A lovely set of the French novelist and playwright Alain-René Lesage's masterpiece, in a good binding with the signature of the binder William Root. This new edition has charming engravings from paintings by Robert Smirke (1752-1845), the English artist. Smirke studied at the Royal Academy and is well known for his illustrative work.

A lovely set of the French novelist and playwright Alain-René Lesage's masterpiece, in a good binding with the signature of the binder William Root. This new edition has charming engravings from paintings by Robert Smirke (1752-1845), the English artist. Smirke studied at the Royal Academy and is well known for his illustrative work.

Gil Blas, the picaresque classic, was one of the great comic novels of the eighteenth century and a landmark in the development of the modern realist novel. It follows its resourceful but morally pliable hero through a succession of adventures in Spanish society, offering a lively panorama of every class, from servants and rogues to nobles and ecclesiastics. Its episodic structure, social satire and emphasis on experience and character had a profound influence on the European novel, notably on Fielding, Smollett and later writers of picaresque fiction. The work remained extraordinarily popular throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with numerous translations and editions; this 1822 English edition belongs to a long and influential tradition of dissemination.