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A Military Journal of the Wars in Germany, and the Wars in England.
From the Year 1632 to the Year 1648.
By Daniel Defoe
Edited with Introduction and Notes by Elizabeth O'Neill
1922
Daniel Defoe is, perhaps, best known to us as the author of RobinsonCrusoe, a book which has been the delight of generations of boys andgirls ever since the beginning of the eighteenth century. For it wasthen that Defoe lived and wrote, being one of the new school of prosewriters which grew up at that time and which gave England new formsof literature almost unknown to an earlier age. Defoe was a vigorouspamphleteer, writing first on the Whig side and later for the Toriesin the reigns of William III and Anne. He did much to foster thegrowth of the newspaper, a form of literature which henceforth becamepopular. He also did much towards the development of the modern novel,though he did not write novels in our sense of the word. His bookswere more simple than is the modern novel. What he really wrote werelong stories told, as is Robinson Crusoe, in the first person andwith so much detail that it is hard to believe that they are works ofimagination and not true stories. "The little art he is truly masterof, is of forging a story and imposing it upon the world as truth." Sowrote one of his contemporaries. Charles Lamb, in criticizing Defoe,notices this minuteness of detail and remarks that he is, therefore,an author suited only for "servants" (meaning that this method canappeal only to comparatively uneducated minds). Really as every boyand girl knows, a good story ought to have this quality of seemingtrue, and the fact that Defoe can so deceive us makes his work themore excellent reading.
The Memoirs of a Cavalier resembles Robinson Crusoe in so far asit is a tale told by a man of his own experiences and adventures. Ithas just the same air of truth and for a long time after its firstpublication in 1720 people were divided in opinion as to whether itwas a book of real memoirs or not. A critical examination has shownthat it is Defoe's own work and not, as he declares, the contents ofa manuscript which he found "by great accident, among other valuablepapers" belonging to one of King William's secretaries of state.Although his gifts of imagination enabled him to throw himself intothe position of the Cavalier he lapses occasionally into his owncharacteristic prose and the style is often that of the eighteenthrather than the seventeenth century, more eloquent than quaint. Again,he is not careful to hide inconsistencies between his preface and thetext. Thus, he says in his preface that he discovered the manuscriptin 1651; yet we find in the Memoirs a reference to the Restoration,which shows that it must have been written after 1660 at least. Thereis abundant proof that the book is really a work of fiction and thatthe Cavalier is an imaginary character; but, in one sense, it is atrue history, inasmuch as the author has studied the events and spiritof the time in which his scene is laid and, though he makes manymistakes of detail, he gives us a very true picture of one of the mostinteresting periods in English and European history. The Memoirsthus represent the English historical novel in its beginnings, a muchsimpler thing than it was to become in the hands of Scott and laterwriters.
The period in which the scene