The "Lost" Continuation of Defoe's Roxana

The "Lost" Continuation of Defoe's Roxana P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens Throughout the nineteenth century, just as Voltaire's Candide was regularly printed with a spurious sequel, so it was the custom to print Defoe's Roxana with a long continuation, amounting to nearly a quarter of the total length of the volume, dealing with Roxana's journey to Holland with her Dutch husband and her later years and death there. This was done in the Hazlitt, the Bohn, the Tegg, and the Aitken editions, and even in the Maynadier edition of 1903. The continuation in question was first reprinted by William Hazlitt the Younger in his Works of Daniel De Foe (1840), where, after the concluding words of Defoe's text ("my repentance seemed to be the only consequence of my misery, as my misery was of my crime"), a footnote reads: The work, as originally published by De Foe in 1724, ends in this manner. The continuation of Roxana's life, which follows, was first printed in 1745, with a long explanation as to the author. It is impossible at this distance of time to say by whom it was written, but the style certainly bears a strong resemblance to that of De Foe.1 This information is repeated in the Bohn, Tegg, Aitken, and Maynadier editions. Hazlitt, however, in his preface, adds a further comment: 1 TAe Works ofDaniel De Foe, with a Memoir ofHis Life and Writings, ed. William Hazlitt, 3 vols (London: John Clements, 1840), 1:109. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 3, April 1997 300 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION In the second edition, De Foe was persuaded by his friend, Southern, to leave out the whole of the story relating to Roxana's daughter Susannah; who, suspecting her relationship, contrived various expedients to throw herself in her mother's way, until she at length succeeded, and accomplished her ruin. Southern 's objection, certainly a very curious one, rested upon the supposition, that the daughter's history was imaginary, whilst the rest of the story was founded upon fact. Whatever foundation there may be for this tradition, it is certain that most of the subsequent editions of the book contain the story, and it is one of the finest-wrought pictures in the work.2 Both the footnote and this prefatory comment require a great deal of unpicking; indeed they are strands in a whole web of misunderstandings. The late Spiro Peterson devoted his PhD thesis to "Roxana and Its Eighteenth-Century Sequels."3 It is a very fine piece of work, resourceful and far-reaching in its discussion of the Roxana continuations as a piece of literary history, but it turned greatly on the fact that the all-important edition of 1745, which Hazlitt mentions in his footnote and from which he supposedly drew his text (including the continuation), seemed to be lost, so that it had to be reconstructed by inference. Peterson submitted his thesis in 1953. Twenty years or so later a copy of a 1745 edition turned up at the Newberry Library in Chicago, with results perplexing for Peterson. For though the Newberry edition contains a continuation, this differs markedly at certain points from the Hazlitt one, introducing one or two quite new incidents and dropping others. Nor did the edition supply "a long explanation as to the author." Did this mean that there was another 1745 edition, still to be found? Or did Hazlitt's words need to be understood in some different manner ? Peterson remained puzzled by the problem, but we are in a position to answer at least the most important question: which text did Hazlitt actually use? We can also, we believe, throw some light on the complicated muddle, involving William Godwin, Charles Lamb, and Walter Wilson, which surrounds the "Hazlitt" continuation. First, however, we must supply a little bibliographical detail. There were at least six different eighteenth-century continuations of Roxana. The first in date that we know of, a long one, comes in a quarto edition published 2 Hazlitt, l:iv. 3 See Spiro Peterson, "Defoe's Roxana and Its Eighteenth-Century Sequels: A Critical and Bibliographical Study," unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard...