The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom
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The opening of Chapter I
Cardinal de Retz very judiciously observes, that all historians must of necessity be subject to mistakes, in explaining the motives of those actions they record, unless they derive their intelligence from the candid confession of the person whose character they represent; and that, of consequence, every man of importance ought to write his own memoirs, provided he has honesty enough to tell the truth, without suppressing any circumstance that may tend to the information of the reader. This, however, is a requisite that, I am afraid, would be very rarely found among the number of those who exhibit their own portraits to the public. Indeed, I will venture to say, that, how upright soever a man’s intentions may be, he will, in the performance of such a task, be sometimes misled by his own phantasy, and represent objects, as they appeared to him, through the mists of prejudice and passion.
An unconcerned reader, when he peruses the history of two competitors, who lived two thousand years ago, or who perhaps never had existence, except in the imagination of the author, cannot help interesting himself in the dispute, and espousing one side of the contest, with all the zeal of a warm adherent. What wonder, then, that we should be heated in our own concerns, review our actions with the same self-approbation that they had formerly acquired, and recommend them to the world with all the enthusiasm of paternal affection?
Supposing this to be the case, it was lucky for the cause of historical truth, that so many pens have been drawn by writers, who could not be suspected of such partiality; and that many great personages, among the ancients as well as moderns, either would not or could not entertain the public with their own memoirs. From this want of inclination or capacity to write, in our hero himself, the undertaking is now left to me, of transmitting to posterity the remarkable adventures of FERDINAND COUNT FATHOM; and by the time the reader shall have glanced over the subsequent sheets, I doubt not but he will bless God that the adventurer was not his own historian.
Ferdinand Count Fathom, chapter 1
Download Full EPUB1753
~157,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 8.7 hours
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England and the Continent in the 1730s and 1740s
67 chapters in two parts, in 12 groups
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Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #6761
The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom is Tobias Smollett’s novel of 1753, the life of a swindler followed from a waggon in a baggage train to a bed of straw in a hovel. Ferdinand is the son of an English sutler, taken up by a Scottish colonel and brought up beside the colonel’s son, Renaldo de Melvil; he repays the family with theft, forgery and a patient campaign against the young man’s love. Vienna, Paris and London supply the gaming tables, the heiresses and the fools, and the moralist is never far behind the joke.
It is also a book about what a bad man can do with good manners, and how far a story can be carried by a narrator who half admires his subject. Beside the rogue’s progress runs the misfortunes of Renaldo and the orphan Monimia, so that every triumph has a victim in view and the comedy keeps turning into something colder. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom is usually read as the darkest of Smollett’s novels and the one that points towards the Gothic. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #6761.
The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett: Summary, Characters & Themes
This is a summary and analysis of Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, published in London by R. and J. Dodsley in 1753. It opens with a flourish about historians and the difficulty of knowing other people’s motives, then produces its hero in a waggon: Ferdinand, son of an English sutler who has been five times a widow in a single campaign. She is killed at Belgrade while plundering the dead, and the boy is taken into the household of Count Melvil, whose life she had saved, and grows up at Presburg beside the Count’s son Renaldo — quick with the servants, slow with his Latin, and already keeping count of what a compliment will buy.
The education continues in Vienna, where Fathom fastens on Renaldo, learns what a young man’s purse is for, and lodges in the house of a rich jeweller whose wife and daughter he courts at the same time. A chimney, a wardrobe and a gold chain pledged by a knight of Malta carry him through that chapter of his life; the war carries him to the Rhine, where he robs his patron’s bureau and deserts to the French. Paris gives him a title he has no right to, and Sir Stentor Stile takes it off him again at the hazard table. Ten months as a one-eyed fiddler in the opera band follow, and then the jewels of a Castilian who has told him too much.
The novel belongs to the years after Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, and readers who know those books will recognise the manner: the mock-heroic address to ‘our hero’, the sudden descents into farce, the appetite for a grotesque minor character. What is new is the patience of the plot. Smollett keeps his villain on the road for two parts and lets the consequences accumulate, and the introduction printed with this text argues that here he began to build a story rather than string incidents together. Tobias Smollett was writing for a market that wanted sensation and moral improvement at once, and the book supplies both. Readers who like the period’s comedy of money and manners can set it beside The History of Tom Jones, published four years earlier.
