The Adventures of Roderick Random

Reading time: about 14 h
Length: 191,217 words · 356 pages
Structure: 69 chapters · 1 front-matter section
Language: English
Era: Enlightenment

Roderick Random, a penniless young Scot cheated out of his inheritance, is press-ganged into the Royal Navy as a surgeon's mate and survives the doomed assault on Cartagena before a chain of misadventures at sea and on land finally leads him back to fortune and to Narcissa, the woman he loves.

Smollett published his first novel in 1748, drawing directly on his own service as a surgeon's mate during the Royal Navy's disastrous 1741 expedition against Cartagena; it helped establish the picaresque novel in English, following the model of Le Sage's Gil Blas.

Bibliomancer restores the 1748 text exactly as Smollett wrote it.

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About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

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About the author

T. Smollett

1721–1771 · Enlightenment

Tobias Smollett (1721–1771) was born near Renton, Dunbartonshire, and trained as a surgeon's apprentice in Glasgow before going to sea as a naval surgeon's mate, serving at the disastrous siege of Cartagena in 1741. Settling in London, he turned the experience into his first novel, Roderick Random (1748), followed by Peregrine Pickle (1751) and Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753); he also translated Don Quixote (1755) and edited the Critical Review. Ill health sent him to Italy in his last years, where he wrote The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), his last novel, and died near Livorno months after its publication.

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