Prudence and Plagiarism in the 1740 Continuation of Defoe's Roxana

Abstract

A number of spurious continuations of Defoe’s Roxana (1724) were published up to the end of the nineteenth century. One unjustly neglected later version is that which appeared in 1740, attributed to Elizabeth Applebee. At least seven different texts are worked into the Applebee edition, making it a complex production, the major source being William de Britaine’s seventeenth-century conduct manual, Humane Prudence. This article recovers the complicated publication history of the latter work and traces its modification and use in the 1740 Roxana. It concludes by asking why the continuations of Defoe’s novel have been neglected, asserting that their history can reveal much about the opportunism of eighteenth century publishers, the commercial pressures on print culture of the time, and shifting expectations about narrative closure.

Plagiarism, Parody, and Pastiche: Eliza Haywood writes back to Daniel Defoe and J. M. Coetzee

“…(Defoe, Robinson Crusoe) As I have already discussed, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Roxana are Foe's primary intertexts, both of which are born of Susan Barton's The Female Castaway. As Nicholas Seager (2009) notes, "the rise in its critical fortunes over the last forty years has seen Daniel Defoe's Roxana (1724) . .…”

“…Defoe's hurried and ambiguous ending of Roxana has Roxana, recently married to a man who loves her and whom she loves in return, exposed to her husband the wayward life she has led; he dies soon thereafter, leaving Roxana to repent. The ending left the work open to various revisions, additions, and rewritings; Seager (2009) points to six such editions, those published in 1740, 1745, 1750, 1755, 1765, and 1775: "A number of these splice a new ending onto Defoe's text, either rewarding the penitent prostitute for her reformation or punishing her marital and maternal transgressions in the original novel" (2009, p. 357). The 1740 version cuts the final paragraph of the original novel and adds 60 pages of Eliza Haywood's The British Recluse as well as plagiarised sections of William deBritaine's 1697 text Humane Prudence.…”