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Memoirs of a Cavalier A Military Journal of the Wars in Germany, and the Wars in England. From the Year 1632 to the Year 1648. By: Daniel Defoe (1661?-1731) |
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or 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
INTRODUCTION.
Daniel Defoe is, perhaps, best known to us as the author of Robinson
Crusoe , a book which has been the delight of generations of boys and
girls ever since the beginning of the eighteenth century. For it was
then that Defoe lived and wrote, being one of the new school of prose
writers which grew up at that time and which gave England new forms
of literature almost unknown to an earlier age. Defoe was a vigorous
pamphleteer, writing first on the Whig side and later for the Tories
in the reigns of William III and Anne. He did much to foster the
growth of the newspaper, a form of literature which henceforth became
popular. He also did much towards the development of the modern novel,
though he did not write novels in our sense of the word. His books
were more simple than is the modern novel. What he really wrote were
long stories told, as is Robinson Crusoe , in the first person and
with so much detail that it is hard to believe that they are works of
imagination and not true stories. "The little art he is truly master
of, is of forging a story and imposing it upon the world as truth." So
wrote 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 can
appeal only to comparatively uneducated minds). Really as every boy
and girl knows, a good story ought to have this quality of seeming
true, and the fact that Defoe can so deceive us makes his work the
more excellent reading. The Memoirs of a Cavalier resembles Robinson Crusoe in so far as
it is a tale told by a man of his own experiences and adventures. It
has just the same air of truth and for a long time after its first
publication in 1720 people were divided in opinion as to whether it
was a book of real memoirs or not. A critical examination has shown
that it is Defoe's own work and not, as he declares, the contents of
a manuscript which he found "by great accident, among other valuable
papers" belonging to one of King William's secretaries of state.
Although his gifts of imagination enabled him to throw himself into
the position of the Cavalier he lapses occasionally into his own
characteristic prose and the style is often that of the eighteenth
rather than the seventeenth century, more eloquent than quaint. Again,
he is not careful to hide inconsistencies between his preface and the
text. Thus, he says in his preface that he discovered the manuscript
in 1651; yet we find in the Memoirs a reference to the Restoration,
which shows that it must have been written after 1660 at least. There
is abundant proof that the book is really a work of fiction and that
the Cavalier is an imaginary character; but, in one sense, it is a
true history, inasmuch as the author has studied the events and spirit
of the time in which his scene is laid and, though he makes many
mistakes of detail, he gives us a very true picture of one of the most
interesting periods in English and European history. The Memoirs
thus represent the English historical novel in its beginnings, a much
simpler thing than it was to become in the hands of Scott and later
writers. The period in which the scene is laid is that of the English Civil
War, in which the Cavalier fought on the side of King Charles I
against the Puritans. But his adventures in this war belong to the
second part of the book. In the first part, he tells of his birth and
parentage, the foreign travel which was the fashionable completion
of the education of a gentleman in the seventeenth century, and his
adventures as a volunteer officer in the Swedish army, where he gained
the experience which was to serve him well in the Civil War at home.
Many a real Cavalier must have had just such a career as Defoe's hero
describes as his own... Continue reading book >>
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