Review: The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler

 I picked up Christopher Fowler’s The Book of Forgotten Authors as a good ‘dippy-inny’ book while I was backstage, performing in a play. The chapters were short and self contained and I didn’t need to keep any plot in my head as I went out on stage and performed the plot there. I was interested in the topic, and I have fond memories of Fowler as the writer of Roofworld and Calabash. 

Of the 99 authors listed, I’ve read 9 of them and own books by another 5. It was interesting reading about the authors I did know well because we have quite different views on them. In the section on Dino Buzzati, he never named The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Italy. His under appreciated pick for TH White was Goodbye Victoria, with Mistress Masham’s Repose getting only a little nod at the end. There were some authors I didn’t recognise I had read till he mentioned the book’s title, things like Mr Gay’s London, and Mrs Pettigrew Lives for a Day. 

Of the authors I hadn’t heard of (or had vaguely heard of) the entries were really interesting. There are all sorts of potted biographies in here of all sorts of intriguing lives. Some very good sounding people, some absolute horrors. I didn’t realise Pierre Boule wrote e Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes, nor did I know the man playing Private Godfrey was an author who’d fought in both world wars.

Many of the books and authors appealed to me but I made a note of the ones that jumped the highest. Alexander Baron seems a very interesting writer and I’ll be seeking out King Dido in particular. Then there’s John Collier’s His Monkey Wife: Or, I married a chimp, which wins on title alone. 

This is an entertaining book, featuring lots of peculiar potted histories and intriguing books. It’s a good read by itself and a finger pointing at interesting reads in the future.

Review: Dr Johnson's Lichfield by Mary Alden Hopkins

 My copy of Mary Alden Hopkins’s Dr Johnson’s Lichfield looks like a fairly sedate affair, possibly even a little bit dry, but perfect for getting myself back into eighteenth century Lichfield as I return to writing my novel in Samuel Johnson’s little brother (as I’ve had a little time off writing it). 

It starts fairly calmly, with a huge list of acknowledgements, with one of the first being to Percy Laithwaite, the man who wrote the surprisingly entertaining history of Lichfield’s Conduit Lands Trust - possibly the most entertaining book about a civil authority/charity that could be written. Then follows the gossipiest timeline I have ever seen in front of a historical book. Yes, there are entries for births and deaths, but most detail strange affairs, scandals and relationships and this timeline suggests the sudden turn the book will make after a few chapters.

For a while, it’s a book about Lichfield in the time of Samuel Johnson, beginning with a potted history of the city, a little about the social and economic make-up of the place, told with a visual eyes and a tendency to fantasise about the fantastic costumes everyone was probably wearing. However, it soon leaves Samuel Johnson as he leaves Lichfield and becomes a full-on soap opera about the lives of those in Lichfield’s Cathedral Close. Albert Square and Coronation Street have nothing on this sedate corner of ecclesiastical housing, and Hopkins loves every detail of it. 

The first mini-history of Lichfield was very interesting, especially its founding myth of the cathedral being built on the site of a huge Roman massacre of Christians. Johnson himself believed this myth, believing that the ‘Lich’ of Lichfield came from the same ‘lich’ in ‘lichgate’ and meant death.  Then there was the founding of the Cathedral by St Chad (a name to conjure with), the Maryan martyrs in the Market Square, the three attacks on the Cathedral Close during the English Civil War and the leader of the Parliamentarians being killed by a deaf-dumb sniper - and you get a real sense of the local stories and legend that the Johnson boys would have grown up in. 

There’s a lot of weight given to David Garrick and Samuel Johnson being invited to the Walmisleys  - how it was a singular honour for a town kid and a garrison kid to be invited to the close. Hopkins notes the apparent coldness in the Johnson home but doesn’t attribute it to lack of love. In comparing the noisy conviviality of the Garricks she says, “there may have been no more love in the Garrick family than the Johnson, but their love was more articulate.” She doesn’t have much to say about Nathaniel, nothing except to suggest that he may have been a “problem son”.

