Career
Born in Sheffield, he worked as a solicitor, qualifying in 1884, and became friendly with the explorer and orientalist Sir Richard Francis Burton. He published Burton"s translation of the Book of One Thousand and One Nights in 1885. He collaborated with Burton in a translation from the Latin of the Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus and Priapeia, a collection of erotic poems by various writers.
He also published a limited edition of the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter.
Smithers published works by Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Aleister Crowley, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons and Oscar Wilde and lesser known figures such as Vincent O"Sullivan and Nigel Tourneur. With Symons and Beardsley, he founded The Savoy, a periodical which ran to eight issues in 1896.
After the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, Smithers was one of the few publishers prepared to handle "decadent" literature, such as Wilde"s The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898, and The Savoy. He went bankrupt in 1900, and died in 1907 from drink and drugs.
His naked body was found in a house in Parson"s Green on his 46th birthday, surrounded by empty bottles of Doctor J. Collis Browne"s Chlorodyne.
He was buried in an unmarked grave, paid for by Lord Alfred Douglas, in a cemetery in Fulham Palace Road.