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Reviewed by:
  • Captain Singleton by Daniel Defoe
  • Srividhya Swaminathan (bio)
Captain Singleton by Daniel Defoe, ed. Manushag N. Powell
Broadview Press, 2019. 424pp. $17.95. ISBN 978-1554813414.

Captain Singleton is not often thought of as a masterpiece of the Daniel Defoe canon. In her introduction to the reissue of Shiv Kumar’s 1969 Oxford edition, Penelope Wilson deemed that the novel was not comparable in “literariness” because it was “a hasty attempt to repeat the success of Robinson Crusoe” (Oxford University Press, 1990, vii). As the first long work of prose fiction following the wildly popular Robinson Crusoe, this story returns to the themes of trade, commerce, and encounters with the Other; however, unlike Crusoe, Singleton ranges over vast geographical distances and interacts with a greater mix of peoples, both European and non-European. In scope, Singleton’s journey reads partly as a travel narrative (with colonialist overtones) and partly as pirate narrative (with mercantilist overtones), so critics point to a lack of internal cohesion that makes the novel difficult to discuss. However, scholarly interest in the text has been consistent, mainly because of the improbably rich detail of both Singleton’s journey across the interior of Africa and his success as a pirate in the Atlantic. As an adventure story, Singleton has a great deal a merit, so a teaching edition of this novel was long overdue.

Manushag N. Powell’s carefully edited and meticulously researched edition does an outstanding job of combining interpretive lens and pedagogical glossing. In her introduction, she states that the edition is “specifically meant for the enjoyment of classrooms,” and she helps to frame a classroom accessible to specialists and generalists who might make use of the novel (9). The succinct, twenty-five-page introduction provides a useful overview of the scholarship around the novel— Singleton’s engagement with piracy and African enslavement; his strong homosocial or homoerotic bond with William; his creative description of unknown (during his time) global geographies—framing the text as providing greater nuance to the worldview that Defoe creates so vividly in Robinson Crusoe. Powell also suggests a useful interpretive lens to guide both teacher and student reading the novel. Rather than reconciling the bifurcated narrative or choosing to privilege one type of narration over the other, she reads the novel as Defoe’s response to English cultural anxieties about trade, commerce, and colonial acquisition. With its many shifting landscapes (and seascapes), Singleton’s story expands the ideas that were so compelling in Crusoe’s narrative. Singleton experiences various forms of captivity, turns to piracy, and finally retires in secrecy with his dubiously acquired fortune and close confidante, William. As he tries to find his place in the world, Singleton develops [End Page 325] as a character from an amoral young man who has been cast adrift from his sense of place and identity to a successful trader who forms strong ties through his friendship with William, the Quaker, to a home. Powell characterizes the novel as “a tale of a man fated to feel forever apart from humankind but still searching high and low for a sense of connection” (13). This act of searching—for human connection, for prosperity through trade, for a sense of place—comes through in Powell’s glossing of the text.

Previous editions, specifically Kumar (1969, 1990) and the Furbank and Owens (2008), target specific audiences. Kumar’s annotations are primarily explanations of terms used in the novel and are aimed at students unfamiliar with eighteenth-century contexts. Furbank and Owens are oriented toward scholars. This edition seems more ambitious in appealing to teachers, students, and scholars alike. Reading the novel as a response to Crusoe, Powell includes short statements of com parison that would assist in teaching the two novels together. For non-specialists in particular, the explanatory footnotes provide helpful suggestions for how the text can be engaged to facilitate classroom discussion. For example, when Bob crosses the continent and suggests the idea of enslaving the native African population, Powell comments that “the complective otherness of Black Africans was one among a host of factors (including religion and culture) that made them appear, to the Europeans, as enslavable, but it was...

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