SOURCE: "Smollett: Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Count Fathom," in his Number and Pattern in the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973, pp. 123-43

In the following excerpt, Brooks examines the numerological patterns of certain events and chapters in Smollett's first three satirical novels as well as the meaning behind such symmetry, observing that Smollett's use of numerological symmetry improves with each succeeding novel.

Gi; i Roderick Random =~ Si Roderick Random

Form mattered to Fielding. Even in Amelia, its iconographical implications can still be detected, if only faintly. In Smollett's first novel, published in 1748, on the other hand, the overriding impression is one of disorder and fragmentation, in subject-matter and in structure. Robert Alter has justly remarked on the way it reflects the phrenetic and neurotic quality of life in the period;¹ and it does so with a fidelity and awareness of the...