The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography

The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography

John Richetti

Blackwell Publishing

The Life of Daniel Defoe

BLACKWELL CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES General Editor: Claude Rawson This acclaimed series offers informative and durable biographies of important authors, British, European and North American, which will include substantial critical discussion of their works. An underlying objective is to re-establish the notion that books are written by people who lived in particular times and places. This objective is pursued not by programmatic assertions or strenuous pointmaking, but through the practical persuasion of volumes which offer intelligent criticism within a well-researched biographical context. Also in this series The Life of Walter Scott

John Sutherland

The Life of William Faulkner

Richard Gray

The Life of Thomas Hardy

Paul Turner

The Life of Celine

Nicholas Hewitt

The Life of Henry Fielding

Ronald Paulson

The Life of Robert Browning

Clyde De L. Ryals

The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer

Derek Pearsall

The Life of Daniel Defoe

John Richetti

The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Rosemary Ashton

The Life of Evelyn Waugh

Douglas Lane Patey

The Life of Goethe

John R. Williams

The Life of W. B.Yeats

Terence Brown

The Life of John Milton

Barbara Lewalski

The Life of Samuel Johnson

Robert DeMaria, Jr

The Life of Ann Brontë

Edward Chitham

The Life of Daniel Defoe

A Critical Biography John Richetti

© 2005 by John Richetti BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of John Richetti to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1

2005

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Richetti, John J. The life of Daniel Defoe/by John Richetti. p. cm. – (Blackwell critical biographies) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-631-19529-0 (hard cover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-631-19529-7 (hard cover : alk. paper) 1. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–1731. 2. Authors, English – 18th century – Biography. 3. Journalists – Great Britain – Biography. I. Title. II. Series. PR3406.R53 2005 823¢.5 – dc22 2005003227 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10 on 12 pt Bembo by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd, Kundli The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

vi x

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer Early Writings 1697–1703: Projects, Dissent, Poems Political Journalism: 1697–1710 Political Agent and Journalist: Queen Anne to the Hanoverians Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 Robinson Crusoe Travel, Politics, and Adventure Crime and Narrative Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment History, Facts, and Literature Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31

Notes Bibliography Index

1 31 70 113 143 174 213 234 268 301 337 362 390 395

v

Preface

. . . a great, a truly great liar, perhaps the greatest that ever lived. William Minto, Daniel Defoe

Paula R. Backscheider begins her biography of Defoe by saying that “few men seem to be better subjects for a biography than Daniel Defoe.”1 She means that Defoe’s life is a heroic story of constant struggle to survive, a string of personal and financial disasters, a life that spanned a tumultuous era (1660–1731) of crucial political and historical events that changed the face of Europe, and witnessed the emergence of nothing less than the modern world order, with Britain in his lifetime gradually becoming the dominant European imperial power. Defoe has since the late eighteenth century attracted many biographers, including most recently a rival to Backscheider’s life by Maximillian E. Novak.2 Much is known about Defoe. There is an extensive factual record of many personal events as well as financial, political, and literary circumstances in his life, some of which do him little honor and mark him as a flawed human being, at times even distinctly unattractive. But in the final analysis, whether one likes this Daniel Defoe is irrelevant, since almost nothing is known or certain about his inner life except what he chose to reveal about himself in his writing and in his surviving letters. That correspondence consists mostly of letters to the powerful early eighteenthcentury politician, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, whom he served from 1704 until 1714 as a secret agent, political operative and advisor. The figure revealed in that correspondence and clandestine relationship is as his biographers have noted preeminently a master of disguise and deception, a plotter and dissimulator. In his public writing as well as in his private correspondence, Defoe is manifestly self-serving and self-dramatizing, or at times as in his most elaborate public apologia, An Appeal to Honour and Justice, tho it be of his Worst Enemies (1714–15), deeply evasive and even mendacious. vi

Preface We need, therefore, to modify Backscheider’s recommendation of Defoe as the perfect biographical subject: he is immensely (or even fatally) attractive to biographers because he lived in exceedingly interesting times, because his voluminous writings allow us to speculate about the personality that must have been lurking somewhere behind the various voices that he projected in that endlessly flowing river of writing that he produced over a long career of over forty years.3 Moreover, there is a clear line to his intellectual development; his wide-ranging and often enough quirky and original mind is very much on display in his writing, and his forcefully-expressed ideas and attitudes are there for those who care to trace them. However, the question of just what Defoe actually wrote is still an open one. W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, his most recent editors and bibliographers, have mounted a largely convincing attack on the canon of Defoe’s writing compiled by scholars since the early nineteenth century that had steadily expanded over the years until in J.R. Moore’s Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (1960) it numbered over 570 separate titles. Owens and Furbank have argued for a skeptical reformation of the expanded canon propounded by several generations of Defoe scholars, who tended to attribute to Defoe any pamphlet from the early eighteenth century that featured what they saw as their hero’s characteristic energy and style. Owens’s and Furbank’s new canon of Daniel Defoe’s writings is a rational, Protestant reformation of the implicit faith in their own judgments of earlier Defoe scholar-enthusiasts. I follow Owens’s and Furbank’s de-attribution of some 252 items from the Defoe canon in this book, with one or two exceptions, as will appear.4 But even Furbank and Owens cannot resolve the uncertainty surrounding some of what we think is Defoe’s massive output, and in their Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe they list works that are “probably” by Defoe, and in their ongoing collected edition of large numbers of Defoe’s works they and their colleagues in that enterprise reprint and annotate some of those pieces that they mark as merely probable in their Critical Bibliography.5 Robinson Crusoe continued to be read through the eighteenth century and in some quarters was highly regarded. Boswell records that Dr. Johnson, for one, admired it greatly and commended Defoe,“allowing a considerable share of merit to a man, who, bred a tradesman, had written so variously and so well,” and Mrs. Thrale remembered him saying that along with Don Quixote and The Pilgrim’s Progress it was one of only three books that its readers “wished longer.”6 Otherwise, Defoe seems to have been little read or remembered in the years after his death. The revival of systematic interest in his life and works dates from George Chalmers (1742–1825), an antiquarian who published a Life of Defoe in 1785 in which he called him “one of the ablest and most useful writers of our island.” Chalmers concentrated on Defoe’s achievements as a “commercial writer . . . fairly entitled to stand in the foremost ranks among his contemporaries” and as a “historian who . . . had few equals in the English language.”7 Despite several vii

Preface centuries of literary and bibliographical criticism since Chalmers, and of repeated biographical investigation, however, the inner man, the personality, the actual Defoe, remains an elusive and even a mysterious figure. As Furbank and Owens put it, “much of the trouble in understanding Defoe and consequently in fixing the canon of his writings, stems from the fact that the personality he presents to us in his writings is completely a construction, allowing us to guess only dimly at the ‘real’ Defoe.” They may be stretching things, since Defoe did not construct his public personae out of whole cloth, and there is always some relationship between these public poses and what must have been his own attitudes and ideas, and we should remember that a persona is an aspect of the actual personality most of the time and not an outright disguise. Still, Furbank and Owens observe that Defoe is thus an impalpable and essentially a textual presence who “courts exposure and yet hides his personality, so that we get no such feeling of him as a person as we do with Swift or Pope.”8 This study will, by choice and by necessity, dwell on the ultimate mystery surrounding Defoe the person, on that gap between Defoe’s writing (in so far as it can be identified as his beyond a reasonable doubt) and the motives and feelings that must have propelled or at least shaped much of it. I will not attempt, however, to construct a coherent interior life or confident psychological profile of Daniel Defoe, nor will biographical speculation accompany my treatment of Defoe’s writings in any exact way that might claim simple relationships between life events and writing, although doubtless they existed and are worth reaching for. That biographer’s hunger for knowledge of the whole man has led in the past to a good deal of fanciful speculation, usually framed as a question that slides from the interrogative to the assertive: “What must Defoe have thought?” becomes “Surely Defoe was thinking.” It seems to me that our lack of information about Defoe’s inner life combined with a literary output that even if defined conservatively is staggering in its extent marks him more than other eighteenthcentury authors as a man whose life consists of his own words. Of Defoe one might say with Vladimir Nabokov that “the best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”9 Given Defoe’s penchant for stylistic mimicry, from The Shortest Way with the Dissenters to the voices he assumes so convincingly in his longer fictions, that is in his case quite an adventure.To be sure, Defoe’s writing has rich local contexts and particular occasions; it is always involved in religious, political, economic, and moral controversies of the day, and we do know enough about his life to call it an adventure, a picaresque tale, almost, of strife and struggle in the commercial, political, and literary arena of his time. Most of his writing is polemical journalism about a wide variety of subjects, directly and practically provoked by contemporary developments and involving Defoe in urgent speculation about his country’s uncertain and perilous future. However obscure his personal and private life, in his writing Defoe has a clear and specific intellectual profile and public persona in the early viii

Preface decades of the English eighteenth century, and there isn’t a contemporary issue from those years that he didn’t write about. He was certainly one of the bestknown and also one of the most reviled writers of his day, attracting what Furbank and Owens in a nice phrase have called “a quite exceptional torrent of vituperation.”10 Much of the book that follows will like many others before it seek to trace Defoe’s views as they are expressed in his voluminous writings and to evaluate their force and resonance for him and his contemporaries, many of whom were his antagonists in the paper wars and bitter political-religious controversy of the early years of the century, especially the tumultuous reigns of William III and Queen Anne from 1688 to 1714. I am chiefly concerned to evaluate his specifically literary achievements, to describe the still attractive and perennially interesting features of his writing, and I mean not just the novels for which he is now still remembered but a representative sample of his entire life’s work in prose and in verse.11 To write a critical biography of Defoe and his works is to traverse nearly fifty of the most important years in British and European history. Defoe was at the center of those events, or at least he inserted himself and his readers into those events by the force and fecundity of his writing and the energy of his intellect. The real Defoe, the only man fully available for analysis and something like full understanding as far as I am concerned, is the veritable writing machine that processes those events and in so doing projects a richly varied and even contradictory persona.This book will try to observe that dynamic intersection between events, ideas, and writing that has come down to us as Daniel Defoe.

ix

Acknowledgments

More years ago than I care to admit, Professor Claude Rawson commissioned this book, and I am grateful to him and to Andrew McNeillie, Emma Bennett, and Karen Wilson at Blackwell, all of whom not only encouraged me over the very long haul that it took me to complete it but patiently and generously, with never a cross word, endured many delays and difficulties in its writing. Claude Rawson also provided excellent editorial advice, and the final product is all the better for his sensitive guidance. I owe a large debt of gratitude to Saul Steinberg, thanks to whose bounteous philanthropy toward his alma mater, I hold the A.M. Rosenthal Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. The resources connected with that chair have helped me in many tangible ways to complete my work on this book. I want as well to thank another Penn alumnus, Leonard Sugarman, whose generosity in endowing the Leonard Sugarman Term Professorship at Penn, which I had the honor to hold for ten years, supported my research in the early years of this project. I have learned a great deal over the years from my fellow students of Daniel Defoe, especially from Paula Backscheider and Maximillian Novak, whose biographies were indispensable for me as I wrote this book. I have also cause to be grateful for the friendly encouragement as well as the scholarship of John Bender, David Blewett, Leo Damrosch, Bob De Maria, J. Paul Hunter, Michael McKeon, Al Rivero, Michael Seidel, George Starr, and Cynthia Wall. Many years ago when I set out to write about eighteenth-century fiction as a graduate student, I was generously and crucially supported when I nearly lost heart for my task by my late mentor at University College London, the great Defoe scholar, James R. Sutherland, who set the highest standards of scholarship imaginable and to whose pioneering work and elegant biography of Defoe I am deeply indebted. And my wife, Deirdre David, sustained me in countless ways through the years that this book was taking shape and slowly coming into being. x

Acknowledgments Some parts of chapters 5 and 6 were published in slightly different form in my essay, “Secular Crusoe: The Reluctant Pilgrim Revisited,” which appeared in Eighteenth-Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms, Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter, eds., Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001). I am grateful to the University of Delaware Press for permission to reprint that material. This book is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend, Edward Said, for whom any praise I could give would be inadequate to his accomplishments and virtues: a precious friend “hid in death’s dateless night” whose like I shall not see again.

xi

1 Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer

Hail to thee, spirit of Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee! England has better bards than either Greece or Rome, yet I could spare them easier far than Defoe. George Borrow, Lavengro

Defoe’s Early Life On approaching my subject, the first and most obvious feeling is regret, that an author whose powers of narration . . . whose simple naturalness in his relations of human intercourse, and in the charm of reality which he imperceptibly spread over the commonest incidents . . . should not have employed his masterly pen in telling the story of his own life to posterity. William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings

Tourists in London in search of the Barbican Center are likely to walk down Daniel Defoe Place, past a high-rise apartment building in that housing complex called “Defoe House,” just across from “William Shakespeare Tower.” Of these two writers, Defoe has the greater claim to be memorialized in that part of London. Among the major eighteenth-century English writers, most of whom like Swift, Gay, and Johnson were of provincial origins, he is almost unique as a Londoner born and bred (Pope was born in the City but grew up in Binfield, near Windsor). Although the landscape of his childhood has been transformed over the centuries, Defoe was born in 1660 or 1661 not far from the tower block of flats and the street that now bear his name, in the City of London, in the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate (close to where in those years Milton, old 1

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer

Figure 1

Defoe House in the Barbican center, London. Photograph author’s own

and blind, was living, on Jewin Street). His parents were Alice and James Foe, his father a prosperous tallow chandler or candle manufacturer who in his later years branched out into overseas trade in other merchandise on a larger scale and became a fairly prominent person in the City of London business community. The Foes were descended from yeoman stock in Northamptonshire; Defoe’s father had emigrated to London from Etton in that county. During Defoe’s childhood, they lived in Swan Alley, in St. Stephen’s parish, near St. Paul’s Cathedral (the old one, before Christopher Wren built his masterpiece) and the Royal Exchange. Defoe’s childhood years at the heart of the City of London were full of transforming events for England: the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660; the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1664–7 in which Dutch ships sailed up the Thames and destroyed much of the English fleet; the great bubonic plague that in 1665 killed over 70,000 people in the city; and then the Great Fire in September 1666 that destroyed most of the wooden houses of medieval London and launched a building boom in brick and stone. It is tempting to speculate about the boy Daniel in those years caught up in these great events, especially since he 2

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer later wrote about the plague year so memorably in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Unfortunately, virtually nothing is known about Defoe’s childhood, although his mother seems to have died when he was ten or eleven, and we do know that he was sent to primary school in Dorking in Surrey at a school kept by the Rev. James Fisher, a dissenting minister.1 Frank Bastian suggests that the death of Defoe’s mother when he was so young was an important, even a defining event in his life. He derives Defoe’s “self-sufficiency and initiative” from an adolescence deprived of a close mother-son relationship.2 Looking back in 1705 in the Review, Defoe remembered a childhood in which he absorbed the anxieties of his fellow religionists when many feared that Popery would come in and take away the English scriptures. “How many Honest but over-frighted People, set to Work to Copy the Bible into Short-Hand, lest when Popery come in, we should be Prohibited the use of it, and so might secure it in little Compass? At which Work, I my self then, but a Boy, work’d like a Horse till I wrote out the whole Pentateuch, and then was so tyr’d, I was willing to run the Risque of the rest” (December 22, 1705).3 This anecdote may remind us of the daily strain of belonging to a persecuted religious minority. The Foes were dissenters, Protestants who did not conform to the prescribed rituals and exact beliefs of the established national church, the Church of England. Like a good number of others, especially among the merchant and trading classes in London, the Foes had followed their pastor, Dr. Samuel Annesley, and his congregation in refusing to conform after the 1660 Restoration of the Stuart monarchy and the Church of England to the Act of Uniformity, promulgated on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August, 1662.This act replaced the much looser and more lenient Elizabethan (1559) Act of Uniformity. The newly-revised Book of Common Prayer, prepared in Convocation of the Church of England clergy the previous December, was according to the terms of the Act to be used exclusively in church services, with every clergyman instructed to “openly and publicly before the congregation . . . declare his unfeigned assent and consent” to everything in the book. Moreover, any cleric who refused to do so was stripped of his office, which the Act added was valid only if the incumbent had been episcopally ordained.4 There was more persecution to come. In 1664, the Conventicle Act was passed (followed in 1670 by an even harsher Conventicle Act) that prohibited more than five people meeting together to conduct any sort of worship except using the official Prayer Book, and from then until 1672 a series of acts referred to as the Clarendon Code (after Charles II’s Lord Chancellor, the historian, Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon) tightened the screws on religious nonconformity and initiated a veritable reign of terror and persecution for dissenting Protestants in England. As James Sutherland put it, as a result of these edicts the dissenters were “a desperate people, harassed by severe laws, and at the mercy of bullies and informers and of all who happened to bear them any personal grudge.”5 3

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer Defoe himself later estimated in 1707 that over 3,000 ministers left the Church rather than conform to the Act.6 N. H. Keeble cites a lower estimate of fifteen or sixteen hundred by William Hooke, a former chaplain of Cromwell’s, and he notes that Richard Baxter, the great Protestant divine, put the figure at about 2,000.7 Whatever the actual number, this clerical exodus was a key moment in the history of English religious dissent. Even with this large defection from the established church, Protestant dissenters (excluding Catholics) were always a distinct minority in England, no more than about 5 percent of the population.8 But from the Stuart Restoration through the reign of Queen Anne (1703–14) and beyond, they played an important and controversial role in English religious and political life, at a time when those two realms were interdependent, indeed inextricable. Defoe’s life from his earliest years is profoundly involved in the complex fate of being an English dissenter during these turbulent times. An angry marginality and a lingering resentment of the ruling elite, as well as of isolated autodidacticism, such as one finds expressed in much of his writing, might well be traced to his growing up among this embattled minority.9 The historian David Ogg has suggested that as a persecuted and disenfranchised minority, excluded to a large extent from public life, dissenters tended to work in commerce in the emerging new financial order that was to transform Britain. They achieved, says Ogg, success and power disproportionate to their numbers.10 Defoe embarked as a young man on a commercial career such as was open to dissenters, on a much more ambitious scale than his father, and a series of spectacular failures as a wholesale merchant and entrepreneur would propel him for sheer physical survival into his life as a political operative and polemical journalist, where his identity as a dissenter (who dissented in his turn from much of what most dissenters of his class thought) would shape his career. In 1662, the Foes’ minister, Samuel Annesley, established his dissenting meeting house at Little St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate. Annesley became a prominent Presbyterian divine, and Defoe memorialized him in a poem (“The Character of the Late Mr. Samuel Annesley, by Way of Elegy”) when he died in 1697. Defoe’s biographers have assumed that he attended Annesley’s services as an adult, or at the least maintained an acquaintance with him.11 Much more is known about the influence on Defoe of another prominent dissenting divine, Charles Morton, to whose dissenting academy at Newington Green, just north of London, he was sent when he turned 16. Students who would not declare their adherence to the Church of England were barred from attending the English universities at Oxford and Cambridge. A network of dissenting academies, as they were called, had evolved as a substitute system of higher education. Morton’s school like others of its kind was conceived as an alternative education for the sons of prosperous dissenters who were intended for the ministry, as Defoe seems to have been. A distinguished scholar and a former fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, 4

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer Morton later emigrated to America and became the first president of Harvard College. Near the end of his life, in a work that survived in manuscript but was not printed until 1890, The Compleat English Gentleman, Defoe looked back with great satisfaction to his unorthodox education at Morton’s academy. He argues in that treatise that it would be much better for the education of gentlemen “if they were taught in English, and if all the learned labours of the masters of the age were made to speak English, to be levell’d to the capacities of the more unlearn’d part of man-kind, who would be encourag’d by that means to look into those happy discoveryes in Nature, which have been the study and labour of so many ages.” Let us have more translation into English of works both modern and ancient, he urges, to follow the example of the French.Then, “it must be granted men might be made schollars at a much easier expence as well of labour as of money than now, and might be truly learned and yet kno’ nothing of the Greek or the Latin.”12 The Compleat English Gentleman offers a familiar complaint against the traditional curriculum: “If then a man may be learned in all the wisdome and knowledge of God so as to be a complete Christian, and that without the knowledge of either Latin or Greek, I see not reason to scruple saying he may be a complete phylospher [sic] or a complete mathematician, tho’ he has no skill in the learned languages.”13 During his years as a journalist in the fractious public arena, Defoe was often subjected to taunts from opponents for his lack of classical learning, borne out by occasional ungrammatical Latin scraps and tags in his journalism, and he was always defensive on that score. For example in the Review of May 31, 1705 he challenged his rival periodical journalist, John Tutchin, who had in the Observator ridiculed his bad Latin, to a translation contest: “by this he shall have an Opportunity to show the World, how much De Foe the Hosier, is inferior in Learning to Mr. Tutchin the gentleman.” And earlier in this number, he declared: “I have no Concern to tell Dr. B – I can read English, or to tell Mr. Tutchin I understand Latin, Non ite Latinus sum ut Latine loqui – I easily acknowledge my self Blockhead enough, to have lost the Fluency of Expression in the Latin, and so far Trade has been a Prejudice to me; and yet I think I owe this Justice to my Ancient Father, yet living, and in whose Behalf I freely Testifie that if I am a Blockhead, it was no Bodies Fault but my own; he having spar’d nothing in my Education, that might Qualifie me to Match the accurate Dr. B – or the Learned Observator.” When in 1710 Swift in the Examiner attacked the Review’s author as “illiterate,” Defoe responded at length and with great dignity, defining himself as a man of the world rather than what he called a “Learned Fool”: “we have abundance of Learned Fools in the World, and Ignorant Wise-Men – How often have I seen a Man boast of his Letters, and his Load of Learning, and be Ignorant in the common necessary Acquirements, that fit a Man either for the Service of himself or his Country” (December 16, 1710). Many years later, he was still harping on this grievance: 5

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer “Will nothing make a man a schollar but Latin and Greek?” he has a character ask in a dialogue in The Compleat English Gentleman. His interlocutor replies that scholars are nothing but pedants, “a kind of mechanicks in the schools, for they deal in words and syllables as haberdashers deal in small ware.”14 Defoe’s aggrieved personality is still on display here in his old age, and the reduction of so-called scholars to dealers in haberdashery is a reprise of the jeers Defoe endured from rival polemicists all his life about being a hosier. But he balances this resentful complaint with what is clearly his memory of Morton’s effectively modern pedagogy, conducted in English and including current subjects such as Locke’s philosophy and Newton’s physics. He calls Morton “a tutor of unquestion’d reputacion for learning . . . a critick in the learned languages, and even in all the oriental tongues,” who set out to correct the mistaken prejudices of “school learning” by lecturing in English and requiring “all the exercises and performances of the gentlemen, his pupils, to be made in English.”15 Defoe describes Morton’s “class for eloquence” in which the pupils “declaim’d weekly in the English tongue, made orations, and wrot epistles twice every week upon such subjects as he prescrib’d to them or upon such as they themselves chose to write upon.” His evocation of these school exercises throws a good deal of light on how Morton’s educational approach may have not only trained Defoe as a disciplined writer of muscular and direct English prose but helped to prepare him for his life of writing in many voices and multiple personae. Sometimes they were Ministers of State, Secretaries and Commissioners at home, and wrote orders and instruccions to the ministers abroad, as by order of the King in Council and the like. Thus he taught his pupils to write a masculine and manly stile, to write the most polite English, and at the same time to kno’ how to suit their manner as well to the subject they were to write upon as to the persons or degrees of persons they were to write to; and all equally free of jingling bombast in stile, or dull meanness of expression below the dignity of the subject or the character of the writer. In a word, his pupils came out of his hands finish’d orators, fitted to speak in the highest presence, to the greatest assemblies, and even in Parliament, Courts of Justice, or any where; and severall of them come afterward to speak in all those places and capacityes with great applause.16

The dissenting academies were mainly training schools for clergymen, and Defoe was clearly meant by his family to follow that calling. But as he remarked years later in the Review for October 22, 1709, “It was my Disaster first to be set a-part for, and then to be set a-part from the Honour of that Sacred Employ.” We can’t be sure just how true this claim is (the comment is a throwaway line in an issue of the Review and hardly a full autobiographical statement) nor in

6

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer this case why he turned away from this calling to enter the secular world of commerce, although his comments years later in a tract called The Present State of the Parties in Great Britain: Particularly An Enquiry into the State of the Dissenters in England and the Presbyterians in Scotland (1712) about the state of the dissenting clergy may be his retrospective rationalization of his youthful decision.17 Oddly enough in the light of his later idealized evocation in The Compleat English Gentleman of Morton’s school, Defoe here has little good to say of the dissenting academies in general and even less that is positive of their students, although he specifically if disingenuously (listing Daniel Defoe among its distinguished alumni) exempts his own alma mater from blame. Otherwise, Defoe describes the dissenting academies as a poor alternative to the established universities, noting that they are “without publick libraries, without polite conversation, without suited authority, without classes to check and examin one another, and above all, without time to finish the youth in the studies they apply to.”18 He also paints a dismal picture of the sort of second-rate young men who are generally sent to these academies, often those whose fathers have died or who have no family resources to depend upon and take to the calling as a last economic resort. Finally, he ridicules the training most receive at the academies, a weak parody of classical education whereby some students “have all their readings in Latin or in Greek, that, at the end of the severest term of study, nay, were to perform a quarantine of years in the schools, they come out unacquainted with English, tho’ that is the tongue in which all their gifts are to shine.”19 Some biographers have speculated that Defoe suffered a crisis of faith as a young man after three years or so at Morton’s and so gave up his clerical vocation. Maximillian Novak suggests that Defoe must have felt isolated at school in Newington Green, cut off from the exciting events unfolding in London such as the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis of 1680 and 1681, when Charles II dissolved parliament as it sought to exclude his brother James from the succession to the throne. Novak goes so far as to say that Defoe witnessed events connected with these crises while on vacation in London from Morton’s Academy and his blood was fired, so that the “chances are that he may found his fascination with the political events of the time had diminished his zeal for becoming a clergyman.”20 Whatever his reasons for choosing a secular career, Defoe’s youthful piety is probably not in question, especially since there exists a manuscript in his hand dating from 1681 of verse religious meditations. These Meditations, not published until 1946, are conventional enough but strongly expressive of genuine devotion. They include, as in this representative example, moments of personal doubt as well as affirmation and acceptance of God’s preeminence: How is it Then That I So Much Aversion To My Duty Find

7

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer That Tho’ I Own it Due And in A Sort performe it To Yet Lord! How Little does my Act Explain My Mind How Freely I Obey Lusts That No Title To my Service Kno’ And Such as I my Self can hardly Sho’ Why I Should Serve or These should Sway Ah My Degenerate Heart How Freely can it With its Freedom Part And Hug the Tyrants yt Destroy Her Truer Interest and Ecclypse her joy21

We shall never know for sure just what prompted his decision to forsake a clerical vocation, and it may be that Defoe’s progressively modern education at Morton’s, reading Locke and studying Newton, had as much to do with his turning away from a religious calling as the lure of action in the political world. There is in Defoe’s writing from his earliest productions an intellectual confidence, a self-satisfaction bordering on arrogance, that would have made the dependence of a dissenting minister upon the good will of his congregation intolerable. Such interesting but quite unverifiable conjecture is the pattern of Defoe’s life as we know it, where there is usually on view for the aspiring biographer a teasing mixture of intellectual and political circumstances with half-glimpsed personal motives and self-dramatizations. For the rest of Defoe’s life, his work expresses a consistent mixture of secular modernity, with all that implies about human agency and autonomy, and an apparently sincere religious conviction (and scriptural frame of reference) that humbly submits to providential arrangements and accepts supernatural mysteries. It may be that this early decision to forsake what he perhaps saw as the second-rate prospects of the dissenting pulpit for the worldly ambitions of the mercantile exchange is the beginning of this key tension in Defoe’s life and mind between an early form of secular modernity and quite strongly held orthodox Christian beliefs. His early days as a merchant are not clearly visible in the historical record but have been reconstructed in large part from anecdotes and remarks in his later writings. We know that he quickly became a wholesale dealer in hosiery and an importer of wine, tobacco, and other goods. He entered into a partnership with two brothers, James and Samuel Stancliffe, who dealt in haberdashery, although as Sutherland observes he always strenuously denied in the face of contemptuous references to him as a hosier that he kept a retail shop and served behind a counter.22 As Novak remarks, “so little is known of Defoe’s business ventures” and so much about his writing and political life that “it is easy enough to ignore this part of his life entirely.”23 What can’t be ignored is the importance of these early commercial experiences in which Defoe learned first hand the cut and 8

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer thrust of commercial wheeling and dealing, the risks and potentially great rewards of speculative ventures, of adventure capitalism. Those early years of his commercial career took place in what historians have called the “financial revolution” of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in which modern financial practices began to emerge and when Great Britain began to take shape as an essentially commercial rather than an agricultural nation. Trade and commerce were to be among Defoe’s favorite topics as a writer, and his education in these topics began in practical experience in these years. He thought of the merchant as the new hero of the new age and its commercial ethos, and he frequently grew eloquent on the subject. Here is one famous celebratory passage from the Review: A True-Bred Merchant . . . Understands Languages without Books, Geography without Maps, his Journals and Trading-Voyages delineate the World; his Foreign Exchanges, Protests and Procurations, speak all Tongues; he sits in his CountingHouse, and Converses with all Nations, and keeps the most exquisite and extensive part of human Society in a Universal Correspondence. ( January 3, 1706)

He may also in the 1680s have traveled to France, Holland, Italy, and Spain on business, or so it would appear from fairly detailed comments he makes about particular places in those countries later in his life. We know from his familiarity with much of Britain displayed in his A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) that starting from his young manhood he traveled extensively in his own country. On 1 January, 1684, Defoe married Mary Tuffley, the nineteen-year old daughter of Joan and John Tuffley, a rich wine cooper, and with his bride he received an enormous dowry of £3,700 (about £400,000 or nearly $800,000 in current purchasing power), which helped set up the young Defoe in the wholesale trade. Four years later, in 1688, he was admitted to his father’s livery company, the Butchers, and by then he was apparently a thriving young professional merchant, with houses in town and in the country. Almost nothing is known of Mary, except that she bore seven or perhaps eight children, of whom six lived to adulthood. For biographers, this is a particularly frustrating aspect of Defoe’s private life, since we know that over the next forty years or so Defoe was away from home much of the time, possibly traveling in Europe on business, certainly riding around a good deal of Britain on political as well as commercial business. In the years from 1704 leading up to the Union of England and Scotland (1707), he was on the road and in Scotland itself (in 1706) just about all the time as a secret agent for the government. Sutherland’s comment that “there is some reason for supposing that his marriage was not one of the more romantic unions of the seventeenth century” is as plausible as it is amusing, especially given Defoe’s harshly practical views on sex and marriage to be found in his later 9

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer writings.24 More sentimentally inclined biographers have found more affection in Defoe’s marriage by reading the commonplace book, his personal collection of quotations and historical narratives called Historical Collections, that he presented to his future wife, complete with a flowery preface to Clarinda from Bellmour. Another biographical mystery from these years is Defoe’s part in Monmouth’s rebellion. In June of 1685, the popular Duke of Monmouth, an illegitimate son of Charles II, landed on the south western coast of England at Lyme Regis to lead an abortive revolt against his uncle, the new and in some quarters unpopular Catholic King of England, James II. In his Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715), Defoe claimed that he “had been in arms under the Duke of Monmouth,” and that is borne out by his appearance in 1687 on a list of thirty-three people pardoned for their part in the late rebellion.25 Monmouth’s forces were cut to pieces in a disastrous encounter at Sedgemoor, near Bristol, on 6 July, 1685, and Monmouth himself was executed a few weeks later. Three of Defoe’s classmates from Morton’s school were among those captured after the battle and executed, so it is likely that Defoe was among the dispersed remnants of the defeated army. Somehow and against all odds, he evaded the pursuing victors and the brutal proscription of rebels in the western provinces that followed the defeat of the revolt, administered by the infamous Chief Justice, Judge Jeffreys, who presided over the “Bloody Assizes” in which hundreds were hanged (some of their corpses hung along the roadsides) or transported to the colonies as slaves.26 As Backscheider notes, very few of the rebel soldiers were from the City of London, so Defoe’s ardor for the Protestant cause was genuine as well as courageous.27 At the same time, his decision to risk the fatal consequences of rebellion is striking and may predict his future rashness in the commercial world. These events lend credence to Novak’s analysis of the instability of his youthful personality: “The youthful Defoe, who abandoned his business interests and his young wife to fight for the Duke of Monmouth, was hardly the steady, dependable tradesman Defoe sometimes idealized.”28 Many years later, in his The Complete English Tradesman (1727), Defoe depicted very vividly the psychological strains of the commercial life, and the irascible Defoe his enemies would evoke during his career seems always to have been an aspect of his personality. Defoe may have sought refuge in Holland for a while after this disaster, along with other Englishmen implicated in the rebellion. Bastian says that it seems likely that he spent part of his exile in Rotterdam, where he speculates he may have been in contact with the established Scottish community there.29 What we know for certain is that he was back in London before too long after the defeat of Monmouth’s army, actively pursuing his commercial career during the late 1680s and 1690s. Once again, our knowledge of his business dealings is tantalizingly sketchy, although certain facts are clear along with some spectacular

10

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer failures and, eventually, two bankruptcies. He had an interest in a passenger ship that sailed to America, the Batchelor, and in a cargo ship, the Desire. Mainly, he was an importer/exporter of whatever might turn a profit, and he seems to have played for high stakes, perhaps recklessly but certainly in the end unluckily. If we consider some cautionary passages from The Complete English Tradesman (1727) that seem to derive from his own chastening experiences as a young man of business, we can construct a plausible profile of Defoe as not only a reckless speculator in trade but also as a merchant distracted from his proper business by his intellectual and political interests as well as his literary aspirations. One of those distractions, and not just for Defoe, came with the crisis that began in 1685 with the accession of Charles II’s Catholic brother, James II, to the throne and peaked in 1688 when James was forced to flee to France, where under Louis XIV’s protection and active support he and his family continued for many years to claim the throne now occupied by James’s son-in-law, the Dutch Prince William of Orange, and his daughter, Mary, and then in 1702 by James’s other Protestant daughter, Queen Anne. This rival claim to the English throne from the Stuart dynasty was for the next 60 years or so a genuine and constant threat, and there were several nearlysuccessful attempts by the Stuarts and their French protectors to seize power. It’s worth remembering that the English monarchical succession was in these years extremely precarious. The situation in 1688 was extremely unstable: a widely-distrusted Catholic monarch was replaced by a widely-distrusted Protestant king related by marriage and blood to the ruling Stuart family (Kings Charles and James were his uncles). As far as Defoe was concerned, this dynastic shift was the most important political moment in his life, and we will see in all of his writing his sustaining enthusiasm for the Protestant cause, already evident in his reckless support of the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion, and his eloquent articulations in the years to come of the ideology of property, parliamentary privilege, and modified kingly prerogative that supported this bourgeois Revolution, with its refusal of the absolute monarchy James seemed bent on establishing. The contemporary historian, John Oldmixon, provides a vivid description of the young Defoe (as well as a partisan attack on him and his political masters) as part of the ceremonies in the City of London that welcomed the new king on October 29, 1689 on Lord Mayor’s Day: “a royal regiment of volunteer horse, made up of the chief citizens, who being gallantly mounted and richly accoutred, were led by the Earl of Monmouth, now Earl of Peterborough, and attended their majesties from Whitehall. Among these troopers, was Daniel Foe, at that time a hosier in Freeman’s Yard, Cornhill; the same who afterwards was pillory’d for writing an ironical invective against the Church, and after that list in the

11

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer service of Mr. Robert Harley, and those brethren of his, who past the Schism and Occasional bills, broke the Confederacy, and made a shameful and ruinous peace with France.”30

Early Writing and Political Polemics The wonder which remains is at our pride, To value that which all wise men deride. For Englishmen to boast of generation, Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation. A True-Born Englishman’s a contradiction, In speech an irony, in fact a fiction. A banter made to be a test of fools, Which those that use it justly ridicules. Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman

Defoe did much more than ride in parades to honor William. Novak calls Defoe the “enthusiastic propagandist, political theorist, and economic prophet” of the new order.31 He also became especially in his own eyes the champion of William III, whose memory he continued to revere all his life in his writing and in whose defense he wrote his most famous or at least until Robinson Crusoe his most popular work, the January 1701 poem “The True-Born Englishman,” designed to counter what Defoe saw as the pernicious slanders and xenophobic attack on William and his Dutch advisors in the Whig journalist John Tutchin’s poem, “The Foreigners.” Tutchin’s poem was only one of many assaults on William’s personality and his policies. Unlike many in his adopted country, William was concerned with the balance of power in Europe and struggled in those years to convince the political nation that Britain needed a large army to counter the expansionist ambitions of Louis XIV of France. In addition, many Englishmen resented the influence and power of William’s Dutch advisors, and it was even whispered that he had homosexual relationships with two of them, his close confidants, Hans Willem Bentinck (the Earl of Portland) and Arnout Joust van Keppel (the Earl of Albemarle). In An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715) Defoe looked back to his rage at the “vile abhor’d pamphlet, in very ill verse” in which the author “fell personally upon the King himself, and then upon the Dutch nation; and after having reproach’d His Majesty with crimes that his worst enemy could not think of without horror, he sums up all in the odious name of FOREIGNER.” And he follows by describing with customary false modesty the intimacy with the King that came as a result of the effectiveness of his poem: 12

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer How this poem was the occasion of my being known to his majesty; how I was afterwards receiv’d by him; he employ’d; and how, above my capacity of deserving, rewarded, is no part of the present case, and is only mention’d here as I take all occasions to do for the expressing the honour I ever preserv’d for the immortal and glorious memory of that greatest and best of princes, and who it was my honour and advantage to call master as well as sovereign, whose goodness to me I never forget; and whose memory I never patiently heard abused, nor ever can do so; and who had he liv’d, would never have suffered me to be treated as I have been in the world.32

Although he was in the poems and pamphlets he wrote during William’s reign an eloquent supporter of the king’s policies and was probably rewarded for his efforts, whether Defoe was actually an intimate counselor of William’s is like so much else in his life uncertain. We have only his word for it. In 1704 as he entered Robert Harley’s service, he sounds pretty convincing (and characteristically shrewd) when he recalls some advice he offered to William: “I Remember Sir when haveing had the honour to Serve the Late King William in a kind like this, and which his Majtie had the Goodness to Accept, and Over Vallue by Far, Expressing some Concern at the Clamour and Power of The Party, at his Express Command I had the heart or Face or what Elce you will Please to Call it, to give my Opinion in Terms like These: ‘Your Majtie Must Face About, Oblige your Friends to be Content to be Laid by, and Put In your Enemyes, Put them into Those Posts in which They may Seem to be Employ’d, and Thereby Take off the Edge and Divide The Party.”33 “The TrueBorn Englishman” provided for years a heroic nom de plume for Defoe, and his debut as an author rather than the producer of occasional or fugitive pieces is marked by the publication of his poems and pamphlets in the volume he entitled A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman (2 vols, 1703–5). The European political scene in those years was hugely troubled by the question of the Spanish Succession: the vast Holy Roman Empire presided over by Charles V (1500–58) had after his death been divided into Spanish and Austrian branches, and the last of his successors, Carlos II (1661–1700) of Spain, at the degenerated end of the Habsburg line, physically feeble and mentally retarded, was childless. Louis XIV of France had married Maria Theresa, elder daughter of Philip IV (1605–65), Carlos’s father. Louis claimed in the last years of the seventeenth century that his eldest son, the Dauphin, was the legitimate successor to the Spanish throne and its empire. But there were rival claims from two others: the electoral prince of Bavaria, Joseph Ferdinand, a great grandson of Philip IV, and the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, who had married a younger daughter of Philip and claimed the right of succession to the Spanish throne for his son, the Archduke Charles, later Emperor Charles VI. Britain and Holland 13

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer were alarmed by Louis’s claim, since if successful it would add the vast Spanish dominions in America and in Italy and Sicily to the French empire and make France the most powerful country in Europe; but they were united with Louis in opposing the Emperor’s claim, since that would have restored the unified power of the old Habsburg Holy Roman Empire. These dynastic rivalries led to the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97) in which Louis XIV invaded the German Palatinate (western Germany), defeated the Dutch in various battles in the Low Countries, and marched into Catalonia but was himself defeated at sea at La Hogue by the British. In the end, with the participants exhausted and a stalemate in place, the war concluded in the Peace of Ryswick, signed in 1697, between the French and Britain and her allies, notably of course the States General (the Netherlands). Louis recognized William as the king of Great Britain, but he continued to harbor James II and his family and to support their claim to the throne through the early years of the eighteenth century when a French-supported invasion of Britain was a constant and real threat. The Peace was followed by the First Partition Treaty (1698), which divided the Spanish empire between Louis’s son and the electoral prince of Bavaria, the six-year-old Joseph Ferdinand, with the Archduke Charles receiving only Milan. Carlos II of Spain then declared that his entire empire should go to the electoral prince, but that prince died late in 1699. So in March 1700 a Second Partition Treaty was signed, with the French Dauphin to receive Spain’s Italian possessions and the Archduke Charles to rule Spain, the Low Countries, and the Spanish American empire.34 Finally, on 1 November, 1700, Carlos II of Spain died, and his will surprised everyone and terrified William and his allies by leaving his empire to the Duke of Anjou, Louis’s grandson. Very quickly, Louis put aside the second Partition Treaty and accepted the will. That acceptance of Carlos’s will and the enormous growth in French power that it signified precipitated the War of the Spanish Succession, which began in 1701 with Britain, Holland, and the Emperor ranged against the French. This war would last until 1714 and would provide the occasion for a good deal of Defoe’s most impassioned journalism during those years when the fate of Europe and the destiny of Britain hung in the balance, as he tried to explain to his readers in the Review, who were he clearly felt badly informed about foreign affairs. Meanwhile, in Britain, where conservative and isolationist opinion tended to look inward and to be wary of European power struggles, William found it difficult to muster sufficient support for his efforts to contain Louis. The parliaments of 1698 and 1701 were dominated by those who called themselves Tories, and they were extremely reluctant to provide money for the large army required for William’s challenge to the expanding power of Louis. Whether Great Britain should have a large “standing army” with a professional officer corps, or whether

14

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer as Tory opinion favored the country should depend on the militia and the leadership of amateur officers recruited from the gentry was to remain a controversial issue for many years. In March of 1701, the House of Commons condemned the Second Partition Treaty, and a month later impeached Portland, Somers, Orford, and Halifax, the Whig lords who had helped to negotiate it. Public opinion, to some extent, came to William’s rescue when the freeholders of Kent met at Maidstone and presented in May of that year a petition to the Commons to supply the king with what was needed to assist his allies in Europe. In part, it read: We most humbly implore this Honourable House to have regard to the voice of the people! that our religion and safety may be effectually provided for, that your loyal addresses may be turned into bills of supply, and that His most sacred Majesty (whose propitious and unblemished reign over us we pray God may long continue!) may be enabled powerfully to assist his allies, before it is too late.35

The five gentlemen who presented this Kentish Petition were immediately imprisoned by the Tory-controlled House of Commons.36 Defoe responded to these events boldly by drawing up what he entitled “Legion’s Memorial” (1701), which he presented in person to Robert Harley, the Speaker of the House; if we believe the pamphlet Defoe wrote shortly after, “The History of the Kentish Petition” (1701), this is what happened: “ ‘twas delivered by the very Person who wrote it, guarded with about Sixteen Gentlemen of Quality, who if any notice had been taken of him, were ready to have carried him off by Force.”37 “Legion’s Memorial” is a stirring piece of classic Whig rhetoric, sounding political themes that Defoe will rehearse many times in his career. Its title and its menacing last line come from the gospels, echoing the answer the man possessed by an “unclean spirit” gives to Jesus: “My name is Legion: for we are many” (Mark 5:9). In language that in 1701 with the events of the last century still fresh in everyone’s mind would have resonated with rebellion, Defoe proclaims that “Englishmen are no more to be Slaves to Parliaments, than to a King.”38 Next to the mild and submissive language of the Kentish petitioners, the pamphlet is consistently threatening, even revolutionary in addressing the House of Commons: “You are not above the Peoples Resentments, they that made you Members may reduce you to the same rank from whence they chose you; and may give you a taste of their abused kindness, in Terms you may not be pleas’d with.”39 As Sutherland remarked of “Legion’s Memorial,” it is “a document that must still evoke a gasp of astonishment from any one who has the least historical imagination.”40 Defoe is speaking for the Kentish petitioners here, but even in “The History of the Kentish Petition” he displays that fractiousness that was to become his

15

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer signature as a polemicist (in an exceedingly fractious and combative age): “The Author of the following Sheets is not afraid to let the World know, that he is so sure every thing related in this Account is Literally and Positively true, that he challenges all the Wit and Malice the world abounds with, to confute the most trifling Circumstance.”41 Outraged by the insults to the petitioning freeholders of Kent, Defoe displays at the end of the pamphlet the freewheeling wit that would very soon get him in the deepest of trouble and change his life: the right to petition is so fundamental, he argues, that no tribunal or legislature he can think of denies it, even the most tyrannical: “nay, the Inquisition of Spain does not forbid it, the Divan of the Turks allows it, and I believe if Sathan himself kept his Court in publick, he would not prohibit it.”42 Such dangerously outspoken political journalism was still in 1701 an avocation for Defoe the harried merchant, although it is astonishing just how much writing he managed in those years. In the early 1690s Defoe’s business career had plunged him into bankruptcy and the threat of debtors’ prison. That disaster was preceded, apparently, by a number of lawsuits against him; some eight have been documented between 1688 and 1694. As Sutherland recounts a few of these, they involved disagreements and charges of sharp dealing from some of his business associates, complicated in some cases by the uncertainties of late seventeenth-century international and colonial trade such as French privateers capturing vessels during the War of the Grand Alliance, bad sailing weather, and other unprofitable accidents. A few years later in the Preface to An Essay upon Projects, he remarks on “the losses and casualties which attend all Trading Nations in the World, when involved in so Cruel a War as this” and adds that he has suffered great losses.43 He seems to have lost large sums of money insuring ships and cargoes that were captured by French privateers during the war. Defoe clearly played for high stakes and lost, but he also seems to have dealt at times from the bottom of the deck. In other more serious cases, Defoe was accused of fraud, and in the most grimly amusing of his financial entanglements he was involved in a botched project to farm civet cats in Stoke Newington for their secretions, used in making perfume. Sued by the person from whom he had borrowed the money to buy the cats, he sold them to his widowed mother-in-law, Mary Tuffley, who in turn sued him when it turned out that Defoe did not really have title to the cats, having used the money he had borrowed initially to pay a creditor.44 As Paula Backscheider, not always a judgmental biographer, remarks in her account of Defoe’s shady deals in these years, he cheated his friends and relatives and “his conduct was reprehensible.”45 At last, in 1692 Defoe was forced to declare bankruptcy to the tune of £17,000 (a staggering sum, almost two million pounds or about three and three quarter million dollars in current purchasing power). He lost his country house and had to give up that special sign of wealth and status, his coach and horses. The rest of his assets were forfeited to help pay his creditors. 16

