Atalantis Major. Defoe Daniel

remarkably congruent with those of both Harley and Godolphin. All three were staunch supporters of England's commercial interests, the Hanoverian Succession, liberty of conscience for Dissenters and Nonconformists, and the terms of the Revolution Settlement. It must be remembered that Godolphin and Harley were both moderates, each trying to chart his course between the extremes of the parties. They, like Daniel Defoe, saw their loyalty being to England and to the Queen, not to a party. Like Defoe, they both discovered that politics often make strange bedfellows. Godolphin, faced with a large Whig majority in the House of Commons after the General Election of 1708, found that his fortunes were bound to those of the Junto. Harley, after the General Election of 1710, discovered the necessity of courting the High-Church Tories far more than he would have liked.

      Argyll's slate of Scottish peers for the November election included men who were even more extreme in their Toryism than the majority of High-Church English Tories. Most of the sixteen were High-Church, many had strong Catholic leanings; all of them were against increasing the religious liberties of the Scottish Presbyterians (and thus those of the English Dissenters and Nonconformists). Several of these peers had been openly professed Jacobites and all were, in some degree, sympathetic to France. To have men with such beliefs in Parliament meant, to Defoe, the chance that Marlborough's victories in France would be negotiated away, the loss of what the Toleration Act of 1689 had gained, and finally, the spector of the Pretender on the throne. In short, such men could mean the loss of all that the Revolution and the war with France had won. Yet, in the late autumn of 1710, Defoe found himself in Edinburgh, the agent and propagandist of the man on whose behalf Argyll had engineered the election of men of such politics.

      Defoe's mission in Edinburgh that autumn was to allay the fears of the Presbyterian clergy and Whig merchants about the new Tory Ministry. His message to them was, in Professor Sutherland's words, that

      What the country needed … was steady, moderate men, whether they called themselves Whig or Tory, men who would uphold the Protestant succession and avoid extreme measures; and that on the whole was what it had now got [appearances to the contrary notwithstanding]. The Ministry was not going to give way to the clamours of the High Tory rank and file; and the Queen would certainly not countenance any form of persecution.5

      In short, Defoe was charged with convincing his Scottish friends and associates (and, by means of the Review, the nation at large) the opposite of all that Argyll's actions and words bespoke of Harley's intentions.

      Defoe wrote Harley from Edinburgh on 18 November (eight days after the election of the peers) to voice his dismay at the tactics that had been used by Argyll. By them his own mission on Harley's behalf had been impaired:

      I hint this Sir to Confirm my Censure of the Conduct aforesaid as Imprudent and as what has rendred [sic] the quieting these people, which was Easy before, Very Difficult now.6

      Further, he suggests that Harley's heretofore moderate allies, the Squadrone, have been pushed by Argyll into league with the old Court Party that had supported the Godolphin Ministry. This letter also contains a brief summary of the main events which were to form the plot of Atalantis Major, but it does not attack Argyll with the same bitterness that the longer work does. Defoe writes:

      In the late Election, the Conduct of the D of 60 [Argyll], the E of 163 [Islay], and the Earle of 194 [Mar] is Very Perticular… [They] Declared Openly [that] the Quallification of those to be Chosen … [was] their agreeing to Impeach 140 [Godolphin] and 193 [Marlborough], Nor did the Impudence End there, but On all Occasions to Say in So Many Words They had her Majties Orders to Choose Such and Such and it must be don: This was So abandonning all Reserves, that it has disgusted the Generallity, and has Put them Upon Measures of Uniteing, which may shut the door upon all future Measures, what Ever the Occasion may be…

      Now they have Returnd their Number, it were to be Wished they Could have Avoided a few who are Declar'd profest Jacobites, Such as 197 [Marischal], Kilsyth, Blantire, Hume &c. who are known to aim in all they do at the Pretender, and whose being Now Chosen has many ill Effects here What Ever may be as to Over-ruleing them in England, I mean as to Encreasing the Insolence of Jacobitisme in the North, where its Strength is far from being Contemptible.7

      What Defoe hoped to obtain from Harley by this and succeeding letters on this subject is not clear. He may have been seeking Harley's public repudiation of the Jacobite peers, or at least some private assurances that what Argyll had told the peers did not represent the new Ministry's policies. Whatever it was he sought, by late December it was obviously not forthcoming from Harley or his Ministry. And on 20 December Argyll was made a Knight of the Garter. It was during this December that the bulk of Atalantis Major was written, most probably between 30 November and 26 December. On 26 December 1710 Defoe wrote Harley of the existence of "Two Vile Ill Natur'd Pamphlets … both of which have fallen into My hands in Manuscript, and I think I have prevented both their Printing. The first Was advertised in the Gazette here and Called the Scots atalantis8 … The Other Pamphlet is called Atalantis Major." The letter concludes with a short description of the work, a disavowal of any knowledge of its authorship, and the hope that he can suppress its publication:

