Memoirs of a Cavalier

Memoirs of a Cavalier

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Title: Memoirs of a Cavalier A Military Journal of the Wars in
Germany, and the Wars in England. From the Year 1632 to the Year
1648.
Author: Daniel Defoe
Release Date: May 4, 2004 [EBook #12259]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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OF A CAVALIER ***

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MEMOIRS OF A CAVALIER
or
A Military Journal of the Wars in Germany, and the Wars in England.
From the Year 1632 to the Year 1648.
By Daniel Defoe
Edited with Introduction and Notes by Elizabeth O'Neill

1922

INTRODUCTION.
Daniel Defoe is, perhaps, best known to us as the author of Robinson
Crusoe, a book which has been the delight of generations of boys and
girls ever since the beginning of the eighteenth century. For it was then
that Defoe lived and wrote, being one of the new school of prose
writers which grew up at that time and which gave England new forms
of literature almost unknown to an earlier age. Defoe was a vigorous
pamphleteer, writing first on the Whig side and later for the Tories in
the reigns of William III and Anne. He did much to foster the growth of
the newspaper, a form of literature which henceforth became popular.
He also did much towards the development of the modern novel,
though he did not write novels in our sense of the word. His books
were more simple than is the modern novel. What he really wrote were
long stories told, as is Robinson Crusoe, in the first person and with so
much detail that it is hard to believe that they are works of imagination
and not true stories. "The little art he is truly master of, is of forging a
story and imposing it upon the world as truth." So wrote one of his
contemporaries. Charles Lamb, in criticizing Defoe, notices this
minuteness of detail and remarks that he is, therefore, an author suited
only for "servants" (meaning that this method can appeal only to
comparatively uneducated minds). Really as every boy and girl knows,
a good story ought to have this quality of seeming true, and the fact that
Defoe can so deceive us makes his work the more excellent reading.
The Memoirs of a Cavalier resembles Robinson Crusoe in so far as it is
a tale told by a man of his own experiences and adventures. It has just
the same air of truth and for a long time after its first publication in
1720 people were divided in opinion as to whether it was a book of real
memoirs or not. A critical examination has shown that it is Defoe's own
work and not, as he declares, the contents of a manuscript which he
found "by great accident, among other valuable papers" belonging to
one of King William's secretaries of state. Although his gifts of
imagination enabled him to throw himself into the position of the
Cavalier he lapses occasionally into his own characteristic prose and
the style is often that of the eighteenth rather than the seventeenth
century, more eloquent than quaint. Again, he is not careful to hide

inconsistencies between his preface and the text. Thus, he says in his
preface that he discovered the manuscript in 1651; yet we find in the
Memoirs a reference to the Restoration, which shows that it must have
been written after 1660 at least. There is abundant proof that the book
is really a work of fiction and that the Cavalier is an imaginary
character; but, in one sense, it is a true history, inasmuch as the author
has studied the events and spirit of the time in which his scene is laid
and, though he makes many mistakes of detail, he gives us a very true
picture of one of the most interesting periods in English and European
history. The Memoirs thus represent the English historical novel in its
beginnings, a much simpler thing than it was to become in the hands of
Scott and later writers.
The period in which the scene is laid is that of the English Civil War, in
which the Cavalier fought on the side of King Charles I against the
Puritans. But his adventures in this war belong to the second part of the
book. In the first part, he tells of his birth and