The Adventures of Roderick Random

Introduction

introduction When The Adventures of Roderick Random was published on 21 January 1748, this raucous novel by the Scotsman Tobias Smollett marked a major breakthrough in its author’s career and in the history of fiction. Still only twenty-six years old, the Glasgow-trained surgeon had been trying for more than eight years to succeed as a writer. In 1739 Smollett had come to London, like James Thomson and Samuel Johnson before him, with the manuscript of a tragedy in hand and other projects under way. Yet until Roderick Random he had not succeeded in publishing anything more than two short poems and a pair of verse satires in the style of Juvenal.1 When his career stalled in its first year, Smollett was forced to turn elsewhere, resorting to a two-year stint as a surgeon’s mate in the navy and a period of fortune hunting in the Caribbean before returning to London in 1744. Still his progress was frustratingly slow. Suddenly in 1747, brimming now with raw life experience acquired abroad, inspired by new trends in publishing and the enormous commercial success of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), Smollett turned to the novel, with stunning results. It was a big risk for him. Nothing about Roderick Random amounted to playing it safe. Tackling a genre that was still marginal and contentious and to him entirely new, Smollett devoted eight months of precious time—while juggling the responsibilities of a new marriage and a struggling medical practice—to produce a literary work many times longer than anything he had written before. At 220,000 words, the novel was almost half again as long as Joseph Andrews, and in its slashing style, risqué language, exotic settings, and global scale, it exploded the cultural and geographical boundaries to which Richardson’s and Fielding’s early novels had confined themselves. Yet to Smollett ’s delight, it proved a big success, selling out immediately and reaching four editions within its first seven years. Smollett instantly became a presence in the London literary world. He would go on, during a career hampered by illness and foreshortened by his death at the age of fifty, to write five more full-length novels as well as an astonishing volume of work in other fields—many thousands of pages of translation, drama, history, journalism, and editorial writing. No major British author produced more published work in the third quarter of the eighteenth century than Smollett, and in the whole of the century perhaps only Defoe matched him for sheer volume.2 But none of his works made a greater impact than his first novel. His contemporaries were startled by the newcomer, their responses ranging from enthusiastic laughter to sniffy indignation. Roderick Random gave her “many a horse laugh,” wrote Admiral Boscawen’s wife, Fanny, a week after it was published.3 In the January 1748 issue of the British Magazine, in the first published notice of Smollett’s novel, an anonymous writer mused about the “soul expressing portrait” exhibited in Roderick Random.4 The eminent Dr. Thomas Birch, Fellow of the Royal Society and a friend of Samuel Johnson , praised its “variety of characters” for their “vivacity and humor” and immediately xxiv Introduction began recommending it to his literary and society friends. Richardson’s friend Catherine Talbot, by contrast, was skeptical: “strange book,” she wrote to the woman of letters Elizabeth Carter on 15 February 1748. When the smoke of its immediate reception had cleared, the impact of Roderick Random proved to be much more than a short-term phenomenon. Enjoyed by critics and general readers, it has remained in print for more than 250 years and had become by the twentieth century a solidly canonical novel. In terms of character, language, and theme, Roderick Random daringly expanded the possibilities of fiction in ways that would reverberate through the works of Dickens, Melville, and Thackeray in the nineteenth century and those of Arthur Conan Doyle, William Faulkner, George Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, V. S. Pritchett, Anthony Burgess, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Barth, John Sladek, and Don Winslow in the twentieth.5 More broadly, with its sweeping depiction of human depravity and the recurrent cruelty of fate, Roderick Random can be seen in many ways as a key text in the emergence of the whole noir sensibility of modern literature and film. biographical background Born 21 March 1721 in Dumbartonshire, Scotland, Smollett had an early life that instilled in...