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. But if the
book was in Robert Harley's collection, and not one of the additions
made by his son the second earl, the main body of the account of
London must be of a date earlier than the first earl's death in
1724. Note, for instance, the references on pages 27, 28, to "the
late Queen Mary," and to "her Majesty" Queen Anne, as if Anne were
living. It would afterwards have been brought to date of
publication by additions made in or before 1745. The writer,
whoever he may have been, was an able man, who joined to the detail
of a guide-book the clear observation of one who writes like an
educated and not untravelled London merchant, giving a description
of his native town as it was in the reign of George the First, with
addition of a later touch or two from the beginning of the reign of
George the Second.
His London is London of the time when Pope published his translation
of the "Iliad," and was nettled at the report that Addison, at
Button's Coffee House, had given to Tickell's little venture in the
same direction the praise of having more in it of Homer's fire.
Button's Coffee House was of Addison's foundation, for the benefit
of Daniel Button, an old steward of the Countess of Warwick's, whom
he had settled there in 1812.
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