SOURCE: "Smollett's Art: The Novel As 'Picture,"' in The First English Novelists: Essays in Understanding, edited by J. M. Armistead, The University of Tennessee Press, 1985, pp. 143-58.

In the following excerpt, Beasley compares the vivid, episodic, and grotesque world of Roderick Random with Hogarth's serial engravings, and observes that Smollett' s narratives possess great visual power and impact.

"A Novel," remarked Tobias Smollett in the mock-dedication (to himself) introducing The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), is "a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groupes, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan."¹ These comments represent, in part, the only extended statement Smollett ever made concerning a theory of fiction, and they have usually been dismissed by critics as conventional and trite or as irrelevant to any meaningful understanding of his work. But actually they are quite crucial, for...