Produced by Chris Curnow, Eleni Christofaki, Joseph Cooper and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
This book contains inconsistent punctuation and various misspellings which have been retained as they appear in the original. An Errata List with unresolved printer errors can be found at the end of the book. Superscripts are preceded by the [^] sign and enclosed in braces if more than one letter is in superscript. The illustration at page 136 was placed at the end of the section so as not to disrupt the text.
William E. Conway, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
George Robert Guffey, _University of California, Los Angeles_
Maximillian E. Novak, _University of California, Los Angeles_
David S. Rodes, _University of California, Los Angeles_
Richard C. Boys, _University of Michigan_
Vinton A. Dearing, _University of California, Los Angeles_
Earl Miner, _University of California, Los Angeles_
Samuel H. Monk, _University of Minnesota_
Everett T. Moore, _University of California, Los Angeles_
Lawrence Clark Powell, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
James Sutherland, _University College, London_
H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., _University of California, Los Angeles_
Robert Vosper, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
Edna C. Davis, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
Mary Kerbret, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
A standard modern history of the English novel speaks of "the appearance of the novel round about 1700. Nothing that preceded it in the way of prose fiction can explain it."[1] Though today many scholars would assert that "nothing" is too strong a term, just how much of the original fiction written under the later Stuarts could "explain" Defoe and Richardson? Most late seventeenth-century novels, it is true, are rogue biographies, scandal-chronicles, translations and imitations of French _nouvelles_, or short sensational romances of love, intrigue, and adventure with fantastic plots and wooden characters. Only occasionally was a tale published which showed that it was not examples of the novelist's craft that were wanting to inspire the achievement of a Defoe, but rather the sustained application of that craft over hundreds of pages by the unique combination of talents of a Defoe himself.