Daniel Defoe - Atalantis Major

In point of fact, Harley's concern for the loyalty of the representative peers is unique in the history of these elections. In subsequent Parliaments, the Scottish peers seldom, if ever, voted against the Government – even at the trial of Lord Lovat in 1745-6. For one thing, almost without exception, the representative peers were dependent on governmental subsidies and this dependence increased during the course of the eighteenth century (see J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England [London: Penguin, 1973], p. 180; and Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne [London: Macmillan, 1967], p. 393). The practice of electing a representative peerage for Scotland was discontinued after 1782 (see Trevelyan, op. cit. , 235).

Trevelyan, op. cit. , 58.

James R. Sutherland, Defoe (London: Methuen, 1950), p. 179.

The Letters of Daniel Defoe , ed. by George Harris Healey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 296.

Ibid. , pp. 294-295.

Healey reports that "in such issues as I have been able to find of the Scots Postman, or the New Edinburgh Gazette , there is no mention of the Scots Atalantis " ( Letters , p. 306, n. 1). The title of this work and of Defoe's Atalantis Major are derived from Mrs. Manley's New Atalantis or Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality of both Sexes from the New Atalantis, an island in the Mediterranean (1709). The OED records that the word atalantis enjoyed a brief currency in the eighteenth century with the meaning, "a secret or scandalous history."

Letters , p. 307.

John Robert Moore, A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), p. 82.

Page 12, line 5: do is omitted before this ; page 16, line 24: an for on ; page 17, line 6: Grandfathers for Grandfather's ; page 19, the catch-word, the for this ; page 20, line 5: run for ran ; page 22, line 22: of for off ; page 28, the catch-word, they for the ; page 36, the catch-word, Cha- for Courage ; page 37, the catch-word, Lansd for Lands . In addition, there are several places where the printer uses eighteenth-century variant spellings such as ballances (pp. 5, 8), mannaged (p. 2), quallifie (p. 8), Soveraign (p. 41) and steddy (p. 15). Eighteenth-century orthographic practice would have permitted such spellings. The word entitled , however, appears on page five as both entituled and intituled .

None of the various copies I have examined contains typographical differences – even in the case of the typographical errors.

On page 38, line 25, the word Big is used where Large would have been the English usage; on page 42, line 3, the word Bann'd is used for Swore and defined in the text as an "Atalantic word"; on page 43, line 4, the word evite is used instead of avoid .

William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life, and Recently Discovered Writings (London: Hotten, 1869), I, 177; Paul Dottin, Daniel Defoe , trans. Louise Ragan (New York, Macaulay, 1929), p. 155; John Robert Moore, Daniel Defoe, Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 191; and Moore, A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), p. 82.