SOURCE: "Introduction," in The History and Adventures of an Atom by Tobias Smollet, edited by 0. M. Brack, Jr., The University of Georgia Press, 1989, pp. xxv-lxxi.

In the following excerpt, Day examines the sources, politics, influences, and attribution of an obscure and little-studies novel by Smollett: The History and Adventures of an Atom. The editors have included only those Abbreviations and Footnotes that pertain to the excerpted portion of the introduction.

It is safe to say that no lengthy work by a major British author (if we except their juvenilia) is so little known, or has been so little studied, as Tobias Smollett's History and Adventures of an Atom (1769). Only a handful of living persons have read it through; and the scholarship devoted to it, aside from brief mention in books or essays and a few short notes in learned journals, consists of three articles, a single chapter or...