Published in 1753, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom is Tobias Smollett’s audacious satirical novel — one of the first in English to place a thorough-going villain at its centre. Fathom is a scheming, amoral adventurer who rises through European society by treachery and seduction, and Smollett uses him to satirise greed, hypocrisy, and the corruptions of polite society across England and the Continent.
The novel is significant in the history of Gothic fiction for its early use of atmospheric horror and also as a forerunner of the anti-hero narrative. Download this free EPUB from Better Gutenberg for the complete, unabridged eighteenth-century text.