London in 1731

From the opening

DON MANOEL GONZALES is the assumed name of the writer of a “Voyage to Great Britain, containing an Account of England and Scotland,” which was first printed in the first of the two folio volumes of “A Collection of Voyages and Travels, compiled from the Library of the Earl of Oxford” (Robert Harley, who died in 1724, but whose industry in collection was continued by his son Edward, the second Earl), “interspersed and illustrated with Notes.” These volumes, known as the “Harleian Collection,” were published in 1745 and 1746. The narrative was reproduced early in the present century in the second of the seventeen quartos of John Pinkerton’s “General Collection of the best and the most interesting Voyages and Travels of the World” (1808–1814), from which this account of London is taken. The writer does here, no doubt, keep up his character of Portuguese by a light allusion to “our extensive city of Lisbon,” but he forgets to show his nationality when speaking of Portugal among the countries with which London has trade, and he writes of London altogether like one to the City born, when he describes its inner life together with its institutions and its buildings.

The book is one of those that have been attributed to Defoe, who died in 1731, and the London it describes was dated by Pinkerton in the last year of Defoe’s life. This is also the latest date to be found in the narrative. On page 93 of this volume, old buildings at St. Bartholomew’s are said to have been pulled down in the year 1731, “and a magnificent pile erected in the room of them, about 150 feet in length, faced with a pure white stone, besides other additions now building.” That passage was written, therefore, after 1731, and could not possibly have been written by Defoe.

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