The History of Jack Connor

The History of Jack Connor (1752) is the only (and once very popular) novel of the Irish writer of Huguenot descent, William Chaigneau (1709-1781). An example of sentimental picaresque fiction in the manner of Alain-Rene Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715-1747) and Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), the work also reveals Chaigneau’s admiration for Henry Fielding’s then-controversial Tom Jones (1749). The entertaining wanderings of Jack Connor take him from his birth and childhood in an Ireland described in unusual detail - through London, Paris, Flanders, and Spain - before returning him to the Co. Limerick of his birth. Describing the novel as a ‘truly moral tale, ’ the London Monthly Review (1747) acknowledged the justice of the author’s ‘smart reprisals upon the English, for their national and vulgar prejudice against their brethren of Ireland.’ (Series: Early Irish Fiction, c.1680-1820)