The Adventures of Roderick Random

A Scots surgeon's mate is cheated of his inheritance, pressed aboard a man-of-war, and carried through the Cartagena expedition, the London taverns, a French regiment and a debtors' prison. Smollett had served as a naval surgeon's mate at Cartagena himself, and the shipboard chapters were the first honest account of the lower deck in English. He was twenty-seven when he wrote it. A hundred plates by Hogarth, Gainsborough and their contemporaries follow the surgeon's mate from the quarterdeck to the tavern and the gaol.