Defoe's Hand in "A Journal of the Earl of Marr's Proceedings (1716)"

Abstract

URING my first visit to the Huntington Library in 1940, it LJ became apparent to me that the Introduction to A Journal of the Earl of Marr's Proceedings must have been written by Daniel Defoe. It was also apparent that the Journal itself was a forgery, issued in London by one of Defoe's principal publishers and, although lacking any significant features of Defoe's own style, conforming closely to his usage in such matters as italics, spelling, and punctuation. Through a minute examination of the Stuart Papers, and especially through a study of the original narrative as it was printed for the Earl of Mar in France,' I have discovered that the Journal was actually a forgery-but first put together by several different hands for the Earl of Mar himself. In this paper I shall show what Mar intended to do with the pamphlet when he had it printed in France, and how Defoe employed it for entirely different purposes when it came to his attention in England. Thus the tract affords an example of an important political writing used almost without change as propaganda for opposing parties. Still more significantly, the tract itself can be traced, with dates, places, and authors' names, from its first inception and through its many revisions to its wide dispersal over western Europe. We have here perhaps the most complete extant example of the development of an eighteenth-century political tract.