The first novel by a major English writer that is devoted to a thoroughgoing portrait of villainy,The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathomchronicles 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 Fathomis 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 Fathommay now be read, understood, and appreciated against the literary and historical background of the eighteenth-century world.