One upon a time, and a very good time it was in many ways, people with a broad education in the humanities would routinely encounter novels like Roderick Random.1 All round the world, students taking courses on Brit Lit had little chance of avoiding Tobias Smollett, unless they managed to track down some alternative option that allowed them to go off piste into a subject like Old Norse. He figured among the early masters of English fiction (women didn’t get a look in, prior to Fanny Burney and Jane Austen). But today the syllabus of a literature program may well include film noir, graphic novels, rap or vampire videos—in most schools it would be easier to get specialist instruction on fans’ responses to Buffy the Vampire Slayer than on the work of, say, George Meredith. This is particularly bad luck for Smollett, who was in fact more popular among lit majors (or so it was reported) than any of the other founding fathers of the novel. But he has few liberal credentials, and he has been expelled from the canon along with some greater writers. Of all those dead white males who once arrogated eighteenth-century literature to themselves, he is now close to the deadest, since he was always the most obviously “male” in his outlook and approach to writing.

Why did he rank so highly with those coming to the period for the first time? One reason lies in the very circumstance that has ensured