The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom [Paperback]

The first novel by a major English writer that is devoted to a thoroughgoing portrait of villainy, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom chronicles the life of an aberrant criminal character. Filled with striking satiric thrusts at the legal, medical, and military establishments of mid-eighteenth-century Europe and England, the novel reveals Tobias Smollett's capacities as a commentator on contemporary life.

First published in 1753, Ferdinand Count Fathom is an experimental work that explores the relations between history and fiction and introduces, for the first time in the English novel, episodes of Gothic melodrama. Too long neglected and never before available in a carefully prepared scholarly edition, Ferdinand Count Fathom may now be read, understood, and appreciated against the literary and historical background of the eighteenth-century world.

The appearance of the first volume of a major scholarly edition of the works of Tobias Smollett is an important event. . . . If the other editors of separate volumes in the series but match Beasley's work with Fathom, the whole project has been well worth the long wait. He has done a superb job. The introduction defines the place of this novel in Smollett's whole career. Also Beasley develops arguments that Fathom was a notable experiment in fiction, 'a serious and unblushing representation of remorseless (at least until the end) villainy,' and that the work represents an attempt to discover a way of presenting the relation between fiction and real life. Beasley's notes, more comprehensive than any ever offered before, are especially illumlÓ.