London is where the comedy turns. Ratchcali, the Tyrolese gamester, reappears with a philosophy of the town as a masquerade; a diamond ring, a crate of violins and a fashion for old china make Fathom’s fortune; a girl called Celinda is frightened into love with groans and a wind-played harp, and a trial for criminal conversation undoes him. The first part ends in a crowded debtors’ prison, with the sharper stripped by his own partner — ‘the biter is bit’ is the title of the chapter. In the second part the comedy narrows: Fathom turns physician, marries badly, and begins to sink while the family he injured begins to rise.
This edition follows the Project Gutenberg #6761 transcription, which prints Smollett’s descriptive chapter titles and divides the book into two parts, sixty-seven chapters in all. Nothing is abridged, and the punctuation of the original is left where it falls, with nothing else touched. The chapter summaries below follow the order of the text and keep the last turns of the plot, so a first-time reader may want to stop at the eleventh group. For the darker line that Fathom’s night scenes anticipate, go on to The Monk, and for the castle and the apparition to The Castle of Otranto, published eleven years later, where the machinery is allowed to be supernatural.
Historical Context
The novel appeared in 1753, when the English novel was still a young form and its rules were being argued over in print. Smollett’s own dedication makes a case for the genre: ‘a novel is a large diffused picture’, he writes, with one principal figure to ‘unwind the clue of the labyrinth’ and close the scene. The wording matters, because the book is built to prove it. The picaresque had given readers a taste for a hero who travels and takes what he can; Smollett keeps the travelling and removes the excuse, and the result is a plot that has to keep account of a man who deserves nothing.
Fathom’s London runs on credit and arrest. A gentleman lives on his tailor’s patience and his banker’s opinion, a bagnio and a bailiff can end a season, and marriages are made at the Fleet by clergymen who ask few questions. A husband may sue his wife’s seducer for criminal conversation and take damages from a jury; the novel’s hero is ruined by exactly that action, and by a solicitor’s bill for 350 attendances at three shillings and fourpence. The prison chapters are the most documentary in the book — the turnkeys, the jailer’s compliments, the debtors’ club and its paper crown.
The second half turns on medicine as a trade. At Bristol and Tunbridge the wells were social occasions as much as cures, and a physician’s fortune depended on fashion rather than on theory. Fathom studies physic, invents a degree from Padua, wins a public argument about why the waters are warm, and prescribes pleasant nothings that cannot be blamed for a death. The satire is precise about the machinery — apothecary, nurse, surgeon and physician passing a patient among them ‘like a flight of wild geese’ — and it is aimed at a profession that was then as much performance as science.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Ferdinand Count Fathom: The son of a sutler, raised in a colonel’s household and taught nothing except how to please. He is handsome, patient, fluent in several languages and entirely without scruple; his frauds are works of construction, and he rehearses a story before he tells it. Smollett gives him no redeeming weakness except vanity, which is what makes him plausible in drawing rooms, and the narrator’s ‘our hero’ is the book’s driest joke. His last scene is a repentance that the novel takes seriously.
- Renaldo de Melvil: The Count’s son, generous, impulsive and slow to suspect. He takes Fathom as a companion out of gratitude to a dead woman, defends him, lends him money, and is repaid by the theft of his jewels and the ruin of his love affair. His story runs beside the hero’s as the counter-plot: a young man disinherited, with a mother shut up in a tower and a promised wife reported dead, who comes out of it a soldier. He is the book’s model of honour, and its most credulous character.
- Monimia: An orphan brought up by Renaldo’s family and loved by him, tall, dark, melancholy and given to Italian. She lives in lodgings, is slandered by Fathom, repulses him with his own sword, and is reported dead so convincingly that Renaldo makes a pilgrimage to her grave. That she survives, and that she proves to be Don Diego’s daughter Serafina, is the novel’s central recognition. Her constancy is the fixed point against which the hero’s treachery is measured.
