The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Adventures of Roderick Random
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The Adventures of Roderick Random opens with the author’s preface:
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. In the dark ages of the World, when a man had rendered himself famous for wisdom or valour, his family and adherents availed themselves of his superior qualities, magnified his virtues, and represented his character and person as sacred and supernatural. The vulgar easily swallowed the bait, implored his protection, and yielded the tribute of homage and praise, even to adoration; his exploits were handed down to posterity with a thousand exaggerations; they were repeated as incitements to virtue; divine honours were paid, and altars erected to his memory, for the encouragement of those who attempted to imitate his example; and hence arose the heathen mythology, which is no other than a collection of extravagant romances. As learning advanced, and genius received cultivation, these stories were embellished with the graces of poetry, that they might the better recommend themselves to the attention; they were sung in public, at festivals, for the instruction and delight of the audience; and rehearsed before battle, as incentives to deeds of glory. Thus tragedy and the epic muse were born, and, in the progress of taste, arrived at perfection. It is no wonder that the ancients could not relish a fable in prose, after they had seen so many remarkable events celebrated in verse by their best poets; we therefore find no romance among them during the era of their excellence, unless the Cyropædia of Xenophon may be so called; and it was not till arts and sciences began to revive after the irruption of the barbarians into Europe, that anything of this kind appeared. But when the minds of men were debauched by the imposition of priestcraft to the most absurd pitch of credulity, the authors of romance arose, and losing sight of probability, filled their performances with the most monstrous hyperboles. If they could not equal the ancient poets in point of genius they were resolved to excel them in fiction, and apply to the wonder, rather than the judgment, of their readers. Accordingly, they brought necromancy to their aid, and instead of supporting the character of their heroes by dignity of sentiment and practice, distinguished them by their bodily strength, activity, and extravagance of behaviour. Although nothing could be more ludicrous and unnatural than the figures they drew, they did not want patrons and admirers; and the world actually began to be infected with the spirit of knight-errantry, when Cervantes, by an inimitable piece of ridicule, reformed the taste of mankind, representing chivalry in the right point of view, and converting romance to purposes far more useful and entertaining, by making it assume the sock, and point out the follies of ordinary life.
The same method has been practised by other Spanish and French authors, and by none more successfully than by Monsieur Le Sage, who, in his Adventures of Gil Blas, has described the knavery and foibles of life, with infinite humour and sagacity. The following sheets I have modelled on his plan, taking me liberty, however, to differ from him in the execution, where I thought his particular situations were uncommon, extravagant, or peculiar to the country in which the scene is laid. The disgraces of Gil Blas are, for the most part, such as rather excite mirth than compassion; he himself laughs at them; and his transitions from distress to happiness, or at least ease, are so sudden, that neither the reader has time to pity him, nor himself to be acquainted with affliction. This conduct, in my opinion, not only deviates from probability, but prevents that generous indignation, which ought to animate the reader against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world. I have attempted to represent modest merit struggling with every difficulty to which a friendless orphan is exposed, from his own want of experience, as well as from the selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind. To secure a favourable prepossession, I have allowed him the advantages of birth and education, which in the series of his misfortunes will, I hope, engage the ingenuous more warmly in his behalf; and though I foresee, that some people will be offended at the mean scenes in which he is involved, I persuade myself that the judicious will not only perceive the necessity of describing those situations to which he must of course be confined, in his low estate, but also find entertainment in viewing those parts of life, where the humours and passions are undisguised by affectation, ceremony, or education; and the whimsical peculiarities of disposition appear as nature has implanted them. But I believe I need not trouble myself in vindicating a practice authorized by the best writers in this way, some of whom I have already named.
The opening pages are shown here; the complete novel can be read online, or downloaded, from the free edition below.
