The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle

Tobias Smollett's 1751 masterpiece is a howling compendium of 18th-century folly, following the amoral Peregrine Pickle from callow youth to dubious maturity through a cascade of schemes, seductions, and spectacular embarrassments. Born to a merchant family ruined by his father's obtuseness, young Peregrine embarks on a career of calculated self-advancement that takes him through the dens of London society, the chambers of vain aristocrats, and the eccentric household of Commodore Trunnion, a retired naval monster whose profanity and peculiarities make him one of the great comic creations in English prose. This is the picaresque novel at its most deliberately outrageous: a novel that refuses to let its readers forget that the great game of society is rigged, and that everyone is cheating. The revised 1758 edition also includes the infamous "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality," a sardonic autobiographical novel-within-the-novel that pushes even further into dangerous territory. Smollett writes with the fury of a man who has seen too much human pretense and refuses to look away.