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer But by coming to rapid terms with his creditors, Defoe spent only a few days in the Fleet Prison and in the King’s Bench Prison for his debts, and his heroic efforts in the years that followed to pay off his huge debt are remarkable. By 1705 he had reduced his debt down to £5000, even though he was not after bankruptcy legally bound to pay back the sums.46 In 1703 Defoe was not above claiming moral superiority out of his principled efforts to pay his creditors in full. In “A Dialogue between a Dissenter and the Observator,” he has his rival journalist, John Tutchin, report that he has heard from one of those creditors: “I compounded with him, and discharg’d him fully; and several years afterward he sent for me, and tho’ he was clearly discharg’d, he paid me all the Remainder of his Debt voluntarily, and of his own accord.”47 Bankruptcy and the unjust and illogical laws governing its punishment were to become almost obsessive topics of Defoe’s journalism. Only more financial disaster provoked by other trials that year prevented him from repaying all of his past obligations. In the intervening years, he struggled with some success to make money again and to re-establish himself as a merchant. In part, this rehabilitation was a matter of exploiting his connections. Through the influence of one of William’s courtiers, Charles Montagu (now Earl of Halifax and Chancellor of the Exchequer), he was appointed the accountant to Dalby Thomas, one of Defoe’s patrons, a prominent financier who was one of the commissioners for the new duty on glass; and this post brought in a steady and reliable hundred pounds a year until 1699, when the duty was cancelled.48 Defoe himself in his 1715 apologia pro vita sua, An Appeal to Honour and Justice, describes some “misfortunes in business” that “unhing’d me from matters of trade,” and notes that he was “without the least application of mine . . . sent for to be accomptant to the commissioner of the glass duty.”49 We can be pretty sure that Defoe’s claim that such an office was unsolicited is disingenuous and that this welcome appointment did not come out of the blue. This moment is suggestive of two complementary forces in Defoe’s life that we will see articulated again at key moments: patronage and dependence on the powerful along with independent and aggressive entrepreneurial action. Like the characters in the fictions he would write many years later, Defoe was clearly a strong individual, but he needed to operate within the prevailing system of power and patronage. The result is often a curious combination of assertive independence and self-abasing servitude (presumably a matter of customary courtesy) to the powerful politicians who controlled his destiny. Defoe’s most serious and for a time successful project to regain prosperity came when on some marshland that he owned near Tilbury in Essex he established with money that he had received for his services to King William a factory for the manufacturing of bricks and Dutch style curved roof tiles (called pantiles), both materials much in demand in those years as London rebuilt after the devastation of the Great Fire and expanded rapidly during the late 17

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer seventeenth century. The factory seems to have provided some of the tiles used in the construction of Greenwich Hospital, one of Christopher Wren’s masterpieces. This venture clearly prospered, with Defoe in later years boasting that he employed some hundred poor families and made a substantial profit of £600 a year. As he later told Harley in 1704, “I began to live, Took a Good House, bought me Coach and horses a Second Time. I paid Large Debts Gradually, small Ones wholly, and Many a Creditor after composition whom I found poor and Decay’d I Sent for and Paid the Remaindr to tho’ Actually Discharged” (Letters, p. 17). He himself in these years had a large and steadily growing family. Between 1688 and 1701, his wife, Mary, gave birth to at least seven children, five girls (the first of whom died shortly after her birth) and two boys. During these post-bankruptcy years, Daniel Foe first appears in documents as “Defoe”; he seems to have added this Frenchified aristocratic prefix to his family’s name in 1695, a huge inconsistency with his assertively plain middle-class manner, and another aspect of his complex personality.50 Financial help came again from Dalby Thomas, who controlled the African slave trade monopoly, and as Michael Seidel puts it, gave Defoe in these years a £800 “piece of the action.”51 During those years, even as he struggles to pay his debts and to re-establish himself financially, Defoe begins to emerge as a prolific writer on political and moral subjects. His first substantial publication came in January 1697, An Essay upon Projects, a remarkable set of proposals (“projects”) for improvements in English life and society based on his own experiences in the commercial world.52 Poems and political pamphlets, in a steadily increasing number, occupied Defoe in the years that followed, culminating in the grandiosely titled collected works of July 1703, A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman (with a second volume in 1705), featuring as frontispiece an elaborate engraved portrait of the author, glaring defiantly at his readers in an elegant cravat, flowing gown, and a full-bottomed wig. The first volume of the collection was published, Defoe noted, to counter a pirated version of his writings published earlier that year. As these volumes make clear, Defoe’s self-conscious construction of himself as an author is at the heart of his publishing history in the first tumultuous decade of the eighteenth century. One text leads to another, as it were, and Defoe in the self-advertising title of these collected volumes (an audaciously self-centered publishing project, by the way) claims identity as the author of a popular poem. His marketability lies precisely in that authorship, and his connection to that body of writing as he presents it is fragile, easily distorted not just by misunderstanding but by piracy and misattribution, as well of course by rival writers and polemical opponents. There is a narrative in Defoe’s life that I’ve been tracing in this chapter, and it is mainly the story of his writing, of publication dates and collections like this, of self-presentation, of self-defense

18

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer and self-promotion. The Review is a week-by-week record of Defoe’s thoughts about political, social, and moral issues of the day, and is in the end as much about him and his opinions, about what he has just or recently written as it is about the various controversies that are its ostensible subject matter. Defoe was throughout his writing life nothing if not fractious, combative to a fault, but he had his reasons. As Pat Rogers comments, Defoe is notable “for the quantity of hostile material directed against him in his lifetime . . . He was a popular target of newswriters and pamphleteers for thirty years.” As he says early in An Appeal to Honour and Justice, he remained dignified and silent in a climate of clamorous self-justification (although in fact he gave as good as he got): “when other men, who, I think, have less to say in their own defence, are appealing to the publick, and struggling to defend themselves, I alone have been silent under the infinite clamours and reproaches, causeless curses, unusual threatnings, and the most unjust and injurious treatment in the world.”53 Rogers correctly calls this notoriety “one of the most potent factors affecting Defoe’s development as a writer.”54

“The Shortest Way with the Dissenters” and After Let him whose fate it is to write for bread, Keep this one maxim always in his head: If in this age he would expect to please, He must not cure, but nourish, their disease; Dull moral things will never pass for wit; Some years ago they might, but now’s too late. Vertue’s the faint green-sickness of the times, The luscious vice gives spirit to all our rhimes. In vain the sober thing inspir’d with wit, Writes hymns and histories from sacred writ; But let him blasphemy and baudry write, The pious and the modest both will buy’t. The blushing virgin’s pleas’d, and loves to look, And plants the poem next to her prayer-book. Defoe, “Reformation of Manners, A Satyr”

Like other men and women, Defoe had affections and passions, and much of what his many biographers present as his interior life obviously took place in something like the narrative they offer. But the story I want to tell in this book has a clear narrative line which is not half an invention nor a good guess but

19

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer follows rather the particular facts of his life as a writer and of course as a purveyor (and exploiter) of certain ideas in that writing. This book aspires to be a critical biography, and it therefore needs as I see it to resist the siren song of speculative biography or (excessively) imaginative life writing. We still read Defoe’s work (or at least some of it) because he projects in it a spirit, energy, and intelligence that are personal and identifiable; his best work is as much about himself as it is about the various controversies he is treating. But we know that person mainly through the self-projection and even a sort of self-creation in the writing itself and not through external events in the very sketchy biographical record he left behind. So there is an interesting circularity in which the Defoe we know is the Defoe he gives us. Defoe himself may be said to license such an approach, since his life as we know it most certainly is precisely a series of publishing ventures and crises of one sort or another. In the preface to A True Collection, he claims that he has been forced to publish this collection to correct a pirated version of his works: “a certain Printer, who had forg’d a surruptitious [sic] Collection of several Tracts; in which he had the Face to put several Things which I had no Hand in, and vilely to dismember and mangle those I had.”55 The collection is also designed, Defoe adds, to correct misunderstandings about him and his work. I am not, he declares with transparent defensiveness,“an Incendiary.” “Of all the Writers of this Age, I have, I am satisfied, the most Industriously avoided writing with want of temper, and I appeal to what is now Publish’d, whether there is not rather a Spirit of Healing than of Sedition runs through the whole Collection, one misunderstood Article excepted” (Sig A4v). That misunderstood article is The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, the prime instance in Defoe’s life of writing that highlights what a critical biography such as this must focus on. From the appearance of that pamphlet Defoe is in nearly constant dialogue with his enemies, and his work is a series of fierce polemics, ferocious attacks and counter attacks. Defoe is an author whose life was changed by one piece of writing. After the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron said that he awoke to find himself famous; after The Shortest Way with the Dissenters Defoe became a wanted man who was forced for the rest of his life to survive mainly as an embattled writer and political operative rather than a prosperous merchant and manufacturer who dabbled in writing. The transformative power of that moment is remarkable. It may be said to mark as well as any other incident in the publishing world in those years the new power of print and the literary marketplace, with Defoe as its exponent and victim. For nearly the rest of his life as an author, Defoe would return obsessively to the misunderstandings of his writing that landed him not once but twice in jail and once in the pillory, and his polemical journalism, notably the Review, would be to an important extent based on a continuing complaint, a life-long grievance, that he was misunderstood and misrepresented by both friends and enemies. 20

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer Contained in the first volume of his collected writings and in its title was the poem defending William from xenophobic attacks that made Defoe famous (and as he claimed made him the personal confidant of the King) but also The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which first appeared in December 1702. As he was to explain many times in the months to come, Defoe intended this pamphlet as ironic mimicry of High Church polemics, a satiric exercise in which his rendition of the incendiary rhetoric of the conservative clerical antagonists of the dissenters such as the notorious Anglican firebrands, Dr. Henry Sacheverell and Charles Leslie, was meant to reveal its untenable extremism. The pamphlet urged measures such as forced mass emigration and the selective execution of religious dissenters, and certainly reads in its outrageousness like an obvious parody of extremism. The debate into which this pamphlet inserted itself was over the practice of what was called “occasional conformity,” whereby to qualify for public office dissenters attended Church of England services and even took the sacrament on occasion. In an earlier pamphlet, “An Enquiry into the Occasional Conformity of Dissenters, in Cases of Preferment” (1698), Defoe had criticized the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Humphrey Edwin, a dissenter who attended Anglican service in his official capacity at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Defoe felt strongly that occasional conformity was an abuse, but many of his coreligionists did not agree. In any event, The Shortest Way was an unmitigated disaster for Defoe, a satirical hoax that misfired, that many of its original readers took as an actual, entirely serious proposal, and that the government, most troublesome of all, found deeply incendiary as well as seditious and ordered the arrest of its author. Novak argues that given his risky behavior as a businessman Defoe must have realized (“somewhere in the back of his mind”) the dangers in such ventriloquism, and he speculates that Defoe’s gambler’s instincts led him so that he “could not resist the perverse pleasure of approaching the edge of an abyss.”56 He went into hiding to avoid arrest shortly after The Shortest Way appeared, going so far as to publish a self-exculpatory pamphlet,“A Brief Explanation of a Late Pamphlet, entituled The Shortest Way with the Dissenters” (1703) in which he expressed amazement that anyone should have missed his ironies:“If any man take the pains seriously to reflect upon the Contents, the Nature of the thing and the Manner of the Stile, it seems Impossible to imagine it should pass for any thing but a Banter upon the High-flying Church-Men.”57 But the apology got him nowhere. His printer was arrested, and a copy of The Shortest Way was ordered to be burnt by the “common hangman.” Advertisements were placed offering a £50 reward for information leading to Defoe’s arrest, and one issue of the London Gazette where this ad appeared contains a physical description of Defoe, then in his early forties and by all accounts no more than five feet, five inches tall. As one biographer puts it, “among pen-pictures of the great writers this is certainly one of the oddest. It reads like a criminal dossier, which is what it is.”58 21

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer He is a middle Sized Spare Man about 40 years old, of a brown Complexion, and dark brown coloured Hair wears a Wig, a hooked Nose, a sharp Chin, grey Eyes, and a large Mould near his Mouth, was born in London, and for many years was a Hose Factor in Freeeman’s-yard in Corn hill, and now is Owner of the Brick and Pantile Works near Tilbury-Fort in Essex.59

The government’s enforcer in this case was Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham and Secretary of State for the southern region, a grimly reactionary High Tory whose nickname was “Dismal.” Finch had no patience with Defoe’s excuses, and when Defoe’s wife pleaded for him Finch said “Let him surrender.” In January 1702/3 Defoe wrote from hiding a contrite and abject letter to Finch evoking his fear of “your Lordships Resentments” as his reason for flight. Defoe threw himself at Finch’s feet, crying for mercy: “My Lord a Body Unfitt to bear the hardships of a Prison, and a Mind Impatient of Confinement, have been the Onely Reasons of withdrawing My Self: And My Lord The Cries of a Numerous Ruin’d Family,The Prospect of a Long Banishment from my Native Country, and the hopes of her Majties Mercy, Moves me to Thro’ my Self at her Majties Feet, and To Intreat your Lordship’s Intercession.” (Letters, pp. 1–2). But even as he groveled, Defoe also made a romantic gesture quite at variance with his desperate position as a wanted man and recovering bankrupt: he offers if he is pardoned to serve in the army “at my Own Charges,” to raise a troop of horse for Queen Anne “and at the head of Them Ile Serve her as Long as I Live” (Letters, p. 3). One always wonders in reading Defoe whether one of his saving graces was this nearly delusional but unwavering sense of self-importance, here verging on the comically grandiose. Brooding on his condition while in hiding from his pursuers, Defoe wrote in April of 1703 to his friend the important London merchant, William Paterson, that he felt betrayed by the very people he was trying to serve by his writing, and again his capacity for grandiose self-dramatization is quite remarkable. “Nay even the Dissenters Like Casha to Caesar Lift up the first Dagger at me: I Confess it makes me Reflect on the wholl body of the Dissenters with Something of Contempt More than Usuall, and gives me the More Regrett That I Suffer for Such a People” (Letters, p. 4). Defoe is honest to his friend about his fear of prison, and says he prefers death in battle, if only the Queen would accept his offer to join the army. Years later when he wrote The History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), Defoe remembered with enduring bitterness his ordeal and describes his efforts to evade arrest. Writing in the third person about the event, he records that “he left his lodging where he had been hid for some time, and removed to Barnet on the edge of Hertfordshire; intending, as soon as he had settled some family affairs, to go away north into Scotland; but before he went away he was obliged to come once more to London.” Walking back to London,

22

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer in spite of a dream the previous night that he will be taken if he returns, he goes by way of Hornsey and then Islington but in London is arrested “just in the very manner as he had been told in his dream.”60 Turned in by an informer in May of 1703, Defoe was arrested at the house of a French weaver in Spitalfields where he was hiding. After harsh interrogation by Nottingham over several days, Defoe refused to betray his friends or to name accomplices, and he was sent to the pestilential Newgate Prison, a new low point in his chequered career. Defoe had enough money to secure relatively comfortable quarters in the old jail, but he spent the next month there, and one can only imagine his state of mind as he contemplated the government’s wrath. As he told Harley years later, he even burned some of his writings, including proposals about establishing an English colony in South America, so that the government could not seize them. Burning his writing must have been rather like cutting off his right arm, but “my Lord Nottinghams fury forced me to Burn Them with Other papers to keep Them Out of his hands” (Letters, p. 345, July 23, 1711). He was at length released on (extremely high, £1,500) bail on June 5 and stood trial a month later. Despite his defense in which he claimed that his intent was not seditious and that the pamphlet was ironical, he was convicted of seditious libel and sentenced with unusual severity to stand in the pillory three times, to pay a fine (£135), and to be incarcerated again in Newgate until he could “find good sureties to be of good behaviour for the space of seven years from thence next ensuing And that he do not depart from thence and . . . be of good behaviour with regard to our Lady the present Queen and her populace.” There is a letter extant that he wrote to the Quaker leader William Penn, who had some influence with the Queen. Defoe protested to Penn that he alone was responsible for the pamphlet, that he would not save his life “at the price of impeaching innocent men.” He swore to Penn that he had no accomplices, “No Sett of Men . . . with whom I used to Concert Matters, of this Nature” (Letters, p. 8). And yet, as George Harris Healey, the editor of Defoe’s letters points out, a few days later Penn was assuring the ministers that Defoe was ready to testify.61 Penn managed only to have the sentence delayed, and Defoe stood in the pillory on the last three days of that July 1703. The pillory was a wooden framework erected on a post or pillar; it had two movable boards attached to it, hinged so that the head and arms of a person could be inserted and then locked in place. Such punishment was more than uncomfortable; persons placed in the pillory were often subject to ridicule, verbal abuse, and even physical punishment from unruly crowds who, in those days of rougher and looser public manners, gathered around and sometimes hurled dangerous projectiles such as rocks and rubbish at the hapless malefactor. As John Gay, in his mock-heroic poem, Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London

23

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer (1716), describes it, the pillory’s humiliation of offenders was a common urban spectacle: Where elevated o’er the gaping Croud, Clasp’d in the Board the perjur’d Head is bow’d, Betimes retreat; here, thick as Hail-stones pour, Turnips, and half-hatch’d Eggs, (a mingled Show’r) Among the Rabble rain: Some random Throw May with the trickling Yolk thy Cheek o’erflow. (Book II, lines 221–6)

Defoe was sentenced to stand in the pillory for an hour three times (on July 29, 30, and 31), the first day in Cornhill near the Royal Exchange and right next to Freeman’s Yard, his old neighborhood as it happened, where he had set up as a merchant twenty years before. The next day he was to stand in Cheapside and the third day in Fleet Street by Temple Bar. The government resorted to this brutal punishment in the hope that he would reveal his accomplices but the strategy backfired in the end thanks to Defoe’s ingenuity and irrepressible spirit. After his sentence was passed but before he was actually displayed in the pillory, Defoe managed to write a brilliant satirical poem, “A Hymn to the Pillory,” which denounces with astonishing defiance all those who should be standing where he is: . . . let all the statesmen stand; Who guide us with unsteady hand: Who armies, fleets, and men betray; And ruin all the shortest way. Let all those soldiers stand in sight, Who’re willing to be paid and not to fight. Agents, and Colonels, who false musters bring, To cheat their country first, and then their King:62

According to tradition, the poem was hawked in the streets adjacent to the pillory and recited by ballad-singers to the crowds who gathered around and who, according to another less likely tradition, pelted him not with lethal or disgusting missiles such as rocks, rotten eggs and vegetables but with flowers. Tory pamphleteers claimed that the Whigs had hired a mob to protect Defoe, and that may have been the case. In “A Hymn to the Pillory,” Defoe dramatized himself as a defiant martyr for conscience, rather different from the officially contrite petitioner on view in his letter to Nottingham. As he boasts at the end of the poem, he had certainly refused under strict questioning by Nottingham and others to reveal the names of his accomplices in producing the pamphlet. 24

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer

Figure 2

Defoe in the Pillory, by Armytage. National Portrait Gallery

Thou bug-bear of the Law stand up and speak, Thy long misconstru’d silence break, Tell us who ’tis upon thy ridge stands there, So full of fault, and yet so void of fear; And from the paper in his hat, Let all mankind be told for what: Tell them it was because he was too bold, And told those truths which should not ha’ been told. Extol the justice of the land, Who punish what they will not understand. Tell them he stands exalted there For speaking what we would not hear; And yet he might ha’ been secure, Had he said less, or would he ha’ said more. Tell them that this is his reward, And worse is yet for him prepared, Because his foolish virtue was so nice As not to sell his friends according to his friends’ advice; And thus he’s an example made, To make men of their honesty afraid.63

This is a remarkable story. As the Defoe scholar J.R. Moore observed, “no man in England but Defoe ever stood in the pillory and later rose to eminence among his fellow men.”64 But despite this odd triumph, the whole episode would cost Defoe dearly and turn him decisively in the face of a desperate necessity 25

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer from merchant to a paid political writer and secret agent. During his long absence his brick and tile factory failed, and with his old creditors still clamoring for payment he was again a bankrupt, languishing in Newgate prison while his wife and children moved in again with his in-laws, the Tuffleys.65 Defoe was after four months redeemed from Newgate by Robert Harley, the Speaker of the House of Commons, a man who will figure largely in a good part of the rest of his life as a writer. In a letter to William Paterson when his troubles began in April of that year, Defoe had asked his friend to mention his case to Harley, and “to convince him of my Sence of his Resentment, and My Earnest Desire to be set Right in his Thoughts” (Letters, p. 6). As he recounts matters in An Appeal to Honour and Justice in 1715, Harley had sent a messenger to him with the question, “Pray ask that gentleman, what I can do for him?” Defoe reports that he wrote to Harley and repeated the parable of the blind man in the Gospel (Mark 10:51–2) who said to Jesus, “Lord, that I may receive my sight.” Although four long months in Newgate went by, Defoe says that he learned afterwards “that this noble person made it his business to have my case represented to Her Majesty, and methods taken for my deliverance.”66 As Backscheider remarks, this account of things is substantially true. Defoe was no ordinary prisoner, and his situation was clearly a matter of debate among various key ministers, including Sidney, first Earl of Godolphin, the Lord Treasurer, who responded to Harley’s suggestion that Defoe might be of use as a secret agent by agreeing that he might be just the man for their purposes.67 The ministry in those years had a number of such agents whose assignments were essentially to gather intelligence from various constituencies, to vet opposition journalism, and to write pamphlets supporting government positions. Defoe, obviously, looked like a good prospect for such a job. Strings were eventually pulled by both of these ministers, and Defoe’s fine was paid by the government out of secret service funds, the word given to him as he was released in November 1703 that the Queen had decided to extend her mercy and bounty to him. Henceforth, Defoe would live almost entirely by his pen, in the new and expanding market for print of all kinds, although he would continue to dabble in trade in various commodities and commercial schemes. From the end of 1703 until Harley’s fall from power in 1714, Defoe’s life was inextricably entwined with this cunning and ambitious politician, at first a Whig but then a moderate Tory who was Defoe’s age and had also come from Puritan stock, although he was now an Anglican. A bon vivant who liked good wine and collected books and manuscripts, Harley was a friend and patron of Swift and Pope and the other members of their circle. Like Defoe as Healey comments, Harley also “enjoyed secrecy and mystification.”68 Most of Defoe’s surviving letters were written to him and deal with their secret relationship. That relationship began in gratitude of an obsequious and embarrassing sort, although

26

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer it was doubtless of the half ceremonial kind customary in client/patron relationships in those years. Defoe on November 9, 1703 wrote to Harley with his thanks and his offer to serve: “That I May have Some Opportunity Put into my hands by Providence to Make More Explicit Acknowledgements; And that as I have Recd Such an Obligation as few Ever Reciev’d, I Might be Able to Make Some Such Sort of Return as No Man Ever Made” (Letters, p. 11). All this bowing and scraping to Harley is probably conventional, formal politesse, but from the beginning of their correspondence Defoe is also daring in his ambitious advice and quietly boastful in his plans for an information and intelligence network for foreign and domestic affairs for Harley: “I shall Take time while I am abroad to Finish a Perfect scheme, and Such a One as I hope you will Approve . . . that if Possible the Affaires of all Europe may Lye Constantly before you in a True Light, and you may know what is a doeing all Over Europe, Even before tis a doeing, and In This weighty Perticular Go beyond all that Ever Were in That Place before you” (Letters, p. 20). In the years that follow, Defoe’s letters to Harley are a fascinating record of his efforts as a secret agent and political journalist. And most interesting of all, as we shall see, is his reporting from Scotland in the year before the Act of Union (1707) when Defoe lived in Edinburgh and traveled around the country promoting the union of the two kingdoms then being negotiated. From the beginning of Queen Anne’s reign, as the historian of English Toryism in those years, Keith Feiling, tells us, Harley had urged Godolphin to get “some discreet writer” to serve the government, and now in Defoe they had “secured perhaps the greatest, though hardly the most discreet, pamphleteer of the age.”69 In terms of pure political writing, however, Defoe had to be cautious in these years after his release from prison. Part of the terms by which he obtained his freedom was that he “keep the peace” for seven years, which meant that he could not take the chance of publishing pamphlets with a sharp political edge, although he certainly did write an enormous amount nonetheless. He continued in various publications right after his trial to sound a defiant note. For example, in a poem published in July 1704 entitled “An Elegy on the Author of the True-Born Englishman,” he declared with characteristic bravado: In vain they spend their Time and Breath To make me starve, and die a Poet’s Death: In Butler’s Garret I shall ne’er appear, Neither his Merit nor his Fate I fear. Heavens keep me but from Bullet, Sword and Gun, I’m not afraid of being undone; I’m satisfy’d it never shall be said, But he that gave me Brains will give me Bread.70

27

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer But instead of God it was Robert Harley who maintained Defoe. For the next eleven years or so, if we judge by Defoe’s letters to him, Harley seems to have manipulated and exploited Defoe, never giving him the permanent position he wanted and paying him irregularly. Still, with his payments from the Secret Service fund (an average of about £200 to £300 a year) and his other income from his writing (and his dabbling in merchandise), he managed to earn in these years that he served Harley a substantial income, which as Novak reminds us would have been the envy of most writers at the time.71 From 1704 onwards, Defoe’s literary production is by any standard absolutely staggering and unprecedented, astonishing in its range and extent, its unflagging fullness. The energy and fluency of his writing for the rest of his life have no equal in English literature, and the greatest instance of those qualities began on February 19, 1704 when the first number of the Review appeared, entitled A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France (when Defoe declared that his intent was to awaken the nation to the threat posed by Louis XIV’s France, the most powerful force in eighteenth-century Europe), and then changed to A Review of the State of the British Nation (when Defoe turned more often to domestic controversies). The paper began as an eight-page weekly, published on Saturdays, but beginning with number five Defoe used smaller type and reduced the number of pages to four. Number seven introduced an issue on Tuesdays, and with volume II, number seven, Defoe added an issue on Thursday. The Review for most of the rest of its existence (the last issue was on June 11, 1713) appeared tri-weekly, and as Arthur Wellesley Secord observes the journal spanned nearly all of Queen Anne’s reign. Secord is exactly right when he says that “in magnitude and variety of matter it is Defoe’s greatest single achievement.”72 Among its many other purposes, the Review continued Defoe’s life long project of self-justification in the face of what he saw as ferocious opposition from a host of enemies. In the preface to the reprint of the first volume, he declares that the work “had its Birth in Tenebris,” which may mean that the idea for it came to him in the dark and dangerous bowels of Newgate prison, or at least as he faced a bleak future after his release. The preface begins with Defoe at his most eloquently defensive and disingenuously self-serving: “I have pass’d through Clouds of Clamour, Cavil, Raillery and Objection, and have this Satisfaction, that Truth being the Design; Finis Coronat: I am never forward to value my own Performances, Let another Man’s Mouth praise thee, said the Wise Man; but I cannot but own my self infinitely pleas’d, and more than satisfied; that Wise Men read this Paper with Pleasure, own the just Observations in it, and have voted it useful.”73 In the Review proper, in the first number published on February 19, 1704, he describes his efforts as an antidote to the prevailing bad journalism. The persona Defoe adopts for this purpose in this very first number of the Review is rather like that of the stately New York Times in the face of tabloid scurrility: “a diligent Enquiry after Truth, and laying before the World the Naked 28

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer Prospect of Fact, as it really is; For this Paper is not design’d for so Trivial an occasion, as only Bantering the Nonsence of a few News-Writers, tho’ that may come in often enough by the way: But the matter of our account will be Real History, and just Observation.” In the preface to the reprinting of the eighth and last volume of the Review in 1712 Defoe is still at this work of vivid self-dramatization and defense: “I am now hunted with a full cry, Acteon like, by my own Friends, I won’t call them Hounds, in spite of protested Innocence; in spite of want of Evidence; against all the genuine Sense of what I write; against fair Arguing; against all Modesty and Sense; Condemn’d by common Clamour, as Writing for Money, Writing for particular Persons, Writing by great Men’s direction, being Dictated to, and the like; every title of which, I have the Testimony of my own Conscience, is abominably false, and the accusers must have the Accusation of their own Consciences, that they do not know it to be true.”74 Anticipating language he would use about his hero, Robinson Crusoe, some years later, Defoe evokes his life as a solitary struggle but also ambiguously as a selfsustaining effort aided by Providence: “I know too much of the World to expect good in it; and I have learnt to value it too little, to be Concern’d at the Evil; I have gone through a Life of Wonders, and am the Subject of a vast Variety of Providences; I have been fed more by Miracle than Elija, when the Ravens were his Purveyors.” Over the years that the Review appears, Defoe is honest enough (or fractious and combative enough) to record a constant struggle with uncomprehending enemies and nonsensical, contemptible “News-Writers”; he dramatizes himself with unflagging energy over a very long haul as a lonely voice of accuracy, reason, and moderation (in about as immoderate a manner as you can imagine). “The life of a wit,” as his younger contemporary Alexander Pope observed, “is a warfare upon earth,” and Defoe’s writing life was one of constant struggle with opponents in the political and journalistic arena. The sustained ferocity of Defoe’s attacks and counter-attacks creates and sustains a polemical persona, Mr. Review, that we can say is the rhetorical embodiment of Daniel Defoe. In many other works that accompany and follow that periodical Defoe projects distinct personae and in the book-length narratives of his later years fullyrealized characters who define themselves rhetorically in similar fashion, by marking themselves as authors, by separating themselves specifically from the inferior competition by honesty and integrity, by an original kind of accuracy in their texts, by a self-proclaimed fullness of being and singularity in their articulations. We can think of that, especially in the fiction, as a thematic achievement, the imagining of particular and distinct individuals or subjects who are related inevitably to the biographical subject we call Daniel Defoe. We can also think of that process as Defoe’s essentially rhetorical strategy whereby writing strictly speaking evokes a subject bound up with the demands of the printed page, where the insistence on virtuous singularity is a means of self-authorization for Defoe 29

Dissenter, Merchant, Speculator, Writer in a proliferating publishing and printing scene where rival voices and opinions clamor for attention. In biographical terms, Defoe can be said to write his own life in his journalism. The entity we call Daniel Defoe is largely, in effect, what he expressed or performed in his writing, which has an inherent instability and fragility that is propped up precariously by Defoe’s energy and rhetorical insistence. We know “Defoe” through his writing, through his unceasing and nearly lifelong articulation of words upon words.

30

2 Early Writings 1697–1703: Projects, Dissent, Poems

Defoe wrote many things, and none bad, though none excellent. There’s something good in all he has writ. Alexander Pope, Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations and Characters of Books and Men. Collected from the Conversation of Mr. Pope and other Eminent Persons of this Time.

An Essay Upon Projects As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, and maturely weighed the several schemes of other projectors, I have always found them grossly mistaken in the computation. Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”

“Project,” the noun, is now a neutral or even a positive word, but a glance at the OED will show that the word’s meaning has altered over the last 350 years.1 Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary defined “project” as a “scheme, design, contrivance,” and the verb as “to scheme; to form in the mind; to contrive.” One of the illustrative quotations Johnson uses for the substantive is from Addison’s Guardian: “It is a discovering the longitude, and deserves a much higher name than that of a project.” In other words, a “project” retained in the mid-eighteenth century some of the negative meanings it certainly had in Defoe’s time at the end of the seventeenth century of something not quite laudable or valuable, a selfish or self-interested or perhaps a foolish and unrealistic enterprise (and such meanings linger into the century, as the quotation from Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” that equates it with a sinister social engineering makes clear), or at its worst a swindler’s scheme or speculation designed to cheat or trick. Defoe’s first extended publication, An Essay upon Projects (1697), presents this double valence 31

Projects, Dissent, Poems as it enthusiastically outlines a series of proposals or “projects” for radical social improvements while at the same time warning against the excesses of other projectors and their foolish or dangerous projects. Defoe’s proposals themselves are sensible, practical rather than utopian, and from our contemporary perspective extremely plausible and well-considered. Defoe’s confidence in all this is disarming; he asserts, for example, early in the book with an apparently innocent immodesty that if his outline of Friendly Societies for the poor and for seamen were to be put into operation, “Poverty might easily be prevented, and Begging wholly suppress’d” (p. 67). In that spirit he offers a wide range of proposals: building a new road system for England, organizing pension and insurance schemes for the poor, endowing a hospital for humane treatment of the insane, instituting an efficient banking system to rationalize credit, establishing a military academy for training officers and one for regulating the English language, creating an improved system for recruiting sailors for the merchant marine and the navy, improving and rationalizing the laws concerning bankruptcy, and founding a college for the education of women. The variety and scope of these proposals are really astonishing, especially coming from a London wholesale merchant and tile manufacturer in his late thirties on the rebound from an enormous bankruptcy. This young, brashly opinionated Defoe deserves to be called, to use an anachronistic phrase, a bureaucratic and managerial intellectual who proposes rationalizing and regulating, centralizing and federalizing what he sees as chaotic or unplanned and inefficient social arrangements. With a centralized office for employing seamen, for one example, paid for by fees and taxes raised on merchants and sailors’ wages, “all the Seamen in the Kingdom shou’d be the King’s hired Servants, and receive their Wages from him, whoever employ’d them; and no man cou’d hire or employ them, but from him. . . . If they were not actually at Sea, they wou’d receive Half-Pay, and might be employ’d in Works about the Yards, Stores, and Navy, to keep all things in Repair.”2 Such schemes presuppose a strong central executive authority and cooperative legislature. Defoe conceives of a social totality efficiently regulated and managed rationally by that executive arm of government and supported by the legislative. Cumulatively, the effect is tremendously ambitious but disarming in a matter-of-fact way, ignoring we may say the actual difficulties of coordinating the executive and the will of the legislature. Also ignored but perhaps built into Defoe’s improvisatory brand of mercantile capitalism is the conflict between such regulation and the free-wheeling commercial adventurism he celebrates here and throughout his work. Each of these proposals is detailed, bristling with specifics and particulars, such as exactly how much to pay the officers who will head the military academy or the chaplains and the cooks in the hospital for the insane, or exactly how the actuarial and fiscal details of the pension and insurance schemes will work out, or (my favorite) that the curriculum for the cadets in the military academy shall 32

Projects, Dissent, Poems include swimming (“which no Soldier, and indeed no Man whatever ought to be without” [p. 105]).3 Defoe the man of affairs, the indefatigably curious and opinionated student of human nature and society, is on display in this book, and much of the presentation is schematic and pedantically precise, the work of a man for whom God is in the details. One might almost say that the various lists and tables in An Essay are the heart of the book, where Defoe is most at home and self-confident in his proposals. In this fine-grained attention to particularity, as we shall see, lies much of Defoe’s style and vision as a writer who was one of those on whom truly nothing was ever lost. But on the other hand, Defoe commences his treatise with some cautionary and generalizing remarks, some drawn from his own experiences, that take the longer and wider view as he surveys “The History of Projects” and “Of Projectors.”This is, he begins, a “Projecting Age,” unprecedented in “the degree of Projecting and Inventing, as it refers to Matters of Negoce, and Methods of Civil Polity, which we see this Age arriv’d to.”4 Defoe the uniquely enthusiastic celebrator of early modernity is very quickly on view here, but in the preface dedicated to his patron, the financier, Dalby Thomas, he also speaks of the “Despicable Title of a Projector” (p. 1). The age, he continues in the text proper in vigorously satiric language,“swarms with such a multitude of Projectors more than usual; who besides the Innumerable Conceptions which dye in the bringing forth, and (like Abortions of the Brain) only come into the Air, and dissolve, do really every day produce new Contrivances, Engines, and Projects” (p. 7). He goes on to distinguish between such promising if fragile enterprises and “the Frauds and Tricks of Stock-Jobbers, Engineers, Patentees, Committees, with those Exchange-Mountebanks we very properly call Brokers” (p. 10) He himself, he adds, has been the victim of a “Patent-Monger,” and the world is full of “Projects fram’d by subtle Heads, with a sort of Deceptio Visus, and Legerdemain, to bring People to ruin needless and unusual hazards” (p. 11).5 Defoe evokes at the beginning of his treatise a world in which projectors and their schemes are driven by economic circumstances, by what he calls “necessity,” to nothing less than criminal behavior in which: a meer Projector . . . is a Contemptible thing, driven by his own desperate Fortune to such a Streight, that he must be deliver’d by a Miracle or Starve; and when he has beat his Brains for some such Miracle in vain, he finds no remedy but to paint up some Bauble or other, as Players make Puppets talk big, to show like a strange thing, and then cry it up for a New Invention, gets a Patent for it, divides it into Shares, and they must be Sold; ways and means are not wanting to Swell the new Whim to a vast Magnitude; Thousands and Hundreds of thousands are the least of his discourse, and sometimes Millions . . . The Diver shall walk at the bottom of the Thames; the Saltpeter-Maker shall Build Tom T–ds Pond into Houses; the Engineers Build Models and Windmills to draw Water, till Funds are rais’d to carry it on, by Men who have more Money than Brains, and then good night Patent and Invention; the Projector has done his business and is gone. (pp. 17–18)

33

Projects, Dissent, Poems Even in so soberly ambitious a work as An Essay, Defoe is often enough a comic and satirical writer, who balances his enthusiasm for certain kinds of honest projecting with a sense of the prevailing dangers of fraud that feeds on modern greed and dreams of instant riches peculiar to the commercial age. There is at times a free-wheeling and wonderfully irresponsible quality to these reflections, quite distinct from the mostly sober and self-righteous style that Defoe will come to in his maturity in the Review. But projectors of all kinds are driven by a grim enough economic necessity, which is in part the human condition as Defoe defines it: “Man is the worst of all God’s Creatures to shift for himself; no other Animal is ever starv’d to death: Nature without, has provided them both food and Cloaths; and Nature within, has plac’d an Instinct that never fails to direct them to proper means for a supply; but Man must either Work or Starve, Slave or Dye” (pp. 17–18). Nonetheless, the best projectors are in this same commercial world, and they are in fact merchants, especially those in international trade: “Every new Voyage the Merchant contrives is a Project” (p. 8). Here in his first book, Defoe begins his own life long project of mythologizing the merchant, a new sort of hero (distinctly apart from the criminal speculator and “meer projector”) for the new expansionist commercial age of which Defoe is the unofficial poet laureate: “Ships are sent from Port to Port, as Markets and Merchandizes differ, by the help of strange and Universal Intelligence; wherein some are so exquisite, so swift, and so exact, that a Merchant sitting at home in his Counting-house, at once converses with all Parts of the known World. This, and Travel, makes a True-bred Merchant the most Intelligent Man in the World” (pp. 8–9). This self-consciously double view of his activity as a writer in An Essay will characterize much of Defoe’s subsequent work, in which he positions himself as the self-appointed regulator of the sprawling world of modern writing, the corrector and censor of corrupt contemporary practices and genres, for example, addressing deluded or ill-informed public opinion and political naivete in various pamphlets on religion and politics, reforming ignorant and scurrilous journalism by his own practice in the Review and elsewhere, or refining irresponsible and mendacious narrative in Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana. As the editors of An Essay for the Stoke Newington Defoe edition put it, there is a tension in the book between an “essay” in Montaigne’s sense of an attempt or exploration and a “project,” which is a very different and less tentative kind of attempt. Their point is that Defoe, in so doing, in his title “relishes the disjunction in tone and purpose between the calm, reasoned essayist and the maddened speculator” (pp. xxi and xxiii). Throughout his career, Defoe’s frequently-achieved originality is exactly a matter of such generic tensions and transformations in which he puts his own stamp or twist on conventional subjects and practices. And just as in his journalism and his fiction Defoe’s own experiences are in some way and at some level exploited for material, so too here in his first book a good deal of

34

Projects, Dissent, Poems his subject bears on his own dealings, especially in the chapter “Of Bankrupts.” From the very beginning of his career, as well, we can see in An Essay on Projects Defoe’s defining and absolute self-confidence. This is not always the most attractive of his characteristics, and some of his contemporaries on the other side of the political and ideological fence found his manner intolerable. As Swift put it in “A Letter Concerning the Sacramental Test,” Defoe was “One of these Authors (the Fellow that was pilloryed, I have forgot his name) so grave, sententious, dogmatical a Rogue, that there is no enduring him.”6 And he is at times brashly opinionated, a garrulous know-it-all, “unabash’d,” in Pope’s malicious but witty slur in the Dunciad.7 But An Essay may be said to have an attractive surplus of linguistic energy (for example, in the satiric and comic passages) that makes it more than a dry series of recommendations from a one-man think tank and redeems its occasional arrogance. The book is of interest, first, as Defoe’s breakthrough in a large way into the world of ideas and of writing in the public sphere. But, second, it is in various of its features the debut of a distinctive voice and manner, of a style that Defoe will elaborate and intensify in the years to come. To be sure, Defoe can’t be said to have one style but rather a flexible and supple range of idioms and emphases that increase in variety and intensity in the years that follow. In An Essay his main idiom is a straightforward clarity and calm directness, obscured sometimes by various professional jargons from the world of commerce and law, but for the most part simple and colloquial, possessing at times a proverbial base or demotic recourse in which he appeals to common sense and common maxims, or what sound like maxims as he formulates or manipulates them. Here, for example, in discussing his proposal for building and maintaining a road network Defoe argues that each county, city, town, and parish shall contribute labor: “Another Branch of the Stock must be Hands; for a Stock of Men is a Stock of Money” (p. 34). And again in a later section where he is discussing his proposal for a military academy, Defoe reviews the latest trends in military strategy whereby generals avoid battle unless they have a clear advantage so that “ ’Tis plain in the present War, that ’tis not who has the longest Sword, so much as he who has the longest Purse, will hold the War out best” (p. 99). This memorable pseudo-maxim, let’s call it, becomes a few years later a refrain in Defoe’s discussion of the war with France in the Review. Defoe from the first reveals a knack for phrase making, for the memorable and catchy formulation, which he will put to even better use in some of his tremendously popular poems such as “The True-Born Englishman” and “Hymn to the Pillory.” Perhaps the most visible feature of Defoe’s manner in An Essay, however, is his anecdotal verve, accompanied by his ear for realistic dialogue and what sounds like common speech, which in retrospect predicts his later remarkable facility as a writer of demotic narrative, or mimic pseudo-autobiography in the voices of

35

Projects, Dissent, Poems a range of characters across a wide social spectrum, although specializing most often in lower-class impersonation.This facility for narrative and mimicry is most prominent, naturally, in the long section devoted to bankrupts, in which he speaks de profundis from his own disastrous experience as a bankrupt (although without self-pity). One might say that in An Essay Defoe’s mind works essentially or at least habitually through narrative, or that narrative for him generates categories and illustrates the social problems he is discussing. On a number of occasions, Defoe works from particular anecdote and vividly rendered experience outwards toward generality. For example, this is how he distinguishes among what he says are the four sorts of players in the drama of bankruptcy: 1. There is the Honest Debtor, who fails by visible Necessity, Losses, Sickness, Decay of Trade, or the like. 2. The Knavish, Designing, or Idle, Extravagant Debtor, who fails because either he has run out his Estate in Excesses, or on purpose to cheat and abuse his Creditors. 3. There is the moderate Creditor, who seeks his own, but will omit no lawful Means to gain it, and yet will hear reasonable and just Arguments and Proposals. 4. There is the Rigorous Severe Creditor, that values not whether the Debtor he Honest Man or Knave, Able or Unable; but will have his Debt, whether it be to had or no; without Mercy, without Compassion, full of Ill Language, Passion, and Revenge. (pp. 81–2) These are complicated narratives of financial existence in all its difficulty and human vividness. Doubtless informed by his own experiences, his intimate knowledge of this milieu, the list – more like an annotated dramatis personae – translates the general problem of bankruptcy into balancing portraits, characters in an old tradition of moral commentary fitted to modern commercial stress and strain. An Essay also contains moments of concentrated, fairly dense narrative, where the resonances of the anecdote as Defoe renders it take in rather more than the particular social problem of bankruptcy. Consider the narrative confidence and control in this passage, the management of moral and social irony, the incidental details and the London insider’s knowledge of the shape of this vignette: the officious Watch and the pathos of the little London thief next to the enormous injustice of the law-evading bankrupt as he passes safely into the Mint and the Friars with his goods: If the Bankrupt be a Merchant, no Statute can reach his Effects beyond the Seas; so that he has nothing to secure but his Books, and away he goes into the Friars. [Like the Mint mentioned below, an area of London, Whitefriars Street, that in

36

Projects, Dissent, Poems Defoe’s time was a place of sanctuary, where debtors and other criminals were immune from prosecution.] If a Shopkeeper, he has more difficulty; but that is made easy, for there are Men (and Carts) to be had, whose Trade it is, and who in One Night shall remove the greatest Warehouse of Goods, or Cellar of Wines in the town, and carry them off into those Nurseries of Rogues, the Mint and the Friars; and our Constables and Watch, who are the allow’d-Magistrates of the Night, and who shall stop a poor little lurking Thief, that it may be has stole a bundle of old Cloaths, worth 5 s. shall let them all pass without any disturbance, and see a hundred honest men robb’d of their Estates before their faces, to the Eternal Infamy of the Justice of the Nation. (p. 78)

And once there in the Mint or the Friars, Defoe imagines with great comic fullness the “Discourse among the Inhabitants of those Dens of Thieves, when they first swarm about a New Comer” (p. 78): Well, says the first, Come, don’t be concern’d, you have got a good Parcel of Goods away, I promise you; you need not value all the World. Ah! wou’d I had done so, says another, I’de a laugh’d at all my Creditors. Ay, says the young Proficient in the harden’d Trade, but my Creditors! Damn the Creditors, says a Third, Why there’s such a one and such a one, they have Creditors too, and they won’t agree with them, and here they live like Gentlemen, and care not a farthing for them. Offer your Creditors Half a Crown in the Pound, and pay it them in Old Debts, and if they won’t take it, let them alone, they’ll come after you, never fear it. (p. 78)

Defoe is not, in this section of An Essay at least, simply making proposals or offering projects; he is evoking the conditions and the characters who provoke those proposals. Like any satirist, he relishes on one level the deplorable conditions that he renders so vividly. These entertaining rascals in the Mint or the Friars are negative examples, of course, hardened and cynical manipulators of a system Defoe hates, but they are also irresistible material for his mimicry and part of the specifically imaginative quality that shines through in parts of his first book. At the same time, Defoe himself in this section speaks to his readers with a related directness if not with the same off hand carelessness as his characters. After commenting on the scandal of English laws that punish the desperate petty thief with transportation or execution and allow the “wilful Bankrupt” to “carry mens Estates away before their faces, and no Officers to be found who dare execute the Law upon them” (p. 88), Defoe considers his own indignation and tells his reader that he “may be a little warmer on this Head, on account that I have been a larger Sufferer by such means than ordinary” (p. 88). This is true, but even if it were not such affirmations amount to a narrative strategy, a personalizing and dramatic moment in a series of otherwise objective proposals. 37

Projects, Dissent, Poems

In Defense of Dissent It were endless to animadvert upon all the extravagant Passages of this envenom’d Libel, which is writ on purpose to set the Nation in a Flame, and to engage us in an intestine War, that the French King may have an opportunity to force the Pretender upon us. Daniel Defoe, Reflections upon a late Scandalous and Malicious Pamphlet Entitul’d The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.8

