Tobias Smollett wrote this novel with the rough energy of a man who'd been pressed into naval service and salt-burned into adulthood. Roderick Random enters the world unwanted: the illegitimate son of a Scottish gentleman and a serving woman, disowned by grandfather's money before he draws breath. His mother dies in childbirth; his father cracks under the grief. What follows is a picaresque gauntlet of abusive tutors, cruel relatives, and the particular humiliations reserved for the poor and illegitimate in 1740s Britain. But Roderick possesses the survival instinct of his genre: he lies, he connives, he finds allies among fellow outcasts, and eventually he escapes to sea where Smollett's own experience as a surgeon's mate at Cartagena de Indias lends the later chapters a bracing, brutal authenticity. The novel moves through debtors' prisons, military camps, and the stratified hell of shipboard hierarchy, each episode a vehicle for Smollett's savage satire of British class, commerce, and empire. This is picaresque fiction stripped of romance: earthier than Cervantes, darker than Lesage, and possessed of a vitality that influenced everything Fielding would attempt.