Hopkins is great about Tetty though. She really brings out how pretty Tetty must have been, with her baby soft hair and general soft features, of how she was witty and gave as good as she got, how she was a good listener. It’s very much the picture of Tetty I want to include in my book. She also points out that the Porters were related to Dr Hunter, and suggests Samuel Johnson’s relationship with him may have affected the family’s acceptance of him. Personally, I think it’s a stretch, but it’s something to bear in mind.

Then Samuel Johnson leaves the book until the last two chapters and Hopkins talks about what she really wanted to, Anna Seward, the younger Lichfield set and all the crazy love lives. When I went to the Dr Johnson Reading Circle’s discussion of Wits and Wives with Kate Chisholm, she said she specifically didn’t choose to write about Anna Seward because she found her annoying. Hopkins reveals and revels in how annoying she could be. Full of passion and self-belief, Anna Seward seems like a truly exhausting person, but someone who made things happen around her - and was reliably expected to blab to everyone else also.

There was Seward’s near miss with a man called Taylor. She was all set to marry him but her family cooled things down a bit and Taylor married another woman. However, Seward started receiving messages from Taylor’s new wife which showed that Taylor still loved Anna more, and what’s more, that his wife had a thing for Anna also. When Taylor died, she moved into Lichfield as a devoted follower of Anna. Then there was her thing for the Vicar Choral, Saville. Although they claimed a never-consummated love, it was enough to make his wife kick him out into a small house next door, where they mooned at each other for years and years.

There’s the story of John Andre and Honora Sneyd, a story known by “every schoolchild” according to Hopkins.. I hadn’t heard of it. He loved her, she tolerated him but the families never really came together, so he went to America, where he was hanged as a British spy and turned into a tragic figure by Anna Seward. Honora later married Richard Edgeworth, who first entered Lichfield on a self-designed one-wheeled carriage, where he’d come to visit Erasmus Darwin.

Other visitors to Erasmus Darwin was Thomas Day, who was a massive twat and I don’t wish to go more into him than that.

Even the bit players in the book, like Dr Vyse had crazy stories where he was engaged to Sophia Streatfield (the long-necked woman who caught Thrale’s eye) and engaged to marry her. The only thing was, he was married, so he engaged to marry her immediately after his wife died. When she did, he ditched her and married someone else.

To say this book on the history of eighteenth century Lichfield devolves into a gossipy series of crazy romances is true, but it is much more entertaining for it. I loved it.  

Review: Lives of Houses edited by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee

 This book seems made for me right now. I am a (struggling) writer who spent the last year finding, buying and doing up the house that I hope will become my perfect little writer’s nest. I’ve visited many house museums over the years, spent ten years regularly visiting one (Dr Johnson’s House in Gough Square) and spent four years volunteering there. Houses have been on my mind.

This book started with a conference in 2017 entitled ‘The Lives of Houses’, which produced a number of contributions from all sorts of people. There are big name writers like Simon Armitage and Julian Barnes, fantastic biographers like Jenny Uglow and Hermione Lee, and a general smorgasbord of interesting people pitching in - yet the book is never quite as interesting as it could be.

Many of the chapters were about the house of a particular famous individual, many writers, a few composers, the odd politician but many of these chapters didn’t give much more than a potted biography of their subject through their house. The chapter on Samuel Johnson used Bolt Court to show the domestic chaos he lived in, and contrasted that with the order of the Thrale’s, essentially telling the same story as According to Queeney. There was a little about Hester Thrale Piozzi’s memoirs relating to her domestic sphere and Boswell’s Life relating to his more public-facing Bolt Court lifestyle, but it wasn’t much developed. There wasn’t much about how Johnson never owned any of those houses, and how a house could be a dangerous drain on his mental health, being both solitary and idle. 