The modern reader of Defoe’s other early work may not always find these distinctive energies of An Essay upon Projects (the locus I would say of his specifically literary achievement and the signature of his enduring readability) much in evidence there, and his various early pamphlets on religion are of interest mainly to historians of the period and to Defoe’s biographers and bibliographers. But these early writings dealing with religious politics during the brief reign of James II and then during the Williamite years and the Queen Anne period raise a crucial issue that applies to all of Defoe’s journalism. If one consults the new Owens and Furbank edition of all of Defoe’s works now in progress and reads the introductions to the volumes containing these writings, one will find scrupulous historical discussions and annotations that fill in the background of Defoe’s religious and political tracts.9 What is missing in the excellent introductions, for example, to the volumes on party politics and constitutional theory (by J.A. Downie and by P.N. Furbank) and Dissent (by W.R. Owens) is some attempt to explore the rhetorical textures and strategies of those writings and to say why at least some of Defoe’s early works should continue to be read by nonspecialists. Do they have qualities as distinctive prose that take us beyond their historical importance as influential polemics? My own view is that a number of these earliest writings do indeed have moments of energy and stylistic distinctiveness that foreshadow Defoe’s work when he hits his stride in the middle of the first decade of the eighteenth century as a journalist and author, so that these polemical pamphlets are part of the story of his development as a writer. And, more locally, there are also moments in these writings that predict the satiric fireworks of the pamphlet that would in December 1702 change Defoe’s life forever, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. Finally, this early prose (the verse I will reserve for a separate part of this chapter) begins the flow of words that makes him such a remarkable phenomenon in the history of English writing. These early pamphlets are the trickling source, the headwaters of what will become in a very few years a full flood of language. At the very least, the early writings show us Defoe cultivating his remarkable fluency, finding his various voices, clearing his throat as it were and beginning his amazing life of writing, or rather his life as writing. 38

Projects, Dissent, Poems From his first pamphlet dealing with political/religious controversy, “A Letter to a Dissenter from his Friend at the Hague” (1688), Defoe displays a talent for clear and forceful argument, as well as a self-confidence bordering on arrogance. In the charged atmosphere created by James’s controversial pro-Catholic policies and strategies, this pamphlet is an audacious contribution to the Protestant resistance, a frank attack among other things on the reigning monarch and his administration. The pamphlet features a smooth impersonation, we may say, of a much older and wiser man than the 28-year-old Defoe, a man who urges on his friend calm deliberation: “before You engage too warmly in this Cause, I would offer some few things to your calm and deliberate Thoughts.”10 It is striking that the young Defoe slips so easily into narrative mimicry of a persona at variance with his own reality, appealing to the experience and maturity his speaker shares with his correspondent: “you and I have liv’d long enough in the World to observe that the most pernicious Designs have been carried on, under the most plausible Pretences; and that is Reason enough to enquire whether there be no danger of it now” (p. 29). There is nothing calm about the pamphlet, which is relentless in its anti-Catholicism as it rubs the reader’s nose in what the historical record so clearly reveals about Roman Catholic resistance to religious toleration. Defoe argues strongly on historical grounds, appealing to precedents: how can a Roman Catholic prince like King James, “whose Conscience is directed by a Jesuit . . . be really zealous for Liberty of Conscience”? (p. 32). Consider, he says as he invokes the recent savage persecution of the French Huguenots by Louis XIV, the Catholic Church’s position on liberty of conscience, “what great friends the Jesuits are to it; how they abhor persecuting men for their Religion: witness the mild and gentle usage of the French Protestants by a King whose Conscience is directed by a tender hearted Jesuit” (p. 32). The argument of this short pamphlet is that King James’s reissuing of his Declaration of Indulgence that had earlier suspended the Test Act and the Penal Laws against nonconformity to the Church of England is nothing less than part of a plan to bring in “Popery,” to seduce the dissenters temporarily as part of James’s campaign to install Catholics in crucial administrative posts and to make Catholicism “the Established Religion of the Nation” (p. 34). These were frequently-heard arguments in those days, and in fact Defoe was right about James’s motives. William’s accession to the throne in the revolution of 1688, however, did not materially diminish the precarious and embattled status of the dissenters, and after William’s death in 1702 and the accession of Queen Anne pressure on the dissenters increased as the Queen declared her loyalty to the established church in her opening speech from the throne that inflamed the Tory right wing: “My own principles must always keep me entirely firm to the interests and religion of the Church of England, and will incline me to countenance those who have the truest zeal to support it.”11 Two other pamphlets published ten and then twelve years later, “An Enquiry into the Occasional 39

Projects, Dissent, Poems Conformity of Dissenters in Cases of Preferment” (1698) and “An Enquiry into Occasional Conformity, Shewing that the Dissenters Are no Way Concern’d in it” (1702), demonstrate that however deliberate and well-informed his arguments remained, his sense of mounting crisis and of danger for his fellow religionists increased. As the years passed he grew warmer and warmer in discussing the complex plight of the dissenters and in denouncing not only his High-Church adversaries but also those among his fellow dissenters who compromised their religious principles by consorting with the established Church for their private ends. Defoe’s position was extreme; he stood for an uncompromising, definitive separation as a matter of principle from the established church such as more moderate dissenters rejected.12 These later pamphlets dramatize how Defoe’s stiff-necked sense of what it meant to be a dissenter had hardened in these years and perhaps more important for understanding his emergence as a writer how his manner as a polemicist had matured as well, preparing the ground for the disaster at the end of 1702 with The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. The earlier of these pamphlets begins as a short history of English Protestantism, pithy summaries of religious upheavals from Henry VIII through Elizabeth and fiery evocations of the original or heroic “Primitive Dissenters” (p. 44) in English Christianity. But nowadays says Defoe there is a unique and unnatural compromising drift in English dissent, and as he begins his assault on occasional conformity the quasi-proverbial copiousness that is one hallmark of his maturing polemical manner emerges: None but Protestants halt between God and Baal; Christians of an Amphibious Nature, who have such Preposterous Consciences, as can believe one Way of Worship to be right, and yet serve God another way themselves; This is a strange thing in Israel! All the Histories of Religion in the World do not shew such a Case: ’Tis like a Ship with her Sails hal’d some back, and some full: ’Tis like a Workman, that builds with one Hand, and pulls down with t’other: ’Tis like a Fisherman, who catches Fish with one hand, and throws them into the Sea with another: ’Tis like every thing which signifies nothing. To say a man can be of two Religions, is a Contradiction, unless there be two Gods to worship, or he has two Souls to save. (p. 45)

Reinforced here by its quasi-proverbial, phrase-making swing, the colloquial vigor that Defoe’s prose rises to in such moments supports his nagging insistence on the inconsistency and dishonesty of occasional conformity; these comically intractable instances from common life and common sense are equated forcefully if not quite logically with occasional conformity: “no Ship would arrive at any Port, that sailed two ways together, if that were possible; nor no man can serve One God, and at the same time hold two Opinions. There is but one Best, and he that gives God two Bests, gives him the Best and the Worst, and one spoils t’other, 40

Projects, Dissent, Poems till both are good for nothing” (pp. 45–6). Relentless insistence, iterated and reiterated, illustrated inventively and exhaustively, may be Defoe’s signature as a polemicist, and here he returns to the blindingly simple proposition that one cannot both dissent and conform: “Nothing can be lawful and unlawful at the same time; if it be not lawful for me to Dissent, I ought to Conform; but if it be unlawful for me to Conform, I must Dissent; several Opinions may at the same time consist in a Country, in a City, in a Family, but not in one entire Person, that is impossible” (p. 46). To the arguments that occasional conformity is merely a civil rather than properly religious action, “in Obedience to the Laws of the Land, which have made it a necessary Characteristick Quality, for admittance into Publick Employments, which they think it their Duty to accept, in order to serve their Country” (p. 47), Defoe constructs a point by point question and answer rebuttal. In doing so, he treats these arguments as despicable sophistries, insisting that taking the sacrament of communion at Anglican service (which is what occasional conformity sometimes involved) is like “playing Bo-peep with God Almighty, and no man can tell of them when they are about a Civil Action, and when about a Religious” (p. 48). Rigorously literal-minded on principle, Defoe repeats that a sacrament is either a sacrament or it is not; to take “the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ” and to call it a civil action is “such Bantering with Religion, as no Modest Christian can think of without Horror” (p. 48). Just so, to be a dissenter is to separate yourself from the established church, and “no Man can be said to Separate from, and Joyn to a thing at the same time” (p. 50). Common sense and clarity enforce the simple opposition that Defoe’s pamphlet will simply not let go of: “Methinks Men should seem what they are; if a man Dissent from the Church, let him do so; and his Principle being well-grounded for such Dissent, let him hold it; if not well-grounded, let him leave it; if he cannot suffer one way, let him suffer another; and why should we not be as honest to God as our Country” (p. 51). The rest of the pamphlet continues this logical and yet blinkered obtuseness, resisting the subtlety and what he defines as the sophistry of the moderate position that occasional conformity is merely a concession to the secular law. Defoe’s mode is a hammering, defiantly uncompromising and unforgiving literal-mindedness, and the polemical edge grows very keen and the language rough and unsparing as Defoe proceeds to accuse occasional conformers of becoming “Pimps to their Secular Interest” (p. 52). Throughout this pamphlet and its 1702 successor on this issue, Defoe also projects a distinctly oratorical force and gravity that shares the stage with his demotic vigor and almost comic single and literal-mindedness. The balance between these two qualities may be said to shift away from oratorical gravity and toward a bantering or even a jeering mode in “An Enquiry into Occasional Conformity” (1702), published in November or early December of that year while a debate was on in parliament about a bill to ban the practice. There is in 41

Projects, Dissent, Poems this pamphlet a self-conscious arrogance that borders at times on clownishness, as Defoe concludes by asking himself an interesting and reasonable question: “What commission have you to write in the plural? And how do we know that the Dissenters disown this occasional communion.” 13 He answers: “Publication is an Appeal to the world; if I have wrote what is not true, or affirm’d that in the name of the Dissenters which is not their opinion, I am liable to an easy Confutation; but as I have never yet had my argument refuted, so tho’ I have not received a Formal Commission, truth is a general commission, and any man may write it” (p. 93). In arrogant moments like this, Defoe sounds rather like a version of Swift’s demented persona, the so-called Hack, who narrates A Tale of A Tub and insists on the unique rightness of his zany opinions. Defoe offers his opinions right from the start as singular, dramatizing himself as in the unique possession of the truth: “ ’Tis hard for a Man to say, all the World is Mistaken but himself; but if it be so who can help it? . . . So to me ’tis every jot as wonderful to find no Body of my Mind, and yet be Positively assured that I am in the Right” (p. 79). There is a Hyde Park Corner assertiveness and auto-didactic self-possession bordering on monomania in that last remark from the opening of the pamphlet that must have either amused or infuriated its first readers. Here, in part, is a list of all those whose opinions about the occasional conformity bill are “mistaken,” a word that provides a unifying chorus for the rest of the pamphlet in which everyone but Defoe is in fact mistaken: First, All those People who design’d the Act as a Blow to the Dissenting Interest in England, are Mistaken. Secondly, All those who take it as a Prelude or Introduction to the further Supressing of the Dissenters, and a Step to Repealing the Toleration, or intend it as such are Mistaken. Thirdly,All those who think the Dissenters at all Concern’d in it, or have design’d to Mortifie them by it, are Mistaken. Fourthly, All those Hot-Spurs of Divinity who Prophesie Destruction from the Pulpit, and from this Step pretend to foretel that the time of Plund’ring their Brethren, is at Hand, are Mistaken. (p. 80)

And so on to an eighth group, those who designed the bill to destroy the dissenters; they, too, are “Mistaken.” Defoe rises to a premature peroration and his manner grows more soberly oratorical as he notes a bit later in the pamphlet that despite all the High-Church party’s efforts not one member of parliament has made a formal motion against the Act of Toleration. So this party has attached themselves to the Occasional Conformity bill as “a Means to Reduce, Humble, and Mortifie the Dissenters”: Why really, Gentlemen, had it been in our Power, you should have had all this without an Act of Parliament; this will Strengthen, not Reduce, us; ‘twill Please,

42

Projects, Dissent, Poems not Mortifie or Humble us; and thus you find your selves all Mistaken: Mistaken in the House of Commons themselves, in thinking the Representatives of a Protestant Nation will Repeal the Act of Toleration, upon which the Tranquility of their Native Country so much depends; but above all Mistaken in their Expectation of the Queen, to whom their Behaviour is Preposterous and Unmannerly. (p. 89)

For readers nowadays, pamphlets like this require the deep contextualizing that modern editions (like the Furbank and Owens Defoe) provide, since they are very much counter-statements and responses, parts always of a ferocious debate and controversy, and we need to read them as directed and thus energized by opponents and particular urgent issues of the day. Hence the accusatory manner so central to Defoe’s pamphlets. Here Defoe specifically invokes his adversaries by refusing to reply “to Mr. Stubbs, or the Multitude of Pamphleteers, who place themselves at the forelorn Hope of the Church, and begin the War in hopes of drawing on that whole Body to an Engagement” (pp. 84–5). Philip Stubbes was the rector of St. Alphage, London Wall, and in 1702 he had preached a sermon against occasional conformity in which he quoted the second edition of Defoe’s “Enquiry into the Occasional Conformity of Dissenters, in Cases of Preferment” (1698).14 Defoe was in these years a bête noire for the High-Church party, and of course he gave as good or better than he got from High-Church zealots like Stubbs and Charles Leslie. For example, in June 1702 Defoe published a pamphlet entitled “A New Test of the Church of England’s Loyalty: or, Whiggish Loyalty and Church Loyalty Compar’d,” an attack on the principle of Passive Obedience, the doctrine that it is never legitimate to resist a lawful king and that even unjust and tyrannical commands must be submitted to. Defoe begins his attack on what he saw as an absurd and inconsistent notion (witness, he says, the recent resistance to James II by the Anglican clergy and indeed the founding of the established church in Tudor times as a replacement for an earlier established church) with a sarcastic roll call of Church of England worthies, “Dr. Hamond, Stillingfleet, Pellin, Beverage and a Cloud of Canonical Witnesses,” and after quoting a passage from a sermon by the Reverend William Beveridge and some passages from two other January 30th sermons (the anniversary of the execution of Charles I in 1649 by the parliamentary party under Oliver Cromwell), he hopes that the reader will accept them as representative so as “to avoid Prolixity of Quotation,” since he could if necessary “produce Ten Thousand fair Quotations out of the Writings of our late Modern Authors since the Restauration” (p. 60) defending Passive Obedience. Defoe quotes his adversaries here and elsewhere to illustrate what he expects his readers will see as their extreme and uncompromising rhetoric: “ ‘Let Incendiaries, Phanaticks, and Bloody Peacebreaking Whigs’ (says another Learned Divine) ‘nourish the Vip’rous Principles of Treason and Rebellion, and let them meet the due Reward of their Factious 43

Projects, Dissent, Poems Doings in the Resentments of a Righteous, but Provok’d, Nation’ ” (p. 59).When he came to compose The Shortest Way with the Dissenters: Or Proposals for the Establishment of the Church later in 1702, Defoe was echoing or even closely mimicking the language of his adversaries but without the quotation marks and guiding commentary, a dangerous business given what looks from this distance and to inattentive eighteenth-century readers as the similarity of some of his rhetoric to theirs. One of his specific targets was the notorious High-Church zealot and polemicist, Henry Sacheverell, but the most immediate source for his parody was an anonymous pamphlet published about three weeks before Defoe’s, “The Establishment of the Church, The Preservation of the State: Shewing the Reasonableness of a Bill against Occasional Conformity.”15 P.N. Furbank finds in Defoe’s title deliberate echoes of two works by one of his most able adversaries, Charles Leslie: “A Short and Easie Way with the Deists” and “A Short and Easie Method with Jews.”16 Defoe himself in 1704 derived the impetus for his pamphlet directly from one of Sacheverell’s sermons. As he wrote to Harley in 1704, the Queen’s speech had encouraged the high Tories to persecute and revile the Dissenters: “From Hence It proceeded to Libells, and Lampoons, and From Thence to the Pulpitt and the Press; Till Mr Sachavrell, in a Sermon Preach’t at Oxford, and Licensed by the University, Told his Hearers that whoever was a True Son of the Church or Wisht will to it,Was Oblig’d to hang Out the Bloody Flag of Defiance Against the Dissenters” (Letters, p. 52). The difference between the style of The Shortest Way and that of Defoe’s various pamphlets on dissent in those years lies in the former’s unrelenting and unvarying viciousness, its high-pitched and hyperbolical pseudo-biblical denunciatory mode. Defoe’s own intensities, as we have seen, are characteristically balanced by a measure of oratorical gravity and restraint, as well as by colloquial ease and demotic irreverence that sets up often enough an implicit and bantering dialogue with his adversaries and with his allies who require persuasion. His early prose is a mixed mode, featuring a variety of tones and emphases, with a characteristic arrogance that communicates at times an awareness of its own audacity and its dangers if he really wishes to persuade those of his party. In preaching to an audience already converted, the voice in The Shortest Way is humorless, shrill in its denunciatory rage, without hesitation or qualification, beginning with a crescendo of invective and strained sermonic eloquence that never lets up: It is now near Fourteen Years, that the Glory and Peace of the purest and most flourishing Church in the World has been Eclips’d, Buffetted, and Disturb’d, by a sort of Men, who God in his Providence has suffer’d to insult over her, and bring her down; these have been the Days of her Humiliation and Tribulation: She has born with an invincible Patience the Reproach of the Wicked, and God has at last heard her Prayers, and deliver’d her from the Oppression of the Stranger.

44

Projects, Dissent, Poems And now they find their Day is over, their Power gone, and the Throne of this Nation possest by a Royal, English,True, and ever Constant Member of, and Friend to the Church of England. Now they find that they are in danger of the Church of England’s just Resentments; how they cry out Peace, Union, Forbearance, and Charity, as if the Church had not too long harbour’d her Enemies under her Wing, and nourish’d the viperous Brood, till they hiss and fly in the Face of the Mother that cherish’d them. (p. 97)

Such violent language has instrumental rhetorical force rather than narrative logic; it repeats and reiterates as it seeks to excite and provoke. If ever you will establish the best Christian Church in the World. If ever you will suppress the Spirit of Enthusiasm. If ever you will free the Nation from the viperous Brood that have so long suck’d the Blood of their Mother. If you will leave your Posterity free from Faction and Rebellion, this is the time. This is the time to pull up this Heretical Weed of Sedition, that has so long disturb’d the Peace of our Church, and poisoned the good Corn. (p. 104)

“Shall any Law be given to such wild Creatures?” (p. 104), asks Defoe’s preacher, who pretends a bit later to reasonable moderation as he maintains that it isn’t necessary to kill all the dissenters: “I am not supposing that all the Dissenters in England shou’d be Hang’d or Banish’d . . . if a few of the Ring-leaders suffer, the Multitude are dismist” (p. 106). If only, he continues, dissent could be suppressed “by gentle and easy Methods, I shou’d be glad,” but in the same sentence the imagery grows violent: “the Wound is coroded, the Vitals begin to mortifie, and nothing but Amputation of Members can compleat the Cure” (p. 108). This call to arms culminates in the last few paragraphs, in perhaps the most notorious moment in the pamphlet: “Now let us Crucifie the Thieves. Let her Foundations be establish’d upon the Destruction of her Enemies: The Doors of Mercy being always open to the returning Part of the deluded People: Let the Obstinate be rul’d with the Rod of Iron” (p. 109). As Claude Rawson remarks perceptively, the speaker’s language in The Shortest Way stops short of actual murderous or death-dealing instructions for its readers as it “tends overtly to affirm less radical solutions” and to imply that it is dissent rather than dissenters that must be extirpated. Rawson, however, finds Defoe prescient in a “sinister sweet-reasonableness, with its veiled and deniable intimations of unspeakable purposes” that is reminiscent of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, “no mean understanding of Defoe’s understanding of the mentality.”17 Defoe’s parody of High-Church extremism is more than mimicry of its intemperate language; the pamphlet also involves an exaggeration of his adversaries’ logic and their inability as he saw it to make proper discriminations and distinctions. The pamphlet concludes with a wild-eyed lumping of dissenters and 45

Projects, Dissent, Poems Catholics: “why shou’d it not be as criminal to admit an Enthusiast as a Jesuit? Why shou’d the Papist with his Seven Sacraments be worse than the Quaker with no Sacraments at all? Why shou’d Religious-houses be more intollerable than Meeting-houses – Alas! the Church of England! What with Popery on one Hand, and Schismaticks on the other; how has she been Crucify’d between two Thieves” (p. 109). Defoe presumably expected his readers to know that Presbyterians had only a few liturgical quarrels (no wearing of the surplice or kneeling to receive the sacrament or bowing the head at the name of Jesus) and administrative differences (they objected to the rule of bishops) with the established church, and as W.R. Owens points out they had no “theological quarrel with the Church of England.” 18 Defoe’s violent speaker even quotes a moderate dissenting pastor, John Howe, to the effect that the dissenters rejected only three of the thirtynine articles of faith. But he uses this small difference of opinion to support his perverse logic that the dissenters will therefore not suffer truly severe penalties (“Gallows and Gallies, corporeal Punishment and Banishment”) for such “Trifles” (p. 107). In following this logic, the speaker in The Shortest Way echoes rather clearly Defoe’s own criticism of occasional conformity in various earlier pamphlets, and he seems in this dangerous game to be enjoying an irony that only he or a very attentive reader of his previous tracts could see clearly. “They that will go to Church to be chosen Sheriffs and Mayors,” Defoe argues with a wink at his own position, “would go to forty Churches rather than be Hang’d” (p. 106). He even comes close to what might be called a Swiftian irony when he notes that the ferocious penal code of England hangs “Men for Trifles . . . but an Offence against God and the Church, against the Welfare of the World, and the Dignity of Religion, shall be bought off for 5 s. this is such a shame to a Christian Government, that ’tis with regret I transmit it to Posterity” (p. 106). In “A Brief Explanation of a Late Pamphlet, Entituled The Shortest Way with the Dissenters” (1703), Defoe specifically pointed to some phrases in Charles Leslie’s “The New Association” that he had echoed in his pamphlet: “Any Gentlemen who have Patience to peruse the Author of the New Association will find Gallows, Galleys, Persecution and Destruction of the Dissenters are directly pointed at.”19 He also named Sacheverell’s Oxford sermon and a Tory periodical, the Poetical Observator, along with Leslie’s book, as having said the same things as The Shortest Way, in “terms very little darker” (p. 114). Defoe was obviously a careful reader of his adversaries’ works; for all of his early career especially he is locked in a continuous process of writing against those who have written against him, and so polemic answers counter-polemic. The Shortest Way with the Dissenters is, as it were, an attempt to halt this process, to subvert his opponents’ rhetoric once and for all by displaying its ugly implications, bankrupt logic, and skewed historical perspective.

46

Projects, Dissent, Poems But the pamphlet was, notoriously, a failed parody that became a successful and thereby disastrous hoax. It alarmed many dissenters, since it seemed a genuine expression of Tory extremism, just as it pleased many of the High-Church party by its uncompromising violence. And of course to the government it was incendiary and seditious, threatening to stir up even more animosity between the parties. Ever the self-promotor, Defoe in the immediate wake of The Shortest Way published three pamphlets featuring that title: “A Brief Explanation of a Late Pamphlet” (1703), “A Dialogue Between a Dissenter and the Observator, Concerning The Shortest Way with the Dissenters” (1703) and “The Shortest Way to Peace and Union. By the Author of the Shortest Way with the Dissenters” (1703). The first of these was appended to a second edition in February 1703 of The Shortest Way in which as Paula Backscheider points out in order “to salvage his reputation” he emended the title page by adding “[Taken from Dr Sach __ ll’s Sermon, and Others.] Or Proposals for the Establishment of the Church.” 20 The second of these pamphlets, “A Dialogue Between a Dissenter and the Observator,” mimics with great high spirits and comic verve the dialogue form used by his rival journalist, John Tutchin, in his biweekly Whig periodical, The Observator, to defend himself. Tutchin is imagined speaking to a dissenter, who wonders if “the Man with the Sharp Chin, and a Dutch Nose” is the author of The Shortest Way, echoing of course the description put out by the government when it issued a warrant for Defoe’s arrest.21 But Defoe imagines this same dissenter attacking him as “a Rogue, a Villain,” and wishing “the Government had him” (p. 120), and he presents Tutchin as his defender (a good joke). When the dissenter says that Defoe “has been a most wicked Wretch,” Tutchin asks if he has been a thief, a murderer, a clipper or a coiner, or perhaps “a Whoremaster or a Drunkard or a Swearer?” (p. 122). Unmoved, the dissenter brags that if he could find him he would turn him in for the £50 reward, and Tutchin tells the story (part now of the official heroic biography of Defoe) of how a dissenter met him in Hackney Fields and Defoe “drew upon him, frighted him out of his Wits, and made him down on his Knees and swear that if ever he met him again, he should shut his eyes till he was half a mile off him” (p. 123). Next to this evocation of the brave, swashbuckling Defoe is Tutchin’s reasoned exculpation: “If he expos’d you for Occasional Conformity, ’tis what you ought to have rectifi’d your selves, that you need not have been expos’d for in it; and in that he was your Friend; for had you took the hint and exploded the Practice, there had been no need of an Act of Parliament to force you to it” (p. 120). In 1703 the scandal was fresh, and Defoe was literally on the run, so the witty resourcefulness of this dialogue is an index of his instinct for self-defense. In the years to come he would use the phrase, “the shortest way,” in various contexts to remind readers of that moment of high notoriety that changed his career, and eventually he wore the phrase like a badge of honor and for his own self-

47

Projects, Dissent, Poems publicizing purposes tried in fact to keep the scandal fresh. Defoe’s aggrieved defensiveness becomes after The Shortest Way his defining characteristic, and his polemics after that pamphlet will continue at one level or another to respond to the wounds inflicted upon him in the aftermath of his prosecution by the government. For most of its original readers the pamphlet seems to have worked as very effective mimicry of a pretty convincing kind, displaying we may say Defoe’s skills as a reader of his opponents’ prose but crucially lacking the satiric distortion and exaggeration that would have made it clear to readers just what they were supposed to think. In his initial explanation of the pamphlet, Defoe expressed amazement that anyone would not have seen by “the Manner of the Stile” that it was “a Banter upon the High-flying Church-Men” (p. 113) and an echo of “the Cant of the Nonjuring party Expos’d” (p. 115). He blames the “Ignorance, or Prejudice” (p. 113) of his readers and wonders rather pathetically why “a poor Author has ventur’d to have all mankind call him Villian [sic] and Traytor to his Country and Friends, for making other Peoples thoughts speak in his words” (p. 115). Defoe came to admit that his imitation was too good, although in characteristic fashion he soon treated that miscalculation as a triumph against his foes. In his long reply to Charles Leslie, “The Dissenters Answer to the High-Church Challenge” (1704), he relishes the joke as he quotes a letter from “a known Church-man . . . being wrote to a Person who sent him the Book for a Present” who says that “next to the Holy Bible, and Sacred Comments, I place it as the most Valuable Thing I can have. . . . I pray God to put it into the Heart of our most Gracious Queen to put what is there propos’d in Execution.”22 In another pamphlet in 1704, published anonymously in defense in part of himself, he returns to this issue when he quotes Sacheverell and asks “What’s the Difference between Mr. Sachevrel’s Bloody Flag and De Foe’s Gallows and Galleys? Only, that One is an Oxford Modern Dialect, and the Other put into Downright Plain English: One is a Church-Phrase, and the Other a City-Comment.”23 It’s odd to think that so skilled a rhetorician as Defoe misjudged his audience or miscalculated his effects, since obviously his original intent was not to delight HighChurch men but to outrage them. In a sense, the failure of The Shortest Way may exemplify how in his polemical prose at least he often cuts against the grain, irritating and potentially confusing readers, preferring his own self-expressive force and rebarbative modalities and paradoxical formulations to the smooth persuasiveness and easy consistency of a contemporary such as Addison. In these polemics with his High-Church opponents in the aftermath of The Shortest Way, Defoe struggles, visibly at first, to keep his temper and to stay within bounds, to maintain what he presents as the moderation and logic, the fair arguments and historical clarity, he claimed to possess, and I think we will see that tension at work in the Review and in his more purely secular political pamphlets and tracts. But we can begin to study it quite specifically in the exchange of 48

Projects, Dissent, Poems pamphlets between Defoe and Charles Leslie, that most ferociously able of HighChurch polemicists. In “The Shortest Way to Peace and Union” (1703), written apparently when he was in custody – “I am in the Hands of the Law,” he says at one point (p. 141) – Defoe is mild and apologetic, claiming in an introduction to the piece that he wrote it “some Years ago” in a pacific and conciliatory spirit to promote “a healing Conjunction of Parties” (p. 140). Part of his apology (not likely to pacify his opponents) is that he was simply parodying the “warm Gentlemen of the Church of England.” Defoe argues that “these furious People” were in fact “the proper Authors of the Shortest Way” (p. 151). He also claims to have been chastened by his recent experience and in the future “very wary how I prescribe more Short Ways, without the Direction of my Superiors” (p. 153). And he goes out of his way to distinguish the “Incendiaries and Disturbers of the Nation, who act under the Mask of the Church Profession” from “the General Body of the English Church” (p. 155), who genuinely desire to come to an accommodation with the dissenters. This majority, he concludes, “are Protestants, and good Christians; speaking of Politicks, are Loyal Subjects to the Crown: but withall are English Men, and fill’d with Charity to those who differ from them, cautious of English Liberty, and forward not to oppress their Neighbours” (p. 156). In The Wolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Cloathing (1704), Leslie attacked among other targets Defoe’s conciliatory pamphlet. He paraphrases Defoe’s argument that the dissenters owe their safety and prosperity to the government and therefore “cannot be guilty of endeavouring the subversion of monarchy,” and he calls it “ingenious” but “knavishly apply’d.”24 With clever malice, he extends Defoe’s argument to mean that the antigovernment activities of dissenters should be ignored because they are in conflict with their true interests: “the Dissenters must first be arraign’d for fools, before they can be indicted for rebels, and ought to be sent to Bedlam, and not to Newgate” (p. 57). Writing against a work by a Presbyterian minister, James Howe, entitled Moderation a Virtue, Leslie is riotously immoderate and scurrilous. For one example out of many, he calls the doctrine that places power in the people “but the spittle of the Papists and Jesuits, which our Whigs and Dissenters have lick’t up” (p. 4).Where Defoe is conciliatory, Leslie is defiant, unappeasable, and uncompromising: the dissenters might be allowed their objections to ceremonies and liturgy and even the ordination of bishops “if it were not for that fulsom word schism! If they did not gather separate congregations, and set them up in opposition to the church, and so form a schism, they wou’d be no Dissenters, notwithstanding their different sentiments as to the points before mentioned” (p. 3). Defoe’s answer to Leslie’s polemic, “The Dissenters Answer to the HighChurch Challenge” (1704), cultivates distance and objectivity by speaking of Defoe as “a late unhappy Author” of the dissenters whose “Test of the Church of England’s Loyalty has receiv’d yet no other Answer than his Shortest Way, by a 49

Projects, Dissent, Poems Fine Ultra Tenementem and the reproachful Answer of the Pillory.”25 Defoe’s speaker disdains to match Leslie in his “Bear-Garden Language” and warns him that he “must not expect a Return of Dirt for Dirt” (p. 189). Indeed, he concedes that “at ill Language you have the better of us,” and wishes mildly enough that “you would let us see one Time whenever by any thing but Raillery you worsted the Dissenters” (p. 164). Instead, he says, he offers fair argument and dispassionate consideration of the historical record, accompanied by a strategic mildness which is full of quiet but firm challenges, and specifically here to the passage from Leslie I have just quoted, where the temperature of Defoe’s prose rises slightly and effectively in the context of all this conciliation to reach an eloquent accusation and confutation: Thou Hypocrite, out of thine own Mouth shalt thou be condemned; If you had not Quarrel’d with us about Habits, Ceremonies, Liturgy, and Ordination, there had been no Schism; no Separate Congregations gathered, no breaking off from the Church, no such thing as Dissenters, at least but few among us; and to impose thus upon the World after such plain Evidence as has been given to the contrary, deserves a courser Title than I care to foul my Paper with, and evidently shows the Method of the Party who run down the Dissenters by Falsities and Forgeries. (p. 172).

Defoe exploits Leslie’s violence and scurrility to dramatize what he offers as his own mildness and fairness, in the process turning his pamphlet into a debate where he has all the best lines and the nobler stance: “But you are Proof against Argument; and without taking notice of these things, or of any thing else that stands against you, you Repeat and Repeat your Railings, and suffer your Tongues to Launch out in a senseless and insignificant manner, In Infinitum” (p. 177). As we will see when we turn to the Review, thanks to the considerable notoriety he gained (and later kept reminding his readers about), Defoe in these years exploits his disgrace to polemical advantage, beginning in these pamphlets to construct the combative persona that he will expand and make very much his own in his later journalism. A few months later in April 1704 he attacks Sacheverell himself in, “More Short Ways with the Dissenters,” a piece that after a defense of The Shortest Way becomes a point-by-point refutation of one of Sacheverell’s published sermons, The Nature and Mischief of Prejudice and Partiality Stated (1704). Quoting liberally from Sacheverell’s sermon, Defoe restrains his own invective by simply annotating his opponent’s rhetorical excess: “running on in a scurrilous Invective on the Dissenters,” he concludes, Are these the Wolves in Sheeps Clothing, that are to be Invited and Complimented, even by our Superior Pastors into Christ’s fold to worry and devour it . . . The Man raves.”26 Defoe accuses Sacheverell of the verbal excesses and doctrinal exaggerations that dissenters themselves were often associated with, and his tactic is to turn his opponent’s language back on himself.

50

Projects, Dissent, Poems Sacheverell calls the dissenters “Phanaticks,” and Defoe answers that “on these Accounts the Zeal of the Lord having so eaten you up, as hardly to leave you your Senses free from the Taint we had never thought it worth while to reply to so much Rallery, and such Abusive Language, as things not fit for a reasonable Man’s Notice” (p. 182). Defoe manages yet another exploitation of his notoriety in his next response that July to the High-Church men, “A New Test of the Church of England’s Honesty” (1704), repeating with much more emphasis a line of attack from “The Dissenters Answer to the High-Church Challenge” by finding an advantage in highlighting his own disaster with The Shortest Way. The High-Church party, he argues, has been silenced by the salience of The Shortest Way, and they have been compelled to use the coercive power of the state and to give up their arguments in order to silence Defoe: “they have made use of Power for want of Argument, and supplied the place of an Answer by finding the Author a Lodging in Newgate.”27 A bit later in the pamphlet he comes back to the case of Daniel Defoe, asking the High-Church men just what they want the dissenters to do? Were the dissenters to return en masse to the Church, then the High-Church party would be outnumbered, he says, warming to the absurdity of the proposition. “What is to be done with us, Gentlemen, if we must neither Conform nor Dissent, and your Bloody Flag and Banner of Defiance is spread against us?” (p. 201). Defoe is clearly enjoying himself as he then concludes that The Shortest Way was in fact the truth about the High-Church party: “When all things are Examin’d, either these Gentlemen are guilty of the Vilest Dishonesty, are all Cheats and Hypocrites, or else the Shortest Way is at the Bottom, and Mr. De Foe has done them no Wrong, and if he has done then none, some body has done him a great deal” (p. 201). This pamphlet is newly aggressive, discarding the disingenuous modesty of his first response after The Shortest Way, with Defoe fully regaining his comic form and polemical stride, coming back from the funk in Newgate and his other postShortest Way problems, ridiculing his adversaries, calling Sacheverell “the Generalissimo of the Oxford Squadron” (p. 190). As part of his argument, Defoe notes that the requirement of conformity to the established church for civic participation was in fact directed at Catholics but redirected at dissenters to deprive them of their civil rights. But now the dissenters have learned the trick of occasionally conforming and thereby infuriated the High-Church party. Disregarding for the moment his own opposition to occasional conformity, Defoe rises to a moment of triumph and of characteristically demotic vigor: “But the Business is, by thus Conforming to the Communion of the Church, the Trick of this State Ceremony is Defeated, the Trap is Discover’d, the Snare is Broken, and the Bird is Escaped; the Dissenter lets himself into Publick Employments in the Cities and Corporations where he lives, from which they had Hopes his Scruple of Con-

51

Projects, Dissent, Poems formity, would have kept him out” (p. 202). He displays much the same renewed vigor and self-confidence in “The Dissenter Misrepresented, and Represented” (1704 or 1705), a pamphlet in which he quotes “The True-Born Englishman” and uses the phrase “the shortest way” as a rhetorical sledge hammer. Here is one of a series of three such powerful rhetorical questions: “What Justice, what Equity, can there be in this way of Dealing with the Dissenters? Nothing can justifie it that I know, but their being a People fit to be extirpated from the Face of the Earth: And as some have very piously mov’d it, you have nothing more to do, but to set about it the shortest Way.”28 Defoe’s persistence in harrying the High-Church party in these years is remarkable, but even more remarkable is the resilient and energetic reconstruction of his persona in the aftermath of The Shortest Way disaster. That speaker, with his sense of aggrievement, is on prominent display in the prefaces to the 1703 and 1704 anthology of his works, A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman, which was itself provoked as Defoe says in his preface by a false and inaccurate collection of his works. A printer, he says, “forg’d a surruptitious Collection of several Tracts; in which he had the Face to put several things which I had no Hand in, and vilely to dismember and mangle those I had.” Defoe declares with patently false modesty that “ ’Tis not from any Opinion I have of the Value of my own Performances, nor from the Fondness of appearing in Print, having so lately and so unjustly suffered for it, that I have consented to this Publication.”29 The first few paragraphs of the preface rehearse his troubles with the government over The Shortest Way, as Defoe complains that “it seems a little hard,That I should suffer for Printing a Book, and another Print it in the Face of the Government to get Money by it” (Sig A4, recto). One could be forgiven for thinking that Defoe’s book might well have been subtitled, “by the author of The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.” Defoe’s advertisements for himself continued in 1705 with the sequel, A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman. In this preface to volume two, Defoe rehearses again the story of The Shortest Way and his grievances with the pirate printer and the government. Since the printer did not suffer for reprinting The Shortest Way, it is “Proof, and most undeniable Testimony, that the Resentment show’d to the Author was on some other and justifiable Account than the publishing that Book, so was it a severe Satyr on the Ignorance and Unwariness of that Ministry, who had not Eyes to see their Justice plainly exposed, and their general Proceedings banter’d by a petty Printer.”30 Thus, Defoe turns the offense of this pirate printer into yet another instance of personal injustice as well as matter for political critique. For him, we may say, the personal is always political. This almost self-destructive urge to attack and parody his High-Church opponents persists into 1705 during the second year of the Review, when Defoe more than ever was in the business of reminding his readers of his past disgrace, which he now wore like a badge of honor in his assaults on the High-Churchmen. In 52

Projects, Dissent, Poems early August of that year, Defoe takes on the High-Church pamphlet written by James Drake, “The Memorial of the Church of England,” which attacked the queen for firing her Tory ministers and hinting at revenge by the ousted party. He responded to Drake’s pamphlet at length in his own “The High-Church Legion, or The Memorial Examined” (July 1705), where he, again, in the dedication to Godolphin represents his old parody of High-Church extremism as nothing less than the literal truth of that position: “All the Loyal Church of England Men in the Nation that are not for The shortest Way with the Dissenters, in the Litteral Sense, are Abettors of a Faction.”31 Near the end of his pamphlet after summarizing and then attacking his opponent point by point, Defoe wonders with a straight face if in fact he has written a parody of the High-Church position just like his own; and he slips in his notorious title one last time: “One would think it was writ by some Body that was in a plot against the High-Church, that it was an Irony, to Expose ’em, like Defoe’s Shortest Way with the Dissenters” (p. 126). The ferocity of Defoe’s rhetoric matches that of his intemperate opponents, as he opens the pamphlet by characterizing the book he’s attacking: “The Stile gross and unmannerly, fill’d with all that Vehemence and Gall, that a Party (who in Place were furious, and out of Place Revengeful) could be imagin’d to be fill’d with” (p. 111).The Memorial, in Defoe’s indelicate polemical rendering, is a “Flux of High-Church Choler” (p. 116), a violent outburst that recalls their language at William’s death when “the High-Church Party had disgorg’d themselves of their restrain’d Spleen in most extravagant Insults and Triumphs” (p. 116). Naming names just as the Memorial enumerates them, Defoe singles out the Tory ministers who were dismissed and who must be behind this pamphlet, among them his old enemy the Earl of Nottingham, as well as the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Granville, the Earls of Seymour and Dysert, Sir George Rooke, and other prominent Tories. He rises to an eloquent summary, a dramatic picture of what he says were the Queen’s (and “the wiser Men of the Nation”) reasons for dismissing them. In a vivid caricature, Defoe draws a political cartoon. The Tory ministers are turned into deranged ruminants like the biblical Nebuchadnezzar, who was transformed by God into a beast and “did eat grass as oxen” (Daniel 4:33). Yet once more Defoe drops in his own title: These very Things were the Reasons, because they saw you abandon all manner of Temper, they saw you bent at Embroiling the Nation, Trampling on your Brethren, Persecuting Conscience, and Widening Breaches; they saw You all Sworn Enemies to Peace, and that You had doom’d all your Christian Brethren to the Devil the Shortest Way; they saw You Mad with Fury, and Drunk with Rage, and by no Measures to be ruled or guided. Thus You turn’d out your Selves; You drove every Man of Moderate Principles from You; You made all your Friends afraid of you. . . . Her Majesty sent your

53

Projects, Dissent, Poems Bu___hams, Nott___hams, G___vills and Dy___ts, your Sey___rs and R___ks home, that they might retire into the Country, Shave their Heads, Air their Understandings, and coming up again like Nebuchadnezzar, when he came Home from Grass, new Men, recover’d and sound, they might be better qualify’d to guide the State, and be capable of finding out some other Ways to secure the Church, than by flying in the Face of Law, Liberty and Conscience, to the Reproach of Religion, and Scandal of the Government. (p. 125)

He reiterated all these attacks in the Review, declaring there that in fact that the government could not do better to discredit the radical High-Church party than by distributing it. The pamphlet would do, he proposes, what The Shortest Way failed to: What tho’ I have been once ill used for saying your Earnest in my Jest, for speaking Directly what you meant Obliquely; the shortest Way is a Fool to the Memorial, as much as the Author was made a Fool to the Party. What if the Meaning of one was Abstruse, and the other Plain, the Meaning of Authors ought no more to be always understood, than Authors that have no Meaning, ought to be regarded. However the Author of the Shortest Way, gives his humble Praise to the Author of the Memorial, for Convincing the World, That all the first said of the High Church, Ironically, is Declared by the last to be true Literally; and therefore when that Scandal to the long Robe, told a certain Court, That the Author would Maliciously Insinuate, That the Church of England was for ruining the Dissenters, and form’d a Crime out of it sufficient to move for an Exorbitant Anti-Parliamentary Punishment, he shew’d, that either he was a Fool enough not to be Trusted with the Plot, or Knave enough to punish another for what he was Earnestly Concern’d in bringing to pass. (August 7, 1705)

Defoe admits that, yes, there are dangers to the Church, but not from the Queen, the bishops, or the Duke of Marlborough! So he says in an earlier number that the government instead of prosecuting the printers and the author of “The Memorial” should distribute it all over the country, presumably because its errors will thereby be manifest. The language is brutal, the biblical allusion coarse and violent: “In this I crave leave to Differ in my Opinion from the Government; and with Submission, humbly propose, That in stead of Suppressing the Memorial, the Government should order 100,000 of them to be Printed, and sent into all the Counties of England, as the Levite that cut his Concubine into Pieces, and sent her to all the Tribes of Israel. The Lyes, the Absurdities, the Contradictions, and Ill Manners of this Book, like the Limbs of the Murthered Harlot, must fill all the People with Indignation at the Hellish Design; and Turning the Tables upon themselves, bring the just Resentment of the Nation upon them, and at last Endanger their own Party” (July 31, 1705). 54

Projects, Dissent, Poems

Poems: Satire, Politics, and Moral Reformation She saw old Pryn in restless Daniel shine.* Alexander Pope, The Dunciad Variorum

Defoe seems to have written couplet verse, in the manner perfected by Dryden, with nearly the same fluency and facility as prose, and that ease of poetic production is both a strength and a weakness in his profile as a writer.32 Paula Backscheider notes that he wrote more verse, if you count the number of lines, than Dryden or Milton.33 Ten of the items in the two-volume anthology of his True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman are poems, including of course the title piece. Even as he was forced to embark on a fulltime career as a political journalist and operative, Defoe continued to write verse, reams of it, most of it now just about forgotten by readers and almost totally neglected by critics. To some extent, that is a shame. A quite interesting anthology might be assembled of Defoe’s best poems and lines. Although he was frequently attacked for his lack of formal classical learning, Defoe was evidently immersed from his days at Morton’s school in the poetry of the late seventeenth century, the verse he grew up with, and the most visible and influential predecessors for his work as a poet are Dryden, Rochester, Butler, Marvell (the satirist), and in some parts of his enormous political verse treatise, Jure Divino, Milton.34 Like Dryden’s, his poetry tended to be almost exclusively occasional, written for particular polemical and political purposes. A few of his poems from these years are celebratory panegyrics,such as the tribute to Anne and Marlborough after the Battle of Blenheim,“A Hymn toVictory”(1704) and in 1705 “The Double Welcome,” celebrating Marlborough’s return to England after Blenheim but also warning him that England is full of dangerous factions. Even in panegyric, Defoe can’t stay away from political polemics, since he is essentially a satirist for whom blame comes easier than praise. “No wonder,” he says in “The Double Welcome,” that “William fought in vain;/ Nothing but Miracle can save a Land,/Where Knaves must execute what Fools Command.” Thus Victory from England fled, And pale Miscarriage manag’d in her stead; Abortive vapours on our councils sate, Untimely devils hover’d o’er the state. The native vipers of the groaning land, Eat out the vitals of their parent isle; And while she fed them with her open hand, Abandon’d her to rogues, and shar’d the spoil.35 * William Prynn and Daniel de Foe were writers of Verses, as well as of Politics . . . [Pope’s note]

55

Projects, Dissent, Poems In that same poem, praise of Marlborough combines with Defoe’s constant sense of personal aggrievement: “You’re welcome, Sir, to this unthankful shore,/Where men of worth were never own’d before” (p. 171). The poem is as much a complaint about ingratitude and unrewarded merit in England as it is a panegryric upon the Duke: Shall any foreign bard desire to know Why Britain can so few like William show? Say angry poet, tell ’em ’tis because Ingrateful devils grudge them due applause. The nation’s genius acted from below Rewards no service, will no merit know. Fame’s empty record none but Marlbro’ shows, Would England’s work on England’s terms espouse, But he, like William, Heaven their fame regard, Pursues true vertue for its own reward. Welcome Immortal hero’s to that shore, Where men of equal worth were never seen before. (p. 172)