Download Full EPUB1748
~194,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 10.8 hours
Standalone
Scotland, London, the West Indies, Bath and France
69 chapters (I–LXIX)
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.75 MB (EPUB) · 0.97 MB (AZW3) · 0.79 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #4085
Roderick Random is Tobias Smollett’s first novel, published anonymously in 1748, and it follows its hero from a Scottish cradle to a London garret, a naval surgeon’s berth, a debtor’s prison and a West Indian fortune. The narrator is a gentleman’s son disinherited before he is born: his grandfather cuts off his father for marrying a poor relation, and Roderick grows up in a school where the master beats him and a village where the nearest thing to an inheritance is a grudge. Every door he knocks on opens onto a swindle, and every generous impulse costs him money he does not have. Smollett tells it in the first person, at speed, with a temper, and with an appetite for the grotesque.
The famous set pieces are all here: the walk to London with Strap, the gauntlet of highwaymen, waggoners and innkeepers, the press-gang on Tower Hill, the sick bay at Carthagena, the wreck on the English coast, and the long comedy of false patrons and fortune-hunting women in London and Bath. Nothing in the novel is decorous and almost nothing is fair; Random is beaten, robbed, mocked, jailed and shipped abroad, and his reward comes only after the whole picaresque wheel has turned. Smollett’s navy, in particular, has outlived the book’s reputation for coarseness. See Wikipedia’s article on The Adventures of Roderick Random for its publication history. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #4085.
The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett: Summary, Characters & Themes
This page is a summary and analysis of The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett: the plot, the historical context, the characters and the themes, followed by chapter summaries and the free download links. Roderick Random is a first-person picaresque novel of 1748 and the first of Smollett’s books. Its hero is a Scottish gentleman’s son who is disinherited before he is born, and who spends sixty-nine chapters discovering how little a good name, a little Latin and an honest temper are worth. He is schooled, apprenticed, cheated, pressed into the navy, shipwrecked, robbed, jailed and hired out as a valet, a soldier and a surgeon’s mate before the wheel finally turns. Smollett writes at speed, with a temper and a taste for the grotesque, and his naval chapters are among the earliest sustained descriptions of a warship as a small, cruel society in English fiction.
The author is Tobias Smollett, and the text of The Adventures of Roderick Random itself has a long critical history. The preface printed at the front of the text is a defence of the kind of book Smollett had written: satire, it argues, works best when it is folded into an interesting story, and the sheets, it says, were modelled on Monsieur Le Sage’s Gil Blas. Smollett had served as a surgeon’s mate in the Caribbean expedition of 1741 and knew the navy, the hospitals and the lodging houses he describes. The book appeared when he was twenty-seven, was read as a scandalous chronicle of living people, and made his name; Peregrine Pickle followed in 1751, the translation of Don Quixote in 1755, and the last novel, Humphry Clinker, in 1771, the year he died near Livorno.
The method is simple and relentless. Roderick narrates his own life, praises his own spirit, and is cheated in almost every chapter: by schoolmasters, apothecaries, usurers, tavern keepers, recruiting officers, patrons and women. Each episode is a small comedy of money, and each ends with the hero poorer, hungrier or further from home. Smollett keeps the book moving with chapter arguments, with abrupt changes of scene, and with inset narratives told by the people Roderick meets: the story of Miss Williams, the tragedy of the poet Melopoyn, the sea anecdotes of Morgan. The result is loose, uneven and vivid, closer to a series of satirical prints than to a plotted Victorian novel.
Contemporaries compared Smollett with Fielding, and the comparison has never quite suited either writer. Fielding is a magistrate’s ironist who believes in a moral order; Smollett is a surgeon’s observer who believes mostly in appetite, accident and rank. His London is a city of smells, bad food, borrowed coats and sudden violence, and his Scotsman’s eye for English self-satisfaction gives the satire its edge. The naval chapters were admired by later writers of the sea, and the book’s frankness about the body, disease, hunger and money made it awkward for Victorian editors, who softened it. Modern readers tend to find the first half stronger than the marriage plot that closes it, but the voice is what lasts.
