Novel Judgements

This chapter focuses on the writings of Daniel Defoe. We will start in the ‘moment’, England in the 1720s, still struggling to get the Reformation ‘done’, and now trying to settle a supposedly ‘glorious’ revolution. And no longer just a matter of England, for there was also a nascent empire to contemplate, inaugurated by an Act of Union with Scotland, sealed in 1707. Against this backdrop of political and constitutional upheaval must be set the intellectual revolution of Enlightenment, the struggle of ‘sense and sensibility’, and a print revolution which was refashioning literate England. Having revisited this remarkable ‘moment’, we will then read Defoe’s three ‘historical’ novels: Journal of a Plague Year, Captain Singleton , and Memoirs of a Cavalier . The resonances are immediate, dealing respectively with pandemics, pirates, and the perversion of history. There is a reason that Defoe is commonly acclaimed the herald of the modern novel. He could see what was coming, because he knew what had been.