Defoe seems to have little patience with panegyric; he is at his best in verse when he is attacking; for him angry energy and manic invention count for more than poetic craftsmanship. Energy trumping craftsmanship is the traditional privilege of satire. As Dryden wrote in his elegy for John Oldham, in Defoe’s case often enough “wit will shine/Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.” Thus, his first published poem, “A New Discovery of an Old Intreague: A Satyr levell’d at Treachery and Ambition” (1691) is an aggressively political poem, modeled on Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel” but lacking that poem’s mastery of ironic tone and structure. The “old intreague” refers to a petition made to the House of Commons on December 2, 1690 by a group of a hundred and seventeen Tory members of the Common Council of the City of London, who complained that a number of posts in the City were being occupied illegally by Whigs, especially Thomas Pilkington as Lord Mayor, who had been knighted by William. Defoe treats the petition as little different from outright Jacobite activities of the time, and the poem is minutely topical as well as broadly and crudely abusive of its targets.36 Here’s a sample of the crudity: Now if you’d hear some loyal city farce, Hear Bed[ingfel]d, hee’l bid you kiss his ar__ Nor sherrifs, nor mayor, nor common halls excus’d, But his posteriors are alike expos’d: Nay, if Bow Bells for Whiggish joys are rung, The jangling metal must salute his bung; The Parliament he hopes will hear him now, If not his common compliment they know.37

56

Projects, Dissent, Poems Defoe is most drawn in this poem and in many of those that follow to satiric scenes like this of confusion and disorder, and the energy of his rough and ready scurrility and the ambition of his invective against his Tory opponents even in so pedestrian a poem as this are worth noting. Although Pope would have cringed at the suggestion, City satire like this anticipates the Dunciad. In suppliant Postures now to Court they go, And they who once abhorr’d, petition now. Nor are the Rout of less suppos’d Esteem, Than Sixscore representing Persons seem: Captains of Thousands, mighty Men of Valour, From silly Will, to Captain Tom the Taylor; In Mood and Figure to the House made way, To beg their Prentices a Holiday. And made a most unconscionable Prayer, That they might have no Aldermen, nor Mayor, But that the City, as in ancient Troy, One general Revel-Jubilee might enjoy; That Bedlam, Newgate, Counters, and Bridewell, Might with the Common-C – il now rebel; That Tower Ditches might exclude the Thames, And Royal Nassau truckle to King James: (p. 19)

Like “Absalom and Achitophel,” Defoe’s poem ends with a resolving appearance by a glorified monarch, in this case King William, who looks down from his throne and at length “Lets flie at once his Vengeance to devour . . . Takes care that they shall never more rebel,/ And with just Thunders drives them down to Hell” (p. 25). This stately ending is at variance with the uninhibited and indecent ridicule in most of the poem, but consistency is never Defoe’s strong suit. Mixing genres and tones, bantering and hectoring, always attacking and asserting himself in the face of popular misinformation, Defoe even on occasions where it is inappropriate is ever the autodidact. For example, in his 1697 tribute to his former pastor, Samuel Annesley, “The Character of the late Mr. Samuel Annesley, By way of Elegy,” Defoe begins his poem not by elegizing Annesley but by lecturing his audience on the self-indulgence of grief, pointing the moral with italics: Ashes and Sack-cloth, cries and renting Cloaths, Our Folly more than our Affection shows: For Grief is nothing, properly, but Rage, And God himself ’s the Object we engage. Fain we would live without his Negative; Which when we can’t accomplish, then we grieve: The Passion’s foolish, as it is profane; The Action, as ’tis fruitless, and in vain.38

57

Projects, Dissent, Poems In praising his former pastor, Defoe is true enough to one traditional aspect of elegy as he makes it partly an occasion for attacking the generality of priests: “He had no Priest-craft in him, nor no Pride;/ . . . Nor was he touch’d or tainted with a Bribe,/ That universal Blemish of the Tribe” (p. 114). (Defoe’s anticlericalism is of course directed at his High-Church enemies, but it is also a standard satiric theme, although he’s drawn to such sentiments pretty often, quoting in “The Pacificator” [1700] Dryden’s line from “Absalom and Achitophel” – “For priests of all religions are the same.”) Defoe ends his eulogy imagining Annesley experiencing heavenly love, “That Heaven-born Passion, which with purest Flame/ Burns only there” (p. 118). But down below, it’s quite another story, and Defoe concludes his tribute to his late pastor by fulminating against the earthly version of love, which is “but a Name,/ An empty Name, by Int’rest limited, / A Slave to Scandal, and by Fancy led” (p. 118). Such general satire is not where the intensely political Defoe’s interests lie, naturally, and his poetic attention in the 1690s and around the turn of the century is focused on contemporary politics and history, as well as the cultural and moral state of the nation. “The Pacificator” (1700), for example, addresses the recent war of the wits in which Sir Richard Blackmore in his “Satyre upon Wit” (1700) had responded to attacks from Samuel Garth and others upon his heroic poems such as “Prince Arthur” (1695). In these early eighteenth-century culture wars, Blackmore lamented the spread by his enemies of what he called “wit,” a moral and social trend that was sapping traditional British virtue:

Who can forbear, and tamely silent sit, And see his native Land undone by Wit? Boast not, Britannia, of thy happy Peace, What if Campaigns and Sea Engagements cease, Wit, a worse Plague, does mightily encrease: How happy were the old unpolish’d Times, As free from Wit as other modern Crimes; As our Forefathers vig’rous were, and brave, So they were vertuous, wise, discreet and grave, And did alike detest the Wit and Knave. For Wits and Fools they justly thought the same, And Jester was for both the common Name. Their Minds for Empire form’d, did long retain Their noble Roughness, and soft Arts disdain; For Business born, and bred to martial Toil, They rais’d the Glory of Britannia’s Isle, Which then her dreadful Ensigns did advance, To curb Iberia, and to conquer France.39

58

Projects, Dissent, Poems Blackmore was a prolific and for most readers a dull poetaster, and yet these lines are of interest by virtue of their translation of attacks by those wits on his patriotic epics like “Prince Arthur” into a modern cultural malaise. In their flatness and predictability, moreover, they are a nice contrast with the sharpness and satiric inventiveness of Defoe’s “The Pacificator,” written as a contribution to this war between wit and sense. Defoe arranges a mock-heroic account of the battles:

Great Nokor [Blackmore] does the Men of Sense Command, Prince Arthur trails a Pike at his Right Hand; Heroick Nokor made the first Attack, And threw Drammatick Wit upon its Back; Sixteen Battalions of Old Brittons stand, Enrich’d with Conquest from the Neustrian Strand, Ready to Charge when he the Signal makes; And thus the bloody Combat undertakes. His Sense was good, but see what Fate decrees! His hasty Talent threw him on his Knees, A Storm of Words the Hero overtook, Disorder’d all his Lines, and all his Squadrons broke. The adverse Troops pour’d in their Light Dragoons, Charg’d him with Forty Thousand arm’d Lampoons; The Shock surpriz’d him into a Retreat, And Wits Gazette proclaim’d a huge Defeat; Printed a List of Wounded and of Slain, And bragg’d he ne’er cou’d rally up again. But Nokor, like a prudent General, Resum’d new Courage from a seeming Foil, The same Campaign again in Arms appear’d, And what the Prince had lost the King repair’d; Apollo Knighted him upon the Spot, With other Royal Bounties I’ve forgot.40

That the impossibly prolific Blackmore should be overtaken by “a storm of words” is a malicious touch, as is his rescue by the King, who had knighted him in 1697. Blackmore was William’s official physician and remained in that office when Anne succeeded to the throne. Despite his ties to William, Defoe clearly found Blackmore deadly dull as a poet, and a bit later in the poem he has Blackmore send for help from those who unlike him and his allies combined wit and sense, but their like nowadays are nowhere to be seen:

59

Projects, Dissent, Poems The General sent for Help both far and near, To Cowley, Milton, Ratcliff, Rochester, Waller, Roscommon, Howard, and to Behn, The doubtful Fight the better to maintain; Giants these were of Wit and Sense together, But they were dead and gone the Lord knows whether. (p. 158)

Blackmore’s troops triumph, but the result is not cause for rejoicing, and the analogy with past political history is suddenly serious:“These are the doubtful dark Events of War,/But who Britannia’s Losses shall repair?/For as when States in Civil Wars engage,/Their private Feuds and Passions to asswage,/The Publick suffers, harmless Subjects bear/The Plagues and Famines which attend the War.” (p. 164). In these degenerate times, Defoe concludes, wit and sense are at odds, and each is the weaker for being alone “Divided: neither Wit nor Sense can live” (p. 166).The result will be “A Dearth of Sense, or else a Plague of Wit” (p. 164). Although the poem is about a quarrel in which Defoe was not directly involved, there is enough in this last section of the poem that links his thoughts to what we know about his own divided sensibility as a writer and to what will become very soon the driving question in all his writing – the opposition between good sense or sober argument and subversive and self-indulgent wit – and indeed in the best extended passage in the poem Defoe’s own wit is brilliantly (and excessively) on display: Wit is a Flux, a Looseness of the Brain, And Sense-abstract has too much Pride to reign: Wit-unconcoct is the Extream of Sloth, And too much Sense is the Extream of both; Abstracted-Wit ’Tis own’d is a Disease, But Sense-abstracted has no Power to please: For Sense, like Water, is but Wit condense, And Wit, like Air, is rarify’d from Sense: (p. 165)

Once he starts playing with the separation between wit and sense, Defoe can’t quite stop, and the images and antitheses that pop up are revealing, full of political analogies and punctuated with comic irreverence and in the last two lines here an apt rhyme that he used more than once: Wit is a King without a Parliament, And Sense a Democratick Government: Wit, like the French, wher’e’er it reigns destroys, And Sense advanc’d is apt to Tyrannize: Wit without Sense is like the Laughing-Evil, And Sense unmix’d with Fancy is the D[evi]l. Wit is a Standing-Army Government, And Sense a sullen stubborn P[arliamen]t:

60

Projects, Dissent, Poems Wit by its haste anticipates its Fate, And so does Sense by being obstinate: Wit without Sense in Verse is all but Farce, Sense without Wit in Verse is all mine A – . (p. 166)

“The Pacificator” is a raucous attack on writing not so different from Defoe’s own future efforts (“Such as with railing Spirits are possess’d,/ The Muses Frenzy, let them be suppress’d” [p. 168]), and he may be said to admit as much in a prophetic line: “And may they write in vain who write for Bread” (p. 168). At the very end of 1700 or early in 1701, Defoe’s most famous poem appeared. “The True-Born Englishman: A SATYR” was a response to the Whig journalist, John Tutchin’s poem published in August 1700, “The Foreigners,” which was an attack on William’s Dutch advisors (“Mislead their King, and steal his Heart away”) as well as a chauvinistic assault on Holland itself – “Its Natives void of Honesty and Grace,/ A Boorish, rude, and an inhumane Race.”41 In its biblical setting and its form, Tutchin’s poem echoes Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel,” which was clearly the gold standard of political satire at the time, and at his best Tutchin manages some fairly convincing echoes of the master like this evocation in imitation of the portrait of Achitophel of one of the king’s closest Dutch advisors, William (Hans Willem) Bentinck, made Earl of Portland by William: BENTIR in the Inglorious Roll the first, Bentir to this and future Ages curst, Of mean Descent, yet insolently proud, Shun’d by the Great, and hated by the Crowd; Who neither Blood nor Parentage can boast, And what he got the Jewish Nation lost: By lavish Grants whole Provinces he gains, Made forfeit by the Jewish Peoples Pains; Till angry Sanhedrins such Grants resume, And from the Peacock take each borrow’d Plume. (p. 7)

In contrast to Tutchin’s smoothness, Defoe’s poem is a rough and ready affair, and he announces as much in his original preface, saying that he expects to be attacked for his “mean Stile, rough Verse, and incorrect Language.”42 Demotically vigorous rather than elegant, Defoe’s poem as he says near its end “No Parallel from Hebrew Stories take . . . But Names and Things directly I proclaim” (p. 30). Unlike the literary “Pacificator,” this is very much popular poetry, near-doggerel directed at untutored understandings, ready to be hawked in the streets like a tabloid newspaper, echoing common prejudices, denouncing universal moral rot and taking shots indiscriminately at everything imaginable on the British scene. After an introduction that invokes the power of satire (“Speak, Satyr, for there’s 61

Projects, Dissent, Poems none like thee can tell” [Sig B5r]), the poem commences with the famous opening that seems to echo common folk wisdom (or cynicism): Where-ever God erects a House of Prayer, The Devil always builds a Chapel there And ‘twill be found upon Examination, The latter has the largest Congregation: (p. 1)43

Defoe concludes the poem with that memorable tag: “For Fame of Families is all a cheat,/’Tis Personal Virtue only makes us Great” (p. 40).44 Comically articulating John Bullish notions about other Europeans: Spaniards are proud, Italians lascivious (“Lust chose the Torrid Zone of Italy,/Where Blood ferments in Rapes and Sodomy” [p. 2]), Germans drunkards, the French frothy and unreliable (“A Dancing Nation, Fickle and Untrue,/ Have oft undone themselves and others too:/ Prompt the Infernal Dictates to Obey,/And in Hell’s Favour none more great than they” [p. 3], Defoe tricks his readers by springing on them in the centerpiece of the poem the comic praise-by-blame description of the English as first a degenerate and then a mongrelized nation created by invasions: He made her First-born Race to be so rude, And suffer’d her to be so oft subdu’d: By several Crowds of wandring Thieves o’er-run, Often unpeopl’d, and as oft undone. While every Nation that her Powers reduc’d, Their Languages and Manners introduc’d; From whose mix’d Relicks our compounded Breed, By Spurious Generation does succeed; Making a Race uncertain and unev’n, Deriv’d from all the Nations under Heav’n. (p. 5)

Those who despise William as a Dutchman have forgotten their own degraded origins. The English are “a Mongrel, half-bred Race” (p. 11), begotten “From the most Scoundrel Race that ever liv’d,/A horrid crown of Rambling Thieves and Drones . . . The Pict and Painted Britain, Treach’rous Scot,/By Hunger, Theft, and Rapine hither brought” (p. 7). A True-Born Englishman is nothing less than “a Contradiction,/In Speech an Irony, in fact a Fiction” (p. 12). In the end, in the kind of paradox Defoe loves to extract, this dubious legacy is a source of strength for the English, who are, if they would only value it correctly, unburdened by a hereditary nobility with a long pedigree: “But England, Modern to the last degree,/ Borrows or makes her own Nobility” (p. 13). All of Defoe’s characteristic writing strategies are visible in this memorable poem (which is I think his best, the truest to his sensibility), as are many of the ideas and crochets he was to propagate almost to the point of obsession in his 62

Projects, Dissent, Poems early career as a political journalist. For one emphasis that would become his hallmark, Defoe provides here a long and in this case scabrous history lesson, puncturing modern pretensions by insisting that they involve forgetting the past. But there are particular themes in the poem that he will rehearse many times in the years to come: in England, wealth and hard work and not length of pedigree create a noble class (this insight is tempered by irony: “Antiquity and Birth are needless here;/’Tis Impudence and Money makes a P[ee]r” [p. 13]); the English poor are feckless and lazy; drunkenness is rampant among the poor and for that matter the other classes, especially the clergy; English liberty is often simple anarchy and irresponsibility (“Slaves to the Liquor, Drudges to the Pots,/The Mob are Statesmen, and their Statesmen Sots” [p. 21]); the Church of England has behaved disgracefully and inconsistently since the Restoration and its priests are to blame (“The Priests, as Priests are wont to do, turn’d Tail;/. . . Now they deplore the Ruins they ha’ made,/And murmur for the Master they betray’d,” proving as Defoe remarks that “Ecclessiastick Tyranny’s the worst” [p. 24]), and finally there is in the end of the poem extravagant praise sung by a personified Britannia of King William who is the under-appreciated savior of England from Popish tyranny and French threats (“Thus England cry’d, Britannia’s Voice was heard,/And great Nassau to rescue her appear’d” [p. 27]). Britannia’s praise of William is so extravagant that one wonders if some readers might have thought it ironic. For example, William is recommended to virgins who are instructed to “Make him at once a lover and a king” (p. 30). May he submit to none but to your Arms; Nor ever be subdu’d, but by your Charms. May your soft Thoughts for him be all Sublime; And ev’ry tender Vow be made for him. May he be first in ev’ry Morning-Thought, And Heav’n ne’er bear a Pray’r, when he’s left out. May ev’ry Omen, ev’ry boding Dream, Be fortunate by mentioning his Name; May this one Charm Infernal Powers affright, And guard you from the Terrors of the Night. May ev’ry chearful Glass, as it goes down, To William’s Health, be Cordials to your own. Let ev’ry Song be Chorus’d with his Name, And Musick pay her Tribute to his Fame. Let ev’ry Poet tune his Artful Verse, And in Immortal Strains his Deeds rehearse. And may Apollo never more inspire The Disobedient Bard with his Seraphick Fire. May all my Sons their grateful Homage pay, His Praises sing, and for his Safety pray. (pp. 30–1)

63

Projects, Dissent, Poems This is just a small sample of the drum roll of this part of the poem, which matches in its extravagance the satire of England and the English. Paradoxical and deliberately outrageous, and all the more attractive for being so, “The TrueBorn Englishman” is a hectoring and unfailingly inventive (if somewhat repetitive – Defoe’s defining vice) popular polemic with occasional touches of memorable wit amid the raucous, sledge-hammer attack of its satire. The best lines in the poem, in my view, are these (the first four line as good as anything in Dryden) but note the flat and metrically lame last two lines with forced rhymes, a sign of the haste that Defoe was quite candid about in his preface: The Royal Refugee [Charles II] our Breed restores, With Foreign Courtiers, and with Foreign Whores: And carefully repeopled us again, Throughout his Lazy, Long, Lascivious Reign, With such a blest and True-born English Fry, As much Illustrates our Nobility. (p. 9)

Defoe’s poetic output in these years is steady, although most of his poems are satiric effusions that fail to rise to the frantic inventiveness or to enjoy the popularity of “The True-Born Englishman” but instead rail in conventional fashion and usually flat and forgettable verse against current immorality and hypocrisy. He was producing many pamphlets on religious and political issues of the day, but he still found time to turn out in 1702, the year of William’s death, “The Mock Mourners, A Satyr By way of Elegy on King William,” a verse satire entitled “Reformation of Manners” and then again in 1703 a sequel to that poem, written in the aftermath of The Shortest Way with the Dissenters debacle, “More Reformation. A Satyr upon Himself.” And in that annus horribilis, in his hour of greatest shame and suffering, he also wrote while in Newgate Prison and published to great acclaim his defiant “Hymn to the Pillory.”45 Clearly, Defoe dealt with misfortune by writing, and verse seems to have been an effective distraction from his troubles, or indeed a means of turning personal disaster into triumphant self-expression, almost one is tempted to think a therapeutic response to his troubles. “The Mock Mourners” is largely an extravagant panegyric of William, although as the title indicates it is also a reproach to those who opposed his policies while he was alive and whose grief is hypocritical: Ye Sons of Envy, Railers at the Times, Be bold like Englishmen, and own your Crimes: For shame put on no Black, but let us see, Your Habits always, and your Tongues agree: Envy ne’er Blushes: Let it not be said, You Hate him Living, and you Mourn him Dead!46

64

Projects, Dissent, Poems In a preface to Queen Anne, Defoe tactlessly compliments her for properly lamenting William’s death and then informs her that his satire is not directed against her: “May those who are not of the same Mind find no Favour with Your Majesty, nor their Maker, till they repent that Sin against his Merit, and the Voice of their Native Country” (p. 41). He goes on in the preface to admit that his grief for William may have led him into “Excesses,” and he hopes that “Your Majesty would place it to the Account of that just Passion every honest Man retains for his extraordinary Merit; believing that no Man can have an Indifferency for the Memory of King William, and at the same time have any Desire for the Welfare of his Native Country” (p. 42). The last section of the poem is a 300-line long eulogy to William by “Britannia,” and it is quite embarrassing in its fulsomeness, although remarkable in its tireless rehearsal of William’s achievements and striking at one point in evoking his enemies’ implacable opposition: But we have here an Ignominious Crowd, That boast their Native Birth and English Blood, Whose Breasts with Envy and Contention burn, And now rejoyce when all the Nations mourn: Their awkward Triumphs Impudently Sing; Insult the Ashes of their injur’d King; Rejoice at the Disasters of his Crown; And Drink the Horse’s Health that threw him down. (pp. 61–2)

Note that in these lines Defoe is referring his readers to “The True-Born Englishman,” and if we read his preface we can’t help but be aware that the praise of William is also the self-presentation of Daniel Defoe as fearless defender of William and scourge of the nation’s vices, and of course the poem is reprinted in that anthology of his writings which forms an extended advertisement for himself. Now that the urgency of early eighteenth-century British politics, religion, and morals has faded from memory, much of Defoe’s poetry retains its interest for its tireless self-expressiveness and moral self-promotion and self-justification, which are partly of biographical relevance but also of key importance for the history of authorship (or literary identity and celebrity) in the early eighteenth century. To some extent, Defoe’s putting his moral consciousness and his literary activities forward is the traditional satirist’s gesture. For example, in the preface to “Reformation of Manners, A SATYR” (1702), he offers himself as a heroic instance of the satirist who is compelled, like Juvenal, to speak in response to the immorality of the day: ’Tis hard that Vice should have so much shelter from Civil Power; that Reproof should lead the Party to suppress the Poet rather than the Crime. And yet his

65

Projects, Dissent, Poems Friends give him over for lost: An Account of what he has ventur’d to say, to whose Importunity he thinks himself oblig’d to answer with Juvenal, Difficile est Satyram non scribere. Nam quis Iniquæ Tam Patiens Urbis, tam ferreus ut teneat se? If any Man is Injur’d by the Characters, he is content they should carry their Resentment to what Extremity they please; but if Truth may be on his side, the only Way to make him do them Justice is to reform: And he promises to give Testimony to their Repentance, as an Amand Honourable in a manner as publick as possible.47

The poem that follows is a vigorous but intolerably extended denunciation of “Ostia” (London), with its various corrupt magistrates and magnates, as well as stockjobbers, slave traders, doctors, and atheists. As the poem rambles on for nearly 1,300 lines, Defoe denounces drunkenness, Occasional Conformity, beaus and fops, priests and bishops, and the immoral tastes of the town that corrupt those who must write for bread. Readers of this diffuse and undisciplined poem in the context of its appearance in the first volume of A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman will probably have fastened, as I did, on the following lines from this section about the fate of authors. In the context provided by the collection, these lines personalize the satire, move it from the merely conventional poses of the satirist and enable a reader to understand the poem as a contribution for a moment to the apologia pro vita sua Defoe constructs in his collected works, especially in the verse pieces as they proceed from the first to the second volume. Let him whose Fate it is to write for Bread, Keep this one Maxim always in his Head: If in this Age he would expect to please, He must not cure, but nourish, their Disease; Dull Moral things will never pass for Wit; Some Years ago they might, but now’s too late. Vertue’s the faint Green-sickness of the Times, ’Tis luscious Vice gives Spirit to all our Rhimes. In vain the sober thing inspir’d with Wit, Writes Hymns and Histories from Sacred Writ; But let him Blasphemy and Baudy write, The Pious and the Modest both will buy’t. The blushing Virgin’s pleas’d, and loves to look, And plants the Poem next her Prayer-Book. W[esle]y with Pen and Poverty beset, And Bl[ackmo]re vers’d in Physick as in Wit; Tho’ this of Jesus, that of Job, may sing, One Bawdy Play will twice their Profits bring;

66

Projects, Dissent, Poems And had not both carest the Flatter’d Crown, This had no Knighthood seen, nor that no Gown. (pp. 104–5)

Of course, “Reformation” is presumably being written at least in part for bread, so these lines (complete with the sour grapes of the examples of Samuel Wesley – Defoe’s schoolmate at Morton’s academy and the father of John of later fame – and Sir Richard Blackmore, both of whom succeeded he says only because of royal patronage earned by flattery) are either self-contradictory or an admission of defeat. Either way, they tell the reader more about Defoe, the author, than about the state of literature. By the time readers of Defoe’s collected works came to the second volume in 1705 and arrived at the sequel to this poem, “More Reformation, A Satyr upon Himself ” from 1703, “An Elegy on the Author of the True-born Englishman,” and “An Essay on the Late Storm” from 1704, they would have understood the shift in emphasis in Defoe’s satire from generalized moral indignation to more purely autobiographical and somewhat shame-faced self-defense. They would also have been reminded, beginning with the preface to “More Reformation” that the shift in Defoe’s poetic stance had been caused by the disaster surrounding The Shortest Way pamphlet. In spite of Juvenal’s maxim Defoe loves to quote, satire has now become difficult to write, and in much of “More Reformation” he agonizes over just who has the right to moral indignation and superiority, and he is pretty hard on himself, at least strategically: Thy Pen shall never plead thine Innocence, Nor write one angry Line in thy Defence; Because thy guilty Thoughts can call to mind More secret Crimes than ever they could find. Yet tell them who their darling Vices love, Thou still retain’st a Title to reprove; For this thy Satyr’s Credit shall restore, Thy Faults are less, and thy Repentance more.48

Balancing such caution with particular attacks and then returning again to the moral uncertainty and self-hesitation that should surround the satirist, Defoe in this flat and repetitive poem comes at last to a moment of rather honest self-exposure: And wou’dst thou now describe a modern Tool, To wit, to Parties, and himself a Fool, Embroil’d with State to do his Friend no good, And by his Friends themselves misunderstood; Misconstru’d first in every Word he said,

67

Projects, Dissent, Poems By these unpitied, and by those unpaid; All Men would say the Picture was thy own, No Gazet Marks were half so quickly known. Thou that for Party-Interest didst indite, And thought’st to be excus’d for meaning right. This Comfort will thy want of Wit afford, That now thou’rt left a Coxcomb on Record; (p. 55)

In what follows, the poem becomes unabashed autobiography and apologia, bursting with bravado and heroic self-dramatization: “Unhappy Satyr, now review thy Fate,/And see the threatning Anger of the State!/But learn thy sinking Fortunes to despise,/And all thy Coward Friends turn’d Enemies” (p. 62). At the end of this poem and in its two sequels Defoe redirects satire or perhaps transforms it into something almost purely personal, as he abandons the distancing technique of a satiric persona for direct complaining about himself. He explains in “An Elegy on the Author of the True-Born Englishman” (1704) that since he has agreed as part of the terms of his pardon by the Queen not to write for seven years, he is poetically dead: Circled in Newgate’s cold Embrace, And reconcil’d to Death by such a place, And, as concerning Poetry, am dead: Perhaps by then I may forget to speak: And thus I dy’d, and yield Satyrick Breath, For to be dumb in Poetry is Death. (p. 69)

Defoe’s is a very lively poetical corpse, and he says it is his rivals who will not let him rest in peace. His name is attached to other people’s works: The Mob of wretched Writers stand With Storms of Wit in every Hand, They bait my Mem’ry in the Street, And charge me with the Credit of their Wit; I bear the Scandal of their Crimes, My Name’s the Hackney Title of the Times (p. 70)

From this joking resentment, the poem slides into thundering moral denunciation, with Defoe all the while lamenting his enforced silence but speaking loudly and at his usual length nonetheless about all his familiar satiric targets. In an extended version of the rhetorical figure, occupatio, Defoe is volubly satiric as he protests his inability to write satire. Unabashed, to use Pope’s accurate characterization, Defoe never loses his defiant independence (“But he that gave me Brains will give me Bread.” [p. 86]) and his sense of humor, which in this case in 68

Projects, Dissent, Poems the most amusing lines in the poem (derived from Rochester’s bawdy poem, “Phyllis, be gentle, I advise”49) in an otherwise tedious effort runs against the grain of his usual prudery. Thus like old Strephon’s vertuous Miss, Who, foolishly too coy, Dy’d with the Scandal of a Whore, And never knew the Joy. So I, by Whigs abandon’d, bear The Satyr’s unjust Lash, Die with the Scandal of their Help, But never saw their Cash. (pp. 85–6)

With its companion piece, “The Storm, An Essay,” “An Elegy” is testimony to Defoe’s irrepressible urge to write, which clearly verges on a compulsion, and his flow of words even as he struggled mightily to preserve himself and his large family from financial ruin is extraordinary. In these poems from his early years as a writer, Defoe turns over and over again to his favorite subject – himself. These satiric surveys of everything that ails England are encyclopedic, but their main effect is to construct and propagate the personality and heroic writing life of Daniel Defoe.

69

3 Political Journalism: 1697–1710

His prose is rough and coarse; but, like the good English cloths he is never tired of praising, it wears well. A workmanlike, unpretentious, admirably familiar form of expression, which puts the reader at his ease without passing into the over-colloquial, it is the prose of democracy, a prose which in modern England with its inhibitions and its class consciousness had almost been parsed out of existence. James Sutherland, Defoe

Merchant-Writer in the Public Sphere Thus some gentlemen place fine specious titles on their books, as Jura Populi Anglicani, A Vindication of the Rights of the Commons of England, and a Vindication of the Rights of the Lords, and the like; and with large and high encomiums upon the excellency of our constitution, treat the levity of some people’s judgments with fine notions; whereas the true end and design is defending the interest and party they have espous’d. Defoe, The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England, Examined and Asserted

Defoe is more than a curiosity in the expansion of literary production in the early eighteenth century. Especially in his early years before the Shortest Way disaster, when he was still a full-time wholesale merchant, entrepreneur, and adventure capitalist, he is prominent among those who articulate what has come to be called the bourgeois public sphere. Emerging with special clarity in late seventeenth-century England, as the German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas proposes, this sphere develops as the dominance of the European 70

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 absolutist states erodes, and along with it the influence of a priori reasoning and traditionalist dogmatism in intellectual and political life. Under this new dispensation, certain groups of individuals by virtue of their economic power and social standing gradually become relatively free to express themselves in public on matters concerning the social and political order, and what we now understand as public opinion begins to assert itself through various forms of expanding print media as an influential part of the texture of civic and political life, a real force for politicians to reckon with and to try to manipulate to advantage. As many commentators on the Habermas thesis have objected, Defoe and his fellow journalists were writing most of the time to order, for special interest and power groups, and public opinion then was an entity shaped (if not quite created) by propaganda and polemic, by hired hacks in the business of public persuasion, attacking and counter-attacking in a raucously competitive and manipulative rather than sweetly reasonable public marketplace of ideas. Nonetheless, one of the hallmarks of this new force in civic life, says Habermas, is an insistence on a universalized rationality, which there is general agreement even in the most intemperate polemics should be consulted in making decisions that affect society and which must be determined in public discussion and open debate and not within the secret council chambers of princes. “A political consciousness,” says Habermas, “developed in the public sphere of civil society which in opposition to absolute sovereignty, articulated the concept of and demand for general and abstract laws and which ultimately came to assert itself (i.e., public opinion) as the only legitimate source of the law.”1 In almost universal practice in the England of Defoe’s time, only those male individuals who owned property, who thereby possessed the franchise as well as the leisure granted by property, sometimes only small amounts of yearly income, could belong to this sphere. Within the precincts of the City of London and elsewhere there existed as well in the political nation specially privileged classes of men such as Defoe. Like his father, he was a “freeman” of the City, granted the “freedom” to practice his trade within the city, and also a “liveryman” of the City of London, eligible as ordinary householders and rate-payers were not to vote for the higher officers of the City and for members of parliament.2 Despite these restrictions on the franchise, the free flow of opinion became possible in a relatively liberal society (in fact unique in Europe) such as late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century London, where a substantial urban bourgeoisie and professional/bureaucratic class met many of these criteria for the rational exchange of opinion concerning matters of public policy. As a substantial merchant and dissenter, the young Defoe enthusiastically participated in a newly-emerging and empowered force that we now call public opinion, and his remarkable and (at first) unsponsored entry into that new sphere could only have been possible at this historical moment. The disastrously severe punishments Defoe suffered for the The Shortest Way and his later troubles as the author of 71

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 other ironic political pamphlets also illustrate vividly the incomplete (or at least emergent) nature of the public sphere and the freedom it sought to license, since there were clearly limits on expression and to the tolerance of the state in such matters. The Licensing Act of 1662 had forbidden the printing of books or pamphlets that did not conform with the teachings of the Church of England, and all publications had to be licensed and registered with the Stationers’ Company. Parliament allowed the act to expire in 1694, but a form of censorship was in effect exercised by severe libel laws selectively enforced by the government. Nonetheless, after 1695 there was a marked increase in periodical publication on contemporary political issues, and Defoe’s career was facilitated by this new looseness in the censorship laws which allowed for a vigorous traffic in political and polemical pamphlets and poems. In addition, the Triennial Act was passed in December 1694, mandating parliamentary elections every three years, so that in the next twenty years there were ten general elections and an attendant proliferation of political activity and writing.3 Defoe’s intense awareness of the political issues of the time grew out of his participation in the coffee house and tavern culture that Habermas suggests fostered the bourgeois public sphere in Britain as well as in the mercantile exchanges and informal commercial networks and relationships (including contacts abroad and perhaps even the foreign travel he may have made) of his day in which he participated. To be a dissenter and a merchant in those years meant that one was by definition vitally concerned in the conduct of political life, and we have already seen how eagerly Defoe took to the issues surrounding dissent. His political opinions about the origins and role of government were no less urgent, complex and extensive, and they are also intertwined with his strong ideas on the question of religious toleration and freedom, which of course affected him personally. I will now turn to those more purely political writings, first in this section from the reign of William and Mary, when he was still an amateur if prolific pamphleteer and polemical poet (and perhaps in due course when his effectiveness became evident to the ministry during William’s reign an officially endorsed and supported government writer). But then, at greater length in the following two sections of this chapter, I will address the large volume of political writing (including the immense verse treatise on divine right, Jure Divino, and the news and commentary sheet, The Review) he produced during the reign of Queen Anne after his Shortest Way disaster. Defoe’s debut as a political pamphleteer came in late 1697, when he entered the lists in the so-called Standing Army controversy. After the inconclusive War of the Grand Alliance (or the Nine Years’War) between France and Britain, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Dutch United Provinces that ended with the Treaty of Ryswick, William found many in parliament reluctant to support the expense of the large domestic army that he argued was essential for containing Louis XIV’s undiminished expansionist ambitions. The Tory House of Commons 72

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 had passed in 1697 a motion that required all land armed forces mobilized since 1680 to be disbanded, leaving William with an inadequate army of fewer than 10,000 men. In October and December of that year, two Whig journalists, John Trenchard and Walter Moyle, published a pamphlet proposing that even this army be disbanded, that the nation depend for its defense upon a citizen militia: “An Argument Shewing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government,” which appeared in two installments. That same year Andrew Fletcher published “A Discourse Concerning Militia’s and Standing Armies,” which took the same position as Moyle and Trenchard.4 Defoe responded to these isolationist challenges from the left or libertarian side of current Whig opinion in three pamphlets in the late 1690s – “Some Reflections on a Pamphlet Lately Publish’d, Entituled, An Argument Shewing that A Standing Army is inconsistent with A Free Government” (1697), “An Argument Shewing, That a Standing Army . . . Is not Inconsistent with a Free Government” (1698), and “A Brief Reply to the History of Standing Armies in England” (1698). From the first of these pamphlets, Defoe speaks in his own voice, signing the preface as “D.F.” and chiding his adversary for not coming forward: “why shou’d he fear his Name?” asks Defoe, invoking it would seem the free public sphere and the tolerance of the current reign. “The days are over, God be thank’d, when speaking Truth was speaking Treason: Every Man may now be heard. What has any Man suffer’d in this Reign for speaking boldly, when Right and Truth has been on his side?”5 That last sentence seriously qualifies Defoe’s position on freedom of speech (always in the polemical journalism of the day a vexed question). Defoe is caught on the horns of the dilemma that faces all those who write in this new era of relative toleration. The public sphere is in daily actuality an arena of fierce struggle for the moral and political high ground where, as Defoe would soon find out, plain speaking, speech or writing that the authorities found subversive, could be very dangerous. Writing with great freedom and strong rhetoric and also warning against the perils of the very free speech he is exercising, Defoe seems to face this inconsistency in the preface to the third of the Standing Army pamphlets. Contemplating “this Evil Spirit of Discontent,” Defoe wonders why “the best Reign, and the mildest Government that ever England knew” tolerates “a whole Club of Mistaken Politicians, who in any Reign but this would have been us’d as they deserv’d” (p. 84). He remarks in nostalgic mode that “true English Queen,” Elizabeth would have “very severely handled” such “a Cabal of the best Men in Nation” if they had “attempted the like” (p. 84). In his polemical writings on dissent from these early years of his career, Defoe’s journalistic rhetoric is balanced on this paradoxical knife edge between fair argument and clear reasoning and an inventive, intolerant railing that is directed at his opponents and at their railing (at which he is even better than at fair argument). Each side, in effect, denies the other their right to speak because they do not play by the rules of responsible reasoning. “Railing is not my Talent” (p. 39), 73

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 he says in the preface to the first of these pamphlets, and near the end of the third pamphlet he quotes one of his favorite lines for disparaging the arguments of opponents, the epilogue to Dryden’s All for Love – “For Disputants, when Reasons fail,/Have one sure Refuge left, and that’s to rail” – as he rails at his opponents when they insinuate that William plans to govern by means of his army: “I wish these Gentlemen would leave out their Raillery, as a thing that never helps an Argument” (p. 93). In a clever if somewhat cheap rhetorical turn later in this first of the pamphlets when Defoe attacks his adversary “for the Foul Language he gives the Souldiers, while they are fighting in Flanders . . . ’tis hard and unkind to treated by a rascally Pamphleteer with the Scandalous Term of Ragamuffins, and Hen-roost Robbers” (p. 54). If his adversary is nothing but “a rascally Pamphleteer,” then Defoe paints himself in this paragraph as above the vulgar fray (his customary strategy), as a concerned patriot who appreciates the sacrifices of his nation’s soldiers: “I am no Soldier, nor never was, but I am sensible we enjoy the present Liberty, the King his Crown, and the Nation their Peace, bought with the Price of the Blood of these Ragamuffins, as he calls them, and I am for being civil to them at least” (p. 54). Defoe as thoughtful patriot opposes himself to his callous adversary, who in the pamphlet’s last sentence is evoked as a disaffected and disgruntled writer, “who thinking he has deserv’d more Respect from the Government than he has found, has taken this Way to let them know, they ought to have us’d them [the militia] or us’d him worse” (p. 59). Disparaging one’s opponent and treating the whole business of political argument as a nasty affair necessitated by his self-interested obtuseness and ignorance – these are the common coin of political journalism in those years. In the second of the pamphlets, Defoe stakes out what he declares is a moderate position, between extremes as he defines them, and he opens thus: “In the Great Debate about a Standing Army; and in all the Arguments us’d on one side and ’tother, it seems to me that both Parties are Guilty of running into the Extreams of the Controversie” (p. 64). He hopes, “calmly to consider” these extremes and to “find out the safe Medium, which may please all” (p. 65). In this spirit of moderation, he offers an internationalist argument that England is now dependent for her safety and security upon alliances abroad, and that makes it essential to have an army ready to send abroad in the service of those alliances. A militia, he concedes, would be sufficient to guard against insurrections and invasions, “but our business is Principiis Obsta [to stop things at the outset], to beat the Enemy before he comes to our own door” (p. 67). As in the first pamphlet, Defoe takes the long view of things in a review of the development of parliamentary authority as the House of Commons replaced the old “Gothick Institution” of Barons versus the king. Since it controls the purse, Defoe argues, parliament can always control an army, no matter how large. Invoking one of his favorite maxims (used in An Essay upon Projects and repeated often in his writing 74

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 in the years to come about modern warfare) “That he who had the longest Sword has yielded to them who had the longest Purse” (p. 76), Defoe makes a strong case for the balance of power between the king and parliament, with the latter’s power of the purse acting as a check against any potential military tyranny that the king’s large army might want to perpetrate. Defoe’s summary of the history of English armies and of constitutional theory is bristling with self-confidence, as he asserts that the only instance of military tyranny in English history was in fact perpetrated by the militia in the City of London in 1682 at the behest of the Lord Mayor, who used “a Company of Trained-Bands” to exclude those sheriffs chosen by the City “in an open Defiance of the Laws of the Kingdom, and Priviledges of the City” (p. 77). The third of these pamphlets, “A Brief Reply to the History of Standing Armies in England,” is the most cogently reasoned. Defoe presents a rigorous argument that on its own logical terms seems unanswerable: if as he has argued a standing army in peacetime may be legal with the approval of parliament (and he says that his adversaries have not denied that point) then it follows that “it cannot be true that ’tis destructive of our Liberty and Constitution; for that can never be destructive of our Constitution which can be Legal; That were to make a thing Lawful and Unlawful at the same time” (p. 88). He moves from this triumphant reasoning to a Realpolitik that abandons logic-chopping and invokes the perilous and unstable European scene where powerful armies abound, and thence to an ironic counter-factual concession that simply reinforces his point about the dangers abroad: I am willing to give the Gentlemen of the Club all the Latitude in Argument they can desire, and therefore I’ll grant that the French King has surrendered all the Towns and Countries he was to surrender, though he really has not. That King James is neither in Power nor Person at all formidable, nor indeed worth mentioning in the Case. That the King of Spain is not Dead, nor like to be so. That these are not, nor ever were Arguments for a Standing Force, at least not singly considered. (p. 89)

But of course they are very strong arguments for a standing army and made all the more so by this mock concession. They cannot in fact be “singly considered,” and Defoe knows it and expects his readers to see the point as obvious. He follows this joke with a couple of aphoristic and quasi-proverbial arguments that he says hold true even if we grant these concessions (which of course we don’t): “We say, Temptation makes a Thief. There is nothing in the World will be so likely to make the Peace precarious and allure the French to break it, as to find us Naked and Defenceless” (p. 89). From these debater’s moves, Defoe goes on to more substantive arguments as he develops the historical notion that warfare is now a specialized profession and 75

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 science, something that cannot be left to amateurs, no matter how brave: “War is no longer an Accident, but a Trade, and they that will be any thing in it, must serve a long Apprenticeship to it: Human Wit and Industry has rais’d it to such a Perfection; and it is grown such a piece of Mannage, that it requires People to make it their whole Employment; the War is now like the Gospel, Men must be set apart for it” (p. 92). Pragmatic internationalist, exact student of English as well as European history and political institutions, shrewd analyst of modernity and its new realities of professional specializations – Defoe in these pamphlets plays all of these roles, and such self-confidence coming with massive condescension from a political amateur, a wholesale merchant, must have infuriated his enemies (in the years to come they never let him forget his origins as a “hosier” who lacked a classical or a university education). Defoe the political journalist was from the start of his career an effective polemicist and propagandist, and as I contend in these pages he is still worth reading for the strength of his arguments but also for his projection of a distinctive voice and personality in his writing. In the years to come, especially as the weekly, then twice- and then thrice-weekly author of The Review, he would acquire partly by constant repetition over a number of years a familiar profile rather like that of the modern syndicated columnist, who appeals to many readers as much for his memorable persona as for any information he provides or even for the validity of his arguments and opinions. Defoe is perhaps the first such English columnist, a journalist who may be said to share the stage with his subject matter, or whose unpredictable and irrepressible (and thereby entertaining) articulation of his opinions is inseparable from the public personality he projects, which some love and some hate but all recognize. A good instance of this signature style that inclines to occasional shock and outrage can be seen in the boldest statement in these Standing Army pamphlets. This comment that prefigures later rhetorical excesses occurs in “An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army . . . is not Inconsistent with a Free Government” when Defoe offers a merely tactical affirmation, designed to catch the reader’s attention. “I am as positively assur’d of the Safety of our Liberties under the Conduct of King and Parliament, while they concur, as I am of the Salvation of Believers by the Passion of our Saviour; and I hardly think ’tis fit for a private Man to impose his private Rules on them for Method, any more than ’tis to limit the Holy Spirit, whose free Agency is beyond his Power” (p. 72). To equate or at least to compare the concurrence of king and parliament with the infallible workings of the Holy Spirit flirts with blasphemy, and Defoe quickly drops the analogy, and admits that kings “have their faux Pas as well as other Men” so that “therefore to provide for the worst, our Parliaments have made their own Consent the only Clause that can make an Army legitimate” (p. 72). The political climate shifted in November of 1700 when Carlos II of Spain died, surprising all of Europe by his will, which left his kingdom (and the 76

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 immense Spanish Empire in America) to Philippe, Duke of Anjou, Louis XIV’s grandson. When Louis decided to honor the will and to disregard the Partition treaties in which he had agreed to the division of the Spanish empire, the tensions temporarily put aside by the Treaty of Ryswick resurfaced. With the Dutch and the Habsburg Emperor, Britain formed a Grand Alliance in 1701 to prepare for conflict with France, although nothing happened at first in spite of the threat of a Bourbon takeover of Europe and the Spanish American empire. Talk of a new war with the French was in the air, the most urgent political topic of the moment, and Defoe’s was among the many voices raised.Two pamphlets he published that year – “The Two Great Questions Consider’d. I. What the French King will do, with Respect to the Spanish Monarchy. II. What Measures the English Ought to Take,” and “The Two Great Questions Further Considered” (the latter a reply to an attack on his first pamphlet) – are careful examinations of the looming European crisis, and as Peter Earle points out they mark Defoe as one of the first commentators to explore the concept of a European balance of power.6 Defoe notes that the British and the Dutch first allied themselves against the French for “maintaining the Ballance of Power in Europe,” and he reasons from the axiom that “Every King in the World would be the Universal Monarch if he might” to the sensible if Hobbesian notion that “nothing restrains but the Power of Neighbours; and if one Neighbour is not strong enough for another, he gets another Neighbour to join with him.”7 (Homely explanation is one of Defoe’s distinctive strategies.) Defoe goes on to warn that if France acquires Spain and its empire, the crucial trade England enjoys with the Spanish would be in grave danger, and moreover the English trade from their North American colonies would be threatened. “A wise Man,” he cautions, “cannot patiently reflect upon the formidable power of France, with the Addition of the Spanish Dominion” (p. 38). He opposes what he characterizes as his own hard-headed but objective analysis to the arguments of ideologically-blinkered opponents. In addressing “Our Jacobite-Protestant-Brethren” and “Our Non-jurants who hold the right Lines of Princes such Sacred things,” Defoe notes that only a Protestant king like William rather than the Papist James is in good position to oppose the Catholic Louis and, more emphatically and controversially for those he is addressing, that “even among Hereditary Princes themselves, the Rights of Succession are oftentimes infringed, and the private Interest of Princes and Families set aside” when public interest and the balance of power require such strategies (p. 36). At the end of all this soberly pragmatic geopolitical analysis Defoe reverts to his own kind of piety and Williamite panegyric to argue against another kind of Realpolitik practiced by the king’s adversaries: “I know God can prevent Humane Contrivances, and I believe he had plac’d King William on the English Throne, on purpose to disappoint this Invincible Monarch in these vast Designs, but no Thanks to our Gentlemen that have so weakened both his Hands and his Interest at home, as 77

