The Adventures of Roderick Random
The Adventures of Roderick Random follows the fortunes of a Scottish orphan of good birth but no means, cast into the world with little but his education and his wits. Cheated of his inheritance, Roderick endures a brutal schooling, a hard apprenticeship, and the indifference of relations before seeking his fortune in London. He is press-ganged into the navy, survives a disastrous naval expedition, drifts through soldiering, gambling, and reckless courtship across Britain and the Continent, and is repeatedly betrayed and rescued by turns until fidelity and luck deliver him to fortune and love.
Modelled on Le Sage's Gil Blas, Smollett's picaresque is a sharp satire on a callous, self-interested society, exposing the cruelty of the navy, the corruption of patronage, and the snobbery that grinds down friendless merit. Its themes of struggling virtue, fortune's reversals, and indignation at injustice give the comedy real moral force. It matters as a vivid, influential founding work of the English novel, unsparing in its realism and rich in memorable characters.
How it begins
Of all kinds of satire, there is none so entertaining and universally improving, as that which is introduced, as it were occasionally, in the course of an interesting story, which brings every incident home to life, and by representing familiar scenes in an uncommon and amusing point of view, invests them with all the graces of novelty, while nature is appealed to in every particular. The reader gratifies his curiosity in pursuing the adventures of a person in whose favour he is prepossessed; he espouses his cause, he sympathises with him in his distress, his indignation is heated against the authors of his calamity: the humane passions are inflamed; the contrast between dejected virtue and insulting vice appears with greater aggravation, and every impression having a double force on the imagination, the memory retains the circumstance, and the heart improves by the example. The attention is not tired with a bare catalogue of characters, but agreeably diverted with all the variety of invention; and the vicissitudes of life appear in their peculiar circumstances, opening an ample field for wit and humour. Romance, no doubt, owes its origin to ignorance, vanity, and superstition.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.