      The Other Pamphlet is called Atalantis Major; and is a Bitter Invective against the D of Argyle, the E of Mar, and the Election of the Peers. It is Certainly Written by Some English man, and I have Some Guess at the Man, but dare not be positive. I have hitherto kept this also from the Press, and believe it will be Impossible for them to get it printed here after the Measures I have Taken. The Party I Got it of pretends the Coppy Came from England, But I am of Another Opinion. I shall Trouble you no farther about it because if possible I can get it Coppyed, I will Transmit the Coppy by Next post, for I have the Originall in My hand. They Expect I shall Encourage and assist them in the Mannageing it, and Till I can Take a Coppy I shall not Undeciev them.9

      There is no evidence to suggest that Harley doubted Defoe's disclaimer or that Defoe sent the copy to Harley.

      Since Defoe was back in London on 13 February 1711, Atalantis Major must have been seen through the press sometime between 26 December and the end of January, not, as Moore lists it, "before 26 December 1710."10 Internal evidence suggests an even narrower range of probable dates of publication. The last four pages of Atalantis Major deal with the Duke of Argyll being given command of the English forces in Spain and the singular lack of grace with which he undertook this command. Since Argyll was not given command of the Peninsula campaign until 11 January 1711, it could not be until after this date that the manuscript could have been finished and printed.

      The work bears few signs of being hastily printed. There are only nine typographical errors,11 and four of these are catchwords. There is no evidence to suggest that there was more than one printing of the pamphlet,12 and the use of several Scotticisms13 seems to offer support for the contention that the pamphlet was intended for a primarily Scottish audience.

      William Lee was the first to ascribe the work to Defoe, and this ascription has been accepted by both Dottin and Moore.14 The evidence for assigning this work to Defoe seems to rest on the two letters to Harley quoted above. Another proof of Defoe's authorship of Atalantis Major is to be found in the remark it contains, "That the Southern Part of the Island [that is, England] was the most remarkable of any, as to the Policy of their Government, and the Character of the People; and excepting Englishmen and Polanders, there is not such another Nation in the World" (p. 12). In 1704 Defoe had written The Dyet of Poland, a poem in which he had made a similar unflattering comparison between England and Poland. A far more substantial case for Defoe's authorship can be made from the existence of the anecdote of John White, Edinburgh's hangman, in both a letter to Harley (18 November 1710) and the Review (for 30 November 1710), as well as in Atalantis Major (pp. 22-3).

Key

5

James R. Sutherland, Defoe (London: Methuen, 1950), p. 179.

6

The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. by George Harris Healey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 296.

7

Ibid., pp. 294-295.

8

Healey reports that "in such issues as I have been able to find of the Scots Postman, or the New Edinburgh Gazette, there is no mention of the Scots Atalantis" (Letters, p. 306, n. 1). The title of this work and of Defoe's Atalantis Major are derived from Mrs. Manley's New Atalantis or Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality of both Sexes from the New Atalantis, an island in the Mediterranean (1709). The OED records that the word atalantis enjoyed a brief currency in the eighteenth century with the meaning, "a secret or scandalous history."

9

Letters, p. 307.

10

John Robert Moore, A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), p. 82.

11

Page 12, line 5: do is omitted before this; page 16, line 24: an for on; page 17, line 6: Grandfathers for Grandfather's; page 19, the catch-word, the for this; page 20, line 5: run for ran; page 22, line 22: of for off; page 28, the catch-word, they for the; page 36, the catch-word, Cha- for Courage; page 37, the catch-word, Lansd for Lands. In addition, there are several places where the printer uses eighteenth-century variant spellings such as ballances (pp. 5, 8), mannaged (p. 2), quallifie (p. 8), Soveraign (p. 41) and steddy (p. 15). Eighteenth-century orthographic practice would have permitted such spellings. The word entitled, however, appears on page five as both entituled and intituled.

12

None of the various copies I have examined contains typographical differences – even in the case of the typographical errors.

13

On page 38, line 25, the word Big is used where Large would have been the English usage; on page 42, line 3, the word Bann'd is used for Swore and defined in the text as an "Atalantic word"; on page 43, line 4, the word evite is used instead of avoid.

14

William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life, and Recently Discovered Writings (London: Hotten, 1869), I, 177; Paul Dottin, Daniel Defoe, trans. Louise Ragan (New York, Macaulay, 1929), p. 155; John Robert Moore, Daniel Defoe, Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 191; and Moore, A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), p. 82.