detail. Art-student, portrait-painter, sightseer, writer, gossip, and keeper of the prints in the British museum, Smith spent his sixty-seven years in close touch with the artistic and literary life of London. He had a keen curiosity about things and people past and present, a retentive memory and a gift for gossip; and his book is one of the most entertaining and most trustworthy memorials of his period. Published twelve years after his death, it forms a valuable corrective to the flashy fictions of Egan and his like.