The Charles Dickens Letters Project

To DR CHARLES MACKAY,1 15 MAY 1869

Extract in Sotheby’s catalogue, Nov 1931; MS 1 p.; dated Office of All the Year Round, 15 May 1869; addressed Dr McKay.

I have been looking through the new De Foe volumes.2 The point is established beyond doubt, I think, that he wrote long after he was supposed to have retired.3 But I should say that numbers of the papers now printed as his are assigned to him on very insufficient evidence.4

• 1. Charles Mackay (1814-89; Dictionary of National Biography), LL.D. Glasgow, 1846; poet and journalist; regular contributor to All the Year Round from 1868; see Pilgrim Letters 1, p. 485n, and Pilgrim Letters 5, p. 200n.
• 2. William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings; Extending from 1716 to 1729, 3 vols, 1869 (in the 1878 sale Catalogue of the Library of CD, ed. J. H. Stonehouse, 1935). It provided the basis for “A Gentleman of the Press”, All the Year Round, 10 & 17 July 69, N.S. II, 132-7, 156-61, of which Mackay was possibly the author.
• 3. CD refers only to Defoe’s retirement from political controversy. Employed on government business under William III and Anne, Defoe was commonly believed, on the fall of the Tory ministry (1714), to have retired from political activity. Forster expressed the general belief (Historical and Biographical Essays, 2 vols, 1858) when he wrote that on the exclusion of the Tories, the achievement of what he had struggled for, Defoe withdrew “finally and for ever from the struggle” (vol. 2, pp. 90-91).
• 4. Lee had discovered six letters of 1718 from Defoe to Charles De La Faye, of the Secretary of State’s office, clear evidence of Defoe’s continuing political involvement (Lee, vol. 1, pp. ixff); see The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. George Harris Healey (Oxford), 1955, pp. 450-61. On the basis of his discovery, Lee claimed to have traced the previously unidentified political writings that fill his vols 2 and 3 (519 pp. and 471 pp. respectively). P. N. Furbank & W. R. Owen, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven & London), 1988, offers a general assessment of works by or assigned to Defoe, and reviews (ch. 6) Lee’s work.