This paper aims to examine Daniel Defoe's understanding of gentility in Colonel Jack (1722). The first half of the novel, drawing a sharp contrast between the eponymous hero's claim for gentle birth and his criminal life, identifies the respectable source of wealth as the first requirement of being a gentleman. But the second half, which portrays Jack's challenge to a duel and his ruthless revenge on the captain, reveals that wealth does not guarantee the making of a complete gentleman. Defoe's intention to describe Jack as a gentleman manqué does not denunciate his hero's desire to be a gentleman as unjust and improper. Rather, Defoe suggests the need for education as the legitimate way of becoming a gentleman. Showing that Jack's notion of honor at face value primarily originates from the contemporary absence of a virtuous model, Defoe implies that a more specific discussion should follow in order to establish the new ideal gentleman.

This article examines Daniel Defoe's use of mobility to imagine the British nation in his domestic travel narrative A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26). While many critics have noted his participation in the national project of imagining a unified Britain, which was of great importance due to the 1707 Act of Union, this article explores the liberating (or destabilizing) effect that Defoe's travels have on the construction of a British national identity. After discussing how his carefully planned itinerary leads him to portray Britain as a prosperous nation primarily engaged in trade, I focus on his rambling movements as an “itinerant” traveler, which take on the qualities of what Paul Smethurst calls “disorderly mobility.” In examining how he repeatedly deviates from his itinerary to venture into less-traveled (and less-commercialized) areas, I argue that Defoe employs his wanderings to subvert the homogeneity of his own national vision and instead imagine Britain in terms of its geography. It is by envisioning Britain as an island, an inclusive space in which everyone within its borders is endowed with a British national identity regardless of how they may differ from each other, that Defoe is able to propose an alternative and more inclusive notion of the nation, which I assert the later editions of the Tour supplement with their “great Additions, Improvements, and Corrections.”

This paper discusses Helen Maria Williams's changing voices in the third and fourth volumes of Letters from France (1793). Published anonymously, the third and fourth of volumes of Letters were written by Williams and other male collaborators, including John Hurford Stone and Thomas Christie. In light of the uncertainty about which letters were written by Williams and which by her collaborators, it is crucial to distinguish Williams's voices from others in these volumes. This research reviews the authorship of the third and fourth volumes of Letters in order to locate Williams's voices. The paper then explores how she varies her voices in the third volume to reveal the involvement of the Mountain, a radical political group involved in the French Revolution, in the 1792 September Massacres, compared to her previous two volumes of Letters. Even between the third and fourth volumes, which were published together in the same year, Williams transforms her voices in the fourth volume and uses different strategies to show her opinion on the execution of Louis XVI. By carefully tracing the changing voices in these volumes, this paper demonstrates the way in which Williams develops herself as a political commentator on the French Revolution.

Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668) starts with the story of George Pine, a castaway in an uncharted island in the Pacific Ocean, who establishes his tribal kingdom through his polygamous relationship with four other female survivors. To transmute himself from a biological father into a patriarch-monarch, George establishes formalized moral systems. George, an advocate of the divine right of kings, derives the foundation of his regal authority from God's law, and continues to depend on the same law for the ongoing prosperity of his kingdom. The Pines' kingdom, however, gradually falls into pieces after George's demise. The island is torn by years of tribal feuds and domestic strifes until the rule of law, whether it be God's law that sanctions George the first father's kingship or a human statute his successor puts in place, no longer holds. By transforming George's utopian dream into a floundering patriarchal system, Neville seems to provide a biting satire on Charles II's restoration regime. As a salutary warning against a deepening crisis of patriarchal succession, Isle presents Neville's republican anti-patriarchalism as a burlesques on the sacred account about the patriarchal genesis of national origin. Neville's caricature, however, loses its critical edges when it becomes an oblique criticism. Instead of directly confronting the fundamental limitations of absolute monarchy, the author ascribes them to the moral failings of the insurgent mulatto tribe named Phills, whose racial alterity is regarded as engendering the nation's moral degradation. With his exclusive racial logic, Neville betrays an anti-liberal bias that contradicts his republican beliefs; he demonizes the biracial Phills as enemies of the state who must be subjected to draconian penal codes and coercive authority.

This paper addresses the recurring critical issue of the Immortality Ode: the contradiction between the first eight stanzas and the last three in terms of tone and assertion. Unlike many critics who, despite the contradiction, still try to find unity between the two parts, this paper offers a biographical explanation in suggesting the poem as a two-part structure. The first part is argued to have been written at the time of the guilt-ridden and not necessarily autonomous decision about the poet's future spouse between Annette and Mary. Under the circumstances, the poet's latent psychological protestation or regret takes the form of exalting childhood. The second part, on the other hand, was written when the poet was psychologically stable because he had come to some sort of understanding with Annette, now settled comfortably to his new married life. As such, the poet, no longer resisting his life as a man, exalts his memory of both beautiful and sad moments of his past life whose true or “philosophic” meaning is finally understood. Thus, the second part of the poem becomes the focus of the Ode as a devotional expression of a lost and hence all the more unforgettable young days of “splendor” and “glory,” with beauty and resonance unparalleled in literary history.