This page is built on the Project Gutenberg transcription, ebook 4085: 193,646 words in sixty-nine chapters, each headed by the one-line argument Smollett wrote for it. The summaries below follow those chapters, grouping the shortest into single entries. The EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files carry the complete text. Readers who want the other great picaresque of the decade can go on to Tom Jones, or back to the source in Don Quixote; for a Scottish road story with a sharper conscience there is Kidnapped. The text used here is the Project Gutenberg transcription (#4085), which is in the public domain in the United States.
Historical Context
Roderick Random belongs to the 1740s, the decade in which the English novel found its commercial footing. Richardson’s Pamela had appeared in 1740, Fielding answered it with Joseph Andrews in 1742 and Tom Jones in 1749, and London booksellers were learning that a novel could be sold, reviewed, pirated and discussed. Behind all of them lay a longer picaresque tradition imported from Spain and France: Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzman de Alfarache, Cervantes, Scarron, and Le Sage’s Gil Blas, the book Smollett names in his own preface. What Smollett added was a Scottish narrator, a medical training and the navy. The result is a novel about a Britain that is not London-centred: its hero comes south with no money, no patron and no accent that will pass.
Smollett was born in 1721 at Dalquhurn in Dunbartonshire, the son of a laird’s younger son, and trained in medicine at Glasgow, where he was apprenticed to a surgeon. He went to London in 1739 with a tragedy, The Regicide, which nobody staged, and in 1741 sailed as a surgeon’s mate on the Carthagena expedition, the disastrous Caribbean campaign in which disease killed far more men than Spanish guns. He came home, practised medicine, wrote Roderick Random, and spent the rest of his life as a professional writer: novels, translations, a history of England, the editorship of the Critical Review, travel books, and a long quarrel with the world that ended with his death near Livorno in 1771. The expedition of 1741 is the raw material of the naval chapters, and the bitterness of those chapters is not invented.
The book’s reception was noisy. It was praised for its humour and its pictures of low life, and attacked for indecency, for libel, and for making a Scot its hero at a moment when Scottishness was politically suspect in London. Smollett answered the attacks in later prefaces and never changed his manner. Victorian editors cut and softened him; twentieth-century criticism recovered him as the missing link between the picaresque and the sea novel, and as a documentary source for the conditions of the Georgian navy, where pressed men, surgeons’ mates and midshipmen shared a wooden world of rank and violence. The novel is now read less for its plot than for its scenes, and above all for its voice.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Roderick Random: the narrator and hero, a Scottish gentleman’s son with no inheritance, quick to take offence and quicker to forgive, who turns his hand to medicine, soldiering, valeting and the sea without ever quite ceasing to be a schoolboy with a grievance.
- Hugh Strap: the Newcastle barber who attaches himself to Roderick on the road to London, a loyal, frightened, practical companion whose running commentary on money, clothes and courage supplies much of the book’s comedy and all of its pathos.
- Lieutenant Bowling: Roderick’s uncle, a blunt naval officer who fights the family’s dogs, defends him against the schoolmaster, is ruined by debt and later commands the ship that carries his nephew back towards fortune.
- Narcissa: the niece of the learned maiden lady who employs Roderick as a valet, beautiful, patient and rich by expectation, courted by Sir Timothy Thicket and a lord, and kept from marriage by her brother’s calculations.
- Mr. Morgan: the Welsh surgeon’s mate of the Thunder, choleric, generous, fond of a quarrel, whose mangled English and physical courage make him the most memorable of Roderick’s professional companions.
- Miss Williams: a merchant’s daughter seduced and abandoned, rescued by Roderick in the street, the narrator of the novel’s best inset story, later Narcissa’s maid and finally Strap’s wife.
Core Literary Themes
- Fortune and the wheel: the novel’s governing image is a turning wheel that lifts a man without warning and drops him without mercy, and Roderick’s career is a long demonstration that rank, merit and money have little to do with one another.
- The road and the sea: coaches, waggons, tenders and ships move the hero from one humiliation to the next, and travel is the novel’s structure as well as its subject, so that every inn is a courtroom and every deck a hierarchy.
