A Review of the Affairs of France. Vol. 1: 1704–1705 by Daniel Defoe (review)

52 to a footnote, ‘‘nasty trifling’’: it took much of the twentieth century to redeem Sterne’s greatness, an effort primarily led by American scholars while the British watched dubiously from the sidelines. It is important, in other words, to create a conversation about Sterne (or any author) in which the air and the water are clean and clear, sustaining life rather than killing it. And, to abandon my overworked metaphor before it devours me, what reviewers must try to do, to the best of their very limited capacities, is to discriminate between good scholarship and bad; strong, coherent argumentation, and weak; perceptive commentary and obfuscating—in short, to make the effort, at least, to contribute to a discourse that future generations will discover has kept alive an author they also would like to read and enjoy. *Excerpted and revised from a lecture delivered at the annual English Department Alumni Lecture, University of Alabama-Birmingham, October 18, 2006. . . University of Florida BOOK REVIEWS DANIEL DEFOE. A Review of the Affairs of France. Vol. 1: 1704–1705, ed. John McVeagh. Part One: February–September 1704. Pp. xli ⫹ 419. Part Two: October 1704–February 1705 and Index. Pp. 421–835. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003. Vol. 2: 1705, ed. John McVeagh. Part One: February–July 1705. Pp. xxxi ⫹ 450. Part Two: August–December 1705 and Index. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004. Pp. 451–844.£195; $325. ‘‘Writing upon Trade was the Whore I really doated upon,’’ Defoe famously wrote in the final volume of the Review, as he looked back on the journal’s nine-year run, but the statement was not literally true. Politics—global, national, and local—was his true love, and writing about it was his obsession. Everything else—trade, history, poetry , fiction, even religion—served the political agenda of securing English hegemony abroad and harmony at home, under a moderate and Whiggish government. That is the impression that arises from reading through the first two volumes, each in two parts, of A Review of the Affairs of France, a title that Defoe expanded at the commencement of Volume Two to include the phrase with some Observations on TRANSACTIONS at Home, and then finally shortened simply to the Review in recognition of the fact that there was nothing that did not come under the journal’s purview. This admirable edition of the Review is the first since A. W. Secord’s facsimile text of 1938, which itself was the first nearly complete collection of each number of the journal since its publication from 1704 to 1713. Another first: errata are corrected, illegible text is restored, annotations of obscure phrases and names are given, and a means is devised for incorporating the various supplements and Little Reviews that appeared during the journal’s run. At four million words and (when completed in 2011) nine volumes in eighteen parts, the last including a comprehensive Index to the 53 whole, this edition will be the single most important source for Defoe’s views on everything from sex and marriage to money and monarchy. It will also provide the fullest articulation of the political vision that brought all those subjects into a sort of harmony. There is something for every reader in the Review. Historians will benefit from the eyewitness account of the war that had convulsed Europe since the 1680s, now known as the War of the Spanish Succession. Defoe referred to his method as ‘‘writing History by inches,’’ but it more closely resembles Pamela’s practice of ‘‘writing to the moment ,’’ in which a breathless confusion is part of the story. Defoe the historian makes no pretence to objectivity: he is every bit the Sartrean writer, engaged on the intellectual front in a war against tyranny. Tyranny is represented by the French, whom his English readers are inclined to underestimate, but Defoe warns that they are ‘‘a Bold, Adventurous, Wise, Politick and Martial People,’’ whose ambition is to dominate the world, and whose navy enables them to do it. The objective of the war ought not to be the destruction of the French people or monarchy, but a ‘‘Ballance of Power’’ in Europe capable of restraining them within their borders. Therefore, a review...