Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (Volume I)

Tobias Smollett's savage, sprawling masterpiece follows the misadventures of Peregrine Pickle, a young man of considerable vanity and no discernible moral compass, as he storms through 18th-century Europe leaving chaos in his wake. Born with an overweening sense of his own greatness, Peregrine embarks on a career as a gentleman of fortune, trading on his charm, his wit, and his utter conviction that the world exists to serve him. From the stews of London to the courts of France, he collects lovers, enemies, and debts with equal abandon, until fate delivers him the humiliating falls that his arrogance has long invited. Smollett wrote this novel in two distinct editions, the original 1751 version and a significantly revised 1758 text, and both crackle with the same furious energy: a contempt for hypocrisy, a love of bodily humor, and an acid eye for the absurdities of social climbing. This is picaresque fiction at its most unapologetic, a novel that refuses to let its readers off easy. It endures because its targets remain eternal: the pretensions of the powerful, the delusions of the young, and the savage comedy of society itself.