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Updated: June 20, 2025
The title-pages of some of these novels cannot with decency be quoted, and the novels themselves are filled with criminal and licentious scenes. But the reforming inclination of Defoe himself, and that which we find in the general literature of the time, induced him to turn these scenes into a moral account.
This is a kind of knowledge which very well becomes a man of sound and solid learning, but which only exposes a man of slight and superficial reading; therefore, pray make the substance and matter of such books your first object, and their title-pages, indexes, letter, and binding, but your second.
I am infected, and I know it: but for science-sake I break the quarantine, and in my magnanimity would be victimized unknown, consigning to a speedy grave this useless offspring, together with its too productive parent, and saving of a race so hopeless little else than their prëdetermined names in fact, their title-pages. But is that indeed little?
Let us hasten to be practical; let us not so long forget the promised title-pages; let it at length satisfy to show, more than theoretically, how authorship stirs up the mind to daily-teeming projects, and then casts out its half-made progeny; how scraps of paper come to be covered with the cabala of half-written thoughts, thenceforward doomed to suffer the dispersion-fate of Sibylline leaves; how stores of mingled information gravitate into something of order, each seed herding with its fellows; and how every atom of mixed metal, educationally held in solution by the mind, is sought out by a keen precipitating test, gregariously building up in time its own true crystal.
In naming these I abbreviate the titles. Most of Defoe's title-pages epitomize his works, and merely as a list would fill a stout volume. It has been suggested that Defoe in his old age became insane, and hid himself from his family for no discoverable reasons. It is certain that in September, 1729, he mysteriously removed from his house, and went into hiding in the neighborhood of Greenwich.
Taking one or two of them out he glanced at their title-pages; he knew that most of them were rare and curious, though his Oxford training had not impressed him with as great a love of things literary as it might or should have done.
No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blasoned abroad on title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another kind of vogue.
What I'm after is the fact that we're going to have variety in our title-pages, and we are going to have novelty in the illustrations of the body of the book. March, here, if he had his own way, wouldn't have any illustrations at all." "Not because I don't like them, Mr. Beacon," March interposed, "but because I like them too much.
In your own enlightened and liberal mind, I do not indeed suspect the indwelling of any such exclusive prejudices as those which forbid altogether the perusal of works of fiction: such prejudices belong, perhaps, to more remote periods, to those distant times when title-pages were seen announcing "Paradise Lost, translated into prose for the benefit of those pious souls whose consciences would not permit them to read poetry."
Who knows but his persecutions in France may lead to some new advancement, or at least add another line to the already crouded title-pages that announce his literary and political distinctions! Yours. January, 1794.
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