- Patronage and imposture: from the Navy Office clerk to the earl who borrows his watch, the book shows a society in which advancement depends on patrons who are usually frauds, and in which the hero learns to perform servility he does not feel.
- The body in pain: wounds, fevers, vermin, hunger and bad food are described with a surgeon’s precision, and the novel refuses to separate physical suffering from comedy, which is one reason it unsettled later readers.
- Satire of the professions: physicians, apothecaries, lawyers, clergymen, naval officers and critics are each given a comic representative, and the book treats professional language as a form of self-interest.
- Love as a market: courtship in the novel is an exchange of fortunes and expectations, conducted through aunts, brothers and go-betweens, and the marriage that ends the book is a settlement as much as a romance.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Adventures of Roderick Random?
The naval chapters are the reason many readers keep the book. Smollett served as a surgeon’s mate and writes from inside the sick bay: the examination of the sick on the quarter-deck, the surgeon who will not report a fever, men dying in a ship packed for a campaign, a midshipman who starves a patient out of spite. Captain Oakum and Mr. Mackshane are not caricatures invented for a laugh; they are the kind of officers a powerless mate actually met, and the comedy sharpens the indictment instead of softening it. Later sea fiction inherits this quarter-deck, and almost none of it is as angry.
Then there is the comedy of the road and the town. Strap fights a blacksmith and loses, a highwayman fires at him in the dark, the waggon fills with fools, an alehouse trick empties Roderick’s purse, the Bath assembly ends with Beau Nash attacked, and Melinda’s mother counts guineas while her daughter counts advantages. Smollett’s jokes are physical, quick and often cruel, and they keep a book published in 1748 from feeling like a monument. The satire has targets, not just victims: the professions, the Navy Office, the marriage market, the literary hacks of Grub Street.
Finally there is the voice. Roderick boasts and suffers in the same breath, reports his own follies without embarrassment, and hands the microphone to anyone with a story, so that a Welsh surgeon, a wronged woman and a starving poet each get a chapter or two to themselves. The chapter arguments, the abrupt scene changes and the refusal to moralise keep the book modern. This edition carries the whole of that text, preface and apologue included, in three reader formats, with the chapter arguments intact so the plot can be followed at a glance.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #4085 — the complete text, unabridged, with the chapter headings the author set.
- Unabridged text: the complete sixty-nine chapters, the author’s preface and the apologue, with nothing cut for modern taste.
- Chapter arguments included: Smollett’s own one-line summary heads every chapter, so the plot can be followed at a glance.
- Three reader formats: EPUB for most e-readers, AZW3 for Kindle and KEPUB for Kobo, all generated from the same transcription.
- The History of Tom Jones — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Don Quixote — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Kidnapped — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
Roderick Random has sixty-nine chapters, numbered I to LXIX, and each one opens with Smollett’s own one-line argument. These twelve summaries follow the novel in order, grouping the shortest chapters into single entries.
- I-IV. Birth, school and the will: Roderick is born in the north of the kingdom, in his grandfather’s house, and the chapter that opens the novel explains how his father was disinherited for marrying a poor relation. School follows, with a master who beats him and a cabal of boys who turn on the new arrival, then the arrival of his uncle Lieutenant Bowling, a fight with the grandfather’s dogs, and a will that leaves Roderick with nothing but a bond and a grievance.
- V-VII. Revenge, university and the surgeon’s shop: Roderick takes a schoolboy’s revenge on the master, wins a bursary and goes up to the university, where his female cousins plot to marry him into the family and his uncle’s affairs collapse. The chapter that ends the movement apprentices him to Mr. Crab, a surgeon whose shop is a lesson in how little a poor apprentice eats, and sends him south towards London.
- VIII-XII. The road to London: On the road to Newcastle Roderick meets Hugh Strap, a barber with a taste for adventure, and the two of them walk to London together. Highwaymen, a burning inn, a waggon full of passengers and a usurer named Isaac fill the chapters, and by the time the travellers reach the capital Roderick has learned that a companion is worth more than a plan.
