A group of ten drawings, seven illustrations for The Adventures of Roderick Random, and three unpublished illustrations for The Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams: ‘Mutual defiance of Capt. Weazel and Miss Jenny Ramper’; ‘The Reading of the Will of Lieut. Rowling’s (Bowling’s) Brother’; ‘Feast after the Manner of the Ancients’; ‘Direful Consequences of Clinker’s Awkwardness’; ‘Humphrey Clinker in prison preaching to the Felons’; ‘The Marriage of Lieut Lumbago (?Lismahago) and Miss Tabitha etc’;‘Tom Jones rescues Miss Waters from the violence of Northerton (unpublished version)’; and three Unpublished drawings for ‘Joseph Andrews'

The Adventures of Roderick Random is a novel by Tobias Smollett (1721-1771), first published in 1748, and illustrated by Rowlandson in a 1793 edition. Inspired by Smollett’s experience as a naval-surgeon’s mate in the Royal Navy during the Battle of Cartagena de Indias in 1741, Smollett also acknowledged the influence of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas.
Set in the 1730s and 1740s, it tells the life story in the first person of Roderick ‘Rory’ Random, born to a Scottish gentleman and a lower-class woman and so shunned by his father’s family, and supported by his maternal uncle, Tom Bowling, a sailor. As a young man he embarks on a series of adventures and misadventures around the world, trying to attract the attention of various wealthy women along the way, so that he can live as the gentleman he believes himself to be. The novel ends with Random being happily reunited with his father in Argentina, inheriting some money and marrying Narcissa.
Henry Fielding’s The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr Abraham Adams was published in 1742 and described by the author as a ‘comic epic poem in prose’. It tells of a good-natured footman's adventures on the road home from London with his friend and mentor, the absent-minded parson Abraham Adams. Again inspired by Don Quixote, it is a comic, mock-heroic story, with bawdy humour surrounding its social purpose and erudition. While the present drawings were not those finally reproduced as engravings for the book, they offer a fascinating insight into Rowlandson’s working practice, with many drawings leading to a handful of engravings, chosen for their pointed wit and communication of the narrative.