[This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
I find, Gentlemen, when you read with me in private, that nine out of ten of you dislike the 18th century and all its literary works. As for the Women students, they one and all abominate it.
— Arthur Quiller-Couch, “Of Selection” (1918)
All eighteenth-century novels are weird in one way or another, if only because the novelists of the time didn’t yet know a standard by which to make them not-weird. Robinson Crusoe (1719) famously has no chapter breaks. Tristram Shandy (1767) famously contains a blank page, with instructions for readers to “call for pen and ink” and hack out a portrait of one of the characters on their own. The Man of Feeling (1771) is hardly a novel at all: An anonymous “editor” explains how a fat curate of his acquaintance had used torn pages from a small memorandum book as wadding paper while hunting; the few surviving pages of that memorandum, representing the scattered observations of an eccentric parishioner, make up the slim novel The Man of Feeling. It’s pretty weird.
But one eighteenth-century novel is weirder than the rest. It is, in fact, by my estimation, weirder than any book written before Modernists of the twentieth-century started pushing the (riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay) weird envelope. That champion is Tobias Smollett’s 1769 The History and Adventures of an Atom, a book of exquisite beauty and mind-numbing tedium, of obscurity and libel, featuring some top-notch humorous set-pieces and also really a lot of gratuitous filth.
In the course of this review I’d like to step back and see how novels in general had reached a point at which Atom became possible; quickly touch upon Smollett’s career to find why he found Atom necessary; and only then delve into what makes Atom so weird. If you have no interest in the history of the novel, or of one random Scotsman, but you do want to learn about what it was like inside a medieval Japanese politician’s butthole, skip to part 3. That’s where the Atom resides.
Proof that the novel is a minor art form: The Romans were better at it than the Greeks.
— Francis Viets, Thoughts Timely and Un (1972).
Don Quixote (1605–1615) is often called (e.g.g. here, here, and here) the first modern novel…which is weird because of course Don Quixote is about a man who is obsessed with reading fiction. DQ is, in fact, a parody or fusion of two kinds of fiction, the romance and the picaresque. A romance is (broadly speaking) a book about a knight wandering around fighting dragons etc. and having martial adventures1. A picaresque (broadly speaking) is about a lowlife wandering around having comical misadventures; Huckleberry Finn (1884) would be a notable American example. The main joke of Don Quixote is that the Don thinks he’s in one kind of book and he’s actually in the other.
So how can Don Quixote be the first modern novel when both picaresques and romances by necessity must predate it? Do they not count as novels?
A lot of weight is borne by the word modern. In the first place, the novel (as a concept) is old enough that isolating the first novel qua novel is literally impossible. Doubtless the first novel ever written has not survived. Prose fiction is as old as the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, although it was generally fairly short at the time. The Greek examples, from around two thousand years ago, are longer…but are they long enough? Various writing guides will give a minimum word count for a novel (40k or 50k words), but how do those numbers translate into ancient Greek?
The real problem is that, word count aside, no one can authoritatively define the rubric that covers short stories, novellas, and novels—all of what we might call fiction. You know it when you see it, as Potter Stewart would say. The basic elements—that it must be a prose narrative that is not true—are clear enough, but Parnassus is littered with examples of such narratives that don’t feel particularly like our idea of fiction—that do not seem, for lack of a better word, novelistic. I think the average reader, if handed a pre-DQ picaresque (such as Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)) or a pre-DQ romance (such as Amadis the Gaul (1508)), would have a hard time calling each a novel. They are clearly prose narratives, and the events in them are presumably false (Amadis esp. o.c.; sorcerers etc.)—but somehow that’s not enough.
(The most famous prose romance in English—Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) starts off sounding like a (fictional) history and ends almost novelistically. Reading it through is like reading Return of the King backwards, starting with the appendix.)
Some of the things (I’ll call them points of alienation) that make sixteenth-century protonovels strange to modern eyes survive two hundred years or so past Don Quixote’s publication. They survive, in fact, up to and into (remember Smollett?) the writings of Tobias Smollett. They’re part of what makes eighteenth-century novels weird. Maybe you can come up a dozen points of alienation, but I’ll quickly name three:
1 Misemphasis
Early narratives—protonovel or novel—tend to place emphasis on the wrong (or “wrong”) things, or at least in the wrong proportions. In Thomas Nashe’s picaresque The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), for example, we find [CW for everything, because Nashe] the following four entirely conventional and novelistic incidents:
1 A murderer named Esdras rapes Heraclide (“a noble & chaste matrone”).
2 Heraclide, in shame, commits suicide.
3 Jack Wilton (the narrator and eponymous unfortunate traveler) is falsely accused of rape and murder. He is tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He is marching up to the gibbet to be hanged, when…
4 …the testimony of a passing Englishman frees him.
