Daniel Defoe and Applebee's Original Weekly Journal: An Attempt at Re-Attribution

William Lee's argument that between 25 June 1720 and 14 May 1726, Defoe was the main contributor to The Original Weekly Journal (later titled Applebee's Original Weekly Journal) was an accepted fact by every Defoe scholar until, in 1997, P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens published an essay with the title, "The Myth of Defoe as Applebee's Man," in which they questioned Lee's ascription, arguing that any connection between Applebee's Original Weekly Journal and Defoe lacked the slightest external evidence. The purpose of this essay is to try to explain why so many Defoe scholars (including myself) believed they were reading Defoe in Lee's selections from Applebee's and to return it to the status of "probably by Defoe," a category that constitutes approximately a third of Furbank's and Owens's Bibliography of Defoe's writings.