Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1724–5) is more often invoked than actually studied, and understandably so. This two-volume work, Haywood's first and most important scandal chronicle, is a fiercely topical roman à clef of 568 pages teeming with contemporary gossip and scandal, much of it scathingly delivered, and critics must proceed through this swarm of contemporary references without benefit of notes or historical commentary. A modern scholarly edition is sorely needed. Until the actual persons and events in this key fiction are identified, accounts of the politics of Memoirs must remain provisional. Part 1, published and heavily advertised in September 1724, deals with corruptions in the period leading up to the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720 and is known to contain long stretches of fairly spectacular personal score-settling including the vicious smear against Martha Sansom discussed in the previous chapter that led one critic to remark that it is ‘hard to imagine any depths to which Haywood will not sink in her prose scandal chronicles’. Haywood must have soon begun the second volume. Part 2 came out the next year and stands as a kind of follow-up report on the state of the nation in the new age of greed. It retails an assortment of scandals both contemporary and not-so, but some so precisely to-the-moment that they can be said to pioneer the ‘ripped from the headlines’ techniques familiar on modern television crime dramas. The stories in this largely unexplored second volume – not reprinted since 1726 – are unusually lurid, brutal, retributive, and coarse and they include a cluster of graphic rape scenes that still have the power to shock.