Defoe and Francis Noble

Defoe and Francis Noble P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens If it be asked how it came to be accepted that Defoe was the author of Moll Flanders, Roxatta, Captain Singleton, and Memoirs ofa Cavalier—if it be asked indeed how he came to be popularly thought of as a novelist—the answer is, through the activities in the 1770s and 1780s of a rascally publisher named Francis Noble. It was an open secret from early on that Defoe was the author of Robinson Crusoe, but for the ordinary reader Crusoe was essentially a book without an author, a book which did not need an author. It would, anyway, have been a break with convention at this period for a novel to carry an author's name on its title-page. (Fielding was a fairly rare exception in this respect.) The fictional genre, in its origins, was one which exploited uncertainty as to whether it were fiction or a real-life document. Thus, when J. Applebee reprinted The History andRemarkable Life of Colonel Jacque for Ward and Chandler in 1738, the work was advertised as being by "The Author of Robinson Crusoe," and it was supplied with a Preface which praised it for its exemplary moral qualities and offered readers the choice whether to believe it fact or fiction. ("Nor is it of any Concern to the Reader, whether it be an exact historical Relation of real Facts, or whether the Hero of it intended to present us, at least in part, with a moral Romance.") The Preface was unsigned. However, in the fourth edition, which came out in the same year, and also the fifth edition (1739), we find at the end of the Preface, now somewhat rewritten, the name "daniel d'EFOE." The fact no doubt explains why, in the brief list of works by Defoe included in Theophilus Cibber's Lives of the Poets of 1753 (it is believed to be by Robert Shiels), the one EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 4, July 1992 302 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION novel attributed to Defoe, apart from Robinson Crusoe, is "History of Colonel Jack."1 By the sixth edition, of 1743, though, Defoe's name had disappeared again from the Preface; and it is not for another thirtytwo years, unless we are mistaken, that Defoe's name actually appears on the title-page of a novel. And what a novel! Here is its title-page: The History of Mademoiselle de Beleau; or, the New Roxana, the fortunate mistress: afterwards Countess of Wintselsheim. Published by Mr Daniel De Foe. And from papers found, since his decease, it appears was greatly altered by himself; and from the said papers, the present work is produced. Printedfor the Editor; sold by F. Noble; T. Lowndes: London, 1775. The work has a Preface, signed "daniel de foe, Islington, August 9, 1730," in which the elderly novelist relates how the dramatist Thomas Southerne once paid a visit to him in his house in Islington and "rallied" him severely for "making the Lady, the Heroine of the work Roxana, so unnatural to her children in her disowning them." Southerne added that, as Defoe very well knew, the original of Roxana did not actually end up in poverty; he imagined Defoe must have made Roxana do so "for the sake of the moral only." To this Defoe had replied that the lady had told him herself about the disowning of her children and had said she lived in mortal fear of their finding out about her wicked past. Responding to Southerne's criticisms, however, he had revised his novel, restoring Roxana's children to her and rescuing her from poverty—though not from remorse. He goes on to explain how, while revising the novel, he has thought it proper to "throw it into chapters."2 To this, the "Editor" of the present edition adds a brief postscript, dated December 1774, which may be quoted in full: The Lady, the heroine of the following history, having passed through a variety of interesting and uncommon scenes in life, a parallel of which can scarce be met with, either in ancient or modem history; and I being desirous of...