Since the eighteenth century, Swift’s prose has been admired for its simplicity and clarity. This chapter pays attention to how the ‘purity’ of Swift’s prose style interconnects with the coarseness and grotesquery of his writing. Swift, this chapter argues, was part of a reaction that emerged in the late seventeenth century against the Elizabethan writers and their ornate metaphysical style. The level of details that he imported into his prose fictions opened up new visual possibilities, both for narrative and for disgust. His microscopic eye collides with his scatological vision.

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)"’.

Horace Walpole finishes his account of writing The Castle of Otranto (1764) with a wry look at its syntactics, confessing that late one night he “could not hold the pen to finish the sentence, but left Matilda and Isabella talking, in the middle of a paragraph.” A close look at the beginnings, middles, and ends not only of chapters but also of paragraphs and even sentences in this first gothic novel reveals syntactical passages behaving like subterranean passages. As readers, we often don’t know what’s coming until we turn the corner of the sentence and bump into it. The lack of quotation marks to distinguish dialogue (when quotation marks were entering into common use) repeatedly slides the reader down wrong turns; we mistake one speaker for another. Later editions would insert quotation marks, brightly lighting the syntactic interior. But what Walpole initiates for the gothic on the small level of typography and syntax as well as of atmosphere and plot is precisely the uneasiness of boundaries obscured and identities blurred. This chapter tracks the spatial implications of the shapes of sentences and the peculiarities of paragraphs in The Castle of Otranto to uncover a template of syntactical structures enacting gothic structures.

Daniel Defoe was responsible for one of the world's greatest myths: Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on a desert island for twenty-eight years. Published in 1719, The Life, and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe had gone through 196 English editions by the end of the nineteenth century, along with multiple translations into French, German, Dutch, Italian, Swedish, Hebrew, Armenian, Danish, Turkish, Hungarian, Bengali, Polish, Arabic, Estonian, Maltese, Coptic, Welsh, Persian and even Ancient Greek. Then there were the imitations, abridgements and adaptations – what in Germany and France was called the Robinsonade. August Kippenberg has referred to ‘Defoes allbekanntes Werk’, which has exerted ‘as extraordinary an influence on world literature as any book’. Yet this larger-than-life, transcontinental myth (in European coin) was created from the smallest, most ordinary bits of life, from the details pebbling about our shoes – scissors, knives and forks, a piece of canvas. Before he began his novelistic career, Defoe had been a journalist, merchant, economist and spy, and from these ongoing and intersecting careers he developed both a sweeping and a local sense of history, an attention to ‘human-interest’ stories, an impressive knowledge of geography and a taste for the realistic tiny detail.

Robinson Crusoe, who left a comfortable middle-class home in England, finds himself stranded on a deserted island, and promptly creates a comfortable middle-class home in its midst. He makes his new corner of the world into a house – two houses, to be precise: his main “fortress” and his “country retreat,” complete with his “family” of dogs, cats, goats, and a parrot, with handy shelves, misshapen pots, raisins, and an umbrella. And when his household stuff is settled, he can begin to write.

Crusoe's domestic management supplies a vignette for the eighteenth-century British novel, which in such sweeping ways is all about home: finding it, losing it, running away from it, replicating it, furnishing it, inhabiting it, remembering it, haunting it. Even the picaresque novels, “homeless” as their rogues go ranging round the world, define themselves by the absence of home, the picaro living by his wits on other people's doorsteps. The house, which houses the home, the domestic, is site of plot, character, action, setting: she is pursued through the chamber; he brandishes a sword in the hall; they meet in the parlor; they avoid each other in the garden; she drops in an elbow-chair; he eavesdrops from the closet; she points the poignard at her breast in the dining-room; they take two chapters to descend a staircase. As Amanda Vickery notes: “Universal but unexamined, homes are implicated in and backdrop to the history of power, gender, the family, privacy, consumerism, design and the decorative arts.”

“For who would leave, unbrib’d, Hibernia’s Land, / Or change the Rocks of Scotland for the Strand?” asks the speaker in Samuel Johnson’s first major poem, London. As this work was published by Richard Dodsley and printed by Edward Cave at Tully’s Head in Pall Mall in 1738, when Johnson was twenty-nine, it marks his first literary entry into London. Famously, the author of this poem would later answer the rhetorical question flatly: “No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford” (Boswell, Life, 3:178).

