Colonel Jack ed. by Daniel Defoe

Reviewed by: Colonel Jack ed. by Daniel Defoe Hal Gladfelder Daniel Defoe. Colonel Jack, ed. Gabriel Cervantes and Geoffrey Sill. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2016. Pp. 416. $18.95 (paper). Writing a century after Colonel Jack (1722) was first published, Charles Lamb maintained that in “its deep knowledge of human nature” it “very much exceed[s] Crusoe.” Nevertheless, the work never gained the fame or canonical status of Robinson Crusoe, or the critical attention, especially in recent decades, of Moll Flanders and Roxana. Indeed, after Samuel Holt Monk’s 1965 edition (reissued 1989) went out of print, Colonel Jack has only been available as part of Pickering and Chatto’s worthy but expensive set of The Novels of Daniel Defoe. All the more reason to welcome this excellent and affordable new edition from Broadview, for which Messrs. Cervantes and Sill have provided a reliable text, a fine and wide-ranging critical introduction, and a useful selection of appendices to illuminate the work’s historical, political, and literary contexts. They have also included the 1822 letter from Lamb to Walter Wilson that I quoted above, one of the earliest and still most insightful critical appraisals of Defoe’s fiction. Published late in the same year, 1722, as Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack revisits much of the same narrative material, but in substituting a male for a female narrator, Defoe completely transforms the social and affective implications of their shared experiences. Both Moll and Jack marry five times, for example, although Moll marries out of economic necessity, and only so long as she is young enough to be viewed as a desirable commodity on the marriage “market.” Jack only takes to marriage in the novel’s final third, after he has made his fortune as a Virginia plantation owner and retired to London (though a brief and almost accidental late-life career as a soldier of fortune awaits). For that reason, Moll’s experience of marriage is one of meticulous financial calculation and what she calls “politick Schemes,” whereas Jack’s is one of naïve, even hapless entrapment by women’s “Witch-Craft.” As he writes of his second wife, “I know not, by what fatallity that was upon me, I was prevail’d with afterward to Marry her”; and the overall mood of his marital misadventures is one of perplexity. Similarly, while both Jack and Moll fall into pickpocketing and street-robbery as a consequence of poverty, Jack does so as a guileless street-urchin, ignorant of any notion of property and thus of crime, whereas Moll turns criminal as a woman of fifty, after the death of her fifth husband has left her with two children to feed and an acute awareness of her limited prospects in life. Thus, while Moll’s criminal career is overshadowed by a sense of sinfulness and anxiety, Jack’s has [End Page 58] few moral consequences: when he learns that his thefts cause pain to his victims he simply gives up thieving, and his sense of innate gentility—instilled by a nurse who taught him to “remember, that I was a Gentleman” by birth—is undisturbed. Colonel Jack’s career as a boy-criminal takes up the first third of his novel, and this part of the text—particularly the episode in which Jack hides stolen money in a hollow tree, despairs when he thinks he has lost it, and roars for joy when he finds it again— was singled out by Lamb as evincing Defoe’s “deep knowledge of human nature.” Indeed Lamb only cites this part of the novel in his letter to Wilson, and many readers, myself included, have rated Colonel Jack’s childhood above the geographically wide-ranging scenes of his later life. One of the noteworthy features of this Cervantes-Sill edition of Colonel Jack is their greater emphasis on the novel’s second part, in which Jack is transported as an indentured servant to Virginia and rises from the condition of slave to overseer to owner. As noted in the introduction, Defoe offers an acute portrait of a colonial Atlantic society in which ideas of racial identity and of different categories of subjection (transported criminal, voluntarily indentured...

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