Nothing unusual here. But how long does it take the book to narrate these four incidents?
1a Heraclide begs Esdras for mercy: 4 ½ pages
1b The rape: The first half of a sentence
2a Heraclide ponders suicide: 2 ½ pages
2b The suicide: Two parenthetical words (“(throughlie stabd)”)
3 Jack Wilton accused, tried, sentenced, brought to the gibbet: ½ page
4a The Englishman’s testimony, which saves Jack’s neck: 1 page
4b The Englishman then spontaneously monologues on the folly of travel because all countries, save England, are trash: 6 pages
Then the Englishman slips away, never to appear again, leaving Jack Wilton a free man. One page later, Jack has fallen into the clutches of Jews (!) who appear to be planning to dissect him alive for the elucidation of medical students. It goes on like this. It’s all a recognizable picaresque except the pacing, which seems so strange and arbitrary that the result rarely reads like a novel.
2 Discontinuity
Something romances and picaresques have in common is that they are made up of a character doing one damn thing after another. Lazarillo de Tormes is going to bounce from one crime to the next and Amadis is going to ride from one chivalrous adventure to the next without much regard for sequence. The incidents, like the lines of a ghazal, are pearls on a string. Of course, such a description applies equally well to Don Quixote—or to Huckleberry Finn again—or to any number of novels (Moll Flanders, Candide, Jack Kerouac). It’s also often a good description of, you know, real life. Look at the way someone from the old pre-DQ days describes his life; look at (selected mostly at random, based on what shelves I can reach from the couch) the writings of fourteenth-century Florentine merchant Buonaccorso Pitti.
Now, partway through his memoir, Pitti begins a short paragraph with the sentence: “On reaching Florence I resolved to get married,” and the paragraph thereafter moves rapidly into his betrothal to an (unnamed here) woman and finally ends that he “married her on 12 November of the same year” (viz. 1391).—This is followed by a paragraph on how Pitti was struck by lightning “one day before my marriage” (he recovers quickly).—After that comes a paragraph about how “before my marriage” some ships of English wool he’d purchased came to various Italian ports. I’m not criticizing either the writing or the life of Buonaccorso Pitti; I’m just saying that this is a natural way to live and to view one’s life. It’s not the only way, of course; certainly Augustine’s autobiography features a conventional redemption plot. But a modern novelist given this material would inevitably try to tie if not the wool than at least the lightning strike into the wedding. It’s a great complication! But it is also the most canonically random of events. This randomness would become anathema to the novelist.
But not yet.
3 Digression
Man did old novels have a lot of digressions. Readers of Frankenstein (1818) will remember the chapters spent by the monster eavesdropping on a family with a melodramatic and baroque history—but 1818 is a little late for a digression of this length, which is much more common in the centuries before2.
In Don Quixote, a character one night picks up a book in an inn—and Cervantes pauses to print the entirety of the book (forty-one pages, in my edition of DQ). In Apuleius’ Golden Ass (ca. 170?)—not the earliest novel, as the earliest novel is, you will recall, unrecoverable from the quicksands of time, but the earliest complete surviving novel that is actually good (as opposed to fun)—the middle fifth or so is devoted to the story (narrated by an old woman in a den of thieves) of Cupid and Psyche…essentially the Beauty and the Beast story, only with Roman gods.
These digressions can involve extreme tonal shifts. In Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743), a satirical novel about London thieves, one character disappears from the story for a span. When she returns, she explains that she had been shipwrecked on the coast of Africa and only after many hardships (mostly involving sailors, natives, and hermits propositioning her) was she able to make it back to England. This narrative of adventure on another continent takes up four nonconsecutive chapters, and after that we’re back to a comical story of the London underworld.