Johnson’s first use of the Strand is a fitting emblem of the city itself. “In former Times it was an Highway leading from London to Westminster,” writes John Strype in 1720 in his survey of London, curving along the Thames between Charing Cross and the Inns of Court. In the eighteenth century it remained the most direct connection between the City (the old medieval center, and still the financial center) and the Court (Westminster, parks and palaces, Piccadilly and Pall Mall), passing through the Town (theatre and law, fashion and dissolution). The borough of Southwark lies south of the River Thames, a sort of suburb of town houses and retreats of more dubious sorts. To understand eighteenth-century London, one must understand these regions, their relations, and their associations.

London is in fact at the centre of many, many literary works of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, not just as a setting or backdrop but as a shaping force - of plot, character, and narrative itself. Narrators describe the city, inhabit the city, walk the city, write the city. The circuits Defoe as traveller- narrator takes in his epistolary documentary A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-7) begin and end in London, and London is its centrepiece, expanding as we read: 'We see several Villages, formerly standing, as it were, in the Country, and at a great Distance, now joyn'd to the Streets by continued Buildings, and more making haste to meet in the like Manner.' And he draws – or rather, follows – a ‘Line of Measurement’ about the city, a line that actively ‘runs’ and ‘passes’ and ‘crosses’ and ‘turns’ and ‘goes away’ and ‘comes to’:

“I BEGAN my Travels, where I Purpose to End them, viz. At the City of London ...” (Defoe, Tour I, 1) / Daniel Defoe began and ended his own travels, so to speak, in London, and the city of London is the implied or explicit setting, subject, or structuring principle of just about every work he wrote, didactic or fictional, prosaic or poetic. Cities in general fascinated Defoe, but he wrote most particularly of London, its boundaries and buildings, streets and occupations, trade and crime, strengths and vulnerabilities, ancient patterns and constant permutations. He knew it intimately and represented it vividly; however fictional the plots and characters of his novels might be, London is always precisely real. The streets are accurately mapped, the buildings reliably themselves. And yet, for Defoe, there are many Londons overlapping in those precisely drawn streets. There is the economically charged city, buoyant with trade, a city of shops and houses and traffic and merchants and apprentices and servants. But there are darker Londons with ragged children and forgotten elderly swept into corners, thieves lurking in the underworld, stockjobbers corrupting financial networks, watermen and hackney drivers imperiling the streets, plague and fire ravaging the whole. Places of safety and prosperity are simultaneously the spaces of danger and vulnerability. Defoe's London teems with contradictions and ambiguities and peculiar linguistic, social, and topographical codes - and he employs different genres to explore them.

Like an epic, Pope's autobiographical poem Epistle to Arbuthnot (1735) plunges in medias res, “into the midst of things” - or we might say, into the midst of spaces. Pope, the successful poet, is besieged by aspiring authors, with “Papers in each hand,” who “rave, recite and madden round the land. | What Walls can guard me, or what Shades can hide? | They pierce my Thickets, thro' my Grot they glide” (5-8). So the poem acts pre-emptively, opening itself by closing the door, to create a sustained refuge of 419 lines where the poet can figure out how he got here in the first place. This is one of the most dramatic spatial gestures of Pope's poetry; this chapter will open the door on others less spectacularly visible.

Pope is one of the most visual of poets. He had learned painting from his friend Charles Jervas, and in “Epistle to Mr. Jervas” he hopes his poems will have the same colour, clarity, elasticity, and precision: “Oh lasting as those colours may they shine, | Free as thy stroke, yet faultless as thy line!” (63-4). But as Lawrence Lipking notes: “The vast majority of modern readers are blind to eighteenth-century poetry. We do not see poems well; we do not make the pictures in our minds that the poets direct and excite us to make.” Part of understanding Pope's poetry is understanding how to see things, because in the eighteenth century description was used very differently. Many early prosodic techniques went out of fashion with the Romantic poets and never quite came back in, so we've lost the power to appreciate their subtleties.