Fathoming Intelligence: The "Impartial" Novelist and the Passion for News in Tobias Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom

Abstract

tobias smollett’s Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) occupies a place in the history of the novel chiefly because of the extended definition of the genre that the author provides in his preface to the work: “A Novel is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan ... to which every individual figure is subservient. But this plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability or success, without a principle personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene by virtue of his own importance.”1 As John Barrell has astutely demonstrated, this definition is consistent with Smollett’s narrative practice in novels such as Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, where characters’ unrestrained mobility enables them to map the “differentiated, fragmented society” through which they circulate, thereby illustrating how that “society can be grasped in terms of relation, and not simply of difference.”2 However, critics have found the definition harder to apply to the novel in which it appears, partly because