A SECOND BITE AT THE CHERRY [WYNNE, John Huddlestone.]

The Child of Chance; or, the Adventures of Harry Hazard.

First edition of a very rare picaresque novel in the manner of Tom Jones. Though largely London-based, there are interludes in India (where Wynne had served two years) and the West Indies. Many of the tropes of Wynne’s earlier novel The Man of Honour are present – orphans, female duplicity, highwaymen, gambling, debtor’s prison, adultery; while both novels have main characters named Harry who are raised in Somerset and go to Oxford, and ‘Sophia Carey’ reappears here as an object of brief romantic interest. Although The Child of Chance was published anonymously, contemporary reviews and later Hookham advertisements named Wynne as author. The Critical and Monthly Reviews thought it ‘a pleasing little novel’ displaying ‘a fertile imagination’, suggesting it reworked the older material more effectively.