Similarly, though many of the other chapters included biographies of people I was less aware of, they didn’t do much more than present the biography through a slightly different lens. The chapter in Edward Lear’s houses chiefly felt like a slimmed down part of his biography, the WH Auden chapters revealed to me that his name was Wystan and he lived in a bizarre melange of order and chaos. I found it interesting that both Churchill and Disraeli bought houses that were out of their budget and made them beholden to others - Disraeli was bailed out by party donors, and Churchill’s house was managed by the National Trust while he was still living in it. 

The better chapters were the ones that skirted around the topic a little more. There was a chapter about a Roman house in Morocco, which shed interesting light on what it may have been like being at the edge of the Roman world as it was collapsing. One chapter is a recollection of her mother’s house and how it reflected the character of her mother - something many of the more famous-focused pieces didn’t quite do. I really liked Hermione Lee’s ‘House of Air’, about visiting where famous houses used to be, and how they still stand in the works of those writers even if they are not actually standing any more.

The chapter that followed the formula of biography-through-house that I found most successful was the one about Yeats’s damp, flooding tower. This building was a project of romance and whimsy that was never really a successful house, but was a successful symbol to the writer himself. There was an interesting one about the Sir John Soame’s Museum, which I’ve visited many times but didn’t realise what a peculiar institution it is, or its bizarre relationship with other museums in general.

There was a section about the unhoused. About a writer who lived in a tent for a while (and had no permanent home after that), a really good one about a man who lived in mental institutions but yearned for the hills of his old home. The chapter where Stuart Masters interviewed a number of people at a homeless charity was interesting but felt sort of undercooked. I got the sense with a lot of the entries, that this was the work of very good writers who were knocking off some B-grade material quickly, when it had the potential to be something more transcendent. The less said about the poems the better.

So, while the book is pretty good, and in writing this review I have remembered more that I enjoyed about it than I initially thought, it feels more like an interesting enough distraction than it does something vital. 

Review: The Canterbury Tales by Harriet & Sophia Lee

 I planned to have a fully eighteenth century December, gulping great quantities of works from my favourite century till I was a fat, satisfied lump. It started well, and when I got to The Canterbury Tales by Harriet and Sophia Lee, I felt truly on a roll. Then I hit a brick wall.

My copy of The Canterbury Tales is a selection from the full set, published by Pandora as part of their ‘Mothers of the Novel’ project. It contains one by Sophia (‘The Clergyman’s Tale. Pembroke’) and the rest by Harriet, taken from the four volumes given.

Although the introduction doesn’t make it explicit, it seems that the first two books had a different frame story to the second. The first involves a group of travellers stranded in Canterbury by the weather, forced into telling each other stories to pass the time - hence, Canterbury Tales. The second frame story has a landlady telling a gentleman about the stories of the house’s residents, as he tries to wheedle out of her the story of one in particular. Both these frame stories were fun (I preferred the second, as it added extra intrigue on the stories themselves). 

The first tale was Sophia’s ‘The Clergyman’s Tale.vPembroke’. This was a fun, free-wheeling story with a fondness for twists and coincidences, like a more developed version on early amatory tales. It begins with a man called Pembroke who found jolliness to be a “mode of felicity he had never the pleasure to partake”. Pembroke does something completely inexplicable, he goes for a walk in Wales and rescues a young boy who is drowning in a pool. Instead of bringing the boy back and telling the story of how he found him, he lets everyone think that he’s a bastard son. I never could understand the logic of this action, perhaps it was from fear the real parents would turn up and take him back.

This boy, Henry, grows up with a chip on his shoulder and a (seemingly illicit) fondness for his (supposed) half-sister. He becomes a soldier, fighting in Wolfe’s campaign in Canada, a setting I’ve not read before. There he meets the most interesting character, Carey, a misanthrope who had previously lived with brahmin in India and become a vegetarian. Unlike the other soldiers, who’d rather eat Bacon than read him, he’s cultured and peculiar. He, of course, has a tragic backstory.

