223). As the perfect disguise, one in which even her husband ‘wou’d not know his Wife when he saw her’ (p. 291), the dress also reminds us of the deception and hypocrisy of the life of the kept mistress who ‘sculks about in Lodgings [and] is visited in the dark’ (p. 171). By the end of the novel it has become the symbol of all that is wrong in Roxana’s life, her need for concealment, her fear of exposure by her daughter, and her shameful past. And it is by means of the Turkish dress that Susan – once a servant in her own mother’s house at the time when Roxana danced, and Susan witnessed, her Turkish dance – is able to connect the wife of the Dutch merchant with the Lady Roxana, and to discover the identity of her mother.

As Roxana, driven distracted by the unrelenting pursuit of her daughter, twists and turns to avoid capture by the wretched and desperate Susan, the loyal but cold-blooded Amy finally murders the girl. Nothing else in Defoe is quite so shocking as this appalling resolution to the story. Yet it may be seen that the ending springs from the preceding pattern of crime with the logic of cause and effect. Roxana is able to achieve her remarkable success only at the high price of denying her children and suppressing her emotions. The terrible result is not only Roxana’s mental breakdown and insanity, but the great wrong that is done to her child. Susan, enduring the drudgery of a servant’s existence and witnessing her mother’s immoral life, is finally murdered by the woman who has usurped her station in life and taken her place in her mother’s affections. As long as Roxana is able to assist her children anonymously, hiding behind the screen of Amy, all is well. But Susan is the only child who demands the one thing that Roxana is unable to give her, the normal affection of a mother for her child. In his final novel Defoe, with a psychological insight for which he is seldom given credit, explored the way in which human beings may be torn apart and destroyed when their own desires and ambitions get at cross-purposes with one another. Roxana is such a woman, ruined because her immoderate vanity and ambition can only be satisfied at the expense of the love and trust which she desperately needs. Her life is her punishment, and her story Defoe’s expression of his tragic vision of the human lot.

In the preparation of this edition I have been assisted by the help kindly given me by the many individuals to whom I turned when the information I was seeking in books ran out. In particular, I am indebted to Paula Backschieder of the University of Rochester, New York (for advice about the chronology of Defoe); to Mary Boast of the Southwark Local Studies Library (for information about the pond at Camberwell); to David Higgs of the University of Toronto and to Roger Lockyer of Royal Holloway College, London (for information about French Protestantism); to Frank Melton of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (for information about Sir Robert Clayton); to V. Neressian of the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books, the British Library (for identifying the Armenian musical instruments on pp. 220–1); to Spiro Peterson of Miami University, Ohio (for identifying the quotation on p. 244); to H. C. Porter of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (for the identification of ‘the Indian King at Virginia’, p. 290); to Julian Raby of the Oriental Institute, Oxford (for information about Roxana’s Tyhiaai); to Jennifer M. Scarse of the Royal Scottish Museum (for information about eighteenth century Turkish costume); to G. A. Starr of the University of California, Berkeley (for information about the quotation on p. 104); and to Raymond Stephanson of the University of Saskatchewan, who generously allowed me to read his paper on ‘The Historical Foundation of Mental Illness in Roxana’ before publication. I am also indebted to members of my family; to my brothers William, a computer scientist, and Edwin, an economist, for advice about Sir Robert Clayton’s ‘Scheme of Frugality’, and, above all, to my late father, whose scholarly acumen was invaluable to me in preparing the text. Finally, I wish to thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which provided financial support for three months’ research in London.

McMaster University

D. B.

1. See Paul Alkon, Defoe and Fictional Time (University of Georgia Press, 1979), pp.