I’m going to keep this brief (Huzzah! they cried), because the points that most need making are best made in a different context.
Instead, I just want to remind everyone – myself included – of where we had got up to with the Chronobibliography.
We did examine two short fictions, James Smythies’ Leandro; or, The Lucky Rescue and Peter Belon’s The Reviv’d Fugitive, both of which dealt – more or less – with the consequences of the issuing of the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685.
However, most exasperatingly, we also had to deal with a resurgence of political writing, most of which hashed over the iniquities of the Stuarts yet again, while a much smaller proportion dealt with the legitimacy of William and Mary’s claim to the throne, or tried unavailingly to attack Louis XIV using the same tactics that had been so successful against James.
What was strikingly missing, though our wander through this material took us pretty much to the end of 1691, was any reference to the Battle of the Boyne. This may have been, as I suggested re: the appendix of Nathaniel Crouch’s revised The Secret History Of The Last Four Monarchs Of Great Britain, because though James himself had scarpered, the war between the Irish and the English forces led by William was still in progress at that time, and would end only with the signing of the Treaty of Limerick in October 1691.
Furthermore, and rather curiously given the preponderance of political writing to date, not only is there no sign of a belated effort to deal with the Battle of the Boyne subsequently, but political writing overall seems almost to vanish from the annals of popular literature from this point.
Oh, sure: Nathaniel Crouch rehashed The Secret History… not once but twice more, catching us up on “the happy revolution, and the accession of Their present Majesties” and “the later reign of James the Second, from the time of his abdication of England, to this present Novemb. 1693”; while some anonymous sadist also decided that we had to hear the story of the Sham Prince one more time; but other than this, a cautious glance forward reveals a fairly steady diet of fiction from this point onwards…at least until the ascension of Anne.
I think another Huzzah! might be in order.
And in fact—I’ve already made a start on 1692, reading one particular work of fiction that to my mind represents a critical watershed in the development of the English novel…
A Course Of Steady Reading 