After some war shenanigans, Henry is ill and Carey saves him. The two go back to England, where Henry introduces his friend to everyone else. Coincidences ensue, threads are tied up and everyone is left rich and happy - it’s a fun story that enjoys the convolutions of its plot and has a satisfying ending.

It was the second tale, ‘The German’s Tale: Kruitzner’ that slammed the breaks on my reading experience. Although I don’t judge the effectiveness of a piece of writing by how long it takes me to read it, I do find it an indication. This 150 page short story took me longer to read than the 15,000 page The Count of Monte Cristo.

It has a decent set-up, a husband and wife travel into a town with their child. They have no money whatsoever but it seems clear from their deportment that they did once, and that there are secrets in their past. The woman is astonishingly pretty and the town big-wigs plot ways to get the husband out the way so they can seduce her. This is made even more complicated when a rich gent rolls into town looking for the disinherited son of the Duke of Bohemia. Of course the man (Kruitzner) is he, and he knows the rich gent wants to kill or imprison him to secure the Duchy for himself. 

The couple had previously given their first son to Kruitzner’s father, the Duke of Bohemia, to be raised as his heir. This son turns up suddenly, followed by a shady tag-along. He arranges a plan to sneak the family out the town and towards their inheritance in Prague. Things go wrong and the rich gent, who was tracking them down, is murdered. He says that the shady tag-along did it but everyone will suspect Kruitzner, so he’d better flit quickly.

Kruitzner reaches Prague, where his father has died and he has become the new Duke. He works to redeem his previously profligate ways and to connect with that older son he gave away, but the relationship never coheres. During a celebration, he sees the shady tag-along in the crowd and has him arrested. Shady tag-along says that it’s actually his son who’s the murderer, and that he’d led a band of brigands, murdering many. What’s more, he may be plotting to murder Kruitzner and take the Duchy. Kruitzner kicks the older son out, who dies leading a brigand raid, and then dies of heartbreak himself. It’s a downer ending.

This story was one of Byron’s favourite, and there was a lot in the plotting and conception of character to recommend it. The claustrophobia of the hunted family in the little town, preyed upon by the town’s elders, was really intriguing. The twist of the elder son being a villain, and the heartache on Kruitzner, was a genuine surprise. But the writing was so difficult to read. The sentences could be half a page long and with so many clauses and sub-clauses and parenthesis that the beginning of it seemed lost in the annals of time and the meaning of it gone completely. I’m a Samuel Johnson fan, he loves a long sentence but his contain these elaborate weighing of ideas, these sentences just wiggled all over the map. I was worried that the rest of the book would be a fearful slog. It wasn’t.

‘The Scotsman’s Tale. Claudine’ was a pleasant love story about a Scotsman in Denmark doing business for his father and falling in love with a formally aristocratic woman who has escaped the French Revolution. He pledges his love to her, but then his Father goes bankrupt and he has to work his way up to enough money to secure a life for them both. He doesn’t, he inherits it from a rich uncle, but everything goes nicely for them anyway. 

‘The Landlady’s Tale. Mary Lawson’ was a fun, tricky little beast. Mary is seduced by an army captain and, pregnant and alone, decides to go to his family seat to worm her way back into his affections. There she discover’s he’s married and loses her own baby. The captain’s wife has a baby and is too sick to nurse her, so Mary becomes the wet-nurse to him, falling deeply in love with the child. She falls so in love with him that she steals him and spends the next ten years raising him and moving about.

She’s staying and a boarding house when she gets a message from her family that they are sick. Leaving the now young man behind, she goes to tend to them. During this time, the Captain, now a politician with gout, stays at the boarding house. His servants are a rough lot and one talks the son into stealing something. The Captain is furious and manipulates the law to get him sent to Botany Bay, with the boy dying on the way. Informed that the boy he transported was his son, the Captain spirals into depression and death, and Mary goes mad. It’s another jolly one. I probably enjoyed this story the most, the emotions were strong and the sense of inevitable tragedy heightened it.

