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The conflict between appearance and reality is a central theme in Tobias Smollett’s first novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748). In the course of his travels and adventures, Roderick encounters a number of people who practise deceit upon him. His slow progress consists in learning gradually how better to see beyond the veil of superficial appearances. Beyond such a somewhat conventional didactic function, the issue of appearances and reality reveals a deep epistemological crisis, since, with Locke, visual perception had acquired great importance in the acquisition of knowledge, while appearances also turned out to be deceitful. Smollett’s universe lacks stability. The dialectics of appearance and reality is thus at the heart of Smollett’s literary endeavour and is used to articulate an implicit theory of fiction.