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 to make him less able to perform for us what is more our own Advantage than His Majesty’s wou’d be, and than the Case requir’d” (pp. 38–9). The opportunistic combination of secular political analysis and pious affirmation and reverent panegyric will recur in Defoe’s writings, and for him seems to involve no contradiction. Or maybe his strategy is that readers will hardly notice such inconsistencies. These pamphlets display that unfailing self-assurance and rhetorical swagger we have seen even in his earliest polemical writing. Always cocky and selfimportant, Defoe lectures his audience like a schoolmaster, and often enough condescends mightily to them, bragging in the second of these pamphlets in response to an opponent who finds him merely a reader of history rather than a qualified political commentator that he has “Read all the Histories of Europe, that are extant in our Language, and some in other Languages.”8 This is a defensive false note. Even though by the time the first of the pamphlets appeared, Louis had decided to ignore the so-called Partition treaties that divided up the immense Spanish empire and to accept the Spanish king’s will, Defoe nonetheless announces in his preface that the pamphlet is still relevant, since it may be that the French king is hoping thereby to test the political will of his neighbors and explore his options. This move may be a feint, part of Louis’s strategy. “The Author therefore thinks the following Sheets are as much to the purpose as they were before” (p. 25). Why waste, in other words, what had already been written? Defoe clearly loved the sound of his own voice, and that ability to pontificate without hesitation or self-doubt is the essence of his voluble strength and easy fluency. In his study of Defoe’s politics, Manuel Schonhorn calls him “the most successful and dedicated propagandist of the last years of William’s reign” and finds that his political ideology in those years is uniquely his own, not “court or country, Whig or Tory,” but undeviating in his support of William and in his attacks on an obstructionist parliament that resisted William’s internationalism.9 But in the early eighteenth century all political writers claimed to be above or beyond party and to deplore the influence of factions, as they were usually derisively labeled. Defoe makes much of his independence of mind as well as the purity of his motives, and strenuous claims of that independence and attacks on the unthinking ideological positions and self-interested motives of his adversaries provide his major rhetorical stance in all of his writings. Moderation often enough is his key claim, for “moderation” became in the later part of Queen Anne’s reign a specific call for bipartisan government as well as a code word for the kind of pure political playing of all sides of which Defoe’s patron Harley was the consummate master. An extreme example of Defoe’s cultivation of such purity and his perfection of a tone of high-handed authority and dogmatic insistence appears in “The Original Power of the Collective Body of England, Examined and Asserted” (1702), a pamphlet that balances Defoe’s usual extrav78

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 agant praise of William and his scorn for divine right theories of monarchy. In a series of aphoristic propositions by way of a preface “To the King,” Defoe offers a transparent rhetorical move that honors William as the tribune of the people, “the Peoples King” he calls him, chosen by them and therefore chosen by God: “Your Majesty knows too well the Nature of Government, to think it at all the less Honourable, or the more Precarious, for being Devolv’d from and Center’d in the Consent of your People. . . . if Vox Populi be, as ’tis generally allow’d, Vox Dei, Your Majesty’s Right to these Kingdoms Jure Divino, is more plain than any of your Predecessors.”10 This is having your cake and eating it too. This pamphlet was attacked by a Tory writer and M.P., Sir Charles Davenant, in his Essays upon Peace at Home and War Abroad (1703), and Defoe responded vigorously in “Some Remarks on the First Chapter in Dr. Davenant’s Essays” (1704), another instance of the snowballing effect of political writing of the day, statement followed by counter-statement and so on. Defoe’s main point in this rejoinder to Davenant is an implicit defense of the Williamite solution to the power vacuum created by James’s “abdication,” a statement of the rights of the political nation as superior to the prerogatives of their representatives in parliament. Defoe’s argument balances these overlapping rights: “Doubtless there are those who do not believe that all Power is given to the Representative, and none left with the represented, and yet are not for over-throwing the Privileges of their Representatives and of those I profess my self to be one.”11 He defends the right of the people to petition the sovereign to dismiss the parliament when it grows unresponsive but defines people and parliament as inseparable in their common interests. Defoe is fond of this kind of careful distinction, and it is one of his strengths as a debater, as he insists on examining his opponent’s assumptions and fundamentals: “ ‘Tis impossible the People of England, call them by the worst Names you please, the Rabble, the Mob, the Multitude, or any thing; I say, ’tis impossible the People of England can ever, either by Inclination, or by Contrivance, be brought to a dislike of Parliaments as such; they may find reason to dislike this or that Set of Men, but that the People of England should ever attempt to destroy the Representative, Qua Parliament, ’Tis impossible” (p. 137). Defoe’s method in this pamphlet is to grant what his opponent allows and then by exploring the consequences of those assumptions “prove the Absurdity of what they Deny” (p. 134). This leads him to a characteristic satiric scene created by what he exposes as the misconceived and incoherent assumptions of his opponent, at least as he paraphrases them: So it cannot be that the People of England can ever Design to lop off this Branch, and trample on the Rights and Priviledges of their Representatives; this would be to destroy themselves, and cut themselves off from the Principal Vital part of the Constitution; and universal Frenzy must possess the Minds of Men whenever such

79

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 a Thing is supposed to come to pass, the People must be all Lunatick, and the Nation be a Bedlam, not a Civil Government. (p. 135)

By the people Defoe means property holders who possess the franchise. In speaking of the people in a loose way, Davenant is creating a bug bear, then, and Defoe reminds him that by the people is meant “not all the Inhabitants but positively all the Freeholders, the Possessors of the Land . . . for all the other Inhabitants live upon Sufferance, and either are Freeholders Servants or having Money to pay Rent live upon Conditions, and have no Title to their living in England, other than as Servants, but what they must pay for” (pp. 144–5). Defoe playfully imagines a situation, not unlike Robinson Crusoe’s as we will see, in which any man who owned all of England “would be King upon larger Terms than ever any Man was legally King of England; for he would be King by inherent Right of Property” (p. 145). With such a ready and flexible answer to his critics on the Tory right, Defoe became one of the main engines of Harley’s propaganda machine as that minister sought to walk a middle path between factions and to cultivate both sides. But as Alan Downie remarks his enemies ridiculed Defoe as someone who always seems to have clung to the notion of his independence and to deny that he was writing to order, that he was more than a paid hack.12 Thus in “The Original Power” he grandly declares that he is “neither for nor against either Person or Party.” There is, he concludes this grandiloquent address “to the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons of England,” properly only one interest, the national, and there should also be “but One Party, and that Party would adhere to Unbyas’d Justice, and pursue the Honour and Interest of the Protestant Religion, and the English Liberty” (p. 105). In these pamphlets from what would turn out to be William’s last year on the throne, even with his clear intentions to support the king’s policies, Defoe is often enough hard to pin down, balancing his fiercely partisan arguments with grandly stated rhetorical appeals such as this one that dramatize his own high purpose and impartiality. His emphases are at times eccentric and perhaps peculiar to his sensibility, deeply inflected by his dissenting background and the lingering resentments it seems to have instilled in him, and his rhetoric is often enough very much his own, full of biblical reference and righteousness. In one of these early pamphlets, Defoe displays at its opening some of that fondness for mimicry that would very shortly prove disastrous in The Shortest Way affair. During the general election of 1700–1, he published in January 1701 “The Danger of the Protestant Religion Consider’d from the Present Prospect of a Religious War in Europe” that begins with mock modesty in the voice of a selfdescribed poor scribbler: “But since answering of Questions is become the Subject, and some are pleas’d to Answer them before they are ask’d, give a poor Pamphleteer (or Scribler, or any thing what you please to call him) leave to ask 80

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 one Question. Where is the League or alliance in Europe, made, or propos’d to be made, for the Preservation and Defence of Protestant Religion?”13 Defoe claims in the next sentence that he is “not going to preach a Lecture of Divinity, to show the Value of Religion” (p. 62), but he provides his familiar popular history lesson (“by which the meanest Understanding may make a judgment” [p. 65]) that forgoes the self-depreciation of his poor scribbler for the know-all schoolmaster he loves to play. Surveying the Protestant and Catholic monarchies and their strengths, he bids his readers draw the obvious conclusions and to remember that “our Saviour directs those who go out to War, to consider whether they are able with their Ten Thousand to encounter the Twenty Thousand of their Enemies” (p. 68). The European political quarrel is essentially religious, and the object of British foreign policy must be “to keep the Popish powers of Europe from Uniting their Forces, and thereby from Invading the Protestant Religion” (p. 74). Defense of the Protestant religion cancels, Defoe argues, all other considerations, and the religious imperative is paramount in this argument as far as he is concerned. Religion trumps narrowly-conceived political controversy: “Here is no room to talk of Pretences and Shooing-horns for Standing-Armies; God, and the Protestant Religion, calls upon all the Professors of it in Europe to look to themselves, and to stand up for the City of our God: And if the enemies of the Church of Christ say, A Confederacy, they are to give the Curse of God on all those who shall refuse to help the Lord against the Mighty” (p. 72). All this dwelling on the essentially religious nature of European politics returns him to the standing army controversy and to his free-thinking opponents, members of what Defoe characterizes as a Socinian Club that included John Toland, the notorious author of Christianity Not Mysterious (1696): “Why truly, Gentlemen, If ever we pretend to have a War, whether it be with France, or any body else, we must certainly have an Army of our own, or some-bodies else, or we shall make but sorry work on’t. Whether those Gentlemen wou’d not chuse to see the Protestant Religion in Europe sunk and lost, rather than see an Army raised in England, I cannot conclude. But this I am bold to affirm, That they who had rather run the risque of the Protestant Religion, than of their Liberties, value their Freedom above their Religion, and may very well be suspected to have no Religion at all” (p. 74). Attacks on the religious bona fides of his opponents are among the least attractive aspects of Defoe’s polemical manner, but his intolerance was the rule among pamphleteers and in the context of the times Socinianism (after Socinius, the Italian theologian, Fausto Paolo Sozzini, 1539–1604, who denied the divinity of Christ) was tantamount to atheism. So Defoe concludes with a biblically resonant and stirring call to holy war, which for modern readers sits uneasily with his Realpolitik: “In short, though I am no Prophet, nor the Son of a Prophet [an echo of Amos 7:14], I think a man, with but a small Talent of forecast, may be able to foretel, that if we are wanting to God in the due and vigorous defence of his Church and Worship, which is in 81

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 English, the Protestant Religion; his Providence has so wisely disposed the matter, and made our Liberty so dependant on, and relative to our Religion, that it is morally impossible Liberty in England can be any longer liv’d than Religion. Popery and Slavery are like Sin and Death, direct Consequences of one another; and whenever we think fit to admit the first, any body may promise us the last” (p. 82). A couple of years later, however, in the Review for April 11, 1704, Defoe tries to sound like an objective analyst rather than a partisan religionist, as he speaks without hesitation of Louis XIV’s brutal revocation of the Edict of Nantes as a sound piece of statecraft that cleared his country of dangerous dissidents, and he just as breezily dismisses the opinion that he did it out of religious principles: “As to the Zealous part of it, that he did it from a true Principle to obtain Catholic Unity in the Gallican church, and Merit the Title of the most Christian; I have nothing to say to it, the Religion of Princes is a thing too deep for me to dive into: I have never seen much of it in the World, and I have no great Reason to expect it there, any more than in other Politick Courts.” He could also in the same vein in July 1704 in the Review observe that “Interest is the Apollo of Princes, and all the Princes and States of Christendom, are now Embark’d in a War for Interest: Liberty and Religion is the Aim of a few, but Interest is the present Article. This is no Religious War, both sides Declare it, and it has been in vain that some have pretended to make it so” (July 29, 1704). In the very odd pamphlet he published this same year, “Royal Religion; being some Enquiry after the Piety of Princes” (1704), a defense of a little book, A Form of Prayers, Used by His Late Majesty, K. William III, when he Received the Holy Sacrament (1704) published by John Moore, the Bishop of Norwich, Defoe displays this same kind of schizoid approach to the religion of princes, although his strategy is to single out William as the glorious exception who proves the rule concerning royal religion. In the first part of the pamphlet, he travels over Europe in satiric search of kingly piety, acknowledging in his opening paragraph that his title is something of an oxymoron. Ridicule like this is one of Defoe’s great strengths and made him feared and loathed by his opponents. Royal Religion! says the First Man that looks on the Book, what d’ye mean by that? Did ever Man write a Book on so empty a Subject? This is like my Lord Rochester’s Poem upon Nothing, or the Niceties of Entity and Non-Entity. Royal-Religion! A Demonstration of a Vacuum in Nature, a Salamander in the Fire, Lawyers Honesty, Jews Charity, Turkish Humanity, a Brute’s Abstinence, a Priest’s Continence, or a Whore’s Maidenhead.14

But after his riotous survey is over, the second part of the pamphlet reprints the Bishop of Norwich’s preface to King William’s prayers, followed by Defoe’s

82

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 usual defense of William against his High-Church enemies that features an embarrassing depiction of William as a warrior/saint, a pious soldier who invoked God as he prepared for battle and in that same spirit approached his final hours on earth: “I appeal to the Manner of his Death; with what Composure of Mind did he prepare for it; with what Easiness did he talk of himself, and of the Affairs of the Kingdom; with what Freedom did he quit all the great Things of the World; how did he lay down the Scepter as a Burthen, and resign the Crown with a Willingness, too great to be Counterfeited” (p. 467). A few months later in the Review, Defoe returns to the subject of the piety of kings, this time explaining to his readers that religion, properly and historically considered, is simply an ideological excuse for political struggle, with William’s exemplary piety for the moment forgotten: As to the pretence of Religion, ’tis confess’d all sides make use of it, Kings to Oppress their Subjects, People to Rebell against their Sovereigns; Kings to obtain new Crowns, Subjects to Transpose their Allegiance; the Hungarians, tho’ their Leaders are Papists, cry out the Protestant Religion to heighten the Claims of their Declaration against their Prince; the Bavarian joyns with the French to secure Religion; the Duke of Savoy breaks off with the French to secure Religion; the Cardinal Primate brings in the Protestants to secure the Popish Religion, and we all joyn with the Roman Catholick Emperor to secure the Protestant Religion; the Lutherans joyn with the Calvinist, the Calvinist with the Lutheran, and both with the Papists, and all to Establish Religion. Thus God almighty is jested with, and banter’d of all sides, and Religion’s made the Foot-ball of Princes, to be kick’d about the World as it suits their occasions, to gloss over the worst of Treasons, Sanctify the horridest Villanies, and be a Cloak to all the Tyrannies in the world. ( July 29, 1704)

Defoe lets his readers draw their own conclusions from this paragraph, so that we can imagine what clerical opponents like Charles Leslie thought about the subversive effects of such analysis. Defoe always insists that as a dissenter his differences with the established church are minor, not involving essential articles of belief but rather what were technically referred to as “things indifferent,” matters of ecclesiastical government and modes of worship. Even when it comes to Christianity itself, for all his bible thumping, Defoe shows that he is a man possessed of “Enlightenment” moral and historical values, for whom Protestant Christianity is superior to Catholic fanaticism by virtue not of its theological superiority but because of its greater rationality and pragmatic flexibility as well as its respect for individual rights. In the Review (June 29, 1706), for one example, he tells the story of the French general, Marechal de Thesse, who surrendered at the siege of Barcelona to the English rather than to the Spaniards, thereby avoiding what Defoe says

83

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 would have been the unforgiving cruelty of the Spaniards. This leads to some thoughts about the humanizing effects of Christianity, and to Defoe’s generously secular sympathies as opposed to his strictly theological enthusiasm for the Protestant religion. This strikes me as one of the most decent thoughts in all of Defoe’s works: It has been a Remark, I have observ’d on many Occasions, and which I cannot think improper here – that the Christian Religion has this one Testimony to the Divinity of its Nature and Original, than which I know no greater, short of Miracles and Revelation; that it has civiliz’d the Nations as to their Manners and Temper, even there where it has not had a saving Operation. The Native Barbarity of Mind and of Customs, that in former Ages spread the World, has fled before that Candor, that Temper and compassionate Tenderness which the Principles of Christianity have infus’d into the very Genius of the Nations, where it has been profess’d; and which gives a glorious Testimony, that the Christian Religion is founded upon what is most agreeable to the best Methods of living, and effectually suited to the Temporal, as well as the Eternal Felicity of Human Nature. (June 29, 1706)

Harley’s Man: The Review . . . between the dates of the first and last numbers of the Review, he wrote and published no less than eighty other distinct works, containing 4727 pages and perhaps more, not now known, the fertility of his genius must appear as astonishing as the greatness of his capacity for labour. William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings

These enlightened principles are in Defoe’s writing combined with a worldly pragmatism, close to Machiavellian, which is on display in a memorandum that Defoe wrote to Harley in 1704 as he entered his service. A brief consideration of it can serve as an introduction to the Review, which he had begun to publish six months or so before he wrote this long letter. As a regular columnist, Defoe cultivates a public voice under the pressure of bi- and then tri- weekly production that moves away from the closely-argued and occasionally eloquent polemics most often heard in his early pamphlets and toward the more digressive, relaxed and self-expressive style of the journalist. Now his stance is, necessarily, more particular and practical, less rigorously logical and less considered as rhetoric or as formal argument, more a matter of improvisation and reaction to current events that features a good deal of repetition and rehearsal of the same opinions from week to week. In the Review Defoe is speaking in propria persona, or in so far as one can ever say that with confidence of so versatile and wide-ranging 84

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 a writer, he is offering the public his own opinions, signed as such. But much of the Review is devoted to the raucous attack and counter-attack of those political polemics in which the Habermasian ideal of the public sphere is deeply compromised. Like the Review, the memorandum is a record of Defoe’s current thinking, and his advice for Harley grows out of a life of Richelieu that he was then reading and which he mentions many times in the Review during those months. Defoe displays in this memorandum a somewhat undisciplined auto-didacticism, and in this case what looks to be a shortage of tact. One wonders what Harley made of the history lesson Defoe presented in the latter part of the memorandum, as he summarized how “The Papist, The Church of England, and The Dissenter, have all had their Turns in the Publick Administration; and when Ever Any One of Them Endeavoured their Own Settlemt by The Ruine of The Partys Dissenting, the Consequence was Supplanting themselves” (Letters, p. 50). Harley may have appreciated such formulations, of course, since according to Alan Downie he in effect created the modern system of governing by publicity and propaganda into which Defoe had now to immerse himself.15 In this memorandum, the ideal politician he models for Harley is in no respect a leader or a party ideologue but very much a master manipulator whose goal is the efficient exercise of power through precise knowledge. The public sphere is not a factor in such calculations. There isn’t a moral principle or political ideal in sight in these pages; there is a large gap between Defoe the earnest Williamite pamphleteer in public and the professional political counselor in private. Also characteristic of Defoe is his enthusiasm for distinctively modern modes of action, understanding, and control; his excitement at the prospect of improving state craft and political intelligence by thorough and up-to-date methods is palpable. The public personality Defoe develops for himself in the Review necessarily lacks this pure Machiavellianism. The prickly and forthright persona that he cultivates in its pages runs counter to the manipulative hypocrisy in which he sought to school Harley (who seems to have required few lessons in that line, known among his enemies for his duplicity, earning him the nickname “Robin the Trickster”). In the early volumes as he began in 1704 and 1705, Defoe continued to articulate the Williamite position on an aggressive policy in foreign affairs by declaring that his readers needed to be educated about the threat posed by Louis XIV, an absolute monarch all the more dangerous by virtue of his freedom from parliamentary restraints such as hampered English kings. Defoe presents the case for a dangerous despotism like Louis’ quite dispassionately and objectively, free of chauvinistic moralizing or sensationalism: “This Absolute Despotick Government, whatever other Scandals it may lie under, is properly adapted to the French Greatness; and that the Methods of their Government at home have been particularly suited to, and a very great Reason of their Greatness abroad . . . 85

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 without Doubt, That Prince, whose Designs center in his own Projects, enlarging his Dominions, and in the Conquest of his Neighbours; there is nothing can constitute more to this end, than a Despotick Arbitrary Dominion over his Subjects” (April 8, 1704). As Alan Downie points out, when it began the Review was aimed at Tory opinion, even though Defoe avoided labels and in the first volume the words Whig and Tory appear only once. But Defoe’s mission was in Downie’s phrase “to cajole the moderate tories into maintaining their support for the government’s war effort.”16 Defoe argued so strongly for French power that many readers, Godolphin among them, seemed to think that the Review was in fact pro-French. Five years later, he was still hammering the lesson of French power home and impatiently explaining the realities of the European power struggle and the exact dangers of French domination, which he notes may just require helping the Austrian empire to build itself up. In explaining such jockeying in this number, Defoe cites historical precedents – Queen Elizabeth aided the French and the Dutch to counter the power of Spain, and King William supplied the Spaniards as a way to check the French. In this exposition, Defoe is chatty and intimate, quoting his hero William, who said to Sir William Temple in this matter of strategic alliances, “that if we were to go beyond the Treaty of the Pyrenees, he should be as much a French man, as he was then a Spaniard.” He is elegantly aristocratic in his choice of metaphor for all this; the situation is a hunt, “The CHASE is Exorbitant Power; all the Powers of Europe are the Hounds; bring but France to run true, she will be the best and most staunch Hound in the Pack; and wherever Exorbitant Power comes in her Way, she will run it down in View.” But in the very next paragraph, Defoe repeats himself more plainly and literally: “we do not fight against France as a Kingdom, or against the King of France as a King, no nor as a Tyrant insulting the Liberties of his own subjects; but we fight against France as a kingdom grown too great for her neighbors, and against the king of France as an invader of other nation’s rights . . . we fight to reduce him to a condition that he may be no more dangerous to his neighbours. In short, we fight to reduce his Exorbitant Power; and this consists in that little understood, but very popular and extensive word, a Ballance of Power” (April 19, 1709). This particular analysis is succeeded by more general ruminations on the prospect of European unity and peace enforced by the confederacy of nations (Britain, the Austrian Empire, Holland) generated by their opposition to French domination: “It is in their Power to make themselves Arbiters of all the Differences and Disputes that ever can happen in Europe. . . . A Congress of this Alliance may be made a Court of Appeals for all the injur’d and oppressed, whether they are Princes or People that are or ever shall be in Europe to the End of the World. Here the Petty-states and Princes shall be protected against the Terror of their powerful Neighbours, the Great shall no more Oppress the Small, or the Mighty devour the Weak.” This is a typical 86

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 moment in the Review, for Defoe loves to climb the ladder from the actual to the possible (a true projector, in early eighteenth-century parlance). His enthusiasm for his vision is compelling, what he admits at the very end of the piece is a “wild Thought,” the product of his musing, “new and undigested” but nonetheless offered to the powers that be as a great notion worth considering: “What a blessed Day of Peace to Europe would this be! – What Seas of Blood would this prevent in the World, which the Lust of Tyrants has hitherto made nothing of !” Many numbers of the paper are similarly essayistic, even improvisational, in their speculative flow of ideas and possibilities (although not in any finished or self-contained way, as discussions of particular topics stretched over various numbers, sometimes for weeks) on a current social, moral, economic, or political topic followed by a feature that at first he called “Mercure Scandale: or, Advice from the Scandalous Club. (Translated out of the French),” which was later simplified to “Advice from the Scandalous Club.” He seems to have borrowed the idea for this feature from the eccentric John Dunton’s periodical, The Athenian Mercury, which appeared from 1691–7. Most of the time, this part of the paper is an agony column, with letters purportedly from readers posing sometimes frivolous questions and moral (and especially marital or romantic) dilemmas for the Scandalous Club, in reality not a club at all but Defoe himself. Sometimes, the Scandal Club responded to queries of a general intellectual sort, such as whether dogs can think or in one case that anticipates a book Defoe wrote years later about the German Wild Boy of Hamelen, Mere Nature Delineated (1726), whether a person born deaf and dumb can be educated to read and write and lead a normal life. Defoe was, naturally, out to make his paper as popular as he could, and he produced an addendum to the regular number, “A Supplementary Journal to the Advice from the Scandal Club. For the Month of September 1704, to be continued monthly,” and he there admitted that the feature was a diversion from more serious business: “But as all Men are not Historians, and even many of those that are, care but for a little reading at a time; this Design was laid to bring such People to read the Story; which if it had been always serious, and had proceeded too fast, had been too Voluminous, too Tedious, either for their Leisure or Inclination; and thus we weedle them in, if it may be allow’d that Expression, to the Knowledge of the World, who rather than take more Pains, would be content with their Ignorance, and search into nothing.” In his introduction to the modern facsimile edition of the Review, Arthur Secord remarked that it was not, of course, a newspaper in our sense but rather “a journal of opinion – a commentary, which taught the masses in Queen Anne’s reign what to think upon important political and social questions” (p. xv). “Masses” is a misleading term for the target audience of what was in fact a sophisticated newsletter and opinion sheet aimed at the political nation. If we trust, as 87

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 we probably shouldn’t entirely, Defoe’s mortal enemy the High-Church polemicist and rival journalist, Charles Leslie, the Review was popular with a wide audience, some of whom were illiterate but still interested in what Defoe had to say and moved to examine issues and take positions by the arguments in his paper. “For the greatest part of the people do not read books, most of them cannot read at all. But they will gather together about one that can read, and listen to an Observator or Review (as I have seen them in the streets) where all the principles of rebellion are instilled into them, and they are taught the doctrine of priest-craft, to banter religion, and the Holy Scriptures; and are told most villainous lies and stories of the clergy, which they suck in greedily, and are prejudic’d past expression.”17 Despite Leslie’s sneers, the main body of the Review seems aimed at a reasonably well informed and sophisticated audience that Habermas might recognize as the public sphere, the political nation that Defoe evoked in his memorandum to Harley in 1704, encompassing the following main groups: “the Gentry and Familys of Rank in England . . . the clergy of England . . . the Leading Men in the Cittyes and Burroughs, with the Partyes they Espouse” (Letters, p. 36). In eighteenth-century terminology, he is writing to freeholders and electors, those males who possess the franchise. And yet, especially during the early years of the periodical, Defoe is ambivalent about this audience, hectoring and lecturing them unmercifully for their misconceptions and ignorance about foreign affairs, especially, but also playing the game of the Scandal Club, even if he seems increasingly impatient as the months go by with this popularizing feature, clearly designed to attract female and perhaps younger readers as well as the male political nation. Looking back in the Preface to the reprinted first volume of the Review, Defoe records his annoyance with this feature: “Thus I am Letter baited by Querists, and think my Trouble to write civil, private Answers to teazing and querulous Epistles, has been equal, if not more troublesome, than all the rest of this Work” (Preface, vol. I, n.p.). Modern estimates of the Review’s popularity concede that by later standards circulation figures were low, and Downie suggests that it is “doubtful” that the paper ever achieved a circulation of more than 1,000 and was most of the time around 500 copies.18 However, eighteenth-century periodicals were passed around at places of public assembly like coffee houses and taverns and thereby reached many readers per copy. Defoe’s Review was also read, we know, beyond London in provincial cities. A friend of Defoe’s in Norwich, John Fransham, wrote to him on 10 November, 1704 describing a recent number of the paper which he read “to several Gentlemen . . . in the chief Coffee-house here where we have it as oft as it comes out and is approv’d of as the politest paper we have to entertain us with.” He goes on to note that the owner of the coffee-house was reluctant at first “to take it in but now he finds I advis’d him well there being no

88

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 paper more desir’d” (Letters, p. 70). Just as John Fransham described a single paper that was read aloud and also read silently by many of the frequenters of the Norwich coffee house, Addison would later claim that each printed Spectator paper had at least twenty readers, so even a modest circulation for the Review meant that Defoe reached at least several thousand readers with each issue. Whatever the actual circulation figures, it is clear that the political nation, his true audience, became very much aware of him in his periodical identity as Mr. Review during the Queen Anne years. For example, in March 1710, Dr. Henry Sacheverell, the Tory fire brand in March 1710 was tried for what the government saw as a seditious sermon he had preached in St. Paul’s Cathedral. In the case argued before the House of Lords, Sir Simon Harcourt, Sacheverell’s chief defense lawyer, could in his closing words allude to one of Defoe’s favorite phrases in the Review, which he used often to twit the Tories who could countenance the removal of James II but condemn the execution of Charles I: “We shall show your Lordships that there are such as run most vile comparisons between the Revolution and the most execrable murder of King Charles the First, and can find no better difference between them than this abominable distinction, of a Wet Martyrdom and a Dry One.” As Geoffrey Holmes points out after quoting this part of Harcourt’s speech, these closing words “were an unveiled, and well understood, reference to Defoe’s Review.”19 The Scandal Club lasted only about a year, until May 1705, and in the number for May 15, 1705 he inserted an announcement that the “publick and more weighty subjects” he was treating were taking up “all the room, both in his serious thoughts, and in the paper it self,” so that “he has resolv’d, for the future, to leave quite out the said part, call’d, Advice from the Scandal Club.” But he also announced that the Scandal Club would continue in a separate paper to be published every Wednesday and Friday. Defoe began on June 6, 1705 what he entitled The Little Review; or, An Inquisition of Scandal; Consisting in Answers of Questions and Doubts, Remarks, Observations and Reflection, which was published on Wednesdays and Fridays, between the numbers of the regular Review (he discontinued it, without notice, after 23 numbers). Defoe, clearly, had not been too comfortable with this aspect of the paper, designed to attract less serious readers, but in this same announcement he promises that sort of reader that he will hope to offer entertainment along with serious discussion in the Review: to “those Gentlemen who do not love to read a long Story . . . he shall study to make it as entertaining as he can, and at least, hopes that its usefulness may recommend it to their Patience.” Still, the range of moral and social topics covered in this feature is wide, and some commentators have seen groundwork here for the domestic situations and characters as well as the casuistical resolutions of personal and ethical problems that Defoe would explore in his narrative fictions in the early 1720s. In the

89

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 “Supplementary Journal to the Advice from the Scandal Club” that he published in September 1704, Defoe concludes: “But the Consequence of Things, as is already noted, has hook’d him in, and he finds his Table spread with Cases of Conscience, Enigma’s, Difficulties in Philosophy, in Politicks, in Æthicks, Oeconomicks, and what not. . . . Here are Questions in Divinity, Morality, Love, State, War, Trade, Language, Poetry, Marriage, Drunkenness, Whoring, Gaming,Vowing, and the like.” (p. 4, I). At first, some of these letters (presumably authentic) are concerned with political topics rather than with his correspondents’ personal problems, and some letters are attacks on Defoe himself and the Review. The club’s answers provide another occasion for Defoe to respond to his critics. But such letters, if genuine, point to Defoe’s willingness, nay eagerness, for battle with uncomprehending and even hostile readers. Opposition and rejection are meat and drink for him. He is never silenced but rather provoked to argue and to write more. Here, for example, is an damning comment from a reader about the divisive effects of the Review and all other such papers, which Defoe defiantly lays before the Scandal Club in the June 15 number of The Little Review: It’s a strange thing, Gentlemen, that the Author can by no Method please some People, as will appear by the following Letter. Gentlemen of the Scandal Club, It’s many Peoples Opinion that the Consequences of Mr. Daniel de Foe’s Peaceable Review is Strife and Contention, and that it does as equally serve to keep up the Animosities, Feuds, and Dissensions of Parties (and prevent the desir’d Union) as Mr. Lesley’s Rehearsal of the Observator. Now, tho’ Mr. Daniel de Foe’s intentions may be good, and his design peace; yet, if he could be perswaded that his Review wrought the contrary Effect, and serves to keep up our Divisions (for some think, and so do I) that all Papers and Pamphlets of that Nature, by whatsoever Party Wrote, are an obstruction to Peace and Union) I am willing to believe he would no longer continue it. (June 15, 1705)

Defoe himself claims at times to be troubled by the degrading nature of polemical gutter journalism, including his own, and he may have written this letter. A few months later, he responds to another such question, and his answer is interesting in that he defines his purpose as essentially oppositional. He needs to stay at this dirty business of periodical writing because of the lies perpetrated by other periodicals. Someone, Defoe reports, asked him why he didn’t simply leave off, since all papers tend to disturb the peace and such a gesture would set a good example. Whenever such a Gentleman will Undertake we shall have no more High-Church Memorials, no more Rehearsals; when the High Party will leave Affronting the Queen and Buffooning the Ministry; when Dyer will leave Lying, and Mad Men

90

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 leave Alarming the Nation, at the Danger of the Church of England from a Protestant Queen; I promise to leave off, and no more Review their Extravagances, or Couple their Management, as they have done their Interests, to the Affairs of France. Till then, Facit Indignatio Versum, says Juvenal, What Man can be silent to see a Nation Imposed upon,Trade Abused, Societies of Men Charg’d with Capital Crimes upon the Horrid Ungrounded Suggestions of a Scribbling Hackney, fam’d for Nonsence and Falshood, and which no Nation but this could bear with, or leave Unrewarded – (August 23, 1705)

A full four years later, on November 1, 1709, Defoe is still sounding this charge in the Review, characterizing his writing as courageous and crusading, “a dangerous Work in this Age, to tread near the Miscarriages of Men in Power, but much more to those of Parties – Such it will ever be my Misfortune to offend . . . I am prepar’d to suffer whatever Power and Oppression, when they have an Advantage, may be able to inflict.” He has heard, Defoe continues, that a legal complaint has been filed at the Old Bailey against the Review as a “NUSANCE.” He wonders how he can be thus accused and he lists the various ways in which he has served the government’s policies. Since he was a government operative, this is of course disingenuous in the extreme, but the purpose of such unnecessary denials is to exalt himself as a steady upholder of right and truth in a political landscape dominated by discord and faction: “I have pursued the true Interest of the Government, in prompting the due Execution of positive Treaties, in setting Affairs in a true Light, in detecting the Fraud and pulling off the Mask of Hypocrites, who cry’d out of Oppression in SCOTLAND, where there was none . . . I have apply’d myself diligently, to appease the Murmurings of the People against the Government, to open the Eyes of those that have been impos’d upon by the Enemies of the Government; I have exposed my Life to Mobbs and Tumults, in pressing the Nations to unite under the Government . . . I have press’d a Peace of Parties in England, and a Peace of Nations in Scotland.” The personalizing fullness in such a catalogue of achievements is Defoe’s signature. At length, he declares in this same number from November 1, 1709 that “Who it is a Nusance to, I know very well, and I cannot foresee, but it will for ever be a Nusance to them.” This defiance is followed in due course in this number by the high, heroic note that he likes to sound from time to time, when Defoe announces that he must go on in spite of the offense he gives to some: “But for vindicating the cause he is embark’d in, he cannot lay it down; it is the cause of TRUTH and LIBERTY; the nation stands upon it; the Union, the Revolution, the Succession, the QUEEN, the Government, they all stand upon it – And if all the world should abandon its Defence, he will never abandon its Defence, while he has Life, and a Tongue to speak for it.” 91

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 From the beginning, however, Defoe admits the difficulties in his educational project of warning the British political nation of the danger of French European domination, what he calls “Writing a History by Inches.” He complains about an impatient audience that “cannot refrain their Conclusions, before I am come to mine.” Such unreasonable expectations make his task even more difficult: “Mankind expects every piece should be entire, and bear a reading by it self: If it must be so, I confess my self incapable; the Scheme is otherways laid, and a half Sheet of Paper can’t do it.” And he concludes: “I have here explained my self; Wise Men I hope will now understand me, and for Fools let them remain so; ’tis not my business to wash Ethiopians.” (July 4, 1704). Regularly on display is outright disdain or defiance of an audience with whom he sometimes loses all patience: “I am content to hear some Reflection on this Paper, on Account of the earnest Care I have taken to represent the French Greatness in its proper Dimensions, and set our Enemies in a true light, it being equally injurious to us, as a People, to believe them either too big or too little. It no way disturbs me, to hear my self call’d a Jacobite, a Frenchman, and sometimes a Papist; one that exposes the Nakedness of the Confederacy; betrays the Weakness of our Friends, and the like” (April 4, 1704). Self-defense and heroic self-dramatization, then, are the threads that very quickly come to tie the Review together – Mr. Review against a degenerate age that will not heed the truths he is delivering: “The Author pretends to no extraordinary Gift of Instruction, but while detecting the Contradictions in the Politicks of this hoodwink’d Age, is the work before him; he thinks himself in his proper Duty, and hopes no People, either abroad or at home, will think themselves concern’d, in his saying, he resolves to go thro’ with it. He presumes so much on the Convictive Invincible Power of Truth, that he expects it will bear it self up, and him upon it, above the Waves and Storms of all the Seas of Faction and Parties, he may be obliged to Steer thro’; and if not, he resolves to venture the Shipwreck” (August 10, 1704). The journal was, of course, a commercial as well as moral and political enterprise. It was reprinted in collected volumes as the years went by, along with appendices and indices, these reprintings heavily advertised in the Review itself. The Review quickly became a deeply personal public airing of Defoe’s opinions; it clearly appealed to many readers precisely because of its self-referential and self-expressively combative nature, with Mr. Review talking as much about himself and his singularity and integrity as about the ostensible subject matter of the moment. The Review’s speaker is far less of a dramatic construct and much closer to the personality of the author than those of Addison and Steele’s Tatler and Spectator. Defoe the notorious celebrity author was Mr. Review, and he dwelt often enough on that actuality. For example, when he turned to foreign trade, he began by noting his own losses at sea when the war with France broke out, and during the many numbers he devoted to the parliamentary debates about 92

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 reforming the laws about bankruptcy he naturally exploited his own disastrous experiences to describe the abuses of the current laws. Often enough, the Review is unabashedly autobiographical and self-reflexive, with Defoe highlighting his own investment in his topics. Thus, trade or as he sometimes like to call it “Negoce,” he wrote in the farewell issue of the Review, was the “Whore he doated on,” a subject about which he was more passionate than other topics, except for the atrocities of the High-Church party. Even three and four years after The Shortest Way affair, Defoe never tired of referring his audience to his defining moment – disaster turned into triumphant material for self-promotion and publicity. In one reprise of the Shortest Way in the July 24, 1705 number, Defoe imagines a Churchman denouncing him: When Saucy Scriblers, and Impotent Pamphleteers, shall set up to discover the Arcana of her Ecclesiastical Designs, they shall be punish’d as they deserve; and whether the thing be true or false, shall feel the Weight of the Church’s Hand, and suffer for divulging our Secrets before their time, and for saying that in Jest, which we have taken Liberty to say in Earnest, both before and since. Nor shall Exposing our shortest ways with the Enemies of the Church’s Interest, be any more pernicious to us, or break any more into our Measures, so as to open the Nation’s Eyes, and alarm the Enemy; but the Church having obtain’d the Coercive Power, by the Regency of her own Ecclesiastical Instrument, shall be no more oblig’d to act under Disguises, or to disown those things she really intends, upon the Casualty of their being too untimely detected.20

As the years went by, Defoe continued to insist that he and he alone produced the paper, a point of pride for him. He inserted a notice in the Review for December 31, 1706 when some accused him of having help in its production: This is, First, to assure the World, that no Person whatever has or ever had any Concern in writing the said Paper Entitled the REVIEW – That wherever the Author may be, the Papers are wrote with his own Hand, and the Originals may be seen at the Printers. Secondly, the Judgment of the Gentlemen, that spread this Report, must be very good; that can neither guess at the Stile, nor guess by the Story or Manner of it both, whether it be the Author’s, and where the Author is.21

As he approached the end of the paper, in July 1712, he was still devoting whole numbers of the Review to a defense of his independence as a writer and as a thinker, offering a hundred guineas to a rival journalist who had accused him of writing to order: “if he will prove by any fair, just, and but tollerable Evidence, either who is the Person that ever Dictated to the Author of the Review, what he should or should not write, or that he knows directly or indi93

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 rectly, who Dictates to me any thing I write, or farther, that I am Dictated to by any one or more Person or Persons under heaven” (July 26, 1712). His selfdramatization reaches a climax in two of the very last three numbers of the paper, June 6 and June 9, 1713, where he admits that some of his writing, “however otherwise design’d” has “given Offence to the Legal Authority I live under,” and he promises to impose “a Silence upon my self for the future, as a just, tho voluntary Penance, for involuntary offending” (June 6, 1713). Such humility is merely a feint, the prelude to yet another attack on his enemies and a projection of his own high and noble purpose: “I have struggled long with the Buffoonery of the Age, and have opposed with my utmost Skill, cool Argument, and calm Reasoning to Party Rage, Personal Prejudice, and Universal Clamour” ( June 6, 1713). He goes on to declare that he has been caught between the dissenters and the Tories, that he has “been like a Man that runs in between two Duellers to part them, and who to prevent the losing their Lives, loses his own.” Self-pity in public is not especially attractive, and Defoe in the next few sentences rather overdoes it: On one side I am reproach’d with writing for Gain, Payments, and Pensions; Alas! I have seen no Gain, but Enemies; and these I have increas’d without Number.Whatever Endeavours I have used to perswade you to Peace on both sides, I have enjoy’d none my self, but am loaded with Scandals, Lyes, Reproaches, and Menaces of various kinds, in your common Discourse, in your Libels and Prints, even from them that know me not: But since I can convince no body by Words, I shall satisfy them now, by letting them see my Gain is so small, I can lay down the Employment; and as I shall not only be out of the Business, but out of the Nation, as soon as publick Engagements shall give me leave; I hope Slander shall not follow me so many Hundred Miles as my designs at present propose to lead me.

In the next paper, the penultimate number, this defiance continues. He admits that he is “really tired with the Strife; the implacable Spirit, and the dreadful Inveteracy of Parties on both sides,” and he warns that no man should “mistake my voluntary Recess, for a suppression of Power . . . the Laws may call me to an Account for what I write, but not for writing; and therefore none that understands our Constitution can say, I am forced to desist.” For his opponents, this personality Defoe consistently projected in the Review was intolerable, pontificating and self-important, the garrulous pub bore, a morally-superior prig who denied that he was an author for hire. But there is a balancing humility and good humor for this arrogance. In the very early numbers of the paper, Defoe carefully explains to his readers just how ambitious his self-appointed task is, how much he proposes to cover in offering

94

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 to explain French power and to teach his audience about the implications of foreign policy and foreign trade: “I remember in the beginning of this Undertaking, the vast Prospect I had before me, prompted me to say, That Life was more likely to be wanting to finish the Subject, than Subject wanting to supply the Paper; this some took for the Author’s Vanity, and I have been more than once reprov’d for it; but since I have put out to Sea, and sail’d to the West Indies, what with our own Colonies, the Spaniards American Settlement, and the French, I find myself in such a Throng of Subjects, that I begin to Question when I shall get back again” (June 17, 1704). Sharing the stage with his truculence and grandiose declarations of high and noble purpose, of moral superiority to mere “news-writers” and scribblers, there is a recurring self-depreciating sense of the impossibility or the absurdity of his self-appointed mission to educate the British public on all these many issues. Defoe also acknowledges in due course his tendency to digress and to indulge his own crotchets. He promises, whimsically I suppose, to bring everything together: “I know long Digressions have been the Great Error of this Work, from which some People complain I never return again; such People cannot yet determine I never shall: A time may come when I may pick up the Fragments of Discourse, and draw every Point to a Head; and I promise to do this with as much Order and Speed as I can” (January 1, 1706). But he immediately in the next paragraph takes it all back as he offers an evocation of his fertile mind and restless imagination, his magnetic attraction to what’s happening in the world – and note the dramatic metaphor, “the Change of Scenes on the Stage of things”: “Innumerable new Occasions draw me off from my first Design, and sometimes I change my Title, sometimes my Design; but all attend the Change of Scenes on the Stage of things, which I think may be a just Apology for the various Turnings of my Pen from or to this or that Subject, which I promise my self will pass for a sufficient Apology.” A few years later, contemplating a work that had grown to six volumes, he could refer to the Review as like “a teeming Woman”: “Where it will end now and when, God only knows, and Time only will discover; as for me, I know nothing of it.”22 In such a remark, we can see Defoe’s amused apprehension of a new development in the marketplace of print in the early eighteenth century: writing has its own snowballing force of constant production that tends to take over from the motivations of the individual writer. Defoe’s volubility is produced or at least encouraged by the nature of the new print marketplace, where authors need to keep finding something to say, need to keep controversy raging for the sake of more and more publication. From the first, Defoe was completely open about the more or less loose and spontaneous manner of the Review as it competed in the print market. In the preface to the first volume of the collected numbers, he could write, disarmingly enough:

95

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 Let not those Gentlemen who are Criticks in Stile, in Method or Manner, be angry that I have never pull’d off my Cap to them in humble Excuse for my loose way of treating the World as to Language, Expression, and Politeness of Phrase; Matters of this Nature differ from most things a Man can write. When I am busied writing Essays and Matters of Science, I shall address them for their Aid, and take as much care to avoid their Displeasure as becomes me; but when I am upon the Subject of Trade, and Variety of Casual Story, I think my self a little loose from the Bonds of Cadence and Perfections of Stile, and satisfie my self in my Study to be explicit, easie, free, and very plain; and for all the rest, Nec Careo, Nec Curo. [I do not miss it nor care about it.] (Preface, vol. I, n.p.)

