In the Library
The Adventures of Roderick Random
Tobias Smollett, 1748
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 14 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 71
- Length
- Length 190k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I was much less surprised that people should die on board, than that a sick person should recover.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
Fielding's answer, out a year later, and the warmer of the two: the same England, the same roads and inns, but a hero the world keeps forgiving.
£1.99
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
Smollett loved Cervantes enough to translate him, and Don Quixote is where the road novel of beatings, inns and wild reversals of fortune began.
£1.99
About the book
Before he is born, his mother dreams she is delivered of a tennis ball, and the devil, acting as midwife, strikes it out of sight with a racket. That is the book: a Scots boy driven across the world by a force that finds him funny. Then the comedy stops being invention. Smollett had served as a surgeon's mate at the siege of Cartagena, and when Roderick is seized by a press gang on Tower Wharf and carried down to the sick berth of a man-of-war, he is reporting. Fifty men hang in rows with fourteen inches of space apiece, breathing the steam of their own bodies, and he is less surprised that they die than that anyone recovers. No English novel had shown the Navy like this. The rest is coarse, casually brutal, frequently very funny, and unsparing about its hero: the fortune that buys Roderick his happy ending is made on the Guinea coast, four hundred people sold at Buenos Aires, and when fever kills some of them on the passage he counts only the crew.