Editions’ begins with the Attribution Controversy: in 1790 George Chalmers attributed 81 titles to Defoe; by 1960 John Robert Moore counted 570. This led to a trio of works by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens overhauling the bibliography: The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (1988), Defoe De-attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s ‘Checklist’ (1996), and A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (1998). Various scholars reinstated titles; various other scholars wondered whether Defoe even wrote Moll Flanders and Roxana. But editors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were confident enough in identifying the Defovian to produce multi-volume Works, while in this century Pickering & Chatto have published to date forty-four volumes. The chapter concludes with a look at some of the more arresting versions of Robinson Crusoe – such as the one in ’Pitman’s shorthand "(corresponding style)"’.

This essay examines Charlotte Lennox’s satirical poetry in her collection of thirty poems in Poems on Several Occasions (1747). Many of these poems were republished between 1750 and 1785 in periodicals and miscellanies, such as The New Foundling Hospital of Wit, published in England and America. I argue that Lennox’s targets were frequently the social systems designed to restrict women’s influence to domestic settings. At a time when elements of participatory democracy were gaining global traction and when many political poems engaged with social unrest, Lennox wrote, “Satire, like a magnifying Glass, may aggravate every Defect, in order to make its Deformity appear more hideous.” Lennox’s amplifying attention to the dominant culture’s method of entrapping women and her advocacy for participatory democracy are informed by her exposure as a preteen with Scottish and Irish parents to a diverse range of national and racial backgrounds, including Mohawks, Hurons, Iroquois, Africans, Dutch, and French residents, in Albany and Schenectady, New York. She uses satiric poetry to cast an accusing light on unjust power structures and to promote democratic aims by alluding to the belief that the power of the government is vested in all those who are governed.