The next story was the flimsier ‘The Friend’s Tale. Stanhope’. This was about an optimist and a cynic who but heads over whether life and people are anything worth knowing. The optimist wins and it’s all very nice. 

The last, ‘The Wive’s Tale. Julia’, was my second favourite in the collection. It starts the funniest, with a man congratulating himself on starting in life, at the age of fifty, when he marries a sixteen-year-old girl he can show off at parties. There’s a lot of fun poked at the age gap, the marriage market, and the way he only wants a wife he can display. The story gets darker and darker, as the relationship founders, as new attractions come along, and as the rich man’s money fritters away. It actually turns out that a boy/young man he has been generously providing for is not his bastard son, but a stronger claimant of the one bit of wealth he hasn’t spent yet - this boy/man also holds quite the torch for the rich man’s wife. Very peculiarly, it has a happy ending for the boy/man and the young wife, who marry and become wealthy - but only because of the fortuitous death of a small baby. Something that’s painted in the story as inevitable and ultimately, a stroke of luck.

Ultimately, I enjoyed this collection. Even ‘The German’s Tale’ had an interesting story, and only ‘The German’s Tale’ was a struggle to read. I won’t rush to read another Harriet Lee book soon.

Review: The Devil on Two Crutches by Le Sage, translated by Tobias Smollett

 

In reading this edition of Le Sage’s Le Diable boiteux, I’m getting an eighteenth century two-fer-one. A book written in French in the early eighteenth century, and a translation by Tobias Smollett in the middle of the century. This edition very specifically focuses on the question of translation and involves a whole raft of appendices and endnotes that dig into those weeds a little too far for my own purposes, I just wanted to read a good story.

While The Devil Upon Crutches didn’t exactly give me a good story, it did give me a patchwork of pretty decent stories, some just character sketches, some full narratives. I’m not quite sure it’s compelling enough to fight a duel over the last copy in a shop, as apparently some French people did with the original release, but it’s an entertaining read nonetheless.

Smollett translated this work when he was still in his hack-life, before he married into wealth and played the part of disinterested gentleman. It was written after Roderick Random and about the same time as Peregrine Pickle, and was seemingly written as a result of Smollett’s successful translation of Le Sage’s Gil Blas but before his most prestigious translation work of Don Quixote.

There’s a preface called ‘Asmodeus’s Crutches’, which summarises the whole book, placed at the beginning before the reader has read any of it. It’s annoying. But then the book starts. A Spanish man with the extremely lengthy name of Don Cleophas Leandro Perez Zambullo is emerging from a lover’s window, where he is waylaid by a group of ruffians who want to force him to marry the woman or die. In his escape from them, he climbs rooftops and finds his way into a dusty attic full of strange, alchemical items. He hears a voice from a jar asking to be released. Despite the voice saying he is a demon, Zambullo releases him.

The demon is Asmodeus, he is not one of the top demons, he can’t poke kings or lawyers, but he has his own thing. He’s the demon in charge of creating silly fads and fashions (so thanks to him for Labubus), he’s also the demon in charge of prompting unsuitable love matches and general daft love shenanigans. He is utterly grateful to Zambullo and so decides to give him a tour of Madrid from a demon’s eye perspective.

They fly up into the air, where Asmodeus is seemingly able to take the tops of houses to see what’s inside “as a man sees what is in a pie when the upper crust is taken off”. He’s also able to read the inner thoughts and histories of the people and the two essentially go on a little tour, taking in the sights. As such, they get to see many of the things people sniggered at in the eighteenth century, people disguising their own infirmity and ugliness, cuckolded husbands and unfaithful wives, general deception and disguise.

