ABSTRACT
The antiquarian and biographer George Chalmers (1742–1825) made a number of important contributions to Defoe studies. His pioneering Life was written in 1785, and later appended to editions of the History of the Union (1786) and of Robinson Crusoe (1790). Chalmers was the first to grapple seriously with the intractable problems in biography and bibliography which Defoe’s career still sets, and his checklist of about eighty ‘canonical’ works and twenty suppositious items was an essential base for nineteenth-century reappraisals of Defoe. Chalmers’s own criticism is not of outstanding interest but it is ahead of its time in its awareness of Defoe’s whole achievement. Chalmers, unlike his predecessors, had a good idea of the scope and nature of Defoe’s literary undertakings. The text follows that of the Life as appended to Robinson Crusoe (1790).