James Sutherland quotes this passage an example of Defoe’s distinctive talking style, suitable for a group of acquaintances in a coffee house.23 But Defoe at his most colloquial and folksy is self-conscious. His colloquial manner is a strategy, only one of his various styles and tones, although perhaps his most frequent and effective mode. Even his quarrels with rival papers are at times conducted in a joking manner. For example, in July 1704 Defoe blasts away at the Daily Courant, which he says has published false information. He contrasts himself with the author of the Courant, “for as it happens you and I write from differing Principles, you to get Money by your Readers – I to Inform and Entertain them, Convince the World of needful Truth, and detect Preposterous Errors and Imposition on Mankind, such as yours, and have hitherto rejected the Profit of it; not Sir, that I am so Wealthy; but if I must live in the World, it must be some other way: The Vice is too high in me yet, to accept of it for writing this Paper, possibly in time I may be reduc’d to be more Humble” (July 22, 1704). His account in the same number of their paper war revels in the absurdity of two news sheets doing battle over the details of actual warfare: “This has been a bloody Battail, the Action of Schellenbergh is a fool to it; the author of the Daily Courant with his 20 Regiments of Booksellers, Storm’d our Counterscarp, and tho’ they have formerly attempted it, and were beaten off as in the Review No. 17 and 18 yet having now Mustered up all their Forces, they came on with an assurance Peculiar to News-writers – and gave all the World Notice of the Victory they thought certain; Inviting them three Days together to come and see the Sport.” And yet for all his occasional good humor and ingratiating folksiness, Defoe dramatized his efforts against his High-Church opponents as nothing less than warfare, full of actual risk to life and limb. In the Preface to volume VI in 1709 even as he jokes about his own mysterious fecundity in the Review, Defoe also reports at length on actual physical dangers, threats that he has faced from opponents if not rival journalists, and there is surely more than self-dramatization at work in his claim that he has 15 letters in his possession from High-Church 96

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 sympathizers threatening to kill him and that he has been waylaid on three several occasions. Defoe describes himself as confident and serene nonetheless, convinced of the rightness of his cause and scorning such threats: “If I am attack’d by Multitude, I must fall, as Abner fell before wicked men – If I am fairly and honourably attack’d, I hope, I shall fairly RESIST; for I shall never practise the Notion I condemn, and every honest Man ought to go prepar’d for a Villain.” Defoe also as the years passed grew more and more truculent and self-consciously defensive about the special qualities of his paper, going so far as to claim in the June 5, 1707 number, written from Scotland, that he deliberately violated the rules of writing in order to make his point and reach his audience. He admits that he repeats and quotes himself but he does so knowingly and for the purpose of instructing the ignorant. He offers a defense of his garrulity and his assertive manner, defying his critics: For my part, I value the instructing and informing one honest meaning ignorant Person, more than the detecting and confronting a thousand Knaves, and ’tis for the sake of these I write; for their Sakes I dwell upon a Subject sometimes longer than the Rules of Language allow, for their Sakes I repeat and repeat, and quote my self over and over, and can with Ease bear the foolish Banters of the envious Critick and Reproacher; I had rather say the same thing over twenty times, than once omit, what may this Way be useful. I am, without Vanity, neither ignorant of the Rules of Writing, nor barren of Invention, that sometimes I repeat and quote what I have formerly, which I know, those, this Paper reaches, never saw; ’tis for their Sakes I bear the Reproach of the scurrilous, who upbraid me with printing in this Paper, what I had in other Pieces printed before; thousands see this, that never saw the other, and what is it to them that it has been said before; do not our Ministers preach the same Sermons to different Auditories? If it does good here, ’tis not the worse for having been thought of before, let the Railers rail on. (June 5, 1707)

Over the years, Defoe’s emphasis in the Review would shift, and indeed its focus changed to mostly domestic affairs when he entitled the paper A Review of the State of the English Nation. My effort here is not to trace the many topics and issues he treated in those nine years but rather to look at the special rhetorical qualities of his weekly political prose. For sheer fluency and day-to-day pertinence and insight, there is nothing else in English political writing then or since quite like this extended and unflagging performance. As John McVeagh, the editor of the first four volumes of the new Pickering & Chatto complete edition of the Review, puts it, Defoe’s “literary excellence” is what separates him from his contemporary rivals such as Tutchin and Ridpath, who could not match his “intellectual range and energy.”24 Some of the paper is disfigured (or enlivened) by invective against his enemies; but as improvisatory as the Review necessarily 97

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 is, much of it achieves a high standard of argumentative coherence and stylistic polish, as well as a distinctive turn of phrase and tangy stylistic signature that combines colloquial vigor and homeliness with genuine eloquence and, often enough, stirring moral indignation. For example, Defoe ponders in an early number of the Review the efficiency of the French secret service: “A Man may live 7 Year in Paris and be acquainted with nothing they do: ’tis as impossible to dive into their Affairs, as it is to Conceal our Own; ’tis as hard to find their Agents False, as ’tis to find ours True; they are Masters of their own Councils, and have been too much Masters of ours.” This has a demotic strength and easy, balanced elegance: “dive into” is a vivid and colloquial expression Defoe likes and uses often, and its slangy ease lightens the somewhat portentous eloquence of the rest of the sentence. Defoe maintained through the years an attractive inconsistency and stylistic variety in which plainness and eloquence are matched against one another. His characteristic effect in the Review thrives on tonal variety and unpredictability. On June 24, 1710, for example, we can find a balance of measured eloquence, almost classical decorum, combined with colloquial ease. He begins by noting that today is election day in the City, “when the Tribunes of the People are to be Nominated for the ensuing Year.” But in the second paragraph the proffered classical allusion is rejected as a stylistic choice: “I could give you Similes and Allegories to represent the Case to you, and read you long Lectures upon the Roman Affairs . . . But I have chosen a down-right Plainness, and to speak home both in Fact and in Stile.” In the rest of the number, Defoe balances contemporary events and classical precedents, citing the banishment of Coriolanus by the Roman mob, and noting the similarity between the political opposition to the Duke of Marlborough,“for whose Victories you make Bonfires, and by whose Dangers you Triumph” and the Athenians’ banishment of “Alcibiades, that had been their Generalissimo, fought a Hundred Battles for them, and reduced the most powerful Enemies of their Common-Wealth.” Mr. Review then turns to recent history and disavows the classical examples, which of course have already helped illustrate his point, turning homely in his advice as he urges his readers to “rummage” their memories as they call to mind a scene of contemporary chaos as Defoe evokes it: It remains then only to put you in Mind of the Times and Things of recent Memory:Things you need not search your Histories for, or ask your Fathers about; but may rummage your own Memory to confirm; and to put you in Mind how the Lives, Fortunes and Honour of your Citizens depend upon the Choice of your Sheriffs – How much it is in their Power to raise or support Rabbles and Tumults, to assist or discourage Mad Factions, to encourage Parties, to form Accusations against innocent Men, and pack corrupt Juries . . . to find Bills, make Presentments,

98

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 and Condemn innocent Men, that your Defenders may be sacrificed to the Malice of your Enemies, and that the laws and liberties of Englishmen may not be vindicated, but at the Hazard of their Lives and Fortunes of those that would appear for them.

And so on to the last paragraph of the number, which is more oratorical and formal than his normal manner, where Defoe rises to a fever pitch of exhortation for this election day, eloquent but dropping down at times to rough and earthy terms, “Gorg’d” and “Vomit,” and painting a demagogically vivid scene of what will happen if the wrong crowd gets into office: If you are tir’d with the Ease of a legal Administration. If you are Gorg’d with Liberty, and Sick till you Vomit up the Privileges you have Surfeited with – Then Neglect the Work of this Day; Omit your Duty, and cease to struggle for faithful Magistrates and bold assertors of your Rights. Give up your Claims to Laws and Constitution, Brevi Manu; and let High Flyers, Mad Men and Jacobites, have their Swinge, that your Post and Chains may be pull’d Down again, and your Streets be Adorn’d with Gibbets for the Execution of those that offer to Espouse your Liberties – As it was before.

There are times in the Review when in those recurring moments of selfdefense Defoe strives toward a purer formal eloquence that stands apart from this mixed manner of elegance and demotic vigor. The line between Defoe’s eloquence and inflated sense of his sacred mission is a fine one. Here from March 27, 1705 is his attack on Sir Humphrey Mackworth’s proposal in parliament to build work houses where the poor would spin cloth and thereby in his view compromise a crucial domestic industry. Defoe’s strategy is to contrast his own humble service to truth and reason with Sir Humphrey’s exalted status, the only thing that he has to offer in his proposals: Unhappy Review! That must be forc’d to Erect his own Opinion, and advance his private Judgment against the Capitals of the Nations Politicks, and must stand the Test of Publick Censure for his Arrogance, only from the Magnitude of his Opposers, not at all from their Reasons, or the Force of their Judgments. Be it so, Truth and Demonstration are the Weapons, and I am only to be Answer’d with the Irrefragable Arguments of Reason – Where these are against me, I submit and pay Homage to Truth, in the Mouth of the meanest Object in the Universe; but with these, I am a Match for the Greatest, and boldly take upon me to say – Be it that it was Contriv’d by the most Consummate Knowledge, agreed to by an Assembly of Inlightn’d Spirits, I affirm That Bill is an Indigested Chaos, a Mass of Inconsistency and Incongruous Nonsence in Trade, big with

99

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 Monsters of Amphibious Generation, Brooding Needless and Fatal Errors, and Numberless Irretrievable Mischiefs, absolutely Destructive of our Trade, Ruinous to the Poor, tending to the Confusion of our Home Trade, stopping the Circulation of our Manufactures, and Encreasing both the Number and Misery of our Poor.

A few months later, he could resort to the same strategy, the same appeal to TRUTH in upper case letters: “My humble Request to all that read this Paper is, that abstracting the Argument from the Meanness, and most Despicable Character of its Author, they would reverence Truth, and pay a due Homage to Reason, and the moving perswading Power of just Arguing, let it come from who it will. If I tell you the Truth, if I perswade to your real Interest, if I warn you against Threatning Impending Dangers, remember the Jews to the Blind Man, Thou wast altogether born in sin, and doest thou teach us? And yet all the Man said was true” (June 7, 1705). Defoe at such moments is an orator at full throttle, unafraid to pull out all the stops. His modus loquendi features a combination of elaborate deference to truth from its humble defender and slashing, merciless invective against those who oppose him and who have no regard for truth, as he defines it of course. Defoe’s prose frequently highlights what he describes as his barely restrained fecundity and fluency, which he avers in a subsequent number continuing the discussion of work houses that would ruin the English textile trade: I omit with some pain, the many very Useful Thoughts that occur on this Head, to preserve the Brevity I owe to the limited Size of this Paper; but I cannot but note, how far from hence it appears, That the Glory, the Strength, the Riches, the Trade, and all that’s Valuable in a Nation, as to its Figure in the World, depends upon the Number of its People, be they never so Mean or Poor; the Consumption of Manufactures encreases the Manufacturers, the Number of Manufacturers encrease [sic] the Consumption; Provisions are consum’d to feed them, Land improv’d, and more Hands Imploy’d to furnish Provision; all the Wealth of the Nation, and all the Trade is produc’d by Numbers of People: but of this by the way” (April 3, 1705).

This vision of the dynamic productive relationships of the modern economic system is at the heart of Defoe’s sense of the uniqueness of his times, and the Review in its cross-fertilizing engagment with the events of the day as they unfold marks his participation through writing in that system, which he celebrates. The public opinion he seeks to mold in the Review is part of that system of productive proliferation. The line between his secular and pragmatic approach to politics and the religious absolutism of his opponents is sometimes blurred in the heat of his 100

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 attacks, and Defoe’s discourse is at times infected by his opponents’ language and frame of reference. He was probably aware of this danger, and there are moments in the Review when he stages his own distance from absolutism by fashioning a compromise between a religious frame of reference and a worldly view of things. I think this effort can be seen a few months later, on August 21, 1705, as Defoe defended “Moderation” against extreme Tory opposition, at first by a dramatic and nearly blasphemous comparison of their presentation of moderation to what the Jews did to Jesus: “Thus the Jews, when they had Crown’d our Blessed Saviour with Thorns, and Cloth’d him, as they thought with the utmost Contempt, then they Bow’d the Knee to him, and Saluted him with Hail, King of the Jews. Thus Men banter Vertue, to justifie their own Vices; and think to make their own Practices Tolerable, by throwing Dirt at their Betters.” Moderation, he continues, is like the biblical Joseph, accused by Potiphar’s wife of sexual assault, or like the falsely accused Mordecai, but we know how Joseph prospered and how Esther exposed the treacherous Haman so that he was hanged on the gallows prepared for Mordecai. Those biblical comparisons (and the threat of violence implicit in the Haman story) yield in the following paragraph to a naturalistic image whereby the sunlight of moderation, like a natural process of revelatory light and heat, will expose false accusers and reveal the base and material reality of their high-flying engine: How weak will all your Efforts at this Scandalous Impossibility be when Moderation, like the Sun, shall break out from behind this Black Cloud, and shall shine full in your Faces? The Glory of its Light, will certainly Discover all the Motes and Blemishes in your Politicks, which now you Varnish over with the Artifice of Words; all your pretended Zeal and Care for the Church, will be Exposed, the Wax it may been Polish’d with being Melted off, by the warm Beams of the approaching Sun, the Native Genuine Composition will appear, the Wood, Hay, and Stubble of Gaudy Pretences being burnt up, the Nauseous Surface of Interest, Malice, Gain, Revenge, Envy, and all the Black Off-spring of Hell, will appear.

This picture is a wholly natural prediction rather than scriptural or apocalyptic revelation, a vividly painted word picture informed by Defoe’s eye for natural phenomena such as he put to good use in his travel writing and in his fiction. A few months before, on June 28, 1705, Defoe had expressed his ambition to paint such word pictures. Evoking potential disaster if political disunity continues, he asks his audience to imagine a French victory and then to imagine looking back at these internal domestic divisions that now prevail: “Here I could wish to be a Painter good enough to represent in Lively Colours, the Operations of Nature, when Agitated by Violent Passions, he that could Paint the Passions to the Life, must move the same Passions in the Reader, that he 101

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 Describes with his Pen.” And he rises to genuine eloquence in the next paragraph: To look back on our Nation lost, our Prosperity sunk, our Wealth Destroy’d, our Religion, Liberty, and Trade Trampled on, and our Posterity bound in Chains of irretriveable Bondage; and all this by our Private Dissentions, our Cavils at Imaginary Dangers, and Neglecting the real ones, our Party and Petty Feuds, Things Deriv’d from nothing Substantial, mov’d from no Cause, and directed to no End, but such as we must Blush to Name; What deep Wounds must these Reflections make upon our Souls? And how must the Thoughts of them be Inexpressibly afflicting?

Defoe is predicting what the confusing and uncertain present time may lead to; he is explaining the implications of current international events and national policies and controversies, thinking out loud in print as columnists do about what the future may bring, and exhorting his readers to a course of action.The columnist as prophet, secular and historical but borrowing the fire and resonance of biblical precedents, Defoe regularly offers his monitory visions of that future. But as he says very often he would rather be explaining a rational and improved future; he would much rather discuss potential improvements in trade and manufacturing and how to improve the social order, but he is forced by the enemies of progress and moderation to immerse himself in politics at their most contentious. The organizing tension in the Review, as he explains it, is provided by Defoe’s political enemies, who by their fanaticism and factionalism distract him and the nation from the project of social reform and improvement that is always Defoe’s central and defining theme. Five years later, on May 25, 1710, Defoe describes his reluctant role in the political events of the day, drawing readers’ attention to the unfortunately suppressed or delayed purpose of his paper, the true and useful subject of the Review. “I have often thought (with some Melancholy),” the number begins, “upon my Writing this Paper, by which I create me innumerable Enemies on one Hand, and very few Friends on the other – why I should not lay it down.” Instead of controversial topics, he continues, he might “talk for one Year or two, wholly upon Matters . . . of Increasing our Commerce, making the Nation Rich, the poor easie, and the People happy.” Could he but treat of these subjects, he argues with his tongue in his cheek, he could please everyone “and make my self no more the Object of the Curses and Contempt, either of provok’d and enrag’d Enemies, or ungrateful Friends.” Unfortunately, he is distracted from that project by the political tumults of the day “where Rabbles rule, and Men are in danger every Day, of being plunder’d by the Mobb.” Like much else in the Review, this is not at all an exaggeration, since during these months during and after the Sacheverell trial dissenters were in actual physical danger from rampaging mobs that rioted in 102

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 London and in other cities.25 The situation this number of the Review and many others may be said to evoke is perhaps the key to the journal and to its relevance for our understanding of Defoe’s special qualities as a writer. Defoe dramatizes his own dangerous immersion in the tumults and confusions of his times, and invites readers to watch as he maintains his balance and his sense of self and humor. There is an insistence in the prose, with its endless reiterations and inexhaustible fluency, that comes close to violence, but of course as Defoe dramatizes the scene of controversy he is simply fighting fire with fire, self-defensive violence against his enemies who threaten him on all sides and every day. He stages his own heroic attempts to bring order and rationality to chaotic factionalism and the incoherent demands of his opponents. Indeed, John McVeagh suggests that it can be argued that the Review acted as a safety valve to draw off potential political violence, as it “helped to stabilise politics after a century of revolutionary turmoil” and “redirected animosities which would have found expression in an earlier time in the street or on the battlefield on to the printed page.”26 In its capaciousness and long-running, persistent attention to national and international issues, in its repetitions and rehearsals, its attacks and counter-attacks on his enemies and opponents, the Review over the years of its existence strives thereby to evoke as well as to master and bring order and meaning to the vertiginous daily experience of political and historical actuality and the deep ideological conflicts of the early years of the eighteenth century, all the while positing a calmly narrating and analytical self who manages to stand profitably apart from its whirling motion and to remain personally stable and consistent amid its mad fluctuations.Whether this is accurate is another matter, since a good deal of the time the Review has a frantic quality to it, with Defoe reacting to breaking events and showing the strain of tri-weekly production. For readers of Defoe who know only the great narratives of the 1720s, this is a familiar situation, since Defoe’s autobiographers are skilled managers on the personal level of their varied and shifting experiences. Just as his novels offer readers both the intractable materials of lived experiences and a retrospective narrative control and understanding of them, the Review may be said in its way and at its intellectual and political level to predict the problems and achievements of his fictional protagonists.27

Jure Divino, The Consolidator, The Dyet of Poland: Political Satires If any are so weak as to suppose this is a satyr against kingly government, and wrote to expose monarchy; I think I should sufficiently answer so foolish a piece of raillery, by saying only, they are mistaken. Defoe, “Preface” to Jure Divino

103

Political Journalism: 1697–1710

Figure 3 Jure Divino portrait of Daniel Defoe; engraving by Michiel van der Gucht, 1706, after Jeremiah Taverner. National Portrait Gallery

The Review was a series of Defoe’s advertisements for himself, but it also contained on the last page other kinds of overt advertisements, for trusses, salves, patent medicines, and medical cures (often for venereal complaints), for cosmetics, and (mostly) for books, some of them about how to treat venereal disease but most of them Defoe’s own productions on less sensational topics. For example, in the Reviews during December 1704, he advertised his soon-to-be published prose political satire and imaginary lunar voyage, The Consolidator (March 1705) and he continued to promote that book, usually in the advertisement section of the Review after it was published but also years after it was published in the paper proper, as in the number for April 5, 1707. But the work that he advertised for months but then had to announce delay after delay in its publication was the enormous political poem, Jure Divino: A Satyr in Twelve Books. By the Author of The True-Born Englishman (1706), which was advertised in the Review of May 1, 1705 as in press but did not actually appear until over a year later, in July 1706. Given the struggle to finish this work while he was busy writing the Review and beginning his traveling in the provinces to gather intelligence for Harley (all the while dodging his creditors and scrambling to make extra money), Defoe clearly counted on this book to make his name as a serious poet and thinker. Unlike his earlier satiric poetry, produced rapidly 104

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 for particular occasions, Jure Divino is certainly neither doggerel in form nor popular poetry in theme but high, heroic verse, meditated and considered, lavishly printed in folio with a frontispiece of a formal portrait of himself in full bottomed wig and flowing cloak and cravat, modeled on the poems of great poetic forebears like Dryden and Milton. But like his other works, it is part of his unrelenting publicity campaign for his own undeserved sufferings, as he tells his audience in his preface that it has been written “under the heaviest weight of intolerable pressures.”28 With customary pugnacity, he complains that the booksellers are bound to cheat him by selling unauthorized reprints for half the money, and he also defends himself against attackers, who he says have not read it: “I shall quit therefore any further defence of it, and leave it to its fate, and the universal censure of criticks, rehearsers, Jacobites, Non-jurors, and the crowd of party-furies, that wait to worry it, as they would do its author, and am pleased with, instead of being mortified at what my experience knows has been a just motto for, Aude aliquod brevibus gyaris & carcere dignum,/Si vis esse aliquis: PROBITAS laudatur & alget. [Juvenal, Sat. I, ll. 73,74 ]” (p. xxvii).29 In the numbers of the Review just before Jure Divino was actually published, he inserts announcements in the paper protesting the appearance of pirated editions of the poem. Unfortunately, from the first despite all of Defoe’s strenuous promotion, Jure Divino even in its own time has never been more than a curiosity. Notwithstanding its long and difficult gestation and its generalizing ambitions, it is a poem very much of its moment, an attack at its best against his High-Church and Jacobite enemies. When the poem is read at all these days, it is mined for Defoe’s political ideas and the satire so prominent in the title tends to be ignored or given second place to the illustration of his notions about constitutional and contractual monarchy and his continuing attacks on the High-Church party and their ideas about passive obedience and the divine right of kings. Nothing I say here is meant to change that, and it is unlikely that Jure Divino in its entirety will ever be reprinted or be of interest outside a narrow circle of Defoe scholars. But like so much of Defoe’s work, it has many strengths and deserves to be known in substantial excerpts. Like the Review, this ambitious (and interminable) poem is a mirror of his busy mind and turbulent spirits during these early years of Queen Anne’s reign, and like the Review its main qualities can be summed up in terms like attack-dog energy and unstoppable fluency that sometimes make up for its numbing repetitiveness and didactic insistence. Parts of it are political satire as good as anything Dryden wrote. Here is the portrait of Sacheverell from Book IV: But he that had his blinder duty swore, And dip’d his hands in arbitrary power; That leagu’d with Hell his county to betray,

105

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 And pull the church down first, The Shortest Way; What right had he to liberty and law, Whom neither this could drive, nor that could draw? The passive priest with sword and pistol rides, And for the churches safety now provides; Obedience buckles down to preservation, And quits allegiance to secure the nation: Forgets his random-oaths consults his sense, And clouds his perjury with Providence. (p. 20)

“Passive priest with sword and pistol” is a nicely-phrased oxymoron; the portrait of the fiery Sacheverell is compactly malicious in its verbal wit, and the militant champion of passive obedience is efficiently skewered by lines that render his contradictory truculence as he “buckles down to preservation.” The influence of Dryden is visible in these lines, as it is throughout the poem. There are clear echoes in this passage from Book V, for example, of “Mac Flecknoe” and “Absalom and Achitophel”: “But humane things are subject to extreams,/ As swelling floods despise contracted streams;/The gentler brooks to rapid torrents grow,/And all the flowery meadows overflow;/But when the accidental causes cease,/The hasty flood returns to calms and peace” (p. 28). At his best, Defoe manages a satisfying rhythm and pace that like his model gives his ideas a clear and vivid narrative line. Here is one such passage from Book II: Ancient as sin, and close ally’d in time, With mischief born and midwif ’d in by crime; Tyrannick power invaded common right, And justice sunk beneath the arms of might. It this be right, if this entails a crown, It much more makes it just to pull it down; For crowns that by oppression are obtain’d, May by the like oppression be regain’d; Th’ injustice will be in the first offence, And ’tis the cause defends the consequence. (p. 15)

Such lines show that Defoe is once in a while as good as anyone at rendering ideas in forcefully clear, sometimes memorable, and always energetic verse. The effective opening lines of the poem derive from one of his favorite models, Rochester, and like the opening of “The True-Born Englishman” shows that Defoe had the knack of drawing readers in: Nature has left this tincture in the blood, That all men would be tyrants if they cou’d:

106

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 If they forebear their neighbours to devour, ’Tis not for want of will, but want of power; The general plague infects the very race, Pride in his heart, and tyrant in his face; The characters are legible and plain, And perfectly describes the monster, man. (p. i)

The opening couplet has a pseudo-proverbial and aphoristic compactness that is part of Defoe’s signature. When he sees fit to turn from satiric denunciation, Defoe can also do pretty well at panegyric. The following description of Marlborough from Book XII matches I think in its stately eloquence and controlled modesty and deference, especially in the last two couplets, Addison’s praise of the Captain General in “The Campaign” (1703): Marlbro’ too great for pen and ink to praise, Supplies romance for future wond’ring days; Too great for verse, th’ amazing deeds remain, And speak themselves, our illustrations vain; To trace his glory, and his steps pursue, What must our weak deficient numbers do! Of battels fought or conquering legions slain, Who shall support the vast Herculean pain! More glories call the poet to reherse, Than thought can croud into the bounds of verse: Swift as the words that his high deeds relate, He flies to action, on the wings of fate: The astonish’d French, that long forgot to fear, Submit to fate, and learn to tremble here; From his bright sword the scatter’d squadrons fly, And court the backward waves for leave to die. (XII, p. 9)

The most ambitious and least successful part of the poem is Books VI and VII, when Defoe offers a quasi-Miltonic account of the primordial angelic rebellion in heaven, and in the process invokes Milton as his master in this attempt: “I cannot do too much honour to the memory of so masterly a genius, in confessing, the manner of Mr. Milton’s poem, in that particular, forms to me the best ideas of the matter of original crime, of any thing put into words in our language” (VII, p. 14). Defoe’s reach exceeds his grasp. His account of angelic ambition sounds like a chemistry lesson: Sure some of the seraphick race, Too curious to survey th’ expance of space, Unsent, some great successful sally made, The deeps and darks of chaos to invade;

107

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 And here as they the liquid regions past, Expanding brightest wings, and made celestial haste: Ungenerated matter at first prevails, And vapour which their own seraphick fire exhales; Their powerful stagnant fumes direct, With pointed acids, seraphs to infect. (VI, p.12)

For all its misplaced ambitions in these two books especially, Jure Divino limps along much of the time, hampered by Defoe’s unimaginative and usually flat and even leaden couplets, straining as they often do for rhymes and here in these lines from Book VI achieving an unintended, literal-minded comedy of spirit turned to mere matter rather than sublimity. Defoe is in every sense a satirist and thereby drawn to materialist reduction rather than transcendence or the exaltation of one of his masters, Milton, and Jure Divino when it works best is a slashing satire that imitates one of his other poetic models, Dryden. But even if there are odd moments of memorable satiric formulation in Jure Divino, aphorism is often overwhelmed by prosiness and repetition, and imagination and variety are in short supply. For example, in Book V Defoe encapsulates his Hobbesian vision very compactly in these two couplets: “Mankind delights his neighbour to devour,/And is not fit to be supply’d with power:/No other beast will prey on his own kind,/But glutted reason, leaves the sense behind” (p. 18). But then, pedant and auto-didact that he seems compelled by temperament to be, Defoe repeats his opening lines to drive this point home – “Nature has left this tincture in the blood,/That all men would be tyrants if they could.” That didactic aspect is very much present in the poem, which is burdened with many footnotes in which Defoe explains what he means in his verses and expands upon the political topics and elucidates his allusions. Some of these notes are amusing in their homely vigor. For example, in Book I he glosses a line describing Jove and putting that divinity in his moral place – “And all unnatural vices crown’d his bed” – with this note: “He was guilty of sodomy and incest; for Ganimede was a boy kept by Jupiter for his unnatural lust; and Juno, whom he marry’d, was his own sister.” And his next note to the line, “And make one general whore of either sex” goes this way – “Danae, Calisto, Alcmena, Semele, Leda, Antiope, Europa, and innumerable others, were his whores; whom he debauched, some by one method, some by another” (Book I, p. 8) Such moments point to Defoe’s greatest strength in what is after all announced in the title as a satire, which begins in fact in full Juvenalian strain: Instructing satyr, tune thy useful song, Silence grows criminal where crimes grow strong;

108

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 Of meaner vice, and villains sing no more, But monsters crown’d, and crime enrob’d with power. At vices high imperial throne begin, And search the ancient prodigies of sin; With pregnant phrase and strong impartial verse, The crimes of men, and crimes of Gods reherse. (I, p. 1)

For modern readers, were they to venture, the best parts of the poem display something less elevated and less purely satirical, what might be called his comicalhistorical approach, as here in Book IX he employs a sort of True-Born Englishman theme: The rights of families must all be meant, Not of possession only, but descent: And all our royal lines are so decay’d, By bastardy and blood precarious made: That no successions can their title clear, To make a crown’s divinity appear: For how can that descent be call’d divine, Where Whores and Bastards interrupt the line. If kings by Jus Divinum wear the crown, By nat’ral devolution handed down; Let them go back and trace the sacred claim, They’ll find the genealogy so lame; So full of usurpations, such a crowd, Of false successions, spurious births, and blood; Such perjuries, such frauds to wear a crown, They’d blush their ill born ancestors to own. (IX, p. 2)

Defoe’s satiric imagination is essentially urban, energized and also appalled by a vision of crowded city streets, of unruly mobs where disorder and tumult reign and where violence and power go hand in hand. His history of England in Jure Divino is a chronicle of violence and betrayals, of usurpations, a satiric corrective to the historical distortions of a heroic myth of beneficent royalty and the assertion of his sturdy merchant-class outlook on the disgraceful histories of England’s royal dynasties. When he describes in Book XI the triumph of the Saxons over the Britons, he evokes the “royal Saxon line” that “Rifled the masters they came here to guard,/And took their lives and fortunes for reward.” And he adds this note, sounding with special vigor a favorite theme of his: “We are very fond of some families because they can be trac’d beyond the Conquest, whereas, indeed, the farther back the worse, as being the nearer ally’d to a race of robbers and thieves, that with monstrous ingratitude treated their innocent masters ill” (XI, p. 15). 109

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 There’s an interesting tension in Jure Divino between impertinent, particular and pointed remarks such as these, especially in the footnotes, and the moralhistorical generalizing with which most of the time Defoe strives to endow his poem with gravity and dignity. Defoe is not most of the time a dignified or restrained writer, and he is at his best in the heat of daily journalistic battle where that special and shameless egomania (he takes everything personally) that he brings to the fray always enlivens matters. Thus, the year before Jure Divino appeared he published two political satires, the prose Consolidator and in verse “The Dyet of Poland” that can still be read with pleasure in spite of their intense topicality. Both of them employ transparent allegory; events in the moon in The Consolidator are an exact replica of British politics, just as the “consolidator” of the title, the feathered ship that takes the narrator to the moon from China, is parliament itself, and Poland in “The Dyet of Poland” is that same parliament with comically obvious Polish names for prominent politicians and High-Church clergymen. As the editors of the Stoke Newington edition of The Consolidator remark, the lunar voyage promises newness of a utopian sort but “the more elaborate the imaginative ‘flight,’ the more Defoe’s narrator assumes the role of satirical historian rather than imaginary voyager.”30 The man in the moon Defoe’s traveler meets, a “Lunar Philosopher,” is no such thing but a mirror rendition of Daniel Defoe, a much put upon author, enduring the same indignities and injustice as his earthly counterpart:“A certain Author of those Countries, a very mean, obscure and despicable Fellow, of no great share of Wit, but that had a very unlucky way of telling his Story, seeing which way things were a going, writes a Book, and Personating this high Solunarian Zeal, musters up all their Arguments, as if they were his own, and strenuously pretends to prove that all the Crolians ought to be Destroy’d, Hang’d, Banish’d, and the D__ l and all” (p. 83). The Consolidator fails as satire, by the way, because of this personalized literalmindedness. Its subject is its author, and one grows tired of it and of him after a while. So, too, in “The Dyet of Poland” Defoe pretends to be working against the grain or obvious satirical purpose of his text, as he complains in his preface about those readers who will insist on doing exactly what his poem instructs them to do: ’Tis very hard, that a Man cannot Write of the Follies of other Nations, but People will be always comparing them with their own. One would ha’ Thought the Author had travell’d far enough to find out Histories and odd Passages to divert us; but if neither China, Poland, nor the Inhabitants of the Moon will protect Folks from being Hang’d as the Frenchman said, for Tinking, go on, Gentlemen, and if the Cap fits any Body let ’em wear it.You are Welcome to say these Polish Grandees represent Englishmen, but look to it, ye Sons of Censure, that can Swear

110

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 to a Man’s Meaning, and know his Inside without the help of his Outside: For if the People your Profoundity pretends to describe, are Affronted, the Action of Slander lyes against You, and not the Author. In the Writing ’tis a Poem, you, in the Reading turn it into a Libel, and you merit the Punishment for the Metamorphosis.31

In part, this tongue-in-cheek warning derives from Defoe’s caution, since in 1705 he was still worried about prosecution and trying to be seen as living up to the terms of the sentence in The Shortest Way affair that he refrain from political polemic. In spite of this technicality that the reader is the one who supplies the scandal, Defoe had unrealistically high expectations for the political effects of this poem, urging Harley in a letter to let him finish it while gathering intelligence in the country: “I Expect strange Effects from it as to the house [i.e. parliament]” (Letters, p. 19). Both this poem and The Consolidator dramatize a new position for Defoe vis à vis his satiric writing forced on him by the legal restraints under which he now had to work: he cultivates a deliberate ambiguity and diffusion of authorship, and develops elaborate if transparently ineffective strategies of disavowal. Even as he continues to highlight, especially in The Consolidator, his own lingering grievances and fierce opposition to the Tory and High-Church party, he claims an objectivity and distance from the work. It is perhaps the best irony among all the other ironies in these works and calculated to infuriate his enemies even more than the works themselves. “The Dyet of Poland” is an unsparing and doubtless dangerous attack against the Tory and High-Church party and especially its ecclesiastical members. Defoe hammers at “the shortest way” disaster once again, in violently anti-clerical invective: Priests, like the Female Sex, when they Engage There’s always something Bloody in their Rage. He told the Dyet they must Fight and Pray, And pull the Cossacks [Dissenters] down the Shortest Way; And in his Zeal, so far his Text forgot, He Perjur’d his Augustus [Queen Anne] on the Spot; Unchurch’d the Nation, Curst the Polish Tribes, And for their Cure, the Cossacks Blood prescribes. Satyr, thy just Regret with Force restrain With Temper write, altho’ thou Think’st with Pain. (ll. 153–62)

But satire doesn’t heed the poet’s advice to write with temper, and the poem is unrelenting and unforgiving in its assaults against all the most prominent Tory

111

Political Journalism: 1697–1710 politicians. Following the traditional excuse the genre offers, satire has in this poem a force all its own; Defoe’s indignation is fully and completely licensed and knows no boundaries nor restraints.

112

4 Political Agent and Journalist: Queen Anne to the Hanoverians

This way of Writing is something like Judicial Astrology, where tho’ all seems to be meer Guess, yet the Calculation of Probabilities may give a Man an insight farther into an Affair, and its Consequences, than every one may think possible; and when what was rationally deduc’d comes to pass, the Man is taken for a Conjurer, with some that know nothing of the Matter; when in Truth every man may Conjure as well as he, if he would study the Reasons, and Natural Consequences of the thing. Daniel Defoe, Review

The Secret Agent: Union with Scotland Behind this rugged front securely lies Old Caledonia, all the worlds surprize. Her native beauty and her wealth conceal’d Waits the blest hour when both shall be reveal’d. In age and fancy’d poverty secure, And yet she’s ever young, and never poor. Defoe, Caledonia, A Poem in Honour of Scotland and the Scots Nation

Armed with a safe conduct from Harley, Defoe began to travel incognito around southwestern England in the late summer of 1704, enthusiastically gathering the kind of political intelligence he had described as essential in his memorandum of July/August that same year. His reports to Harley during these months are extremely thorough, including right from the start a day-by-day summary of observations and findings in his movement in a great circle of several hundred miles circumference from London through the western counties and back again. 113

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians He displays in these reports the kind of near mania for exact record-keeping and precise detail that is a crucial part of his personality as man and writer. “An Abstract of my Journey with Casual Observations on Publick Affairs” from 6 November 1705 features entries such as this: July 23. Lyme. A town entirely united and the Church Men very moderate and well affected. 24. Honiton. A terrible mob election here, but John Elwill of Excester is so cow’d by Sir William Drake and Frank Gwin that he dares not petition. 25. Excester. here I have the list of all the parties exactly and model how Sir Edward Seymour may be thrown out against another election without any difficulty at all. (Letters, p. 109)

Defoe was not only efficient and even pedantically thorough. He clearly enjoyed playing the secret agent, and his report to Harley in a letter dated August 14, 1704 from Barnstable in Devon of a comic misunderstanding is an incident worthy of one of his picaresque narratives but also a moment that illustrates the very real dangers that he faced in his new work. A few weeks later in the Review for August 25, 1705 he summarized these events: “the Author of this Paper, with but one Friend, and his Friend’s Servant, being in the Western Counties of England, on a Journey, about his Lawful Occasions, met with several Unmanlike and Unreasonable Insults upon the Road.” Defoe had left a letter for one of his fellow spies, a Captain Turner, at Weymouth, where it was read by mistake by another Captain Turner, Captain James Turner, commander of the privateer “Diligence.” As Defoe relates matters in the letter to Harley, “The Ignorant Tarr when he found Things written Darke and Unintelligible shows them to all the Town. At Our Comeing however he Restores the Letters, Drank a pint of wine with us and Calls for One himself ” but goes away without paying. Summoned the next day by the innkeeper to pay, the naive sailor describes the letter and the town’s mayor informs the authorities. Eventually, in this comedy of errors a local justice tells a grand jury that “There are Severall Seditious persons Come Down into the Country spreading Libells &ca and Embroiling the people, and advises the Justices to Apprehend them” (Letters, pp. 97–8). By this time, Defoe is deep in Cornwall, at Lizard, but when he comes north again into Bideford in Devon he is obliged to use Harley’s pass to avoid arrest. As he travels he learns that plans have been made to arrest him at Barnstaple. He also hears that three of his creditors from his recent bankruptcy in London have filed suits against him, and so as he brags to Harley he avoids Barnstaple and travels safely incognito, anticipating the agile, evasive movements of his novels’ heroes: “I have Visited Every Town So securely by being lodg’d among friends that I am Now under the Nose of the Justices Concern’d in the Enclos’d warrant and yet Out of their Danger” (Letters, p. 99). 114

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians Delight in disguise and concealment as a spy in the provinces seem to sit oddly with Defoe’s relentless self-promotion and dramatization in the Review and in his other publications from these years such as the two volumes of A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman and the sumptuous folio edition (with engraved portrait) of Jure Divino. In the Review for August 25, 1705 where he reports this misadventure, he makes it yet another occasion to dramatize himself as an unregarded voice crying in the political wilderness, yet another instance of his sense of persecution by the age: “But even this also may have its use, and Ages to come, to whom this Prophet that is thus without honour in his own Country, may be thought more worth reading, ought to see how a Man is to be used, that attempts to perswade People to be quiet, when they resolve to fall out among themselves.”These self-presentations (publicity and concealment) are two sides of the same coin, and each reinforces the other as complementary forms of self-expression, the identity constructed by weekly publicity and advertisement in his writings, the author of “The True-Born Englishman” and Mr. Review, balanced outrageously by its opposite, the master of disguises and evasive movements, secret and anonymous. Defoe’s letters to Harley from these years provide a window into this balancing act, and his eventual settling in Scotland in September 1706 at Harley’s urgent request for a few years to help promote the union of the two kingdoms provides a sometimes melodramatic setting for more self-presentations, for dangers and adventures nearly the equal of those he would later give his fictional heroes. Defoe’s letters to Harley from Edinburgh from late in 1706 until 1710 as he worked to promote the Union of England and Scotland (which since the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne as James I in 1603 were in effect one nation but had separate legislatures, distinct national churches, and other institutions and traditions) provide a fascinating narrative, an extended epistolary novel as it were, of a secret agent who took to his complicated and dangerous assignment like a duck to water. Harley had cautioned him that secrecy was crucial, as he wrote to Defoe in October 1706: “You are to use the utmost caution that it may not be supposed you are employed by any person in England: but that you came there upon your own business, & out of love to the Country” (Letters, p. 132). Defoe followed his instructions and added his own grace notes in fashioning his modus operandi. He did not disguise his identity as Daniel Defoe, but his real purpose for coming to Scotland was carefully hidden. For the most amusing and illuminating example of how he managed this subterfuge, in a letter dated 26 November, 1706 he describes his activities upon his arrival in Edinburgh: I have Compass’t my First and Main step happily Enough, in That I am Perfectly Unsuspectd as Corresponding with anybody in England. I Converse with Presbyterian, Episcopall-Dissenter, papist and Non Juror, and I hope with Equall

115

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians Circumspection. I flatter my Self you will have no Complaints of my Conduct. I have faithfull Emissaries in Every Company. And I Talk to Everybody in Their Own way. To the Merchants I am about to Settle here in Trade, Building ships &c. With the Lawyers I Want to purchase a House and Land to bring my family & live Upon it (God knows where the Money is to pay for it). To day I am Goeing into Partnership with a Membr of parliamt in a Glass house, to morrow with Another in a Salt work. With the Glasgow Mutineers I am to be a fish Merchant, with the Aberdeen Men a woolen and with the Perth and western men a Linen Manufacturer, and still at the end of all Discourse the Union is the Essential and I am all to Every one that I may Gain some. (Letters, pp. 158–9)

In that last clause, Defoe is echoing one of his favorite scriptural texts, from St. Paul, (“To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made All things to all men, that I might by all means save some.” Corinthians 9:22) and echoing himself a few months earlier paraphrasing the same text in his memorandum to Harley.1 Although he apologizes to Harley for what he calls “this excursion on my self,” he also boasts that among the Scots he is, “privy to all their folly, I wish I Could not Call it knavery, and Entirely Confided in” (Letters, p. 159). A couple of months later, in January 1706/1707, he is still at this deceptive work: “I Treat with the Commission to Make them a New Version of the Psalms, and that Ile lock my Self up in the College 2 year for the performance – by these things Sir I Effectually Amuse them and I am perfectly unsuspected” (Letters, pp. 196–7). This mixed brew of solemn biblical piety and delight in duplicity, trickery, and manipulation is quintessential Defoe and to readers of his novels a familiar and delightful combination, which tells those readers a good deal about affinities between Defoe and his characters. Months later, in March 1707 after the Union had been finally negotiated and agreed to by both parties, Defoe was still boasting to Harley of his subversive and we might even say amoral efficiency. His analysis of the power of money is chilling: “In my Mannagemt here I am a perfect Emissary. I act the old part of Cardinall Richlieu. I have my spyes and my Pensioners In Every place, and I Confess tis the Easyest thing in the World to hire people here to betray their friends” (Letters, p. 211). During those years in Edinburgh, Defoe produced a steady stream of propaganda for the Union, not only in the Review but also in various pamphlets and poems. The most elaborate of these productions is Caledonia. A Poem in Honour of Scotland and the Scots Nation (1706). There is a good deal of praise of Scotland in what advertises itself as a panegyrical poem, especially of the valor of the Scots soldiers in the recent wars in Europe against the French and with King William in the low countries and in Ireland (Defoe never lets slip an opportunity for praise of his hero), and there are flattering portraits of many of the Scottish nobility. But the poem rather tactlessly reminds the Scots at some length of their rela116

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians tive poverty and backwardness, for next to England Scotland was in fact a poor and undeveloped country, and of the two countries Scotland stood to gain the most in economic terms from the unification. Defoe in the poem is especially struck by the Scots’ failure to exploit their potentially rich fisheries: “What pains has Scotland taken to be poor,/That hast the Indies at her door;/That lets her coursest fate of choice remain,/And sees her maker bountiful in vain.”2 Union, however, will rouse lethargic Scotland to emulate English industry and as Defoe puts it with an alarming metaphor of rape and sexual aggression make Nature do her bidding: Wake Scotland from thy long lethargic dream, Seem what thou art, and be what thou shalt seem, Shake off the poverty, the sloth will dy, Success alone can quicken industry. No more the bondage of reproach endure, Or bear those harms thou canst so quickly cure. To land improvement and to trade apply, They’ll plentifully pay thine industry. The barren muirs shall weighty sheaves bestow, Th’ uncultivated vales rich pastures show, The mountain flocks and herds in stead of snow. ’Tis blasphemy to say the climat’s curst, Nature will ne’re be fruitful till she’s forc’t; Nature’s a virgin very chast and coy, To court her’s nonsense: If you will enjoy She must be ravisht; when she’s forc’t she’s free, A perfect prostitute to industry.3

For the English government, the main attraction of union was political, and with one unified nation the government calculated that the Hanoverian succession could be assured and the considerable Jacobite presence in Scotland more effectively neutralized. As he makes certain to assure Harley in his letters, Defoe thought of himself as an important actor and quite public personage in the protracted negotiations for the union of the two kingdoms; he was regularly consulted as a virtual representative of the English interest by various high-placed Scots such as the Marquis of Montrose and the Duke of Argyll and also by the Commission of Assembly in Edinburgh, a special committee of the Scottish parliament. To the larger public as well, Defoe proclaimed his role in arranging the union in the Review (without his customary superficial modesty), claiming credit for the Union and at the same time predicting that he would not get his due for helping arrange it: “I plead no merit, I do not raise the Value of what I have done; and I know some, that are gone to London to sollicit the Reward of what they have had no hand in. I might have said, are gone to claim the Merit of 117

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians what I have been the single Author of – But as this has been the constant Way of the World with me, so I have no Repinings on that Account; nor am I pleading any other Merit, than that I may have it wrote on my Grave, that I did my Duty, in promoting the Union, and consequently the Happiness of these Nations” (March 29, 1707). He was also then (and in later years) seen by many Scots as an English meddler or worse, as D.W. Hayton puts it, “a propagandist hack, who wrote for pay and presented dishonest arguments to bamboozle honest patriots.”4 Although as usual Defoe’s public story is disingenuous (he was working for the English government), he clearly believed in the Union and many of his arguments for it are compelling. His enthusiasm expressed in the Review for 29 March, 1707 seems genuine and in the second paragraph striking in its thoughtfulness: And tho’ it brings an unsatisfying childish Custom in Play, and exposes me to a vain, and truly ridiculous Saying in England, As the Fool thinks, &c. yet ‘tis impossible to put the lively Sound of the Cannon just now firing, into any other Note to my Ear, than the articulate Expression of UNION, UNION. Strange Power of Imagination, strange Incoherence of Circumstances, that fills the Mind so with the thing, that it makes the Thunder of Warlike Engines cry Peace; and what is made to divide and destroy, speaks out the Language of this Glorious Conjunction!

