Eighteenth-Century England Through Defoe’s Magnifying Glasses in The Consolidator

The allure of the Moon as made mankind dream about endless fictional scenarios over lunar voyages and space colonization for centuries. Daniel Defoe’s novel The Consolidator or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon (1705) revealed itself to be much more than the eyes can see. Under the immediate perception of it being just a story about a travel to the Moon and back this is in fact, an amazingly shrewd text when choosing technology as the plot to expose eighteenth-century England’s flaws. The feather-covered rocket ship, the consolidator, works as a means of transportation to the moon that allows the reader to be distant enough to look upon the social and political span on Earth, more specifically England. The main purpose of this essay is to understand how science is at the service of fiction in Defoe’s novel by analysing the presence of scientific elements along the narrative and by presenting a critical view over the innovative way Daniel Defoe presented scientific knowledge discussed by the Royal Society (1660) in his voyage to the Moon in the consolidator.