Smollett committed one of the most audacious or flagrant digressions in English letters in his second novel, Peregrine Pickle (1751). During one of his many misadventures, our hero Peregrine encounters an unnamed “lady of quality” who, in the manner of characters from an eighteenth-century novel, proceeds to tell him her story. Said story makes up chapter LXXXI of Pickle. Nothing unusual here…
…except the story is ostensibly true, the lady a real anonymous lady (history has identified her as Francis Vane), and if Vane did not pen her own narrative, neither did Smollett. Vane or her ghostwriter gets a chapter in Pickle, and this was, in fact, a selling point of the book (the account is suitably scandalous, the secret identity of the “lady of quality” an exciting mystery). Pickle was advertised as containing “A Memoir of a Lady of Quality” like a bonus feature. Even people who found Pickle too coarse or irreverent praised the interpolated memoir, which was, one contemporary magazine3 raved, “Most elegantly wrote4, and greatly outshines the rest of the work.” Certainly the memoir is unlike anything else in this picaresque novel about an impish prankster who gets 1. his comeuppance and 2. the girl.
In my edition of Peregrine Pickle, chapter LXXXI takes up a full 108 pages.
And so…
I guess Don Quixote makes a convenient Schelling point for the imprimatur of first modern novel…in part because it is self-aware and self-reflexive in a way earlier novels or protonovels are not, in part because all later novelists, at least into the nineteenth century, would see it as a forebear. But DQ does not represent a real rupture with the books that came before it. In fact there is no real rupture. There’s only a superabundance or lack of the three abovelisted points of alienation.
Most fiction of the seventeenth century, and arguably all earlier fiction, has these points in sufficient quantities that the books end up feeling un-novelistic. In English: Euphues (1571) or The Blazing World (1666) (and all between) I would call protonovels.
But as time progresses, the ratio of non-novelistic elements to novelistic elements start to tip in favor of the novel. The emphasis falls more naturally; digressions gradually lighten; plot comes to the fore. Perhaps by Oroonoko (1688), and certainly by Robinson Crusoe (1719), we reach, for the English novel, a tipping point. Eighteenth century novels are weird., but they are least novels.
(O.c., twentieth-century and later novelists have felt free to toggle the ratios back. If we held more recent novels to the standards of old ones, a good half of Italo Calvino’s canon would be kicked out of the fiction section of the bookstore.)
I think the world would be better off if I could tell a strange woman, met at a church social, that I have diarrhoea.
— H.L. Mencken, letter to Theodore Dreiser (1918).
Tobias Smollett trained as and intermittently tried to make a living as a doctor. Several of his characters are doctors or at least con artists masquerading as doctors, and his books never hesitate to break into complicated medical jargon when the opportunity presents itself. But one foot was always in the world of letters, and despite some ups and downs, this was the world that would bring him what is conventionally called immortality.
He worked for it! Smollett wrote incessantly: plays, pamphlets, translations of Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Voltaire’s “Micromegas,” and (his great success, at least from a pecuniary standpoint) the multivolume Complete [!] History of England—in addition to his editorial work—but of course we are here to talk about his novels. The History and Adventures of an Atom was his fifth, of six…
The Adventures of Roderick Random(1748)The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle(1751)The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom(1753)The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves(1761)The History and Adventures of an Atom(1769)—that’s what we’re talking about!The Expedition of Humphry Clinker(1771)
…and by far his most obscure as well as being his strangest.
Smollett’s early novels are almost paradigmatically picaresque. His heroes bounce from one scrape to another in a manner that often appears improvised. It is almost impossible to convey the sheer amount of incident that he crammed into these novels. Have a look at this chapter heading, which summarizes the contents of the first chapter of the second volume of Roderick Random. (For context: Roderick (the narrator) is sailing from Jamaica as a surgeon’s mate; Crampley is first mate.) The chapter header:
“
We depart for Europe—a misunderstanding arises between the Captain and the Surgeon, through the scandalous aspersions of Crampley—the Captain dies—Crampley tyrannises over the surgeon, who falls a Victim for his Cruelty—I am also ill-used—the Ship strikes—the behaviour of Crampley and the Seamen on that occasion—I get on shore, challenge the Captain to single combat—am treacherously knocked down, wounded, and robbed”
By my count, that’s two deaths (the captain and the surgeon), a shipwreck, a general mutiny, a fight on a lifeboat (barely alluded to i…