The story leading up to this exciting event that Defoe relates in his dispatches to Harley is full of real dangers, with him narrowly escaping a violent anti-union mob rampaging in the streets of Edinburgh. One night, he reports on 24 October, 1706, he “found the wholl City in a Most Dreadful Uproar and the high street Full of the Rabble” (Letters, p. 134): In This posture Things stood about 8 to 9 a Clock and the street seeming passable I Sallyed Out and Got to my Lodging. I had not been Long There but I heard a Great Noise and looking Out saw a Terrible Multitude Come up the High street with A Drum at the head of Them shouting and swearing and Cryeing Out all scotland would stand together, No Union, No Union, English Dogs, and the like. I Can Not Say to you I had no Apprehensions, Nor was Monsr De Witt quite Out of my Thoughts [Jan De Witt (1625–72), Dutch statesman who was literally torn to pieces by an enraged mob], and perticularly when a part of This Mob fell upon a Gentleman who had Discretion little Enough to say something that Displeased them just Undr my Window. (Letters, p. 135)

Defoe goes on in subsequent letters to Harley to relay accounts of hostile gatherings and anti-union protests in other Scottish cities such as Glasgow, and he describes fierce, colorfully dressed Highlanders strolling menancingly in 118

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians the Edinburgh streets. Worried by the small, ineffective English garrison in Edinburgh, he urged Harley to advise the Queen to send more troops to the city or at least to the Scottish border (and this was in fact eventually done). After the Union, Defoe passes along reports of Jacobite intrigues and lingering discontent among parts of the Scottish populace, that “Fermented and Implacable Nation,” as he calls them at the end of one letter in May 1707 (Letters, p. 222). But Defoe also dutifully passes along the day-by-day, protracted and dull wrangling in the Scottish parliament over the details of the proposed agreement for union. Even after the final ratification of the Union in 1707, there were difficulties, chiefly about some Scottish merchants taking advantage of the new situation to bring foreign goods into England duty free and underselling English traders. As Novak notes, Defoe himself proposed to Harley to take advantage of this loophole, proposing on 10 March, 1706/1707 to buy his master “a Ton of Rich Claret here which I May do as Cheap as you buy a hhd [hogshead] and Ile Take my hazard that it shall be Extraordinary on My Own Risq” (Letters, p. 206).5 Defoe had been in the wholesale wine trade; he often brags about his connoisseurship in such matters and his worldly vanity and joie de vivre provide a welcome change from his customary priggish self-righteousness. These letters to Harley constitute an insider’s private history of the tumultuous events in Scotland leading up to the Union, and in fact they are much more lively than the massive History of the Union of Great Britain that Defoe published in 1710. This latter is padded out with many documents reproduced verbatim such as the minutes of the meetings between the English and Scottish negotiators, including the agreed upon Articles of Union. However, Defoe is never just dull and prosy, even if he does commit those sins for long stretches of The History of the Union. The book is sometimes engagingly personal, a considerable fictionalization of its author’s motives for participation in these events: I cannot forbear hinting here, that my curiosity prest me to take a journey thither, and being by all my friends, to whom I communicated my design, encouraged, to think I might be useful there to prompt a work that I was fully convinced was for the general good of the whole island; and particularly necessary for the strengthening the Protestant interest, I was moved purely on these accounts to undertake a long Winter, a chargeable, and as it proved a hazardous journey. I contemn, as not worth mentioning, the suggestions of some people, of my being imployed thither, to carry on the interest of a party. – I have never loved any parties, but with my utmost zeal have sincerely espoused the great and original interest of this nation, and of all nations, I mean truth and liberty, – and who ever are of that party, I desire to be with them.6

The incidents related to Harley find a place in his narrative, and the account of the mob in Edinburgh is among the liveliest in the book. Here, again, Defoe 119

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians inserts himself as an active participant who narrowly escaped the fury of the mob: “The author of this had his share of the danger in this tumult, and tho unknown to him, was watch’d and set by the mob, in order to know where to find him, had his chamber windows insulted, and the windows beneath him broken by mistake. – But by the prudence of his friends, the shortness of its continuance, and God’s Providence, he escaped” (III, p. 30). Defoe, however, avoids political melodrama and mere partisanship and tries to offer a balanced view of the situation, distinguishing what he depicts as principled opposition to the Union from dangerous Jacobitism. “Here were good people of all opinions, as well as others; some were against the Union, on a principle of justice and honesty, as earnestly as others were against it, on a principle of treachery to their country; some were fairly possess’d, that they were under national engagements, which in the nature of them, clash’d with the Union; and that therefore, however it might be necessary for the safety, and peace of either Church, or nation, they could not get over those obligations, or consent to this evil, that the other good might come . . . yet I cannot but do them that justice, that I believe they were far from the least intention, to encourage the strengthening a party, whose principle was French government, and a Popish sovereign” (III, pp. 33–4). At his best and most effective in The History of the Union, Defoe is a sort of Protestant preacher, and the book turns into popular sermonizing at times. Defoe explains with a biblical example the opposition to Union that led to violence in the Scottish countryside: This [violence] manifestly shewed the difference between the men, who, in the singleness of their hearts, opposed it, as apprehending it unsafe for the establish’d Church, and inconsistent with their national engagements; and those, on the other hand, who opposed it, as contrary and fatal to the Popish succession of James VIII, as they called him, and the Episcopal hierarchy: – And these differed just as the two harlots in Solomons time; – The true mother of the child chose to lose her possession of him, rather than that the child should be murthered; so these faithful friends to their country, however possessed against the Union by the publick clamour; yet they would choose to suffer the inconveniencies they feared, rather than see the country involved in blood, a civil war breaking out in the bowels of the kingdom, and forreign Popish, or tryrannical powers invading their privileges, and pulling down all before them. (III, p. 55)

There are also, in The History of the Union, moments of vivid narration, some of it nicely circumstantial. Describing the riots in Glasgow, for instance, Defoe zooms in on several of the ringleaders: imprisoned for theft in the Tolbooth is one Parker, “a loose, vagabond, profligate fellow of a very ill character, a spinner of tobacco by imployment but a very scandalous person” (III, p. 63). The Provost of Glasgow, Defoe continues, decides to free this Parker, “apprehending that the 120

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians imprisonment of this fellow might be a pretence for new disturbance” (III, p. 63). Among Parker’s gang as Defoe sketches the colorful local scene of popular rebellion, is one Finlay, “a loose sort of a fellow, who had formerly been a sergeant in Dumbartons regiment in Flanders, and who openly professed himself a Jacobite, a fellow that followed no employ, but his mother kept a little change house at the remotest part of the town on the Edinburgh side” (III, p. 63). Led by this Finlay, the mob in due course pursues the Provost, who evades them by hiding in a bed folded against the wall. Next to this comic detail, Defoe’s biblical gloss is strange and striking: “But the same hand that smote the men of Sodom with blindness, when they would have rabbled the angels, protected him from this many headed monster, and so blinded them, that they could not find him” (III, p. 64). Biblical parallels are never far from Defoe’s mind and presumably came naturally to his readers as well as to him even in the midst of the most secular and pragmatic activities. Thus, a bit earlier in The History of the Union, describing how Scottish mobs grew in response to rumors, he invokes the experience of the Apostle, Paul: “How soon did the Jews of Asia put all Jerusalem in an uproar, when they made them believe their worship was in danger by Paul’s preaching; and that he not only invaded their worship, but had actually defiled the Temple. How readily did they lay hold of the blessed Apostle, and had certainly murdered him, if the civil authority has not, assisted by the military, rescued him out of the hands of the mob, and put the case in the way of a fair hearing” (III, p. 56). This intensely felt frame of reference gives Defoe’s personal and political affairs a religious dimension that we tend nowadays to dismiss too hastily as superficial or self-justifying. There can be no doubt at all that Defoe was sustained in his struggles by his deeply-held belief in such parallels and that all his ideas are informed on some level by Christian imagery and biblical precedent. Although in his longer fictions later in his life, his protagonists very often wonder if Providence can actually be directing their steps, with such doubts establishing a central and defining tension in their narratives between the secular world of action and self-preservation and the realm of faith in God’s Providence, Defoe himself often enough expresses serene confidence in God’s workings in his own life. For example, in May 1705 he writes to John Fransham, a Norwich linen draper and writer who was helping him distribute the Review in his part of the country, expressing confidence that “the work I am upon is of him whose immediate hand by wonderful steps have led me through Wildernesses of Troubles and Mountains of popular Fury” (Letters, p. 84), and that he is “delighted in observing by what secret steps in his providence he has furnish’d me with or directed me to such sincere propagators of this blessed work as you are whose hearts he have [sic] touch’d with a sence of the obligation we have all upon us to assist in the establishment of his Interest in the world” (p. 85). Pious trust in God is intertwined in such musings with Defoe’s lingering sense of personal affront and 121

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians aggrievement, although even in those feelings he finds tokens of God’s purpose in his singular sufferings. To be sure, occasionally Defoe’s biblical analogies feel conventional and at times deeply inappropriate, even comically self-aggrandizing. Setting out in September 1706 for Scotland on Harley’s orders, Defoe wonders why he could not see him just before he left, but he adds that he goes forth in good spirits anyway, “as Abraham went Chearfully Out Not knowing whither he went, Depending on him that Sent him” (Letters, p. 126), which when you think about it is also an outrageous bit of flattery for his patron. Throughout this long correspondence, mainly from Scotland, with his patrons, chiefly Harley but also for a time, Sidney, 1st Earl of Godolphin, then Lord Treasurer, over the first decade or so of the eighteenth century, Defoe is an uneasy client of these powerful politicians, fawning for grace and favor, bragging about his accomplishments and insights even while deferring to his masters, pleading hat in hand for prompt payment of his irregular if substantial emoluments, and always hoping (in vain) that he will be given a permanent place. It’s not always an edifying spectacle, although one has to remember that Defoe is simply playing the system in force at the time and of course dealing with the most powerful men in England of the day. “I am Sorry to Say that I look Now as One Entirely forgott,” he writes from Edinburgh to Harley on 19, July 1707, “That haveing the honour to be sent hither, and Not thinking it my Duty to Abandone my post without your Orders, have now neither Capascity to stay Nor orders to Come Away” (Letters, p. 231). He watched as the commissioners of the customs met in Edinburgh and filled up the places “with persons as Usuall supplyed with More Friends than Merit” (Letters, p. 231). Things got even worse, as Harley ignored his pleas. As Sutherland summarizes matters, Harley neither recalled Defoe “nor sent any money to defray his expenses.”7 In a letter he wrote on September 18, 1707, Defoe declared himself at his wit’s end: “send me Out of This Torture; Give me your Ordr to Come Away: Ile Ever be your faithfull and Sincere Servt whether Subsisted Or Not . . . the Bravest Garrison May be starv’d Out, and It is my Duty to Tell you when I Am Not able to hold out Any Longer (Letters, p. 245). Harley advised him to apply to Godolphin, but even then Defoe did not get any money until November. But again the next year, on August 3, 1708, he writes to Godolphin to present an abject plea, full of biblical resonances as well as abjection, for financial support as he invokes the needs of his “Desolate family” and states his case in urgently biblical terms: “I have lain My Ld at the Pool for Deliverance a long Time, But have Ever wanted the Help Needfull when the Moment for Cure happend; I Most Humbly Seek your Ldpps Help; which with the breath of your Mouth Can Restore the Disstresses of your faithful Sevant, who shall Ever Dedicate his life, and strength, to your Ldpps Intrest and Service” (Letters, p. 264). Early in 1708, a split developed in the ministry. Backed by Henry St. John, later Viscount Bolingbroke, and by Queen Anne’s new favorite, the lady in 122

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians waiting, Abigail Masham, Harley’s kinswoman, who had supplanted in Anne’s affections her old confidante, the irascible Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, Harley had persuaded the queen to form a Tory administration that was in fact designed as a coalition government to include moderate Whigs like Marlborough. Despite a scandal in his office when a clerk named William Greg was caught spying for the French, Harley continued to enjoy the queen’s backing, and she decided to drop Godolphin from the cabinet and to instruct Harley to form a new government. But support for such a government from parliament was lacking, and the Whig grandees Marlborough and Godolphin (the so called Duumvirate) told the queen that they would resign rather than serve in the cabinet with Harley.8 When they refused to attend a cabinet meeting presided over by Harley, the game was up, and he and St. John resigned and gave way to a government now firmly in the hands of the Whigs. But as the war with France (the so-called War of the Spanish Succession) dragged on and public opinion grew increasingly impatient with its costs in blood and treasure, the tide began to turn against the Whigs, and Harley’s compromise and “moderation” (his rallying cry) made him a powerful force on the political scene once again. Harley and the Tories were also the beneficiaries in early 1710 of a serious miscalculation by the Whig administration, when it decided to prosecute Henry Sacheverell, who had preached an incendiary sermon at St. Paul’s in London on November 5 1709 (Guy Fawkes Day) on the text “In perils among false brethren” (2 Corinthians 11:26), which was published shortly after as “The Perils of False Brethren.” As Geoffrey Holmes points out, some hundred thousand copies were quickly sold, so that as a short-term best seller Sacheverell’s sermon “had no equal in the early eighteenth century.”9 Of course, Defoe had been attacking Sacheverell since 1702, when he published The Shortest Way with the Dissenters and during the trial, which began in February 1710, he had been pounding him regularly in the Review. On March 8 of that year he wrote to Lieutenant-General James Stanhope, one of the Whig managers of the trial, who had according to Defoe’s letter sent for some recent copies of the Review “to furnish something of the Doctor’s character” (Letters, p. 265). He reports of “this insolent priest” that he has “drunk King James’s health upon his knees” and that during William’s reign he is reported to have “believed that he (the King) would come to be De-Witted [that is, torn to pieces by an angry mob] and that he hoped he would live to see it” (Letters, p. 266). But in the end the Whigs were outmaneuvered, partly by Harley’s shrewd manipulations in the course of a long and sensational trial, and Sacheverell was convicted but given a light sentence, with no jail time: his sermon was to be burnt by the public hangman; he himself was barred him from preaching for three years but allowed during that time to receive ecclesiastical preferment, in effect assuring that he would be rewarded by Tory churchmen for his actions. In the event, he became a wildly popular hero, and for a week before the verdict in March 1710 and for several weeks 123

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians afterwards, in London and in the provinces, there were violent pro-Sacheverell and anti-dissenter riots that in London at least had to be put down by the army. Sacheverell himself made a triumphal tour in June and July of that year, promoting addresses to the Queen, who had prorogued Parliament on April 5th, urging her to call new elections.10 In the October 1710 parliamentary elections that followed as a result the Tories won a landslide victory, partly as Geoffrey Holmes argues owing to Sacheverell’s influence, with the anti-Whig reaction as he points out most clearly marked in those counties through which he had passed on his triumphal tour.11 Boasting a parliamentary majority of nearly two to one, the new administration was composed of an alliance of high Tories like Bolingbroke and Simon Harcourt, along with Tory and High-Church lords such as the Earls of Nottingham and Rochester, and more moderate Harleyites. As one of Queen Anne’s biographers, the historian Edward Gregg puts it, this election marked the biggest change in English administration since 1689.12 And Harley’s star continued to rise when in March 1711 he was stabbed in the breast by a disgruntled exiled Frenchman, Antoine de Guiscard, who had served the administration against France under Godolphin but had since been caught in treasonable correspondence with the French. While being questioned by the Privy Council, Guiscard had suddenly lunged at Harley with a penknife. The wound turned out to be superficial, but Harley became a hero and was soon after made Lord Treasurer and raised to the peerage by Queen Anne as the Earl of Oxford. Amid all this turmoil, Defoe had from the beginning proclaimed his loyalty to Harley when he was forced out of office and resigned as Secretary of State in February 1708. Defoe wrote that same month to Harley and affirmed his “Invviolable Duty,” and offered to serve him “and that More Freely Than when I might be Supposed following your Riseing Fortunes” (Letters, p. 250). Harley recommended to Defoe that he apply to Godolphin to continue in his employment for the government. A few years later, on June 19, 1711, Defoe reminded Harley with some bitterness that Godolphin had offered him “a Very Good Post in Scotland and afterward offred me to be Commissioner of The Customs There” (Letters, p. 331). Defoe in that letter goes on to say that in spite of the advantages for him and his family from such a regular post and steady salary, he agreed with Harley and Godolphin that he would be “More Servicable in a Private Capascity.” As Novak remarks, such a decision (whatever prompted it, perhaps a desire to please his employers) seems to fit with Defoe’s natural propensity for action and secrecy, “responding to changing political events through his writings and acting as a secret agent”13 rather than settling in to the life of an eighteenth-century bureaucrat. Moments like this in Defoe’s life need to be handled carefully, since his motives and decisions can be interpreted in different ways. Novak’s gloss strikes me as more persuasive than the narrative offered at

124

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians this point by Backscheider, who constructs a heroic moment: Defoe, she says, refused to take “a routine administrative post when he could have done something more valuable to his religion or country would have been, in his opinion, irresponsible and perhaps even sinful. . . . For Puritans like Defoe, to serve their country would be to participate in this struggle [the European conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism] and to be instruments of truth. Still insisting that his work was ‘to tell things aright,’ Defoe believed that he worked for moderation and national harmony.”14 Of course, that is probably what Defoe believed, but his fate at this point was in the hands of his political masters, who clearly decided he would be more useful as their agent than as the holder of a bureaucratic post. In the middle of 1711, by all accounts, Harley was turning more and more to Swift as his chief propagandist, and in this same letter Defoe describes his “Private Affaires” as “Mellancholly, and Ruinous, from the Discontinuance of your Favor” (Letters, p. 331). Again, Defoe invokes his pressing domestic needs, “the Importuning Circumstance of a Large Family, a Wife and Six Children,” and swears that were it not for them he would “Serve your Ldpp Twenty year without the Least Supply Rather Than Thus press upon your Goodness” (Letters, p. 332). If we are to judge by these abjectly pleading letters, as Defoe twists himself into knots to please Harley and retain his patronage, Harley was stringing his man in Edinburgh along, keeping him hungry and jealous, giving him just enough to make him loyal and dependent. The painful pattern continues throughout the four years of Tory ascendancy and beyond, with Defoe’s letters tracing his services to the government and bemoaning the increasing isolation he suffered as a defender of its policies. Apparently, as he writes in a long letter to Harley on August 19, 1712, he had been ill much of that year and hoped on the advice of his doctor to visit the warm springs at Buxton in Derbyshire. With the Tory victory in 1710, Defoe had offered his services again to Harley, writing to him on August 12, 1710, just after Godolphin had been dismissed as Lord Treasurer and Harley made Chancellor of the Exchequer: “Providence Sir Seems to Cast me back Upon you (I write that with Joy) and Layes me at your Door; at the Very Juncture when She blesses you with The Means of doing For me, what your Bounty shall prompt to” (Letters, p. 273). In the letters that follow during the subsequent months of 1710 as Harley solidified his power, Defoe describes late night (secret) consultations with Harley and lays out particular and detailed advice for managing Scottish affairs. According to George Harris Healey, the editor of Defoe’s letters, as he reported later in the year from Edinburgh he wrote in a disguised hand, signing himself “C. Guilot.” Such caution seems to have been warranted, as Defoe warns Harley on December 6, 1710 that Jacobitism is a real threat in Scotland, “That the Intrest of the Pretender is too great here to be Slighted” (p. 301).

125

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians

Political Writing: 1710–15 I Endeavour to practise The great work of Resignation Under The Injurious Treatmt I Reciev, Submitting to his Disposall who in a like Occasion (Tho’ of higher Moment) Bad shimei Curse, But left him not Unrewarded. Defoe to Robert Harley

During these unsettled times between the Union and the rise to power of the Tories, led by Harley, Defoe shuttled between Scotland and London. For example, in 1709 he set up a separate Scottish edition of the Review, all the while walking a fine line in its pages between Harley’s self-styled moderation and the cryptoJacobite sympathies of his powerful Tory associates such as Bolingbroke, who had the support of the conservative back benchers in the House of Commons known as the October Club, who formed a key part of the support for the new administration. Attacked (with good reason) by Whig journalists as a hack employed by the ministry, Defoe defended himself: “All the World will bear me Witness it [the Review] is not a Tory Paper. – The Rage, with which I am daily treated by that Party, testify for me. – Nay the Tories will honestly own that they disown it. – Yet, because I cannot run the Length that some of the other would have me, New Scandal fills their Mouths, and now they report, I am gone over to the New Ministry” (2 November, 1710). As Alan Downie puts it in the introduction to his edition of the political writings from these years, “By writing for successive governments between 1704 and 1714, Defoe earned his description as a ‘thorough-pac’d true-bred Hypocrite, and High-Church-Man one Day, and Rank Whig the next’, and it was for this reason that he sought to make his peace with the Whigs following the accession of George I.” 15 Defoe in these years, more so than in the Williamite years, was clearly troubled by his pariah status in the eyes of his opponents and made his isolation increasingly a part of his public persona in his political writing. His aggrieved defensiveness forms a regular part of his political rhetoric, which as we will see even at its most pointed, factual and objective is obsessed with self-justification. In an extraordinary letter to Harley on August 19, 1712. Defoe seems to be reassuring himself that he was, in spite of it all, maintaining his independence, even as he regularly in other letters proclaims his readiness to serve and to defend the new administration’s policies: What Ever your Ldpp has done for me, you Never So much as Intimated, (tho’ Ever So Remotely) That you Expected from me The Least Byass in what I should write, or That her Majties Bounty to me was Intended to Guide my Opinion; . . . This Fills me with Peace Under all Their [“your Ldpps Worst Enemyes”] Clamour, That I Serve a Master who Scorns the Service of a Mercenary

126

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians Conscience; and who at the Same Time That he does me good, leaves me full Liberty to Obey the Dictates of My Own principles; This My Lord Gives Me Room to Declare, as I do in Print Every day, That I am Neither Employ’d, Dictated to, or Rewarded for, or in, what I write by any Person Undr Heaven. (Letters, pp. 379–80)

For any reader of Defoe’s letters, this claim is transparently self-serving, almost self-deluding as well as hugely self-dramatizing, as the epigraph to this section from the same letter also makes clear. Defoe certainly agreed with Harley’s “moderation,” and had come to reject the obstructionism of his Whig opponents, just as he had been driven into Harley’s employment in part by what he saw as the ingratitude of his fellow dissenters. But his need to dramatize his own (and his patron’s) moral superiority by idealizing his own independence and Harley’s magnanimity tells us a good deal about the strenuous efforts at self-confidence that seem to have driven his writing even when he was beleaguered and nearly desperate for financial support. Defoe’s life, if we attend to this tortured correspondence with Harley, was as racked with contradictions and recurring crises as those of the characters he would years later invent for his long narrative fictions. As he balanced on a knife’s edge of personal and ideological contradictions, these four years that the Tories were to be in power mark a very productive and effective stage in Defoe’s political writing. He sought to meet the challenge to steer between his (and Harley’s) moderate, essentially Whiggish principles and support of the Tories’ attempt to bring an end to the war with France. Harley and Bolingbroke were in secret correspondence with the Old Pretender in France, and Defoe must have been aware of those negotiations, although he nowhere in his writings acknowledges that. Nonetheless, as James Sutherland says of these years, they “can only be compared in their effectiveness with those other four years from 1698–1701 when Defoe was working for William and the Whigs.”16 In 1711 alone, for example, Defoe published over twenty pamphlets on political and economic subjects. He was also producing the Review during these years, on a thrice-weekly basis at this point. His energy and facility, his sheer copiousness as a writer, are something of a continuous wonder for anyone who sets out to understand Defoe. A good deal of this political prose from these four years does not successfully outlive its historical moment, since there is a thickly specific contemporary frame of reference to it. But these writings show Defoe at the top of his game. One can properly speak of an energy in this writing that continues to make it readable beyond a strictly scholarly context, and that energy in Defoe’s prose is provoked by the urgency of his purposes and intentions. Near the end of Anne’s reign (she was to die in 1714), the stakes grew increasingly high as the political scene became more and more fractious, and many foreign observers at 127

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians the time predicted another English civil war, which nearly happened in 1715 when the first unsuccessful Jacobite revolt and French-sponsored invasion of Britain by the Stuart Pretender took place. The ferocity of Defoe’s rhetoric in these years has to be seen as a response to the increasingly volatile and uncertain nature of the struggle between Jacobitical Tories and moderates like Harley, who sought to steer a middle course. This was serious and even deadly business. So much so that after Queen Anne died in 1714 and the Elector of Hanover, the German George I, was installed as king, the Whig House of Commons impeached Harley and Bolingbroke for high treason for their secret negotiations with the French and with the Pretender. Bolingbroke fled to France, but Harley stayed and found himself imprisoned in the Tower. (He was eventually exonerated by the House of Lords in 1717, but not until he languished in the Tower for two years.) In a good deal of Defoe’s polemical political writing from the earlier years of the century, the modern reader always understands a furiously intense purpose in the words if not the specific issues that provokes them. Defoe’s rhetoric in the Review is always liable to flame out repeatedly when some particular enormity moves him to outrage. But in his writing during the four years the Tories were in power when he was employed by Harley, Defoe’s ferocity is exchanged most of the time for a dignified calmness and authoritative reasonableness, as he strives in his various pamphlets to cultivate the moderation and Realpolitik espoused by his political master. Consider, for example, some typical moments from “Reasons Why This Nation Ought to Put Speedy End to this Expensive War” (1711), a piece of propaganda as Alan Downie points out for peace negotiations that Harley’s government had already begun in secrecy.17 Although he is often enough in the seat-of-the-pants improvisations in the Review given to a selfindulgent wordiness, here in this pamphlet Defoe’s powers of lucid and elegant summary, of oratorical polish, are very much on display: But the Case is alter’d Now. Now we see our Treasure lost, our Funds exhausted, all our publick Revenues Sold, Mortgaged, and Anticipated; vast and endless Interest entail’d upon our Posterity, the whole Kingdom sold to Usury, and an immense Treasure turn’d into an immense Debt to pay; we went out full, but are return’d empty. We find our Great Navy spread the Seas to the Expence of above Three Millions Yearly, which yet our Enemies regard so little, that they carry on the War as if it were without a Navy, and think it not worth the Expence to fit out their Fleet to prevent us; but they gain from us every Year by their Privateering, as much as they would lose by fitting our their Navy.18

Eloquence such as this is supplemented by a sweet reasonableness a few paragraphs later, as Defoe wonders how long the king of France will hold Britain at bay by giving up “one Town every Summer,” which may “eternize and entail the 128

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians War to us and our Heirs for ever, or to Issue a few more such Glorious Campaigns in an inglorious Peace at last” (p. 224). Defoe asks his readers with modesty to consider “our own Circumstances, and enquire what Reasons we have, which are drawn from within our selves” and in a phrase he repeats several times he calls this a “most needful Enquiry for the curious Heads of this Age” (p. 224). He continues by positing alternative causes of action. Either the country must take drastic fiscal measures such as passing a general excise tax on all necessities such as food and clothes or (worse) suspend interest payment on government securities; or “on the other Hand, put an End to the War” (p. 229). Defoe tries a characteristically cagy and daring reference to the Review, pretending to be a reader and admirer, referring to its author as “one of their [the Ministry’s] own Writers,” and remarking that “the Man has more Penetration in those Matters” than those Whigs who had sought to undermine the nation’s credit (p. 230). Defoe says of himself that “the aforesaid Writer, tho’ of their own Party [i.e. the Whigs]” warned them that this was “sinking the Ship; but when Envy blinds Mens Eyes, they are render’d deaf to the Counsel of their Friends, much more are they so to that of their Enemies; for they cast Stones at the Advice, and, as I am inform’d, at the Adviser too” (p. 230). Defoe’s drive toward selfdramatization even in a pamphlet meant to serve his political masters rather than to defend himself against his enemies is striking, a sign of what seems to be an interesting instability that invades his writing and marks it as his own even when he is supposed to be effacing himself to make the logical case for his political masters. Near the end of the pamphlet, as Defoe disingenuously refuses to admit that the administration was in fact negotiating secretly with the French, he argues with the Review, proposing that Britain may well have to think about giving up Spain to the French. “Let us expostulate a little with the Review, or his Party, upon the Point, at the same time protesting that there is not, to our knowledge, any such Concession made, or designed to be made, or that France is under any expectation of it” (p. 237). Defoe slides his way into Harley’s new posture to end the war. With his never-failing ability to find reasons and to pose questions provocatively, Defoe lays out 11 essentially rhetorical questions about the Spanish issue. This is number 10: “Whether, so many Expedients offering themselves in this Case, it may be worth all the Blood that may yet be expended, before France can be compelled to yield up the whole Spanish Monarchy, and King Philip be driven entirely out of it; and whether a reasonable Partition be not better than such a Conquest? (p. 238). The question like all the others answers itself, and the persuasive effect of such rhetorical insistence is considerable. Anonymity makes this kind of pure persuasiveness divorced from his public celebrity as Mr. Review possible, of course, but the talent for equivocation and for touching all the bases, for making what had been true now false, for adjusting rhetoric in the light of changing circumstances, is Defoe at his most protean as a writer and rhetorician, 129

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians especially in retrospect when we know the many shifts and jumps that Defoe was forced to make in his career as a political propagandist.That same year, 1711, Defoe published a long defense of Harley, “Eleven Opinions about Mr. H[arle]y” in which he is at one point in the pamphlet up to his old tricks of writing about himself in the third person. Recounting how the ousted Whigs thought that Harley would make common cause with the Tory High Flyers, the author notes that a “certain Author of their own [i.e. the Whigs] who it seems made in that Article as good a Politician without Doors, as some of those great States-Men did within, told them in Publick, it could not be.” And so, he goes on, this author (Defoe in the Review, as Downie notes, for August 19, 1710) was laughed at for a fool “and gave him Opportunity to laugh at them again in his turn; for, as by the Event appear’d, there was nothing of this in Mr. H–y’s View” (p. 190). Defoe seems incapable, even when on assignment to defend his patron from his enemies, of not talking about himself and of playing a complex self-referential game, and that in one way or another in his writing he makes his own presence felt. Defoe’s brashness at quoting himself and in the process recommending his own works and propagating further his version of things crops up again in January of the following year in “The Conduct of Parties in England” (1712), an attack on the Junto Whigs19 who were attacking Harley’s government for the dismissal of the Duke of Marlborough as Captain General of the army. After quoting his own “The Secret History of the October Club” (1711) for several pages on the alliance between the Junto and the so-called Flying Squadron of conservative Scottish peers back in 1707, Defoe remarks with some complacency that “this Quotation is so Authentick and full, Additions are needless” (p. 254). Defoe has a point. The earlier tract is a comprehensive political history of England since the Glorious Revolution, wrapped in polemical satire. In addition, “The Secret History of the October Club: With some Friendly Characters of the Illustrious Members of that Honourable Society” is the most amusing and accessible of Defoe’s political pamphlets from these early days of the new Tory government. As the title indicates, this is a satirical narrative of the foundation and the aims of that group of Tory backbenchers who gathered together in a club of that name, named after the strong ale made in October they were supposed to drink at their meetings. At the end of the pamphlet, Defoe invents some mock proceedings of the group, some of it quite nasty as when the group passes a resolution condemning Harley’s would-be assassin, the Marquis de Guiscard, “for doing it by halves, and Stabbing him in the wrong place.” 20 The title is misleading, since this is not an uncovering of racy scandals such as recent and wildly popular “secret histories” like Delarivière Manley’s Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality, of both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean (1709), but rather a kind of mock historical/materialist

130

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians inquiry into the origins of a political faction, which Defoe carries back to the events of 1688: No sooner was the Blow struck in Britain, and King James being Fled, the Convention of Estates had declared the Throne Vacant, and had the placing the Prince and Princess of Orange in the Seat of the Government in their View; but a Third Party rose up and violently opposed it. We knew not what at first to call these people, neither did they give themselves any Name; tho’ they might have been call’d October-Men at that time, as truly and with as just a Derivation as any now bear that Name. (p. 142)

Slightly absurd, mushroom-like, tipsy on strong ale like the current party, these early antecedents of the October men were nonetheless opposed to the “Tyranny and Dispensing Power of King James, as other Men” (p. 142) but they were otherwise obstructionist in the face of the new arrangements. Defoe slides at the beginning of this pamphlet into a summary of nonjuring clergymen and an attack on those who did take the oath but in fact retained their allegiance to King James – Jacobites all. His approach is scornfully satiric, relishing the absurdity in the paradox of unprincipled principle: The World having in no Age been used to a People of such Amphibious Politicks as these, Men were at a loss what to call them a great while: Non-Jurors they were not, for no Parliament could frame Oaths of any kind, but they would take them: They submitted to Oaths of Allegiance, Recognition, Association, Abjuration, Assurance, and every thing you please. Williamites, they could not be, King William was their Aversion, and they would Drink King James’s Health as openly, as if they had seen him upon the Throne. From these Practices, they came to distinguish themselves as his more particular Partisans; and there began the first Mention of the word Jacobite, as a Title justly given them, and which they quickly grew fond of. (p. 143)

In a characteristically copious moment, framed by claims of brevity and the figure of occupatio or paralipsis (whereby Defoe claims that he doesn’t have time to say what he in fact says at some length), the Jacobite opposition is set into frenzied motion in the following summary of their anti-William activities: In order to the Brevity, we profess you shall expect no farther account of the Conduct of these People during the whole Reign of King William; how upon all Occasions they Plagu’d and Perplex’d him, how they Betray’d him abroad, and Embarrass’d him at home; how they Ruffled him on the Partition Treaty, Suggested his Desire to rule by a Standing Army, Bully’d him on his proposals of keeping his Dutch Guards, forc’d him to give up his best Friends to their Fury; and at last how

131

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians they Insulted his End, Triumph’d in the manner, Drank the Beasts Health that gave him the Fall by which he came to his Death; and have since, offer’d innumerable Injuries to his Glorious Memory: These are things we choose to omit, not caring renovare Dolorem, to look back upon them. (pp. 143–4)

There follows a summarizing narrative of political/religious affairs in England since the removal of King James, exceedingly familiar to any reader of Defoe’s works from these years. (Defoe is in these years indefatigable at the reiteration of this history; he never tires of rehearsing it, and readers of the Review would have found all of this very familiar.) Like the introductory pages of the tract, that summary has a distinct satirical edge to it, since Defoe’s approach in his reiteration of the derivation of multiple party and faction labels from the Glorious Revolution to the present day is to describe those events with a pained incredulity and cynicism at the absurdity and predictability of it all and also to promote the notion, subscribed to by all parties but violated of course in reality “That Government should be of no Party” (p. 153). Eventually, Defoe puts his cards on the table as he speaks of the new ministry that had come to power the previous year, Harley and his friends, as embodying a “New System of Politicks . . . and the best of all Parties be employ’d while the Government itself should be of no Party at all” (p. 159). The negative side of his exposition has been to outline the twists and turns of factional alliances that he says are in sharp contrast to this enlightened new system. Consider, for example, the derivation of Old Whigs and Modern Whigs: To explain this Unhappy distinction, it may be necessary to note to you, that the Modern Whig was understood to be the Ministry and all their Dependants; together with all those, who by the Proceedings of the Government since the last Change at Court, were come over to act upon the Principles of Liberty and the Revolution; whether from Conviction of their own Reason, or from Knowledge of their true Interest, it matters not. . . . The other Evil which follow’d this New Change, was, that the Old Whig, and the turn’d out Tory Party, from Principles however remote, fell in together, and joyn’d their Forces against the Modern Whigs, or Whigs in Place, Anglice, the Ministry. (p. 146)

It is the revelation of this unholy alliance between “Whigs out of Place” and the High-Church/Jacobite factions that Defoe says (with a disarming candor about the impropriety of his title) that “might very well entitle this Tract to the Face it bears, (viz.) of a Secret History” (p. 145). Defoe adds to this proliferation of labels and cynical alliances against the current ministry (his employers, let it be remembered) those in use in Scotland – “Court and Squadroni; the thing meant the same, they were both Whigs” (pp. 147–8). But the current Tory ministry, labelled the “New Managers,” as Defoe tells 132

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians the tale manage to co-opt the High Flyers, playing them like anglers (a metaphor he elaborates at comic length) and offering them sugar plums and opiates to lull them into an alliance: Many a Sugar-plumb, as before, was they fain to give them; many an Opiate to doze and delude them; they learn’d the Language of the Party, and cry’d Hereditary-Right, Passive-Submission, and Non-Resistance, as fast as any of them: In Exchange for this, they the Mangers got their Auxilliaries to baul out Protestant Succession, House of Hannover, and the like; tho’ it is true, they never lik’d the sound, and brought it out damnable rough. Thus our New Managers went on with them, and while they wanted the Assistance of their Croud and Clamours, they chim’d to one another. These cry’d down with the Phanaticks; those answer’d, for they would pull down the Queen; these cry, Damn the Presbyterians; those Eccho, for they will bring in the Pretender, tho’ they knew they talk’d Nonsense all the while; and thus both sides speaking what neither of them design’s, they nevertheless, run with a joynt Current, and open Mouths upon the Whigs, till at last they effectually Overthrew and Dispossessed them (p. 160)

Strategic cunning rather than moral or political integrity is what Defoe credits the Tory Ministry with, and he reports with some glee that they “made meer Tools” of the High Flyers and the “concealed Jacobites among them, more stupidly blind than the rest” (p. 160). Misled and bamboozled, they were says Defoe like madmen, so “led on in their State Frenzy, that they perswaded themselves to believe that the Queen . . . would remit the Crown. Come into the House, and make a voluntary Resignation in Favour of the Pretender” (p. 163). In the end, such frenzied hopes for the new Tory ministry are exposed as a complex deception, in Defoe’s rendering “the Wheel within the Wheel” whereby the “Engineers of the State Gradually and Wisely dropt all their first appearances, and acted upon the same Revolution Foundation that others had done before” (p. 164). One wonders what his ministerial masters made of this defense, since Defoe’s satiric narrative reduces political life to a riotous game, and the ministry is no better than their opponents, just smarter. Defoe’s position in these latter years of the brief Tory dominance was becoming more and more untenable. He was promoting a moderate Tory line that was under steady attack from Harley’s High Tory and crypto-Jacobite associates such as Bolingbroke, who was in fact in touch with the Pretender and favored his restoration. In “The Secret History of the October Club” Defoe is in effect claiming as truth what was only valid in a satiric and imaginative sense, within the topsy-turvy logic of his pamphlet, that the Tories were in practice no different from the Whigs that had preceded them: “they turn’d Whiggs themselves, making very little alteration of Method, only an alteration of Persons in Execution” (p. 162). Defoe’s irrepressible stylistic energy, his refusal to let well enough alone, a kind 133

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians of rhetorical mania with its own impetus, must lie at the heart of the three pamphlets he wrote in the first three months of 1713, whose full titles will provide a flavor of their inflammatory ironies, which as James Sutherland remarked were “startling enough to make every honest Whig gasp with astonishment.”21 “Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover, with an Enquiry how far the Abdication of King James, supposing it to be Legal, ought to affect the Person of the Pretender” (February 1713), “And What if the Pretender should come? Or, some Considerations of the Advantages and real Consequences of the Pretender’s Possessing the Crown of Great Britain” (March 1713), and “An Answer to a Question that No Body thinks of, viz. But what if the Queen should die?” (April 1713). These pamphlets were to land him in jail and in big trouble for the second time in his career, and we can only wonder what led him to take these risks. To read Defoe’s political writing is to marvel at the energy he brought to the task, at the variety of rhetorical appeals he could manage, but it is also to wonder if he was not at times just a bit bored with ordinary pamphleteering and polemicizing and drawn to danger and its excitements. For a sense of that, we can look at an example of much more conventional writing from these years, in fact from the end of 1712, just before the three incendiary pamphlets he wrote in the next three months, “A Seasonable Warning and Caution Against the Insinuation of Papists and Jacobites in Favour of the Pretender. Being a Letter from an Englishman at the Court of Hannover.” This is simple if eloquent propaganda, providing a vivid evocation of Jacobite subversion: “Every Considering Protestant cannot but observe with Horrour what Swarms of Popish priests from Abroad, and Jacobite Emissaries at Home, are spread about among us, and busily employ’d to carry on these wicked Designs; how in Disguise they run up and down the Countries, mingling themselves in all Companies, and in Coffee-Houses, and private Conversation, endeavouring to insinuate with all possible Subtilty, favourable Notions of the Pretender into the Minds of the People.”22 Defoe’s persona, that Englishman at the court of Hanover where the royal succession lies, is uncomplicated and forthright, vehemently rehearsing all the old scare stories about the looming threat from the Pretender, addressing his audience with a Whig preacher’s intensity and oratorical directness:“For God’s sake, Brittains! what are ye doing? And whither are ye going? To what dreadful Precipices are ye hurrying your selves? What! are you selling your selves for Slaves to the French, who you have Conquer’d; to Popery, which you have Reform’d from; and to the Pretender, whom you have Forsworn? Is this Acting like Britains; like Protestants, like Lovers of Liberty?” (p. 11). The three pamphlets that followed this one are the boldest rhetorical and political experiments in Defoe’s writing career, since the stakes were much higher on the face of it than when he wrote The Shortest Way with the Dissenters 10 or so years earlier, the succession issue in 1713 being a much more inflammatory issue than the plight of the dissenters. The first one (“Reasons Against 134

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians the Succession”) opens strikingly, with a persuasively folksy and riotously funny evocation of the state of the political nation in the widest sense, right down to the servants’ quarters and the marital beds, a cacophony of contending voices and opinions: Why, the Strife is gotten into your Kitchens, your Parlours, your Shops, your Counting-houses, nay, into your very Beds. You Gentlefolks, if you please to listen to your Cook-maids and Footmen in your Kitchens, you shall hear them scolding, and swearing, and scratching, and fighting, among themselves; and when you think the Noise is about the Beef and the Pudding, the Dish water, or the Kitchen-stuff, alas you are mistaken, the Feud is about the more mighty Affairs of the Government, and who is for the Protestant Succession, and who for the Pretender. Here the poor despicable Scullions learn to cry, High-Church, No Dutch Kings, No Hannover . . . The thing is the very same up one Pair of Stairs, in the Shops and Warehouses the Prentices stand some on one side of the Shop, and some on the other, (having Trade little enough,), and there they throw High-Church and Low-Church at one another’s Heads like Battledore and Shuttlecock . . . Nay, go up to your very Bed-Chambers, and even in Bed, the Man and Wife shall quarrel about it.23

The voice Defoe invents for this pamphlet is wonderfully fluid, modulating from the ironic observer who renders this scene with comic vividness and worldly amusement to the well-informed student of British history who compares, half ironically, the present situation to the moment in 1533 when the Catholic Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII, was preferred as the legitimate successor to the throne to the Protestant Lady Jane Grey. The speaker’s appeal to history is more rhetorical than exact, but it serves Defoe’s purpose admirably. The right of the Hanoverians, his speaker says, is as shaky (and as preferable to good English Protestants) as Lady Jane’s, and they may fear that they will meet her fate given the divisions in the nation: “What! Would you bring over the Family of Hannover to have them Murther’d? . . . first unite and put yourselves into a Posture that you may defend the Succession, and then you may have it” (p. 171). Shocking as it is, this gambit is followed by a much more dangerous irony, as Defoe’s speaker mouths the clichés of strict dynastic succession, seeking in the process to expose them for what they are and yet at the same time clearly out to communicate his awareness that such reasoning is specious and dependent upon an absolutist theory of government that every reader of good sense, as he seems to assume, is bound to reject. “It is evident that the Divine Hereditary Right of our Crown is the Main Great Article now in Debate. You call such a Man the Pretender, but is he not the Son of the King? And if so, what is the Protestant Religion to us? Had we not better be Papists than Traytors? Had we not much better deny our God, our Baptism, our Religion, and our Lives, than 135

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians deny our lawful Prince, our next Male in a Right Line?” (p. 172). All this is nothing but a reductio ad absurdum of the absolutist, monarchical, “Passive Obedience” line of his enemies, but the danger is that Defoe’s persona argues it with such force and characteristic persistence. Even when presenting a position whose validity he hopes to destroy by extended articulation, Defoe tends by his very insistence to give it force and a measure of plausibility. And that is not the end of it, since the following pages go on to list other in fact pragmatic and at least superficially persuasive reasons for admitting the Pretender: “Now it cannot be doubted but the Succession of Hannover would necessarily involve us again in a War against France, and that perhaps when we may be in no good Case to undertake it” (p. 173), and he proceeds to give four very plausible reasons why in the European power struggle with France the coming of the Pretender may yield real advantages for Britain. Defoe doesn’t stop there. His strategy is to introduce an extravagantly specious physical analogue where he must have counted on the satirical force taking over from the oddly persuasive practical case for the Pretender. The nation, he says, is ill, unprepared in its disunity for a Protestant Prince like the Elector of Hanover, so by virtue of the “Proverbial Saying in Physick, Desperate Diseases must have Desperate Remedies” (p. 175), let us administer it a dose of “French Physick” in the form of popish absolutism. The language in these pages is almost alarming in its violence and satiric force, which here slides back to reveal what has been implicit all along, that this is a rhetorical move against untenable Jacobitism rather than an actual proposal: “What if this Popery, like the Vomit made of Poison, be the only Physick that can cure you? If this Vomit make you spue out your Filth, your Tory Filth, your Idolatrous Filth, your Tyrannick Filth, and restore you to your Health, shall it not be good for you?” (p. 176). And, once again, British history is invoked to strengthen the mock argument, although the casual brutality of the image is startling. In Bloody Mary’s time, there were those who in a “wild headed Whimsie of the Right Line being Jure Divino” (p. 177) took up arms for her, and “they took a Vomit of Popery; the Potion indeed was given in a double Vehicle, (viz.) of Faggots a little inflamed, and this work’d so effectually, that the Nation having vomited, brought up all the Filth of the Stomach, and the Foolish Notion of Hereditary Right spued out Popery also along with it” (p. 177). Defoe in a real sense was playing with fire in this pamphlet, and as usual he doesn’t know when to stop. “If this be our Case now,” he declares a couple of pages later, if the hopeless and ruinous divisions over the royal succession that linger from the 1688 Revolution are in fact still in place (and he seems to be arguing that they are), “then it may be true that bringing the Pretender is the only Way to establish the Protestant Succession; and upon such Terms, and such only, I declare myself for the Pretender” (p. 180). The ironies and high moralistic/satiric spirit of the earlier pages have dropped away, and Defoe is now proposing not that the Pretender be brought in but that his establishment may well 136

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians be inevitable under current divisions. One just didn’t say that kind of thing in England in 1713. Defoe’s persona in this last section of the tract is the logical prosecutor, out to shock his readers by the rigor of his logic and to expose the disastrous implications of not seeing the High-Church or High-Flying position for what it is and what it implies. “And What if the Pretender Should Come?” has essentially the same argument and strategy, although it is a purer satire, since Defoe here invents a persona who is dispassionate most of the time but inclining to the High-Flying position, which flares out in some moments of extreme rhetoric. If the Pretender is actually James II’s child and not a suppositious infant passed off as the heir (as was widely claimed and believed), he argues at first mildly and for a moment ferociously at the outset that the “Doctrine of Hereditary Right being Indefeasible, is a Church of England Doctrine ever received by the Church, and inseparable from the true Members of the Church, the contrary being the stigmatizing character of Republicans, King-killers, Enemies to Monarchy, Presbyterians, and Phanaticks” (p. 190). But moderation returns quickly, and the author begins to argue with the extreme warnings about the Pretender put forward by “that Scandalous Scribbler, the Review” (p. 191) and to contend that the dangers from him are in fact “less than those of the House of HANOVER” (p. 192). Just like its predecessor of the month before, the tract dwells at length on the present miseries in England of disunity and faction, and proposes in some detail a more extreme and therefore more obviously invalid defense of French absolutism, which would solve all of England’s problems. All of Defoe’s ventriloquistic powers are brought to bear in this intense mimicry and parody of High-Flying rhetoric, whose derision of sacred Whig ideals in a passage like this will provide a sample of the energy with which Defoe grinds relentlessly on and on in these pamphlets: All the Business forsooth is this Trifle we call Liberty, which rather than be plagued with so much Strife and Dissention about it as we are, who would be troubled with? Now it is evident the Peace and Union which we should enjoy under the like Methods of Government here, which we hope for under the Happy Government of the Pretender, must needs be a full Equivalent for all the pretended Rights and Priviledges which we say we shall loose . . . And here we pretend Liberty, Property, Constitutions, Rights of Subjects, and such Stuff as that, and with all these fine Gewgaws, which we pretend propagate Trade, and encrease the Wealth of the Nation, we are every Day Declining, and become Poor; how long will this Nation be blinded by their own foolish Customs? (p. 196)

Defoe is depending, we may say, on progressive notions like Liberty being impervious to this sort of ridicule, and he clearly trusts that readers will assert their intellectual superiority to his author. But that thoroughly imagined author 137

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians has a fluency and as always in Defoe’s writing a well nigh indefatigable persistence in his arguments that tend to undercut what I take to be the pamphlet’s rhetorical aim, making the satire somewhat unstable and liable to sound more persuasive than Defoe wants it to be. It seems to me that Defoe in this pamphlet is aware of that tendency and seeks in the following section to edge his persona into the sort of double-edged complexity that Swift managed in some of his satires such as “An Argument to prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England, may as things now stand be attended with some Inconveniences, and perhaps not produce those many good Effects proposed thereby” (1708). Defoe’s author turns to precisely this religious issue, noting blandly that opponents of the Pretender are concerned that his arrival will bring in Popery but arguing that they will rather obtain “that so long desired Happiness of having no Religion at all” (p. 198). The nation, he continues, has long groaned under the “Oppressions and cruel Severities of the Clergy” but with “the Slavery of Religion being taken off, and an Universal Freedom of Vice being introduced, what greater Liberty can we enjoy” (p. 198). It doesn’t quite work or fit, this particular irony. The speaker is writing a panegyric on the simplicity and convenience of an absolutist Catholic monarch such as the Pretender will be; he will bring order, eliminate mob violence, and “suffer none to Insult or Plunder the City but himself” (p. 204). As in this last phrase, obvious ironies leak out, but just shift the perspective slightly and purge these asides and one can imagine a Jacobite or extreme monarchist finding this sermon just to his taste. This ambiguity may be the reason why the third of these inflammatory tracts – “An Answer to a Question . . . But what if the Queen should die?” – is the simplest and perhaps for that reason the most effective but least interesting of the three from a purely rhetorical point of view. This is not an ironic pamphlet, and the persona might well be Daniel Defoe himself in the Review, since the principle behind this very powerful and in the final analysis disarmingly simple polemic is the dogged reiteration of the fact of the (tragically) childless Queen Anne’s mortality, which as a dynastic inevitability cannot be escaped and should enter into every political calculation for the nation’s future. Defoe begins in a misleading manner, with scatological abuse of two rival journalists, Abel Roper, editor of the Whig paper, The Post-Boy, and George Ridpath, editor of another Whig paper, The Flying Post. Like two collectors of night soil (“two Tom T[urd] – men”), he begins, they have thrown dirt at each other so long “that they stink now in the Nostrils of their own Party” (p. 209). So Defoe’s pamphlet eschews their “Satyr and Scurrrility” (p, 211), as he claims to locate himself with some dignity between extremes, to consider possibilities, and to make careful, even legalistic distinctions between those who say the Protestant succession is in danger and those who see it as secure: “Both these Uncertainties serve to perplex us, and to leave the thing more undetermined than consists with the publick Ease of the Peoples Minds” (p. 209). 138