I particularly liked the handsome beau, who comes home and takes out his teeth, off his wig, then his wooden arm and leg, sleeping with “what’s left of him”. In the same house there’s a beauty who once accidentally dropped her false rump at the altar during mass. The demon says that if were not a devil he’d “choose to be a father of the Holy Inquisition”, as everyone dotes on them. One 35 year old one has a mild cold and is inundated with widows bearing cough syrups.

They see a tragic poet who gives birth to twins.. or at least couplets, before having an argument with a comic poet about which form of poetry is the most difficult. This fight has them romping about in their underwear and looking silly. They visit a prison and see a highwayman receiving a file in a loaf of broad, follow Death on his rounds (frequently seeing how happy the relatives in for a payday are) and even dive into dreams. Asmodeus says that dreams are just wishes that the heart makes when we’re fast asleep and all have rational explanations.

Occasionally, Asmodeus finds people with a more involved story, and we get little interpolated novellas. There’s one about a rich man, Count Belfour, who wants Leonora as a sidepiece and corrupts her duenna onto his side. It gets complicated, with disguises, a brother coming back from university, and a whole lot of razzmatazz until reaching a happy ending. It’s a decent little amatory tale of its sort. The second volume has an even more involved love story, with a genuine love triangle, people being captured by Barbary pirates as slaves, kidnapping - and all that other stuff. The point of this tale, to Asmodeus, is the lasting friendship between two of the male characters, something that he says could not have happened if they were women because “women have no friendships.” Fair to say, the demon is not all-knowing.

There was a little action scene at the end of the first volume. A house was burning down with a young lady in it, and the father pronounces that whoever will save her can marry her. Asmodeus goes down, dressed as Zambullo, and rescues her, looking like Zambullo did it. At the end of the book, he takes Zambullo back to the family to claim his ‘reward’, and so everything ends happily - except for Asmodeus, who is summoned back into the alchemists chamber and presumably locked in a bottle again.

This is one of those eighteenth-century fictions where many of the parts are interesting, there are some genuinely engaging little snapshots and stories and some funny little lines, but it doesn’t build to much of a whole. As such, the time spent is enjoyable, but it doesn’t hold the imagination much afterwards. 

Review: Captain Singleton by Daniel Defoe

 Daniel Defoe really seemed to luck out with Robinson Crusoe. He realised the narrative potential in Alexander Selkirk’s tale, sanded off the rough edges and created the archetypical desert island narrative. He even managed to create one of the most iconic moments in literature when Crusoe finds the footprint of another human on the beach. The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton is less lucky in this regard but is probably a more entertaining book. 

It’s a typical Defoe novel in some ways, someone without the wealth to easily do good finds themselves committing crime, earning enough cash to repent of their evil deeds and live happily ever after. As usual, the actions of the character are more interesting before they repent and he better describes processes than he does characters. However, Captain Singleton does have some sly humour in the telling and Defoe does create a genuinely fun and likeable character - though not the one of the title.

Our protagonist starts off as a reasonably well off little boy who is kidnapped in toddlerhood from outside his Islington home. Siân Rees’s Moll, went into quite a lot of detail about the Mayor of London’s underhanded encouragement of kidnappers to rid his streets of waifs, strays and embryonic footpads (and the selling of them to the New World, slavery not yet being coded by skin colour). 

Of course the people kidnapping the young boy are ‘gypsies’, a peculiar racial myth that was the latter Victorian equivalent of quicksand in the eighties. His mother being soon hanged for “her good works”, a little sardonic note, and one of many that pepper this book and give it more character than other Defoe works.

He’s dragooned onto a ship and becomes the property of a Portuguese man. There’s a lot of Portuguese bashing in this book, just being in their presence teaches the boy (now named Bob) to be “an arrant thief” and (worst of all to the British mind) “a bad sailor.” These Portuguese are every brand of despicable, and they are defined by their underhandedness and cowardice, and, as we know every English person hates a coward. At one point, the Portuguese sailors go to a Spanish port and try to get the inquisition off their back by declaring him to be Muslim - something a quick foreskin check denies. 

