This is Smollett's method throughout, even in that singular _pastiche_ of _Don Quixote_ itself, _Sir Launcelot Greaves_, which certainly was not his happiest conception, but which has had rather hard measure.
As used by him it has singular merits, and communicates to at least three of his five books (_The Adventures of an Atom_ is deliberately excluded as not really a novel at all) a certain "liveliness" which, though it is not the life_like_ness of Fielding, is a great attraction.
He showed it first in _Roderick Random_ (1748), which appeared a little before _Tom Jones_, and was actually taken by some as the work of the same author.

It would be not much more just to take Roderick as Smollett's deliberate presentment of himself than to apply the same construction to Marryat's not very dissimilar, but more unlucky, _coup d'essai_ of _Frank Mildmay_.

But it is certain that there was something, though exactly how much has never been determined, of the author's family history in the earliest part, a great deal of his experiences on board ship in the middle, and probably not a little, though less, of his fortunes in Bath and London towards the end.

As a single source of interest and popularity, no doubt, the principal place must be given to the naval part of the book.

Important as the English navy had been, for nearly two centuries if not for much longer, it had never played any great part in literature, though it had furnished some caricatured and rather conventional sketches.