- XIII-XVIII. London, the Navy Office and Surgeons’ Hall: The capital begins with an insult, an alehouse trick and a robbery. Roderick waits on Mr. Cringer at the Navy Office, is passed from clerk to clerk, sits the Surgeons’ Hall examination, is taken up by the beau Mr. Jackson, and spends a night in the Round-house. A French apothecary, Lavement, finally gives him work, and Strap fights a blacksmith on his behalf.
- XIX-XXIII. Lavement’s house, St Giles and Miss Williams: The apothecary’s household turns out to be a comedy of wife, daughter and apprentice, and a mistake there costs Roderick his place. An old enemy, Gawky, has him arrested on a theft charge; discharged, he lodges in St Giles and finds Miss Williams destitute in the street. Her story, told across two chapters, and a bailiff who carries her off to the Marshalsea, close the movement.
- XXIV-XXVII. The press-gang and the Thunder: A press-gang takes Roderick on Tower Hill and he is carried aboard the Thunder, where a friend, Mr. Thompson, gets him the post of surgeon’s third mate. Mr. Morgan, the Welsh surgeon’s mate, takes charge of his education in the mess, and Captain Oakum and the surgeon Mackshane show him what a warship’s hierarchy can do to a man with no rank.
- XXVIII-XXXI. Carthagena, the fetter and the trial: The fleet sails for the Caribbean and runs into a tempest. Mackshane’s malice has Roderick and Morgan imprisoned as spies; Thompson refuses to turn evidence, and Roderick is fettered on the poop during an engagement. A curious trial follows, the subornation is exposed, and the two men are freed in time for the landings at Carthagena.
- XXXII-XXXVII. Bocca Chica, fever and shipwreck: The assault on Bocca Chica, the cowardice of Mackshane, the chaplain’s frenzy and Jack Rattlin’s lost hand fill the battle chapters; epidemic fever and a refused petition follow, and Crampley nearly suffocates Roderick in his hammock. Captain Whiffle, a fop, takes him to Port Royal, where he stays in the West Indies as a surgeon’s mate, and the voyage home ends in a wreck and a duel.
- XXXVIII-XLIII. Narcissa, the smugglers and Dettingen: Roderick crawls ashore, is succoured by a reputed witch and hired as a valet to a learned maiden lady, whose niece, Narcissa, he falls in love with. A rescue from Sir Timothy Thicket, a declaration, a flight to the coast, capture by smugglers, a reunion with his uncle at Boulogne, a robbery by a Capuchin, enlistment in the Picardy regiment and the battle of Dettingen follow in quick succession.
- XLIV-LII. London again, wits and false patrons: Back in London, Roderick is introduced to the coffee-house wits Medlar and Wagtail, falls in with Banter, courts Melinda, loses money at cards at Hampstead, and is taken up by the earl of Strutwell, a patron who borrows his watch and never delivers. The movement ends in a debtor’s despair, with Strap pawning his best sword, and a lucky run at the gaming table.
- LIII-LX. Bath, Miss Snapper and Lord Quiverwit: A stage-coach to Bath introduces Miss Snapper and a highwayman scare, and the Long Room produces Beau Nash, Melinda and, at last, Narcissa, whose maid Miss Williams becomes Roderick’s ally. A declaration, a jealous nobleman, a duel with Lord Quiverwit and Narcissa’s removal by her brother close the movement with the hero’s fortunes at their lowest.
- LXI-LXIX. The Marshalsea, Melopoyn and the wheel turned: Arrested, Roderick ends up in the Marshalsea, where he meets the poet Melopoyn and hears the story of his tragedy and the managers. His uncle pays the debt and gives him the post of surgeon aboard his ship; a voyage to the Guinea coast, a Spanish don’s villa at Buenos Ayres and a discovery there restore his family, and the last chapters marry him to Narcissa, settle Strap with Miss Williams, and take the whole party home to Scotland.
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Part of: Classic fiction · Adventure and Sea Stories
