The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Colonel Jacque, Commonly

Daniel DefoeProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.0
Word count
761K words
Chapters
77

Tags

English Originals Social Fiction Legendary LivesAdventure JourneyFate and FortuneComplex HumanityMoral DilemmaPicaresque Novel

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Colonel Jacque, CommonlyAuthor: Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jul 18, 2016

Editor's review

Written by Defoe alongside Robinson Crusoe, Colonel Jack unfolds as a first-person memoir, telling the winding life of a protagonist who is kidnapped, wanders, joins the army, and rises in the world. The work continues Defoe's interest in the "history of individual striving," with plain narration and dense detail, bearing clear Puritan ethical coloring and the social landscape of eighteenth-century England. Its value lies not in intricate structure but in weaving the survival experience of lower-class figures, overseas adventure, and moral reflection into a chronicle-like self-account; it is an important text for understanding the formation of the early English novel. Read it as both social history and literary history: follow the plot, but also watch how the narrator justifies his own conduct. The Project Gutenberg electronic edition is convenient for searching and comparative reading, and suits course use or reading groups.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the preface or editor's note first to understand the book's place among Defoe's works.
  2. Read in segments by the protagonist's life stages, summarizing his logic of moral justification after each.
  3. Pair with materials on eighteenth-century English social history to understand the military and overseas background.
  4. For reading groups, set questions around "narrator reliability" and compare with Crusoe's narration.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

What is the relationship between this book and Robinson Crusoe? Both are by Defoe and both use first-person self-narration, focusing on individual striving and moral reflection, but Colonel Jack tells of a protagonist's rise from the bottom in Europe and overseas. The subject matter and structure differ, and it can be seen as another facet of Defoe's novelistic interests.
What does "Colonel" in the title refer to? "Colonel" is the military rank the protagonist acquires in the course of his life; the title's "Truly Honourable Colonel Jack" points to his identity with an ironic edge. The specific circumstances unfold in the self-account itself and should not be over-inferred apart from the text.
What background knowledge is needed to read this eighteenth-century novel? Some knowledge of eighteenth-century English social class, overseas colonization, and military recruitment helps; it is also useful to be prepared for the self-account form and Puritan ethical tone of early English fiction, which makes it easier to enter the narrator's world.

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About the author

Daniel Defoe Author · British · 1660–1731

Daniel Defoe (1661?–1731) was an English novelist, political writer and journalist, and a founding figure of realist fiction in the English Enlightenment. His birth year is recorded variously; the library lists 1660, and he died in 1731. A prolific author, he is represented here by 59 works, the best known being Robinson Crusoe, alongside Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague Year. His novels often follow individual fortunes and adventures, written in a plain, concrete and realistic style that presents characters' circumstances and choices in unadorned narrative, and his influence on the development of English realist fiction is far-reaching. Commonly classified under inspirational growth, his works are still read today as important accounts of endurance and self-reliance.