Tobias Smollett (Author) TOBIAS SMOLLETT (1721–1771) was a novelist, playwright, journalist, historian, travel writer, critic, translator, editor, and compiler—an eighteenth-century man of letters in the fullest sense of the phrase.Alexander Pettit (Editor) ALEXANDER PETTIT is an associate professor of English at the University of North Texas. He is also the general editor of three series: The Works of Tobias Smollett (Georgia), British Ideas and Issues, 1660-1820, and Selected Works of Eliza Haywood.George S. Rousseau (Editor) GEORGE S. ROUSSEAU is codirector of the Centre for the History of Childhood, as well as a member of the Faculty of Modern History at Oxford University. His books include The Notorious Sir John Hill: The Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Era of Celebrity.John P. Zomchick (Editor) JOHN P. ZOMCHICK is vice provost for faculty affairs and a professor of English at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere.O M Brack Jr. (Editor) O M BRACK, JR., a professor of English literature emeritus at Arizona State University, is coauthor of Samuel Johnson's Early Biographers and coeditor of The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson. He has edited volumes of the Works of Samuel Johnson published by Yale and is textual editor for the Georgia series the Works of Tobias Smollett. Brack is the curator of the 2009 Johnson tercentenary exhibition at the Huntington Library.

The genius of Peregrine Pickle and its young author is to be found neither exclusively in the interpolated tales that its contemporary audience read avidly nor in the ‘main story’ that appealed to its later readers but rather in the entire canvas upon which is painted a densely populated and vividly realized fictional world. Taken in its entirety, Smollett’s novel still holds the power to delight and instruct a modern audience by virtue of its author’s capacious vision, his force of spirit, and his ability to capture life in words and images.