The Best of Defoe’S Review: An Anthology 9780231886796

Table of contents :
Preface
Introduction
Contents
Portrait of the True-born Englishman
The Press: License and Liberty
Economics and Trade: Britain’s Mystery and Bulwark
Politics: Britain’s Glory and Shame
Curiosa: Britain’s Manners, Morals, and Wonders
Index

Citation preview

T h e Best of Defoe's Review

T H E B E S T OF

Defoe's REVIEW A N

A N T H O L O G Y

Compiled and Edited by WILLIAM

L.

PAYNE

New York COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 1

95I

COPYRIGHT 1951 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK Published in Great Britain, Canada, and India by Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press London, Toronto, and Bombay

M A N U F A C T U R E D IN T H E

U N I T E D STATES OF

AMERICA

DEDICATED E.

C.

P.

TO

PREFACE

N

I think that not enough of the Review has been included here—that other interesting and pertinent essays should have been included} but I console myself with the thought that the Review "fan" can satiate his appetite with the fifteen hundred essays which comprise the complete Review as published in twenty-two volumes by the Facsimile Text Society in 1938. While making my Index to Defoe's Review I found myself wishing that a representative selection were available to the general reader so that those who today read its contemporary, the Spectator, might get a glimpse of another England. Accordingly, I have tried to select essays which show the variety and range of the journal. Essays upon the social scene are included not as rivaling those in the Spectator, which Defoe "venerates," but to reveal the man Defoe. For the same reason I have included a number of autobiographical essays. If it appears that the bulk of the essays concern themselves with impending legislation, projected treaties, and national credit, we can only conclude that the Englishman of 1711 is the true-born ancestor of the Englishman of 1951. ATURALLY,

I have nowhere changed Defoe's wording, and where additions have been necessary the word or letter has been put in square brackets. I have ventured to modernize the punctuation, spelling, and paragraphing. However, Defoe's sentences sometimes defy one who would diagram them. Since I would not meddle with his words, I was constrained to break up some long, hard-to-understand sentences into shorter ones. But punctuation alone could not of itself always correct the syntax, make clean-cut English sentences. I can only say that in my punctuation I have been scrupulously careful not to alter Defoe's meaning as I have understood it. As originally published, the separate Reviews had no subject titles. I have given each essay a title which tries to point up its central thought or spirit. I have added notes only where I thought them necessary to an adequate understanding of the matter in hand} volumes have been written on the W a r of the Spanish Succession, and Defoe himself wrote

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PREFACE

a large book on the history of the union of Scotland and England. Where I have not been able to cite chapter and verse I trust my friends will believe I made an honest search, and that my correctors (first having taken an honest lick at my slothfulness) will generously share with me the fruits of their own industry. Miriam Bergamini of the Columbia University Press has been a vigilant and faithful editor. W. L . P. New York May 7, 1951

INTRODUCTION

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who knows the eighteenth-century periodical only through the Tatler and the Spectator may well feel some bewilderment as he leafs through the pages of these selections from Defoe's Review. H e will find no casual and charming comment upon the passing scene of court and coffee-house, of lovely (if slightly ludicrous) ladies, no periwigged dandies at the opera or theatre, no sense of a world at leisure with infinite time for brilliant chatter. H e will seek in vain for amusing reflections upon beaux's heads and coquettes' hearts or for quiet ponderings on the tombs in Westminster Abbey. But it is possible that if he goes on to read the essays, he will find something that strikes him as more "modern" than the charmingly artificial world of M r . Spectator. In the essays of M r . Review he will discover another side of the eighteenth century, will learn how earlier men faced political, social, and economic problems which we sometimes think peculiar to our own times. It is possible too that he will turn from these pages to reread Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders with new eyes and new understanding. In an age famous for its periodicals (more than three hundred were published during the first sixteen years of the eighteenth century) Defoe's Review was remarkable for its longevity. T h e Spectator lived only into its second year, as did the Tatler and the Guardian. The Rehearsal maintained its hold on life for four years, the Observator only a little longer. But the Review held its course for nine years, from February 19, 1704, until June 11, 1713. On occasion it changed its format, its days of publication, its long-title, but whatever it was officially called, it remained what it had been from the beginning, the Review. Various explanations have been offered for its unusually long life, the most probable of which is that the periodical was subsidized by an influential member of the government, well aware of the importance of periodicals in what we now call "propaganda." Defoe himself has left us only one cryptic statement about the origin of the magazine: he said that it "had its birth in tenebrisFor many years modern scholars H E READER

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INTRODUCTION

believed that its origin was to be found in the dark period when Defoe was in prison as a result of his inflammatory pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. While that theory has been disproved, authorities seem in general agreement that there was some connection between Defoe's imprisonment and the genesis of the Review. Defoe's release from prison seems to have been a result of intercession on the part of Robert Harley, Secretary of State, to whom Defoe wrote that he stood "ready to dedicate my life and all my possible powers to the interest of so generous and so bountiful benefactors." We know that Defoe wrote Harley, begging him to "appoint me a convenient private allowance on which I might comfortably depend and continue to be serviceable in a private capacity." Certainly, as modern biographers have pointed out, there was a remarkable coincidence between the policies of the Review and those of Harley. Some of Defoe's contemporaries took for granted that his periodical was an organ for the government. "Review," wrote one of them, "you are a damned rascal; do you think to persuade us that you are not writing for the ministry, because you're writing upon trade?" Defoe's denials were not convincing then nor are they now, particularly when we read his veiled references at the end of the first and the beginning of the second volumes to unidentified benefactors "who have it in their power to sink it with their breath; and by withdrawing the influence which now supports it, cause it to receive its death from the same hands it had . . . life." In the closing pages of the last volume, too, he expressed his appreciation of "the few friends I have left; who from the beginning have been benefactors to the work, and without them I could not have supported the expense of it." Whether Defoe's statement that the origin of the Review lay