The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom

Eighteenth-Century Illustrations of the Novels of Tobias Smollett

“…This in itself is not entirely unexpected, since the novel purports to present a portrait of a wicked man in order to warn the naïve and deter the vicious. 19 Yet strangely enough, the six illustrations do not present Fathom as a terrifying and menacing villain; they catalog the failures of vice rather than its successes. The first image is of Fathom's mother being shot while trying to kill and plunder a wounded officer on the battlefield.…”

The Secularization of Poetic Justice in the Long Eighteenth Century

“…Novelists, Tobias Smollett similarly realized, can use "the disgrace and discomfiture of vice" to cause "a deep impression of terror upon the minds of those who were not confirmed in the pursuit of morality and virtue," "enabl[ing] the right scale to preponderate" in moments of indecision. 60 What makes this method so effective, Smollett implies, is that the association between vice and disgrace is unreflective. Given enough reiteration, readers will see it regardless of their will.…”

Tobias Smollett and the work of writing

“…Given the challenges presented by Smollett's novels, it is perhaps no surprise that much critical attention has been directed towards finding coherence in them. A useful starting point, in this regard, is Smollett's novel The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (). This contains Smollett's only known piece of theorizing on the novel: “A Novel,” he writes, “is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groupes, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every figure is subservient” (p. 4).…”