Collection of four Books Defoe, Daniel.

A Tour through the whole island of Great Britain / A Journal of the Plague Year / Memoirs of a Cavalier / Colonel Jack.

Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, c. 1965 – 2006. 19 cm. 730 p. : map, port. Original Softcover. Secondhand book in very good condition.

Book 1: Britain in the early eighteenth century: an introduction that is both informative and imaginative, reliable and entertaining. To the tradition of travel writing Daniel Defoe brings a lifetime’s experience as a businessman, soldier, economic journalist and spy, and his Tour (1724-6) is an invaluable source of social and economic history. But this book is far more than a beautifully written guide to Britain just before the industrial revolution, for Defoe possessed a wild, inventive streak that endows his work with astonishing energy and tension, and the Tour is his deeply imaginative response to a brave new economic world. By employing his skills as a chronicler, a polemicist and a creative writer keenly sensitive to the depredations of time, Defoe more than achieves his aim of rendering ‘the present state’ of Britain.
Book 2: n 1665 the plague swept through London, claiming over 97,000 lives. Daniel Defoe was just five at the time of the plague, but he later called on his own memories, as well as his writing experience, to create this vivid chronicle of the epidemic and its victims. ‘A Journal’ (1722) follows Defoe’s fictional narrator as he traces the devastating progress of the plague through the streets of London. Here we see a city transformed: some of its streets suspiciously empty, some – with crosses on their doors – overwhelmingly full of the sounds and smells of human suffering. And every living citizen he meets has a horrifying story that demands to be heard.
Book 3: By the author or Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier is the story of an English gentleman during one of the most unstable and fascinating periods of English and European history. The Cavalier, thought to be ‘no less a figure than one of King William’s secretaries of state’, tells of his adventures during the Thirty Years War as a soldier fighting in the army of the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus in support of the German Protestants. The death of Gustavus Adolphus eventually draws the Cavalier back to his native land, and when England descends into civil war, he goes into battle again, this time for King Charles I against his own parliament. Memoirs of a Cavalier, one of the earliest examples of the English novel, is above all else a gripping adventure story set on the battlefields of Germany and England.
Book 4: Daniel Defoe’s fifth novel, Colonel Jack is the supposed autobiography of an English gentleman who begins life as a child of the London streets. He and his two brothers (both also named Jack) are brought up as pickpockets and highwaymen, but Colonel Jack seeks to improve himself. Kidnapped and taken to America, he becomes first a slave, then an overseer on plantations in Maryland and Virginia. Returning to England, he is drawn into the Jacobite rebellion and into a succession of marriages, all of which end badly for him. Escaping back to Virginia, Jack becomes a successful planter, ending his life as a gentleman despite his mistakes along the way. (Publishers information).

• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140430660
• Inventory Number: 400153AB

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