Roderick Random : Penguin Classics - Tobias Smollett

Roderick Random

By: Tobias Smollett

Paperback | 30 November 1995 | Edition Number 1

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Roderick Random was published in 1748 to immediate acclaim, and established Smollett among the most popular of eighteenth-century novelists.
Narrated by an unheroic, apparently rudderless hero named Random, Smollett's wildly energetic and entertaining novel is held together not least by the narrator's outrage and dismay. Although Roderick Random was first published anonymously, the secret of Smollett's authorship was soon discovered, with the result that many readers thought they recognized similarities between the life of the hero and that of his creator. Certainly Roderick Random's early years - disinherited and without wealth and influence - and his university career, apprenticeship and service as a naval surgeon, vividly reflect the experiences of the author.
How Random learns to survive the fickle hand of fortune, recovers his long-lost father, marries his beloved Narcissa, and dispatches his enemies is the stuff, not of autobiography but of a novel which profoundly satirizes the moral chaos of its times. Dickens and Thackeray, among other great Victorians, applauded Smollett for his wit and invention, and in Roderick Random we enjoy the novel of a pioneer opening up the frontiers of fiction.
Industry Reviews
Smollett's first novel remains his most accessible. The innocent Roderick, arriving in the London of 1748 with his schoolfellow companion Strap, fights off rogues and villains - Gawky, Crampley, Weasel, Wagtail and Badger among others - becomes a common sailor, falls in love, is captured by smugglers, courts a rich heiress but ends up in prison, and...well, in the end, of course, he re-meets and marries the beautiful Narcissa (Strap marries her maid) and lives happily ever after. Not just one story, but at least half a dozen - and all narrated in an easy, familiar manner quite astonishingly readable after two centuries and more. (Kirkus UK)

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