The Scholarly Adventures of Roderick Random

Fifty years ago, in 1964, the New American Library reprinted Roderick Random (1748) as a Signet Classic, with an afterword by the American novelist John Barth. According to O M Brack, Jr., textual editor of this outstanding edition of Tobias Smollett’s first novel, that reprint was the impetus for a scholarly edition of Smollett’s collected works, formally launched in 1967.¹ Like several other major editions of eighteenth-century authors — those of Henry Fielding (recently completed), Samuel Richardson (recently begun), and Samuel Johnson (still in progress), for example — the collected Smollett had a long and complex gestation. After the University of Iowa Press, its first intended publisher, dropped the project, it was taken on by the University of Delaware Press, and then eventually by the University of Georgia Press, under the general editorship of Jerry Beasley. The first volume, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, appeared in 1988, edited by Beasley and Brack. Eight more volumes followed at irregular intervals: The History and Adventures of an Atom (1989), The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1990), Poems, Plays, and “The Briton” (1993), The Adventures of Telemachus (1997), The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (2002), Don Quixote (2003), The Devil upon Crutches (2005), and The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane (2011).

The Adventures of Roderick Random (2012) is the tenth and penultimate volume of the Georgia Smollett, now under the general editorship of Alexander Pettit. All but one of the volumes, Sir Launcelot Greaves, has been coedited by Brack, who is also textual coeditor of the novel that will conclude the series, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. The completed edition will contain, according to Roderick Random’s dust-jacket blurb, “all of those writings by which Smollett was best known in his own time and by which he is best remembered in ours.” The series can be supplemented by Frank Felsenstein’s excellent edition of Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (Oxford Univ., 1979; Broadview, 2011), by a two-volume edition of Smollett’s miscellaneous writings, edited by Brack et al., now in progress, and by The Letters of Tobias Smollett, edited by Lewis M. Knapp (Oxford Univ., 1970).

As James G. Basker, the principal editor of Roderick Random, notes in the preface to this new edition, his own work on annotating the novel began some twenty years ago in the early 1990s, after the publication of his invaluable Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist (1988). In the latter part of the project, he was aided by Nicole Seary and, until his death in 2004, by the preeminent Smollett scholar, Paul-Gabriel Boucé, whose Novels of Tobias Smollett (1976), first published in French in 1971, remains the best close reading of Smollett’s fiction. This formidable team has produced a stellar edition of one of the great eighteenth-century comic novels. It includes a substantial and incisive introduction by Basker, paying careful attention to the novel’s composition, printing, initial reception, and afterlife, as well as to its form and thematic concerns. The Georgia Edition also features an extensive set of illustrations, including the frontispieces by Francis Hayman and Charles Grignion, designed for the two-volume second edition of 1748; a series of engravings by Thomas Rowlandson and J. C. Stadler (1792–93); rival illustrations by Richard Corbould and H. Hamilton (1793); and later illustrations by George Cruikshank (1831). The selection enables readers to compare visual responses to the novel from three eras. Another welcome bonus item is Smollett’s little-known “Account of the Expedition against Carthagene,” first published in 1756 as part of his seven-volume compilation of travel writings, A Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages. Smollett wrote this piece in 1744 and adapted it for parts of Roderick Random. The “Account,” as Basker contends, “sharpened Smollett’s narrative style, fostering both the eye-witness reporting...