Long dismissed by critics as a novel of merely historical interest, Colonel Jack is one of Daniel Defoe’s most entertaining, revealing, and complex works.It is the supposed autobiography of an English gentleman who begins life as a child of the London streets.He and his brothers are brought up as pickpockets and highwaymen, but Jack seeks to improve himself.Kidnapped and taken to America, he becomes first a slave, then an overseer on plantations in Maryland.Jack’s story is one of dramatic turns of fortune that ultimately lead to a life of law-abiding prosperity as a plantation owner. Historical appendices relate to eighteenth-century Virginia and Maryland and to contemporary crime, punishment, and imprisonment.