His master takes his wages and beats him, so Bob is pretty keen to get out of his company. When a group of sailors mutiny, he joins that as the nearest way to get away. This leads him and the mutineers stranded on Madagascar. It’s genuinely interesting how the group of mutineers form themselves into a band and the roles they take within the group. Much like historical pirates, much of their planning is done democratically but there are voices that hold more sway. One of these is Bob’s, he’s young, brave, and has more of a knack for strategy than the weak, cowardly Portuguese - though Bob’s plans are usually the most violent option. Eventually they cobble together a raft that gets them off the island and into mainland Africa.

A big chunk of the book then tells the group’s travel across Africa to get to a safe port. Much of the continent was unknown to Europeans at the time and the journey attempts to be within the realms of possibility but bears no relation to reality. If possible, the group avoid inhabited areas, and they generally try to barter their ways through other civilisations with trinkets and gewgaws made by a very skilled metal worker. It’s interesting how Defoe tries to differentiate the people he meet, he’s aware of Africa as a place containing multitudes of people with many different languages - it’s not a non-racist view of the people, but it does allow for variation and difference. For example, the more aggressive Africans they meet are those who have met Europeans before, which is rather telling.

One of the first groups they meet have a misunderstanding, resulting in a battle where Bob leads from the front. The king of the group is killed and the prince injured. Because they have experience in bullet wounds, they heal the prince, who then pledges himself and a number of his people to carry the Europeans stuff. Again, we have the familiar image of the black people carrying the white men’s stuff, but Defoe gives the prince as much character and agency as he gives most of his characters. 

They reach the far coast, having acquired a fortune in gold nuggets and ‘elephant’s teeth’ and go their separate ways. Bob squanders his fortune in London and so quickly hops back on a boat, joining a mutiny and emerging as a pirate captain. 

It’s odd that when Bob becomes a pirate, the book loses a lot of it’s swashbuckle. These pirates are generally more into stealing beef than booty, and the book reads more like a merchant’s tally than a tale of derring-do. There’s a lot about tactics, about the right place for a pirate to ply his trade, and the right kinds of ships to rob - both for the goods within them, and the potential repercussions of robbing certain kinds of ships. There’s also a lot about how the pirates share equally and the level of trust they have for each other. One of the strangest parts of this book is when the crew besiege a tree-trunk, which is linked to a whole network of Vietcong-esque tunnels.

This is when Defoe introduces one of the most compelling characters in any of the works I’ve read by him, William the Quaker. As a Quaker, William is a pacifist, but he’s still a pirate. Not only that, he’s the wisest and wiliest character in the book, who would probably make a far better captain than Bob. He serves as a conscience, speaking against killing the slaves who took over their pirate ship, but he steps back when the pirates sell those slaves on. He’s frequently funny and reads situations better than Bob, or anyone else on the crew. There’s something compelling about this contradictory character.

After a while of sailing about and plunder, Bob is getting to the stage of the book where he has enough money to have a spiritual conversion and end the book. This is conveyed more organically than similar conversions in Defoe works, and starts with Bob’s profound sense of rootlessness and loneliness. Bob has no family, no place that’s ever been a home, and his life as a pirate has been partly a consequence of his lack of connection. William the Quaker prods him along this path, emphasising the belongingness in Christendom, learning to accept a brotherhood of man rather than everyone for himself.

This conversion is painful to Bob. He looks at his previous life and sees it as, pointless at best, downright villainous at worst. He’s even led to consider suicide. William convinces him to lay that aside and to join him in England, disguised as Armenians, where Bob eventually settles down and even marries William’s sister - leading to our happy ending.

Captain Singleton hasn’t had the cultural impact of Robinson Crusoe, or even Moll Flanders, but it is one of Defoe’s more engaging works, with themes of belonging and identity and an (albeit tentative) attempt at humanising the ‘barbarians’ of Africa. It’s not perfect, but it is worth being read more.