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340 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1722
It was a very ill time to be sick in…
‘Oh! death, death, death!’ [p.59]That’s it. That’s the review. No punch line.
There are people who still find Defoe hard to take as a novelist, and this is because they have become accustomed to regarding the novel as a form almost aggressively 'literary', full of barely concealed machinery, self-conscious fine writing, the personality of the novelist himself peeping through as a show-off puppet-master, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent.(264)By contrast, for Mr. Foe (his aristocratic prefix was acquired by the author later in life, parthenogenetically, as it were) "the thing was more important than the word, and 'human interest' was more important than either"(269). And as far as words went, while from his plume admittedly came a whole hell of a lot of them, they were nonetheless
models of plain and dignified style. The audience he sought was not that which enthused over Addison and Steele [or for that matter, over Anthony Burgess]; it was still the plain dissenting tradesmen he spoke to, patriotic, shrewd, practical, philistine.And so he speaketh not to this reviewer, then, who ticks precisely none of those boxes, except most likely (given his evident distaste with this book, and as his GR-friends should surely attest) the very last one .
London is an emanation of ourselves, a projection of our own personalities. The individual citizens go uncharacterized, atoms which make up the collective body [...] This is in conformity with DeFoe's qualified liberalism, which means a kind of optimism. It is neither God's grace nor innate goodness which saves man's soul alive; it is rather his need for community, his concept of the desirable life as one lived collectively."Evidently, then, this philistine pessimist needs to re-read the Journal already!