First published in six volumes in 1794 and 1797, Thomas Holcroft's The Adventures of Hugh Trevor is one of the boldest and sharpest novels of the radical decade. It follows the son of a poor farmer's son and a proud clergyman's daughter, as he is buffeted between the workhouse and the drawing room: apprenticed, abandoned, brutalised, rescued and patronised in turn.

Brave, curious and hopelessly susceptible to flattery, Hugh trusts the institutions he has been taught to revere—school, Church and the dream of Oxford—and each betrays him in turn, with the satire growing steadily darker as the gap between the world's professions and its practices widens.

Holcroft drew on his own rise from stable boy and shoemaker to playwright and political radical, and wrote the novel amid the repression that followed the treason trials of 1794. Yet beneath the biting satire of establishment virtue runs a stubborn faith that human beings can improve, and that institutions may be judged by their conduct rather than their rank.

Pacy and often shocking, the novel races through the social worlds that other fiction of the period carefully ignored.

This first volume presents the opening two volumes of the original, together with the Preface, Biographical Introduction, Editorial Note and Introduction to the series.

Edited with notes and an introduction by L.A. Davenport.

Thomas Holcroft's The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794–97) is the missing link between Tom Jones and Oliver Twist—a picaresque satire of class, education, and institutional hypocrisy.

Why now: Written amid technological upheaval and collapsing trust in institutions, the novel's questions—who gets to rise, and what recognition we owe people who refuse to conform—are strikingly contemporary. It pairs naturally with growing reader interest in recovered eighteenth- and nineteenth-century voices, especially women and radicals.

Format: The first volume of a three-part edition that restores the novel's original six-volume structure in comfortable A-format paperbacks, with notes and an introduction written for the general reader. Volumes II and III follow in 2027.

Circulation/shelving notes: Trade adult fiction. Suggest reading-group interest around class, meritocracy, and institutional distrust. This volume is self-contained enough to recommend on its own merits.

Perfect for fans of Golden Hill, Hilary Mantel, and Tom Jones: a forgotten radical masterpiece that reads like Dickens with the gloves off.