Tobias Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom: The Purpose of Picaresque

Abstract

Tobias Smollett’s third novel, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), is best understood as a satire of the national self-involvement that Smollett detected in the emergent discourse of English literary sentimentalism. Like Sarah Fielding, Smollett identified a distinctive strain of sentimentalism in the mid-eighteenth-century English novel well before the sentimental novel had emerged as its own subgenre. In Fathom, he revises older Spanish picaresque conventions to confront this popular taste for sentimental fiction, which he sees as simply a modern manifestation of traditional romance delusion. To grasp the central importance of picaresque to Smollett’s project in Fathom is to see that this method of writing in its original anti-romance guise retains a more vital and purposive presence in the eighteenth-century British novel than is often recognized. And it shows how the much-maligned Fathom brings to full conceptual fruition the tantalizing hints of anti-sentimental and anti-English attitudes found in Smollett’s more widely admired first two novels.