Literary Evaluation and Authorship Attribution, or Defoe’s Politics at the Hanoverian Succession

In this essay, Nicholas Seager argues for re-attributing two pamphlets to Daniel Defoe: A Secret History of One Year (1714) and Memoirs of the Conduct of Her Late Majesty and Her Last Ministry (1715). These works, published shortly after the Hanoverian succession, were excluded from Defoe’s canon by Furbank and Owens on the grounds that the writing was poor in quality. A closer review of the external and internal evidence, however, points to Defoe as the author of these occasional political tracts, which reveal his attempts to attenuate what he perceived as the harmful effects of government by a single-party ministry.