Captain Charles Johnson - Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe

In 1934 John Robert Moore, an American scholar of Daniel Defoe, announced his theory that Johnson was really Daniel Defoe writing pseudonymously. He eventually published Defoe in the Pillory and Other Studies, in which he compared the style and contents of A General History to Defoe's works, noting that the frequent meditations on morality are similar to Defoe's work, and that Defoe wrote several other works on pirates. Moore's study, and his reputation as a Defoe scholar, was so convincing that most libraries recataloged A General History under Defoe's name. However, in 1988 scholars P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owen attacked the theory in The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe, in which they point out that there is no documentary evidence linking Johnson to Defoe, and that there are discrepancies between A General History and Defoe's other works.