True-Born Englishman's a Contradiction, / In Speech an Irony, in Fact a Fiction." (1.372-3). 2 So says The True-Born Englishman, a satirical poem that by Daniel Defoe (ca. 1660-1731). Until recently, Defoe's early career as a poet has...
moreTrue-Born Englishman's a Contradiction, / In Speech an Irony, in Fact a Fiction." (1.372-3). 2 So says The True-Born Englishman, a satirical poem that by Daniel Defoe (ca. 1660-1731). Until recently, Defoe's early career as a poet has gone relatively ignored, perhaps because it reveals a Defoe living in the Restoration rather than the novel-dominated early eighteenth century. Written in heroic couplets and engaging with biblical allegories to discuss the English nation, The True-Born Englishman certainly shows the broad influence of Dryden's Absalom & Achitophel. Defoe biographers, moreover, have noted his admiration of Rochester and Milton, two men who deployed graphic language to expose the abuse of patriarchal power, another central theme of The True-Born Englishman. 3 Neither Milton nor Rochester, though, linked dysfunctional monarchy with a vexed English identity quite as directly the republican satirist Henry Neville (1619-1694), an idiosyncratic figure most remembered for his fictional travel narrative, The Isle of Pines. Published in its first complete edition in 1668, Neville's The Isle of Pines relates the discovery of a fictional island that has been settled by several English-speaking castaways. 4 Because of the text's frank discussions of polygamy, The Isle of Pines has been received somewhat uncritically by some as a light-hearted satire or "pornotopia." 5 Polygamy in The Isle, however, has serious consequences that expose the fictionality of legitimate descent that underwrote hereditary monarchy as well as the nativist system of national belonging. In this respect, The Isle of Pines anticipates Defoe's thesis in The True-Born Englishman (1701) that the principle of legitimate descent-central to Stuart royalism, ethnocentric