- Don Diego de Zelos: A Castilian soldier who tells his life story to a stranger in a Paris lodging house, and pays for the privilege. He has killed a man he thought had dishonoured him, poisoned a wife and daughter in a fit of honour, and fled his country under a false name; the beard and the Persian dress are a disguise. His narrative is the novel’s most violent interlude, and his reunion with Serafina its most sentimental scene. He is credulous, proud and genuinely penitent.
- Ratchcali: The Tyrolese gamester, Fathom’s first partner and last betrayer. He is a professional: he knows the value of a dupe, the use of a letter, and the moment to disappear. He reappears in London with a speech about the town as a masquerade and a plan for selling pebbles as brilliants, and he ends in irons at Luxemburg, chained among men condemned to labour on the fortifications. He is the only character in the book who understands Fathom completely, and the only one who beats him.
- Elenor: The curate’s daughter, travelling to London to be a milliner’s apprentice, robbed of her purse by the man she takes for a count and seduced while she is grateful to him. She is discarded, loses her reason and is carried to Bethlem; the novel meets her again at the end as Fathom’s wife, keeping him alive in a hovel. Her fate is the plainest statement of what the hero’s charm costs, and her loyalty in the last chapter is more disturbing than any of his crimes.
Core Literary Themes
- The rogue at the centre: Smollett’s dedication admits the risk and turns it into a programme: the hero is chosen ‘from the purlieus of treachery and fraud’ so that his fate may serve as a beacon. The narrator then calls him ‘our hero’ and ‘our adventurer’ with a straight face, and the irony does the work a sermon would do. What keeps the book readable is the exactness of the frauds — the borrowed letter, the planted purse, the story told to a justice of the peace. We are watching a trade being practised, and the technique is the interest.
- Fraud as a trade: Fathom rarely works alone for long. A Tyrolese gamester teaches him the value of a partner, Ratchcali supplies the capital and the philosophy, and a lawyer takes a share of the proceeds. The novel is unusually interested in the division of labour among thieves, in the way a respectable front is hired, furnished and advertised, and in the moment when partners fall out. Its central image is Ratchcali’s London as a masquerade, where a man may wear a thousand disguises and every profession is a costume. The comedy is that the disguise so often fits.
- Virtue as a foil: The dedication promises a virtuous character ‘raised up in opposition to the adventurer’, and Renaldo is that character, with Monimia and Madam Clement beside him. The contrast is not subtle and is not meant to be: the one man gives, the other takes, and the plot arranges for the taker to be dependent on the giver. The sentimental scenes have often been thought the weakest part of the book, but they are structurally necessary, because they show what the fraud costs. Without Monimia’s constancy the hero’s cleverness would be merely a spectacle.
- Providence and poetic justice: The novel punishes its villain by coincidence as much as by law. A forged letter is exposed by a stranger, a partner absconds at the right moment, a duel is decided by an inch, and the dead return. The characters call this Providence, and the narrator half agrees; Serafina suggests that Heaven made Fathom ‘the involuntary instrument’ of the testing of her virtue. The machinery is clumsy in places and effective in others, and it gives the book the shape of a moral fable without quite convincing us that the world works that way.
- The Gothic before the Gothic: Eleven years before Walpole’s castle, Smollett had already found the furniture of the Gothic: a corpse warm in the straw, a locked loft, barred windows, a midnight church, an organ that plays itself, a veiled figure in white. The introduction printed with this text calls these chapters ‘melodramatic rather than romantic’, and notes that they come ‘over ten years before Walpole’s Castle of Otranto’. What Smollett lacks is Walpole’s willingness to let the supernatural stand; his ghosts are always explained. What he has is the pacing of fear, and it is surprisingly modern.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom?
