Roxana

ROXANA

DANIEL DEFOE was born in 1660 at St Giles, Cripplegate, the son of James Foe, a tallow-chandler. He changed his name to Defoe from c. 1695. He was educated for the Presbyterian Ministry at Morton’s Academy for Dissenters at Newington Green, but in 1682 he abandoned this plan and became a hosiery merchant in Cornhill. After serving briefly as a soldier in the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion, he became well established as a merchant and travelled widely. Between 1697 and 1701 he served as a secret agent for William III in England and Scotland, and between 1703 and 1714 for Harley and other ministers. During the latter period he also, single-handedly, produced the Review, a pro-government newspaper. A prolific and versatile writer, he produced some 500 books on a wide variety of topics including politics, geography, crime, religion, economics, marriage, psychology and superstition, and in his writing he often adopted a pseudonym or another personality for rhetorical impact. His first extant political tract (against James II) was published in 1688, and his bestselling satirical poem, The True-Born Englishman, appeared in 1701. Two years later he was arrested for The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, an ironical satire on High Church extremism, committed to Newgate and pilloried. He turned to fiction relatively late in life and in 1719 published his great imaginative work, Robinson Crusoe. This was followed in 1722 by Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague year and, in 1724, by his last novel, Roxana. All of these novels are published in Penguin Classics. His other works include A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, a guide-book in three volumes (1724–6; abridged Penguin edition, 1965), The Complete English Tradesman (1726), Augusta Triumphans (1728), A Plan of the English Commerce (1728) and The Complete English Gentleman (not published until 1890). He died on 24 April 1731. Defoe had a great influence on the development of the English novel and many consider him to be the first true novelist.

DAVID BLEWETT is Professor of English at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and the Editor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction. He is the author of Defoe’s Art of Fiction and The Illustration of ‘Robinson Crusoe’: 1719–1920, and has edited several eighteenth-century novels for Penguin.

The famous ROXANA.

Facsimile of frontispiece to first edition

DANIEL DEFOE

ROXANA

THE FORTUNATE MISTRESS

or, a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards call’d The Countess de Wintselsheim, in Germany.

Being the Person known by the Name of the Lady Roxana in the Time of King Charles II.

EDITED BY
DAVID BLEWETT

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Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 1724
Published in the Penguin English Library 1982
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1987
21

Introduction and Notes copyright © David Blewett, 1982

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90536–5

In memory of my father

CONTENTS

Introduction

A Note on the Text

A Chronology of Daniel Defoe

Select Bibliography of Critical Studies

ROXANA

The Preface

The Fortunate Mistress

Notes

Map of Roxana’s London

Introduction

Roxana (1724), Defoe’s strange last novel, is among his most fascinating works. Unlike his other novels, which without exception end with the triumph of the protagonist, Roxana is the story of the moral deterioration and ultimate defeat of the heroine. But what makes it unusual among Defoe’s novels and important to the subsequent development of English fiction is Defoe’s focus upon the interior drama of Roxana’s moral decay, the psychological turmoil of a woman who wilfully chooses the glamorous but immoral life of a courtesan over the honourable but duller life of a married woman. The result of her decision, as she slowly comes to realize, is that she sacrifices personal integrity for worldly opportunity and in doing so is caught in a web of circumstances from which she struggles in vain to escape. Formally, Defoe’s other works of fiction are comedies. Roxana is his only tragedy.

Defoe turned to fiction when he was fifty-nine years old and at the height of his power and his reputation as a writer. Essentially he was a journalist – for nine years he single-handedly wrote the Review, a newspaper that appeared as often as thrice weekly – with a strong interest in politics that in his later years grew into a concern with larger questions of social order and family responsibility. But Defoe could, and did, write on anything – politics, history, geography, religion, economics, sex, marriage, psychology, magic, superstition – often employing a pseudonym and adopting another personality for rhetorical effect or as protective covering. His love of role-playing and disguise was an essential part of his personality, so that he took an evident relish in his skilful impersonations when he worked as a government spy for Robert Harley, the Lord Treasurer. It is not perhaps surprising that Defoe eventually began to write novels, or that he wrote them in the form of fictitious autobiographies, playing a wide variety of roles to do so. What is surprising is how vividly he realizes those imaginary lives – so much so that one of them, Robinson Crusoe, the original desert island hero, has become one of our cultural myths, like Faustus or Don Juan. Defoe lives the parts of his heroes and heroines, revealing their fears and desires, their selfish scheming as well as their capacity for sympathy and generosity. His achievement as a novelist, however, was not an inspired accident, but the result of years of practice as a professional writer which taught him how to develop and sustain a fictitious personality, to construct a story full of drama, and to deploy the words and images that would give force to his moral themes and life to his creation.

Like all true novelists, Defoe creates a fictional world. His protagonists inhabit a moral universe that defines their actions and gives meaning to the pattern of their lives, compelling us beyond pleasurable observation into moral assessment.