A Jacobite Antiquary in Grub Street: Captain John Stevens (c.1662–1726)

Abstract

Some of the multifarious literary activities of Captain John Stevens have received attention from specialists. His journal of the Irish wars of 1688–91, not published until 1912, is now generally recognised as being one of the most important primary sources for the campaign. His place in the history of travel writing, as the translator into English of classical works in Spanish and Portuguese on the history, geography and ethnology of the Iberian world, has been established by Dr. Colin Steele. His major contribution to English monastic history, as the translator and continuator of Sir Thomas Dugdale, though less well known, and deserving closer study, has been recognised by David Douglas. More recently a Portuguese scholar has paid tribute to him as one of the first writers to introduce the English reader to Portuguese history and literature. English Hispanists have acknowledged his prolific output as a translator of Spanish authors, notably Cervantes and Quevedo. More controversially, in Pat Rogers’s fascinating study of the literary underclass in London during the age of Pope and Swift, he is ignominiously—and, I shall argue, unjustly—indexed under the heading ‘Dunces and their allies’.