Daniel Defoe: Conversations with the Eidolon

Throughout his long form fictions and periodical essays, Daniel Defoe brings points of factuality and fictionality into contact and collision, seeking to provide readers with both instruction and diversion. This chapter explores the conversability of Defoe’s writing as it manifests through letters, footnotes, interpolated tales, dialogues and, in the case of the Review (1704–13), eidolon. Bringing together The Storm (1704), the Review and Colonel Jack (1722) the chapter considers how Defoe put the printed page to work to effect multiple conversations with readers. Challenging the notion that the Review , as a government-sponsored publication, is dense and even inaccessible to readers, this chapter examines how Defoe used conversation not only to make his writing entertaining, but to make it fictional, framing his periodical’s histories and parables in ways that resonate very clearly with the fictions Defoe would pen more than a decade later.