Because the plotting is tighter than Smollett’s reputation suggests. The two parts are built as a rise and a fall, and the second half pays off details planted in the first: a ring, a chain, a letter, a girl left behind in a coach. It is also the Smollett novel with the strongest Gothic streak, and the scenes in the loft and the church are as good as anything written before Walpole. Read it once for the swindles and a second time for the machinery.
The files are built for reading rather than for archiving. There is a working table of contents, chapter breaks that survive a change of font, no page images and no scanning errors, and the chapter titles are kept as Smollett wrote them. The same text opens on a phone, a Kindle, a Kobo or an old e-ink reader, with nothing locked: no account, no sample chapter, no email address, no conversion step. The source is Project Gutenberg #6761, and the spelling is the transcription’s.
Read it beside this page rather than instead of it. The summary, the character notes and the context above are meant to be useful before and after the novel, and the chapter groups keep the last recognitions, so a first-time reader may prefer to save the final two for afterwards. If you already know how it ends, the closing scenes are worth a second look, because Smollett has planted the evidence for them in the first volume and trusts the reader to have forgotten it.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #6761, the source of this edition, with both parts, all sixty-seven chapter titles and the dedication as printed.
- Complete text in two parts No abridgement, no modernised spelling and no silent rewriting; the novel from the Cardinal de Retz to the last chapter, with the dedication, the prison chapters and the final recognitions intact.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB One download per format, so the book opens on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and every other reader without conversion, with a table of contents that works on all of them, including older devices.
- Free and DRM-free Public domain in the United States, with no account, no sample chapter and no lock on the file; download it once and it is yours to keep, to move between devices and to reread.
- The History of Tom Jones — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Monk — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Castle of Otranto — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
Sixty-seven chapters in two parts — chapters 1 to 38, then a second part that runs to 67 — each with a descriptive title of the kind eighteenth-century novels liked. These twelve summaries follow the book in order, from the Cardinal de Retz to the last page.
- Chapters 1–6 — A child of the baggage train; the Melvil household; a dunce at Latin: The book opens with the Cardinal de Retz on the difficulty of writing history, and the narrator’s admission that the hero was too careless to write his own life. Ferdinand is born in a waggon in the Low Countries to an English sutler five times widowed in one campaign; at Belgrade she is shot while plundering, and the orphan is taken up by Count Melvil, whose life she had saved, and brought up in Presburg beside the Count’s son Renaldo. He is a dunce at Latin, quick at cards and a favourite with the servants.
- Chapters 7–11 — A lady’s maid enlisted; stolen earrings; Vienna and a Tyrolese gamester: Fathom seduces Teresa, his young mistress’s maid, and binds her with private vows; together they try to debauch Mademoiselle de Melvil, fail, and instead plant a purse to ruin a chambermaid. Diamond earrings vanish, the Count suspects his son, and Renaldo is packed off to Vienna with Fathom as companion. There Fathom falls in with a Tyrolese gamester who strips Renaldo at dice; Fathom writes a challenge, the gamester returns the money, and both men are admitted to the young Count’s confidence.
- Chapters 12–15 — A jeweller’s wife and daughter; the chimney; a gold chain: Lodged in a rich jeweller’s house in Vienna, Fathom courts the daughter Wilhelmina and her stepmother at once, playing each against the other. Roused at midnight he hides up a chimney and comes down black with soot, and another night he is shut in a wardrobe while the drunken jeweller searches the house. From the daughter he takes a gold chain pledged by a knight of Malta, and from the stepmother two hundred florins, each payment dressed up as a favour refused with regret.
- Chapters 16–19 — A watchman on the stair; the siege of Philipsburg; a plundered portmanteau: The chain is wanted for a family feast, Wilhelmina shams a robbery, and suspicion falls on her stepmother; a watchman is posted and Fathom is caught on the stairs, talking his way out with a story about a ring left to be altered. War calls Renaldo away and Fathom follows him as a volunteer, shamming paralysis to avoid duty and sitting out the siege of Philipsburg. Then he robs his patron’s bureau, accuses the runaway valet and deserts to the French.
