The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett (review)

The University of Georgia Press edition of Roderick Random presents an authoritative, scholarly text of the rollicking, expansive narrative that established Smollett’s place in the literary world of eighteenth-century London. Described by its author (in surprisingly Swiftian terms) as “a Satire on Mankind,” Smollett’s debut novel was an instant hit in the early months of 1748. The 2000 copies of the first edition—an unusually sizeable print run for a work by a largely unknown writer—were quickly followed by a second edition of a further 3000 copies. While its provocatively earthy scenes and indecorous idioms were sometimes condemned, early readers also found the work highly entertaining, even joyous: Frances Boscawen (wife of the Admiral) reported that reading it gave her “many a horse laugh.” Constantly in print since its first publication, Roderick Random has continued to draw such “horse laughs” (what we might perhaps term “houyhnhnms”) from generations of readers. Scrupulously edited, and generously interspersed with illustrations by Hayman, Rowlandson, George Cruickshank, and others, this new edition of Smollett’s breakthrough novel has much to recommend it to students and scholars of Smollett, prose fiction, and the literature of the mid-eighteenth century.

In keeping with the previous volumes in Georgia’s Works of Tobias Smollett series, the edition is traditional, with extensive annotation and bibliographical apparatus (textual commentary, historical collation, list of emendations, word-division list, and bibliographical descriptions). The volume is very much a library and research edition: its bulk and price, and the small type in which the novel is printed, militate against its use as a reading text. Accuracy and information are the watchwords here, and the edition scores highly: the printing and publication history, in particular, is expertly handled. As is observed in the introduction, Roderick Random is a “big-canvas novel,” and the annotations are correspondingly wide-ranging. Particular attention is given to revisions across the early editions, to nuances and resonances of language (vulgarisms, puns and double meanings, Scotticisms), to eighteenth-century cultural forms and social mores (from wig-wearing to the gentrification of boxing), and to national and international contexts (Scotland, slavery). The novel’s innovative rendition of idioms, dialects, and idiolects is nicely explicated at points, with insightful discussions of the comic “illitericisms” of Clarinda and of the “Franglais” of Lavement, which becomes increasingly anglicized as the novel progresses. On more interpretive and contentious matters, the annotations are generally even-handed, though the editors do not shy away from passing their own judgments on topics such as the novel’s treatment of slavery and homosexuality.

The introduction, which appears to be mainly the work of Mr. Basker, provides a substantial and fascinating account of the novel, covering biography, composition and reception, forms, influences and themes, and source texts. The discussion addresses such influences as Hogarth, Cervantes, Le Sage, classical literature, and theater; issues of language and obscenity; and the “existential” aspect of the narrative, which sees the contemporary eighteenth-century world being overlaid by the successive plot events, and frequent reversals in fortune, of picaresque narrative. Notably, the introduction also dwells on the Carthagena expedition, in which Smollett participated as a surgeon’s mate in the early 1740s. In this reading, Smollett’s naval experiences in the Caribbean were formative not just for the corresponding sections of Roderick Random (chapters 28–33) but, more broadly, for his authorial outlook and the narrative focus on human physicality and vulnerability that runs through his novels, from the naval episodes in Roderick Random itself to the equally well-known descriptions of the waters at Bath in Humphry Clinker.

Although masterly, the introduction is not without its weaknesses. In places, the discussion is overdetailed, too concerned to cram in quotations from later readers of the work (such as nineteenth-century and colonial readers). The broad overview of themes and influences is cursory at times, and inevitably leaves much unsaid about many of the topics it raises. Despite noting...