The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom

A confidence man crosses eighteenth-century Europe fleecing the gullible, and the book follows him without ever pretending he is likeable. Smollett was a ship's surgeon before he was a novelist and wrote with the same absence of squeamishness; the preface here contains one of the earliest definitions of the novel in English. Scott and Dickens both learned from it. Fifty-five plates of ruins, landscapes and portraits from 1725 to 1805, among them Gainsborough and Guardi, extend the novel's own taste for a Europe of crumbling grandeur and plausible faces.