A History of the Lives and Exploits of the Most Remarkable Pirates, Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-Robbers, &C. Interspersed with Several Tales, and Pleasant Songs.

by Daniel Defoe

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.Western literary study flows out of eighteenth-century works by Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Denis Diderot, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others. Experience the birth of the modern novel, or compare the development of language using dictionaries and grammar discourses. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition ++++National Library of ScotlandT190100Capt. Charles Johnson = Daniel Defoe. Consists of the lives of the pirates selected from the first volume of Defoe's 'A general history of the robberies and murders of the most notorious pyrates .. by Captain Charles Johnson', interspersed with selections from the lives of highwaymen and others from Capt. Alexander Smith's 'The history of the lives of the most noted highway-men'. printed and sold by T. Aris, 1742. [2],373, [3]p., plates; 2

388 pages, Paperback

First published August 2, 2002

About the author

Daniel Defoe was an English novelist, journalist, merchant, pamphleteer and spy. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, which is claimed to be second only to the Bible in its number of translations. He has been seen as one of the earliest proponents of the English novel, and helped to popularise the form in Britain with others such as Aphra Behn and Samuel Richardson. Defoe wrote many political tracts, was often in trouble with the authorities, and spent a period in prison. Intellectuals and political leaders paid attention to his fresh ideas and sometimes consulted him.
Defoe was a prolific and versatile writer, producing more than three hundred works—books, pamphlets, and journals—on diverse topics, including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural. He was also a pioneer of business journalism and economic journalism.

Reviews

[Michael Meeuwis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Curioser and curioser, pirate-wise. Most of the expected things lacking in Defoe's pirate novels, including rape, amputation, vivid descriptions of gunfights, and so on forward actually appear in this book, which is presented as non-fiction. The text itself is a dog's breakfast--albeit a fascinating one--of accounts of piracy, violence, prostitution, legal documents relating to on-board pirate law and on-shore pirate prosecutions, and seemingly whatever else Defoe could find to copy or fabricate. Defoe's introduction even says that the proceedings are repetitive--and, boy howdy, are they--but for the reader interested in skimming there is much of interest here. I think it's safe to say that this is the ur-text for the pirate as we've come to know him, rather than Defoe's weirdly bloodless pirate novels.