CARLETON, George; DEFOE, Daniel (formerly attrib.).

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The Memoirs of an English Officer, Who serv'd in the Dutch War in 1672. First edition, presumed first issue, of this eyewitness account of late Stuart warfare, formerly attributed to Daniel Defoe. These memoirs have been read and admired by such notable figures as Samuel Johnson and Walter Scott.George Carleton (c.1651-1728) fought as an army engineer in several key military campaigns mounted by late Stuart England, including the Anglo-Dutch wars and the War of the Spanish Succession. In the latter, he was captured by the Spanish, and the Memoirs includes extensive observations on the Spain of Philip V.Boswell reports that Samuel Johnson found in the Memoirs "such an air of truth, that he could not doubt its authenticity" (quoted in ODNB), while Scott had the work reprinted in 1808 and hoped in his preface that "our present army possesses many such characters". Until the discovery of documentary evidence in the 1920s, Carleton was long assumed to be one of Daniel Defoe's fictional creations. Defoe's frequently clandestine approach to publication has resulted in an ever-changing canon, but the attribution of the Memoirs to him is easiest to understand on stylistic terms. Its flow and structure is comparable to some of Defoe's more securely attributed works, most obviously the Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720).ESTC identifies two issues of this work: the present lacks the postscript to the "To the reader" section.

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