- Chapters 20–23 — Rusty nails in the saddle-bags; a corpse in the straw; Paris: The Tyrolese has ripped Fathom’s bags open and filled them with rusty nails. Benighted in the forest between Bar-le-duc and Chalons, he shelters in a lone cottage and is locked in a loft where a murdered man lies warm in the straw; at midnight two assassins stab the body he has laid in the bed, and he takes the dead man’s purse and ring and forces the old woman to guide him out. In Paris he passes as a count and makes his first conquests at the gaming table.
- Chapters 24–27 — Sir Stentor’s dice; the opera fiddler; Don Diego’s jewels: Sir Stentor Stile arrives in jockey dress on a wager and empties Fathom at hazard; the Count retires to a garret, plays one-eyed fiddle in the opera band for ten months, and waits. His melancholy fellow lodger tells a Castilian story of a wife and daughter poisoned in Seville, and gives him jewels to sell. Fathom weeps over them, takes a thousand crowns’ worth, and is gone by dawn, leaving the old man and a landlord’s daughter behind.
- Chapters 28–33 — The London coach; a false count; diamonds and Cremona violins: On the road to London Fathom is taken for the Young Pretender and hauled before a justice, where his forged letters save him. He ruins the curate’s daughter Elenor, then meets the Tyrolese again and sets up as a man of fashion: a ring sold as a brilliant, fiddles sold as Cremonas, antiques made to order. A Swiss chevalier questions his birth in a coffee house, and a duel in Hyde Park settles the matter in his favour.
- Chapters 34–38 — Celinda and the harp; Bristol; the biter bit: In the country he frightens a girl of fifteen with groans and a wind-played harp, seduces her, and leaves her drinking cordials. At Bristol he prescribes, disputes with the resident physician and grows rich on presents. Mrs Trapwell and her husband set a trap, the trial for criminal conversation costs him fifteen hundred pounds, and Ratchcali, entrusted with his affairs, vanishes with the money. Part one ends in a debtors’ prison with fifty pounds in his pocket.
- Chapters 39–43 — King Theodore’s jail; a duel of smoke; Renaldo in prison: The prison has its own court: a Corsican king without a kingdom, a tiny captain who quotes poetry, an Irish major, a Hebrew-mad projector and a French chevalier. Fathom mediates two quarrels, one settled by a cloud of assafoetida. Then Renaldo de Melvil walks in, looking for a cousin who never existed, and finds the friend of his childhood; he discharges Fathom’s debt with two hundred pounds, tells him his father is dead and his mother married to Count Trebasi, and speaks of Monimia.
- Chapters 44–49 — Usurers; a plot against Monimia; the sword and the widow: Renaldo’s money goes in loans and lawyers while Fathom poisons his friend’s mind and works on Monimia. Told that Renaldo has abandoned her, she refuses Fathom’s offer of marriage and, when he seizes her, takes his own sword to hold him off. She finds shelter with Madam Clement, falls into a fever, and is reported dead; Fathom watches the hearse go by. He then turns physician, and Tunbridge takes him up.
- Chapters 50–56 — Doctor Fathom at Tunbridge; a wife and a bigamy charge: As a physician Fathom routs a rival, wins the favour of an heiress’s mother, loses her, and sets up near Charing Cross with an apothecary’s help. A patient dies, his chariot overturns, and he falls back on a soap-boiler’s niece and then on a widow married at the Fleet, who has less money than he thought and a brother-in-law with a lawyer. The marriage ends in a box on the ear, a bigamy indictment and the King’s Bench.
- Chapters 57–67 — Trebasi’s castle; the midnight grave; the death of Fathom: Renaldo reaches Presburg, finds his mother shut in the west tower, and kills Trebasi in a duel at the gate; the dying man restores the estate. Ratchcali is met in irons at Luxemburg, Don Diego is rescued from bandits, and the two men keep a midnight vigil at Monimia’s grave, where an apparition in white turns out to be the living girl. She proves to be Serafina, Don Diego’s daughter; Renaldo marries her, and Fathom is found dying in a hovel and forgiven.
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Part of: Classic fiction · Adventure & sea stories