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians Defoe actually begins after this introduction by defending the Ministry from charges (true as we now know) that they were “in any Kind, or with any Prospect near, or remote, Acting for, or with a Design or View to bring in the Pretender” (p. 211). And he continues in this defense, admitting that the Ministry has employed some men with Jacobite sympathies but arguing that such association for good reasons with Jacobites does not mean “that therefore they must have done it with a Jacobite Principle” (p. 212). Nonetheless, the paragraph ends, surprisingly this first time, by asserting that in spite of these good intentions it does “not follow that there is no Danger of the Protestant Succession from the Employing those sort of People: For what if the Queen should Die?” (p. 212). So the whole sweetly reasonable paragraph blows up when the refrain sets in. The careful, detailed, even legalistic mode of Defoe’s paragraphs, full of qualifying and modifying expressions – “This is not meant as any Reflection upon the Ministry, for making use of such Men; The late Ministry did the same, and every Ministry will and must Employ Men sometimes, not as they always Joyn with them in their politic Principles” (p. 212) – is scattered by the gnomic and deliberately intrusive finality of his recurrent question. As the pamphlet goes on, the drum beat of the refrain, paragraph after paragraph, sounds like the stroke of an inevitable doom. The effect is rather like Ravel’s “Bolero,” intense, relentless, and at length annoying. But Defoe does vary the appeal even as he turns up the heat and evokes the perilous state of the nation. Everything, he warns, depends upon “the Foundation of the late Revolution” and the Act of Settlement whereby the Queen was established in preference to her half brother, the Pretender. The following set of sentences displays a strong tension as it makes these assertions, affirming their rightness but also their fragility, sealing that divided state of affairs with a biblical echo (“he that runs may read”: Habakkuk 2:2) and the implicit invocation of that prophet’s dire warnings: “Why dost thou make me see wrongs and look upon trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law is slacked and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous, so justice goes forth perverted” (Habakkuk 1: 3–4). All of this uncertainty, at last, is incapsulated in the refrain, that italicized question that is after all not a question but the iteration of an inevitability: As the Revolution therefore is the Base upon which the Throne of Her Majesty’s Possession is Established; so her Majesty and all that Act under her, are obliged to Act upon the Foot of the said Revolution, even Will they, Nil they; or else they sink immediately out of rightful Power to Act at all; Her Majesty’s Title would fall to the Ground, their own Commissions would from that Hour be Void; they must declare their Royal Mistress and Benefactress, a Subject to the Pretender, and all Her Pretences of Rightful Possession, Injurious, and an Usurpation.These things, being so plain, he that runs may read them, seem to stop all our Mouths from so

139

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians much as any Suggestion, that any Body can Attempt to bring in the Pretender upon us during the Life of her present Majesty. But what if the Queen should die? (p. 216)

And so it goes, from religious matters to “Civil Interest, Liberties, Privileges, Properties” (p. 219), all of which are safe “during the Righteous Administration of Her Majesty’s Reign” (p. 223). In an idyllic, quasi-biblical evocation of the state of the nation, just as Pope in “Windsor-Forest” tells us that same year, 1713, that “Rich Industry sits smiling on the plains,/ And peace and plenty tell, a STUART reigns,” Defoe draws a quasi-biblical picture only to underline the threat to it in the queen’s mortality: “every Man Sits in Safety under his own Vine, and his Fig-tree; and we doubt not but we shall do so as long as Her Majesty Lives. BUT what if the Queen should die?” (p. 223). At the end of the pamphlet, the inevitable slides into the imminent, and Defoe shifts from “what if ” to “must.” Winding up his memento mori theme to an almost fever pitch and crescendo, Defoe rubs the queen’s mortality in his audience’s face: “But this is Evident, the Queen is Mortal, tho’ crown’d with all that Flattering Courtiers can bring together, to make Her appear Great, Glorious, Famous, or what you please; yet the Queen, yea, the Queen Her self is Mortal, and MUST die” (p. 224). Moreover, the queen’s life is threatened not just by mortality but it lies “at the Mercy of Papists and Jacobites” (p. 225). As the pamphlet comes to a breathless close, the urgent fact for Defoe is that now it is not a matter simply of the ordinary, necessary, if uncertain mortality of the queen, but that “she may die even to Day before to morrow, or in a very little space of time” (p. 225). The Pretender and his French backers know that their cause depends as Defoe puts it “upon the single Thread of Life of a Mortal Person” (p. 226), and he insinuates that we should be ready for their attempts to assassinate her and ask the question, which now has even more urgency, “What if the Queen should die?” (p. 226). Defoe always seems to go just a bit too far; his writing has a momentum he can’t always control, and here the rhetorical iteration has a manic quality almost unique in his political prose. During these early months of 1713 just as these three pamphlets were appearing Defoe had returned to London, warning Harley on 14 February, 1712/13 about the clamors against the government being stirred up by the Whig opposition through their incendiary periodicals like The Flying Post. “They are now Spreading it Over the Countrys That the papists Are Arming and Prepareing for a Generall Massacre, That Innumerable Numbers of Priests and Irish Papists are Come Over, and The like” (Letters, p. 398). But a few weeks later, on 1 April, 1713 Harley received a dramatic letter from debtors’ prison, delivered by Defoe’s son, begging for help (in fact, the salary he was owed, “the Usuall Period of her Majties Bounty being a few days past” [Letters, p. 402] ). He had been arrested on the complaint of one of his old creditors, and as he later claimed he lan140

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians guished in jail for 11 days before Harley could supply the £150 required for his freedom. When about two weeks later he wrote to Harley with advice about problems with nonjuring clergy in Scotland, he explained that he was doing this by letter because of his continuing illness. But his next imploring letter to Harley was written de profundis again from a place Defoe knew all too well, Newgate Prison, where he had been committed after being arrested yet again on a warrant granted by the Whig Lord Chief Justice, Sir Thomas Parker, on the instigation (as Defoe wrote to Harley on 12 April, 1713) of three of his Whig journalistic enemies:William Benson,Thomas Burnet, and George Ridpath, the last of whom Defoe had insulted pretty crudely in the opening paragraph of “An Answer to a Question . . . But what if the Queen should die?” The other two were old enemies who had felt Defoe’s scorn in the Review. Defoe protests in this letter that the pamphlet for which he has been arrested (he names only “Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover” but he had been arrested for all three) is harmless, a matter as he puts it of treating ironically “Our fatall Heats at Home” and of “Clear and profest Banters upon The Pretender” (p. 406). The Whigs, as Defoe explains, had not understood “the Satyr upon themselves in it,” and they were at first pleased with the pamphlets and were all the more furious as it dawned upon them what he was up to. Thanks to Harley and two of his friends who put up his bail, Defoe was quickly released. But Chief Justice Parker complained strongly to the government about their pamphleteer, to Bolingbroke on April 15, and his letter can be taken as vindication of Defoe’s rhetorical strategy in that the pamphlets provoked precisely the kind of Whig outrage that he hoped for. But Parker’s annoyance also signals an unease others of different political persuasions might have had not just about these pamphlets but about a good many of Defoe’s political polemics and about his defining, aggressive and paradoxical manner as a writer. After characterizing the titles of the pamphlets as “libellous and seditious, and neare Treason,” Parker turns to what we would call their rhetorical strategy, for which he has nothing but contempt. “There is in some parts a Mixture of what They call banter which seems design’d to screen the rest, and to make way for a pretence of an innocent intention. To which I shall say no more at present than that these are not Subjects to be play’d with.”24 To a modern reader it is Defoe’s subversive playfulness, his willingness to go to far, to breach political as well as stylistic decorum that is the essence of his appeal. He is generally in spectacularly poor taste, the upstart intruder into political and religious controversy, and therein lies much of his continuing appeal as a prose writer. A few days later (19 April), in a long, characteristically shrewd letter to Harley, Defoe laid out the Whigs’ motives for his prosecution, having in the Review on April 16 and 18 presented a detailed critique of the way his case was conducted by the court. As one would expect, Defoe is unrepentant and explains the “Design” of this “Faction” as meant to strike at Harley and to expose him as 141

Queen Anne to the Hanoverians Defoe’s secret employer. He has a plan to frustrate this, however, and if Harley arranges things so that the government only seems to prosecute, Defoe can in the Review “Complain Loudly of the Oppression. Ile Petition (I mean in Print) to be brought to Tryall; and shall have abundant Room to Expose Them for attacking me in a Thing they can not make Out” (Letters, p. 411). Defoe’s sheer delight in oblique tactics like these is palpable. In this letter he himself notes his agitated excitement over his strategy, as well as his indignation at his enemies (given a biblical gloss, as he quotes one of his favorite scriptural passages, “if They do This in the green Tree, what would They do in the Drye?” [Luke 23:31] ) when he concludes by saying “I shall Endeavour (being a little Composed Now) to begin where I brake off ” (Letters, p. 412). Writing in this strategic way seems to have been for Defoe an almost visceral experience. His journalism in these years, as these letters make clear, is driven by the kind of controlled emotional intensity in tactics that in a few years his fictional characters will so richly display.

142

5 Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31

England is a Trading Nation, that the Wealth and Oppulence of the Nation, is owing to Trade, that the Influence of Trade is felt in every Branch of its Government, in the Value of its Land, and the Blood of Trade is mix’d and blended with the Blood of Gallantry, so that Trade is the Life of the Nation, the Soul of its Felicity, the Spring of its Wealth, the Support of its Greatness, and the Staff on which both King and People lean, and which (if it should sink) the whole Fabrick must fall, the Body-Politick would sicken and languish, its power decline, and the Figure it makes in the World, grow by degrees, most Contemptibly Mean. Daniel Defoe, Review

Defoe the Moralist: Trade, Morality, and Society The distinguishing characteristics of De Foe, as a commercial disquisitor, are originality and depth. George Chalmers, The Life of Daniel Defoe

We now think of Defoe as primarily a novelist, and we credit him accordingly with great powers of projection and sympathy for flawed and imperfect humanity. But he was consistently through his long writing career a conservative, quite unforgiving moralist who displayed little patience for human weakness. For example, he was deeply hostile to the theater on traditional puritanical grounds, attacking it on numerous occasions in the Review. He admits at one point that “Men of Vertue sometimes go to Plays,” but he wonders ironically whether “they go to gratifie that Vertue; or to please a meaner Part of their Inclination” and cites the authority of Jeremy Collier who has exposed in playgoing “all that’s 143

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 wicked and prophane” (10 August, 1706). In the previous number he expresses outrage at reports that a London company has gone to Oxford to stage plays, noting shrewdly enough that plays by virtue of popular demand do not “act dull Sobriety” but offer “the leud and the prophane” (8 August, 1706). Given his manifest delight throughout his career as a secret agent in dramatic impersonation and in his writing life his frequent recourse to mimicry of a wide range of characters, this antipathy to theatrical representation is puzzling, although not inconsistent with his moral posture and his religious affiliations. His performances as spy and political writer required the protective cloak of anonymity and secrecy, but he nonetheless condemned more overt forms of dramatic representation in his (self-appointed) capacity as public moral censor, which in the context of his writing career seems to be his favorite role. Defoe is always the compulsive moralist, whether writing about religion, politics, or commerce, although he is sometimes as we have seen deeply pragmatic and even Machiavellian (and Mandevillian1) in his approach to moral questions. Despite his essentially Whiggish and what looks like his progressive outlook in politics, he is, confusingly for modern readers, much of the time a strict and in many ways a rigorous and rigid moralist and social critic with about as little tolerance or compassion for the poor or the unfortunate as Ayn Rand or Dickens’s Mr. Bounderby (in Hard Times). An early pamphlet, reprinted by Defoe in the second volume of The Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman in 1705, “Giving Alms No Charity, And Employing the Poor A Grievance to the Nation” (1704) provides a particularly repellent instance of Defoe’s stridently moralistic understanding of poverty and the problem of the English working classes in which he declares that they are poor because they are given to “Luxury, Sloath, Pride.”2 His contempt for the working classes is a classic instance of middleclass denigration of the improvidence and laziness of the lower orders: An Englishman will “Work till he has got his Pocket full of Money, and then go and be idle, or perhaps drunk, till ’tis all gone, and perhaps himself in Debt; and ask him in his Cups what he intends, he’ll tell you honestly, he’ll drink as long as it lasts, and then go to work for more” (p. 190). Or as he put it in “The TrueBorn Englishman”: The lab’ring poor, in spite of double pay, Are saucy, mutinous, and beggarly: So lavish of their money and their time, That want of forecast is the nation’s crime. Good drunken company is their delight; And what they get by day, they spend by night.3

This contemptuous attitude to the poor echoes contemporary economic theory, and Defoe’s views were shared by many commentators. In his study of 144

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 Defoe’s economic views and his fiction, Maximillian E. Novak contends that Defoe was no prophet of nineteenth- and twentieth-century laissez-faire economics and was in no sense a proto-capitalist. Rather, says Novak, he deserves to be called a “Mercantilist,” whose economic views consequently were in fact quite traditional, favoring state control of commerce. The historian Peter Earle observes that Defoe opposed anything that threatened the status quo: he was appalled by the growth of joint stock companies, but he was very much in favor of state-sponsored monopoly enterprises like the Royal African Company that was set up to control the slave trade and the South Sea Company founded by Harley. Defoe ignored much technological advancement and was interested mostly in the process of distribution rather than production; he overemphasized the importance of inland domestic trade and had very cautious and mercantilist notions about the balance of trade with other nations that stressed accumulating bullion and imposing restrictive tariffs on imported goods. And he was most often an opponent of free trade theories; like other mercantilists, he considered economic activity in collective and statist rather than individualistic terms. For mercantilist theory, as Novak summarizes it, the poor “subtracted from the national wealth” by depending upon welfare, and Defoe’s contemptuous attitude toward the laboring masses was no more than the traditional view of them.4 In his writing about the emerging modern financial system, Defoe is often ferociously moralistic rather than analytical. Oddly enough, he is consistently opposed to what from a modern point of view would qualify as entrepreneurial initiative or speculative daring. For example, his first short treatise on what he saw as alarming economic change is “The Villainy of Stockjobbers Detected, And the Causes of the Late Run Upon the Bank and Bankers Discovered and Considered” (1701), and he returned to the evils as he saw them of stock jobbing many times in the years to come in the Review and in other pamphlets, notably “The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley” (1719).5 And yet beginning with An Essay upon Projects, Defoe wrote with passion and intelligence about financial issues all his life, and as a merchant he had first-hand practical experience of those issues. In the Review he wrote repeatedly and at length on trade, tirelessly lecturing his readers on the workings of government financing and new forms of credit, both public and private. He declared in the very last number of the Review that trade was his favorite subject, the “Whore I really doated upon, and designed to have taken up with” (11 June, 1713). Economic historians take Defoe fairly seriously; he lived through the founding moments of the modern financial transformation of economic life in England and in Europe, and his ideas about these confusing new developments were always strong and well-informed if never wholly original and indeed sometimes nothing less than contradictory.6 As John McVeagh argues Defoe was not a consistent mercantilist; his views were idiosyncratic and often unorthodox, as one might for that matter characterize his 145

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 opinions about everything else.7 I don’t propose to treat in any systematic way all those ideas, nor to survey his many writings on economic matters.8 I will consider, rather, in fairly brief compass at the start of this chapter, the satiric energies and polemical emphases in some of his economic writings, which along with his social and moral pamphlets form an important part of his vision of early eighteenth-century British society, and I will offer a view of his irrepressible vigor as a writer wrestling with the key social and moral problems of the day as he understood them. From An Essay on Projects onward, Defoe uses “stock jobbing” (and “jobbing”) as terms of absolute contempt, synonyms for unscrupulous wheeling and selfish (indeed treasonous) dealing. Thus, in the short pamphlet published in 1701, “The Free-Holder’s Plea against Stock-Jobbing Elections of Parliament Men,” he speaks in the voice of an honest yeoman (or freeholder) to denounce the establishment of a new East India Company while the old one still existed. This honest freeholder describes his outrage over the buying of parliamentary seats by “Parliament-Jobbing, a new Trade.”9 He explains that “Stock-Jobbing in its own Nature, is only a new invented sort of Deceptio Visus, a Legerdemain in Trade, so mix’d with Trick and Cheat, that, ‘twou’d puzzle a good Logician to make it out by Syllogism” (p. 171). Later that same year he also published a somewhat longer diatribe against stock jobbing, “The Villainy of Stock-Jobbers Detected, and the Causes of the Late Run upon the Bank and Bankes Discovered and Considered,” where the theoretical indictment of stock jobbing is more sophisticated and generalized and thereby much more alarmist in its evaluation of the dangers: the practice threatens both “the Publick Revenue and the Current Credit of the Nation, nor never was there so much Bare-fac’d Villainy acted, in the Affairs of Publick Trade as there is now.”10 Defoe claims as he opens the pamphlet that it is not “an Invective at any Particular Person or Party” (p. 36), but in fact he is working in almost pure attack mode, and the best moments in this brief essay are satiric invective, a denunciation of “mercenary Brokers” who have it in their power to “declare a new sort of Civil War among us when they please”: Nay, the War they manage is carried on with worse Weapons than Swords and Musquets; Bombs may fire our Towns, and Troops overrun and Plunder us: But these People can ruin Men silently, undermine and impoverish by a sort of impenetrable Artifice, like Poison that works at a distance, can wheedle Men to ruin themselves, and Fiddle them out of their Money, by the strange and unheard of Engines of Interests, Discounts, Transfers, Tallies, Debentures, Shares, Projects, and the Devil and all of Figures and hard Names. They can draw up their Armies and levy Troops, set Stock against Stock, Company against Company, Alderman against Alderman; and the poor Passive Trades-men, like the Peasant in Flanders, are Plundered by both sides, and hardly knows who hurts them. (pp. 44–5)

146

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 It’s pretty easy to see the target audience for such extreme rhetoric: conservative, petty-bourgeois citizens and shopkeepers, small shareholders, country squires – anyone in short for whom the new schemes and terms of art of this emerging new world of speculative finance are a mystifying swindle. Just to repeat the new jargon for such an audience is to expose the absurdity of the enterprise. If the honest freeholder is puzzled as well as outraged, Defoe’s speaker here exposes the whole practice of stock jobbing as a dishonest charade. The point of view behind the satire is fundamentalist in a financial sense, relying on a denial of the essence of the marketplace and a belief in “intrinsick” value; stock jobbers have the power “to make and manage at will, the Price shall dance attendance on their designs, and rise and fall as they please, without any regard to the Intrinsick worth of the Stock” (p. 37). At the very end of the pamphlet, Defoe appeals (as satirists are wont to do) to a similar social fundamentalism, as he locates the threat in specifically reactionary social terms. In his satiric narrative, a simple scam is exposed, for these villains are upstarts, dangerous disrupters of good social order, persons who “within this ten years past have rais’d themselves to vast Estates, most of them from mechanick, and some of them from broken and desperate Fortunes, by the sharping, tricking, intreaguing, scandalous Employment of Stockjobbing . . . Now they ride in their Coaches, keep splendid Equipages, and thrust themselves into business, set up for Deputies, Aldermen, Sheriffs, or Mayors; but above all, for Parliament-men” (pp. 46–7). Nearly 20 years later, Defoe was singing the same tune, intensifying almost hysterically his attack on the stock exchange. “The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley: or, A System of Stock-Jobbing” (1719) also quotes at length his 1701 pamphlet, “The Free-Holder’s Plea against Stock-Jobbing Elections of Parliament Men,” to revisit what he calls the parliamentary corruption scandal of those days, which is about to be replayed he says. Later in the pamphlet he cites his other 1701 attack on the stock jobbers, praising his work (without mentioning that he wrote it – as always, not slow to advertise himself ) as setting the culprits out “in their true Colours” and “ for some time gave them a little Shock.”11 “Anatomy” in Defoe’s title promises in classic satiric terms a cutting open of what he presents as a corrupt body of practices. The satiric attack in this pamphlet is if anything even stronger than in the 1701 works, the rhetoric even more uncompromisingly extreme. Defoe calls a small area in the City “the Kingdom of ExchangeAlley,” drawing our attention to its insignificance as “easily surrounded in about a Minute and a half ” (p. 143). He evokes this patch of London as a satiric landscape dominated by three vividly rendered chief denizens, “a true Triumvirate of modern Thieving” (p. 144). This is how he sums the place up, crowded as satiric landscapes always are with a motley crew of villains, most of them anonymous and interchangeable: “Having thus given the blazing Characters of three Capital Sharpers of Great Britain, Knaves of lesser Magnitude can have no room to shine; the Alley throngs with Jews, Jobbers and Brokers, their Names are needless, their 147

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 Characters dirty as their Employment” (p. 146). Exchange Alley in Defoe’s dramatization is an intensified and specifically financial instance of urban moral danger where the innocent are perennially corrupted. A young man who enters its precincts is “immediately surrounded with Bites, Setters, Pointers, and the worst sort of Cheats, just as a young Country Gentleman is with Bawds, Pimps, and Spungers when he first comes to town” (p. 147). And, indeed, stock jobbing is pure and simply gambling, although more pernicious: “Stock-jobbing is Play; a Box and Dice may be less dangerous” (p. 147).These jobbers, he asserts, are moral monsters, far worse than highwaymen as well as gamblers. As Woody Guthrie a couple of centuries later would put it, some will rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen. Highwaymen take great risks but jobbers are safe from reprisal; highwaymen are “generally touch’d with Remorse, and affected with Principles of Humanity and Generosity, stop short and choose to prey upon Strangers only,” whereas jobbers are “void of Humanity,” exploiting “Fathers, Brothers, Widows, Orphans, and intimate Friends” (p. 132). Like so many of Defoe’s polemical/satiric pamphlets, “The Anatomy of Exchange Alley” is rich with specifically oral effects and farcical scenes; his attack is grounded in ridicule and exaggeration. It begins with some imagined dialogue, as a jobber sidles up to a “Cull, a young Dealer that has Money to lay out” and begins his pitch: “Sir, here is a great Piece of News, it is not yet publick, it is worth a Thousand Guineas but to mention it” (p. 130). And his confederates help to spread false rumors – the Pretender has been captured and stocks are bound to shoot up – so that when the young cull “meets his Broker, who throws more Fire-works into the Mine, and blows him up so fierce an Inflammation,” the victim “employs him instantly to take Guineas to accept Stock of any Kind, and almost at any Price.” In the end, “the Jobber has got an Estate, the Broker 2 or 300 Guineas, and the Esquire remains at Leisure to sell his Coach and Horses, his fine Seat and rich Furniture to make good the Deficiency” (pp. 130–1). In this comic as well as sinister farce Defoe imagines, there is a way to get back at the swindlers; “this Part of the Comedy may well be call’d A Bite for the Biter” (p. 131) is how he puts it. The cull resolves not to pay all of what he owes: “I’ll pay none of them: Besides, my Lawyer, Sir Thomas Subtle, tells me, there’s not a Man of them dares sue” (p. 132). When he speaks in his own voice and the pamphlet gathers a head of righteous indignation, Defoe’s prose has the solemnity of oratorical discourse, and he wears another traditional satirical mask as the relentless public prosecutor, attacking the jobbers with a series of increasingly pointed rhetorical questions as he wonders why stock jobbers should have the political power they have gained to influence the price of stocks so that “every Menace of the Nations Enemies is to receive its Weight from them; and the Price of Stocks is the Rule by which we are to guide our Judgment in publick Affairs”:

148

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 Is this an Advantage fit to be put into the Hand of a Subject? Are the King’s Affairs to go up and down as they please, and the Credit of his Majesty’s Councils rise and fall as these Men shall please to value them? This would be making them Kings, making the King Subject to the Caprice of their private Interest, his Affairs to be liable to be rated in Exchange-Alley . . . which as the Roman Pontiff, in the first Politicks of the Church, made all the Kings of the Earth become Pensioners to the Priests, so it would make all the Kings of Britain Pensioners to Exchange-Alley. (p. 154)

That last comparison is hardly fair or even coherent but it is effective, given eighteenth-century British anti-Popery. Defoe’s attacks on stock jobbers may puzzle readers nowadays in their unforgiving ferocity, especially from so eloquent a defender of modern commerce. His outrage issues from a position based on his conservative, quite traditional financial views; Defoe seems here to be appalled by destructive modern fiscal innovations that depend upon the artifices of the new credit economy as manifested in the shifting value of stocks. During the so-called “financial revolution,” an elaborate and expanding system of paper credit evolved in Britain, axiomatic to the financial universe all of us now live in but a distinct innovation at the end of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Defoe’s hero, William III, inherited from his predecessors a tax base too small for his ambitions. In order to finance his expensive wars of containment against Louis XIV of France beginning in 1689, the king needed much more than the money provided by the tax on land and the excise and customs revenues then in force. Raising those taxes did not bring enough revenue in, and so he borrowed a million and a quarter pounds from London’s gold merchants, who founded the Bank of England to raise the money. As ever more money was needed for the war, the government borrowed huge sums (from 1689 to 1714 these amounted to more than 130 million pounds) from the public and in the process created what came to be known as the National Debt, a complex and ever-expanding collection of annuities and lotteries backed by parliament’s promise to pay. This huge expansion of government borrowing represented a transformation in the fundamental conception of public credit, since investors could be absolutely confident that their money was safe and that the nation would not default on its debt. High rates of interest were offered to large investors in these annuities, as high as 14 percent, and when Harley was in office he floated various lottery schemes to raise more millions and began in 1711 to raise more by founding what came to be called The South Sea Company, which was expanded in 1713 when by the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht ending the war with France it was granted the monopoly on supplying African slaves to the Spanish colonies in America. Much government debt at the time was reassigned, as premiums were offered for investors to

149

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 exchange their annuities for stock certificates in the new company. In addition, private joint stock companies proliferated, with hundreds being formed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, some to fund get-richquick schemes and projects.Very quickly, a speculative frenzy developed and the price of South Sea shares rocketed up. It was all to come crashing down in 1722 in the so-called South Sea Bubble, when thousands of investors lost everything. Despite his scorn for stock jobbers, Defoe was fascinated rather than appalled by these innovations in public credit. He thought the Bank of England was a wonderful idea and urged that its capitalization be increased to five million pounds, just as he was enthusiastic about the South Sea project (invented, after all, by Harley, his patron), which he defended in “An Essay on the South Sea Trade” in 1712. As far back as Jure Divino (1706), Defoe was much taken with the power of this new approach to public finance, and he exalts it there with apparent seriousness as a magic force, superior to nature: Funds perhaps may fail, And Streams may stop, but Credit must prevail: Credit’s a Bank no Mischief can undo, She’s Sister to Potosi and Peru; She’ll out-do Nature, Mines of Gold prepare, And Fleets of Coin, from Paper and from Air; New Species forms, anticipates the Oar, Extends a little, and then can wait for more; The vast equivalent that she supplies, Our mighty boasted Poverty defies, And mocks th’ abortive Hopes of England’s Enemies (Book XII, lines 208–18)12

In these years, the Review is full of celebrations of public credit (and extended explanations of how this new modern concept actually worked). As he explains to his readers on 16 June, 1709, credit “whether National or Personal” is an aweinspiring mystery, a beautiful system that resembles the human organism, and his excitement as he evokes it is palpable: “its infinite Branches, the secret Springs and Streams which maintain its Variety and Circulation, by which, as by Veins and Arteries, it conveys its quickening Spirits . . . and by which it likewise receives its own Nourishment and Supply from the Heart.” In one memorable number of the Review a few years earlier he had played with the conceit that credit is a lady: Money has a younger Sister, a very useful and officious Servant in Trade, which in the absence of her senior Relation, but with her Consent, and on the Supposition of her Confederacy, is very assistant to her; frequently supplies her place for a Time,

150

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 answers all the Ends of Trade perfectly, and to all Intents and Purposes, as well as Money her self; only with one Proviso, That her Sister constantly and punctually relieves her, keeps Time with her, and preserves her good Humour . . . Her Name in our Language is call’d CREDIT (10 January, 1706)

Lady Credit is a “coy Lass, and wonderful chary of her self ” and if kings like Charles II, who “had got her once for his Mistress,” betray her (in his Stop on the Exchequer in 1672, Charles had refused to pay the crown’s debts and was hard up for money from then on) then “away she flew, and she never came near him again as long as he liv’d.” Once you have treated her ill and lost her, persuading her to return “is almost as Difficult as to restore Virginity, or to make a W __ re an Honest Woman.” Defoe was clearly much taken with this conceit; he returns to this allegory often in the Review. A few years later, on 16 June, 1709, he described how Lady Credit had been brought back to England: “We have to our Happiness, and to the Honour of the Publick Management, this Coy Mistress of Treasure, call’d CREDIT, absolutely in our hand . . . She has here Her meer Native Diet, viz. Flowing Cash, unquestion’d Funds, punctual Compliances, Faithful, exact Payments, Due Interest, and, which is the Foundation of all, Intrinsick Value.” He goes on in this little allegory to warn of the dangers from “the Stock-Jobbers . . . every day tampering with her; they flatter her with fine Words, feed her with Sugar-Plumbs as they do Children, and gorge her with luscious Diet” in order to “dishonour and debauch her.” This is a joke, but in the misogynist assumptions of the time (that Defoe certainly shared) Lady Credit as la donna mobile is meant to be a significant and resonant joke, perhaps related to the fickle classical goddess, Fortuna as an embodiment of uncertainty and unpredictability. As Sandra Sherman has explored it, Defoe’s repeated employment of this conventional female allegory is even more complicated, since it reveals the radically destabilizing tendencies of the modern credit economy.When she works well, Lady Credit is a virgin, but she is also a courtesan, the one time mistress of that notorious royal womanizer, Charles II, raped as well in Defoe’s allegory by villainous stock jobbers; but the joke is that her virginity is renewed the more she accepts suitors. In Sandra Sherman’s rendering, “The narrative of credit-asa-woman literalizes the tendency of paper credit to elude stable valuation.”13 Modern commentators like Sherman have read a great deal into this conceit about the pervasive climate of anxiety built into the new credit economy wherein as the historian J.G.A. Pocock has put it “the institution of funded debt and public stocks has turned the counters of language into marketable commodities, so that the manipulators of their value are in a position to control and falsify” language and distort truth.14 This moment in English history, this new credit economy where wealth is located in paper certificates rather than in land and solid specie, creates say these commentators a kind of epistemological opacity and moral confusion whereby all discourse, not just financial instruments, is affected 151

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 so that in Sherman’s words “the market, a congeries of bills, notes, stocks, annuities, reports on the National Debt, accommodated readers to an equivocal, impenetrable textuality.”15 Defoe’s writing on trade and credit, in the Review and elsewhere, can be taken as his quite deliberate attempt to get beyond this “impenetrable textuality” Sherman speaks of and the moral and epistemological confusion some have attributed as important side effects of the financial revolution, since he was well aware of the paradoxical and elusive nature of public credit. Despite the instabilities revealed by his allegory of Lady Credit, Defoe stands up often enough for moral clarity and simplicity in his writings on economics, and among his self-declared missions in the Review is explaining the mysteries of credit as well as trade to the nation. For one key aspect of this program of clarification of modern finances, he insists on the necessity of believing in “Intrinsick Value” in the realm of public credit. But perhaps more important, he also explains in a pamphlet entitled “An Essay Upon Publick Credit” (1710) that public credit is not a substance but rather a process. At first, Defoe pretends to struggle with the concept: “Like the Soul in the body, it acts all Substance, yet is it self Immaterial; it gives Motion, yet, it self cannot be said to exist; it creates Forms, yet, has it self no Form; it is neither Quantity or Quality; it has no Whereness or Whenness, Scite, or Habit.”16 As he had suggested in Jure Divino, Credit is best understood by analogy with natural phenomena, and here he explains it in terms of what it is not as well as what it is: “CREDIT is a Consequence, not a Cause; the Effect of a Substance, not a Substance; ’tis the Sun-shine, not the Sun; the quickening SOMETHING, Call it what you will, that gives Life to Trade, gives Being to the Branches, and Moisture to the Root; ’tis that Oil of the Wheel, the Marrow in the Bones, the Blood in the Veins, and the Spirits in the Heart of all the Negoce,Trade, Cash and Commerce in the World” (p. 53). Credit might as well be called organic, even though Defoe carefully explains it as a set of social relations; it “grows insensibly, from fair and upright Dealing, punctual Compliance, honourable Performance of Contracts and Covenants, in short, ’tis the Off-spring of universal Probity” (p. 53). That is to say, public credit is a function of public morality and in that respect it differs from the unregulated volatility of the stock market; public credit rests firmly on the probity of the “Care, Conduct and Vigilance of her Majesty and the Parliament; the latter in establishing sufficient Funds; and the former in Placing able Officers, and obliging them to an honourable Management. . . . while the Sovereign carefully prefers Men of Honour and Probity in the Nations Trust, Credit rises by a natural Consequence” (p. 58). Defoe’s most convincing approach to the problem of public credit involves shifting the focus from public to private credit and in the process launching one of his O tempora! O mores! attacks and aligning himself with the perennial protest in the early eighteenth century against that excess consump152

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 tion of goods denounced as “luxury” (from the Latin word, luxuria, meaning “excess”). In several numbers of the Review in January 1706, it is retail credit that is the bane of the nation, as he rails against luxurious spending beyond one’s means that often leads to ruin for both debtor and creditor: “if every Man liv’d within the bounds of his Income, whether by Trade, Sallary, or Estate, he might pay ready Money for all he wanted; the Pride and Vanity of Equipages; the Luxury of House-keeping, and Extravagances of Expensive Living; as they are the Vices of the Manners, so they are the Vices of Trade. Every Prodigal is a Moth in the Commonwealth; not as he helps to crowd it with Beggars only, but as he lays the Foundation of National Evils that eat into the Vitals of Trade, and lessen the Publick Prosperity” (January 18, 1706). Curiously enough, in the light of the common understanding of Defoe the novelist as an creator of strongly individualized characters, for Defoe the moralist it is individual deviance that is always to blame for the moral problems of the nation and not, for the most part, institutional imperfections or structural weakness in the social system. Indeed, Defoe rises in the Review to heights of extravagance when he evokes trade as coexistent with the logic of divine creation and spends several numbers in 1713, for example, celebrating trade and commerce as exemplifications of the ultimate system, the created universe. As he writes on 3 February, 1713, “there is a kind of Divinity in the Original of Trade,” since “Providence has adapted Nature to Trade.” The nature of the physical world in its subservience to human preservation and domination is a testimony to providential arrangement, as is the unequal distribution of raw materials and manufactured goods, necessitating mutual exchanges: the Wines, Oyls, Silks, Fruits, Iron, Marble, Steel,Wooll, Brimstone, and sundry other Goods produc’d in France, Spain, Italy, &c. would not have compleated the Delightful Habitations, Accommodations and Comfortable Living of the Inhabitants without the Gold and Ivory of Africa, the silver of Hungaria and America; the Lead and Tin of Britain, the Copper of Swedeland, the Sugar and Tobacco of the Islands, the Furrs of the North, and the Spices of the South, none, or very few of which, are found in those Delicious Countries of France, Spain, or Italy.

In the next number, 5 February, 1713 this conceit grows even more fantastic as Defoe proposes that in spite of traditional notions about the earth after the fall being a diminished thing (he cites Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), for whom the postlapsarian world was a ruin) Providence has brought “the Greatest Order out of the Greatest Confusion” so that all those disruptions of the earth after the fall of man – “this irregular Figure, this Rupture, and Dislocation of the Parts of the Earth, this intervention of Waters, and the whole distortion of Parts” – are nothing less than “the first moving Causes, 153

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 as the subsequent Assistants to Commerce in the World.” This is surely a heterodox theodicy, a very odd addition to natural theology, but Defoe is always an enthusiastic auto-didact when it comes to his pet topic of trade. This number concludes with an equally extravagant evocation of the difficulty that God’s disposition of the earth has attached to the extraction of those raw materials that create modern comfort and advanced material civilization, “Materials for Cloathing, varieties for Feeding, and many of the numberless Addenda to the Pleasures and Conveniences of Life; Nay, some of the most Sovereign Remedies in Capital Distempers.” Out of that very difficulty that providence has arranged come “Labour, Industry, and Correspondence, and this is TRADE.” To troll through the Review is to find Defoe at the height of his rhetorical powers when it comes to financial themes; he is distracted from his customary hectoring and polemical political mode when he turns to matters like trade and money, at times aspiring to (and even achieving) a kind of panegyrical eloquence on topics that would seem to be mundane and unpromising. For Defoe, money in one memorable number (16 October, 1707) provides an occasion for an exercise in rhetorical expansion that is poetical in its plenitude. I quote some selections from it which have a kind of proto-Marxian understanding of the magical, transforming power of money: O Money, Money! What an Influence hast thou on all the Affairs of the quarreling, huffing Part of this World, as well as upon the most plodding Part of it! Without Thee Parliaments may meet; and Councils sit, and Kings contrive, but it will all be to no Purpose, their Councils and Conclusions can never be put in Execution! . . . Mighty Neuter! Thou great Jack-a-both-sides of the World, how hast Thou brought all Things into Bondage to thy Tyranny? How art Thou the mighty WORD of this War, the great Wheel in the vast Machine of Politick Motion, the Vehicle of Providence, the great Medium of Conveyance, in which all the Physick of the secret Dispensation in human Affairs is administred . . . Thou art the Test of Beauty, the Judgement of Ornament, the Guide of the Fancy, the Index of Temper, and the Pole-Star of the Affections; Thou makest Homely Things Fair, Old Things Young, Crooked Things Straight; Thou hast the great Remedy of Love, thou can’st give the Blind an Eye, the Lame a Leg, the Froward a Temper, and Scandalous a Character . . .

And so on, and much more. Writing like this is interesting in its own right as a sample of Defoe’s copiousness as a stylist and also pertinent for understanding his intoxication with modern commerce, although it is a quite traditional rhetorical exercise in paradoxical panegyric, praising that which is normally considered undesirable. But perhaps it is not so paradoxical for Defoe, for whom, as he says near the end of this number, money is a “necessary

154

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 Evil” which has “some Panegyrick due to Thee” for the good it does such as rewarding men for their labor; “without thy help, Tyrants would never be dethroned, nor Ambition restrained, nor any of the Capital Diseases of the World cured.” The world of trade and the power of money have a dark side, too, with complicated moral and psychological side effects for those who deal in them. Trade and its discontents as well as its rewards and even glories are the subjects of an enormous book he published in 1726–7 that I suppose we should call a businessman’s conduct book, since as Defoe declares in the opening page of the preface to volume one it is intended as “a collection of useful instructions for a young Tradesman”: The Complete English Tradesman, in Familiar Letters Directing him in all the several Parts and Progressions of Trade (two volumes, 1726–7).17 Volume two offers advice to more seasoned merchants, “to the Men of Business; as well to the over-grown, as to the growing; the upper Class, as well as the lower” (II, p. vi). Miscellaneous and improvisational as descriptive terms hardly do justice to this collection of advice, which is an omnium-gatherum of Defoe’s opinions and preoccupations in his long career, all jumbled and tumbled together. Here are chauvinistic celebrations of English commerce, whose merchants are the best in the world; and here are stirring defenses of the trading classes as quite the equal of the gentry, one of Defoe’s pet notions, developed at length in the letter in volume one, “Of the Dignity of Trade in England more than is in other countries” where he speaks of how trade as much as learning “has been the two chief steps, by which our gentlemen have rais’d their relations and have built their fortunes” (I, p. 306). And here in volume two there is an extended exaltation of the tradesman as the embodiment of the modern condition whereby hope of prosperity and social advancement springs eternal:“A Tradesman is never out of Hope to rise till he is nail’d up in his Coffin, and six Foot under Ground” (II, pp. 184–5). But hope is balanced by fear, and the tradesman knows more than other men the risks of his enterprise and the instability of human fortune. And tradesman are subject to worldly temptations – drink, sex, gambling – that lead Defoe into very familiar moral and social polemics.Yet the tradesman embodies an irresistible energy, in one of Defoe’s most memorable images: “he rolls about the World like a Snowball, always gathering more, always increasing, till he comes to a Magnitude sufficient to exist of himself, and then he boldly shews himself in the same Orbit, in which he first shin’d; for that is what he ever aims at” (II, p. 185). For all this familiar mythologizing of the merchant, The Complete English Tradesman also narrates in rather alarming and specific terms the psychological and moral dangers of the commercial life, which as Defoe renders it is not only fraught with financial risk and uncertainty but also requires of the shopkeeper behind his counter a potentially crippling repression of his passions if he is to

155

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 prosper: “what impertinences, what taunts, flouts, and ridiculous things, he must bear in his Trade, and must not shew the least return, or the least signal of disgust . . . he must be a perfect complete hypocrite, if he will be a complete tradesman” (I, p. 94). Defoe also notes the dangers of this completeness, as he recounts the story of a shopkeeper who behaved perfectly behind the counter but then would go up stairs “and beat his wife, kick his children about like dogs, and be as furious for two or three minutes, as a man chain’d down in Bedlam” (I, pp. 94–5). Beyond these professional deformations of the tradesman’s personality lie the moral pitfalls that are part and parcel of business, which as Defoe admits necessarily involves rather less than normal honesty as “Custom indeed has driven us beyond the limits of our morals in many things, which trade makes necessary” (I, p. 234). He even wonders if a tradesman can in his professional capacity claim to be a Christian, and in a startling admission in Part II of the second volume he allows that “Trade is almost universally founded upon Crime,” and by that he means that trade depends on goods that go beyond the necessary and depend upon what eighteenth-century moralists (including Defoe) assailed as “luxury” (II, part II, p. 108). On both psychological and moral grounds, then, the glories of trade are set against its enormous stresses and personal as well as moral costs. There is much suggestive material in this long book for the biographer, of course, and it is tempting to guess that Defoe was speaking from first hand knowledge about the moral and psychological dangers of the trading life. At one point where the example seems very near the bone, he recounts the story of a tradesman who when he went bankrupt felt a profound sense of relief and liberation from intolerable pressures:“he was now no more obliged to make promises, which he knew he could not perform, and break promises as far as he made them, and so lie continually both to God and man; and he added the ease of his mind which he felt upon that occasion was so great, that it ballanced all the grief he was in at the general disaster of his affairs” (I, p. 236). This is only one anecdote, but The Complete English Tradesman is candid in exposing these negative and hugely stressful aspects of the trading life. Moments like this also highlight once again the most interesting feature of Defoe’s writing: in its energy and copiousness it often enough spills over what would seem to be its boundaries, seems to complicate the simplicity and clarity of purpose he began with. In The Complete English Tradesman, his habit of exhausting a subject, of beating it into submission as it were, leads him to follow no matter how subversive they sound the ultimate implications of his subject. We might want to say in Walt Whitman’s phrase that he admits contradictions because he is large and capacious; he contains multitudes. Defoe’s encyclopedic instincts as a writer often enough overwhelm pattern and the simple purpose he claims to be seeking and produce fullness as an abiding expressive effect. Near the end of his life, in 1728, he returned yet again to the subject of trade in A Plan of the English Commerce, an enormous treatise reprising all of his life156

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 long notions about trade and its centrality for the emerging greatness of Britain. This is an interesting work for several reasons. First, it dramatizes the enduring attraction of this subject for Defoe, a virtual obsession we may say, and it highlights his own unabated vigor and amazing fluency on financial topics. But, secondly, to take another perspective on this characteristic energy, in its encyclopedic ambitions A Plan of the English Commerce veers into the negative danger of his customary fullness – an intolerable prolixity and digressiveness. I think that it marks a decline in Defoe’s powers of coherence and structure. And yet as it opens, the Defoe on view is as brashly energetic and self-confident as ever, denouncing parochial views and partial understanding of what should be at the center of everyone’s awareness: in England, he opens, “nothing is more wonderful than to see how ignorant the Generality of our People are about [Trade]; how weakly they talk of it, and how little has been made publick for their better Information.”18 Defoe’s defining eagerness to speak plainly to his audience is on view from the very beginning: “Trade, like Religion, is what every Body talks of, but few understand” (p. 127). Ambitious as ever, he defines his educational mission without modesty as the curing of such ignorance, and he characterizes his book as nothing less than “a general or universal Plan of Commerce” (p. 118). Moreover, this plan is also like most of Defoe’s work something of a satire, in this case on what he characterizes as the lack of ambition among English merchants: “the World presents us with large Scenes or Trade, new Platforms for Business, enough to prompt our Ambition, and even to glut our Avarice; yet we seem to have no Heart for the Adventure” (p. 122). To be sure, there is something of the Mandevillian realist about him, as he comments later on the enormous trade in wine and brandy (a trade he knew a good deal about from personal experience), since the English are “a luxurious, expensive People” (p. 227). To the reader of Defoe’s other economic writings, in the Review and in independent treatises, however, much of what follows in this book is numbingly familiar, including his exaltation of the English merchant classes over the effete and exhausted nobility. Once again, Defoe grows enthusiastic as he contemplates the contributions the merchant makes to the general welfare and the parasitic and profitless life of the gentleman of leisure: “How do our Merchants in London, Bristol, Liverpole, Yarmouth, Hull, and other trading Sea-Ports, appear in their Families with the Splendor of the best Gentlemen, and even grow rich, tho’ with the Luxury and Expence of a Count of the Empire! So true it is, that an Estate is but a Pond, but Trade is a Spring” (p. 177). This last is a good line, but Defoe uses it many times in his work. Trade is a good thing, indeed the best of things, but for Defoe in his reiterations it can never be praised too often or too much. Thus, at the end of the long first chapter, he summarizes in a few words what he has expatiated on for many pages, and the need expressed in that phrase signals it seems to me his own sense that the discourse requires some compact 157

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 statement after so much somewhat diffuse expansiveness: “Upon the whole, to sum it up in a few Words, Trade is the Wealth of the World; Trade makes the Difference as to Rich or Poor, between one Nation and another; Trade nourishes Industry, and Industry begets Trade; Trade disperses the natural Wealth of the World, and Trade raises new Species of Wealth, which Nature know nothing of: Trade has two Daughters, whose fruitful Progeny in Arts may be said to employ Mankind; namely” (p. 160). The two daughters of Trade are Manufacture and Navigation, and the chapter ends with a description in tabular and upper case form of how they operate: MANUFACTURE supplies Merchandize. NAVIGATION supplies Shipping. MANUFACTURE is the Hospital which feeds the Poor. NAVIGATION is the Nursery which raises Seamen. MANUFACTURE commands Money from Abroad. NAVIGATION brings it home. (p. 160)

And so on. This conclusion to chapter one of A Plan of the English Commerce is a primer for those who haven’t thought about such things, and one wonders just who they might be! Was Defoe thinking of benighted country squires or even of small urban shopkeepers who weren’t aware of these truisms? The chart and the summary betray a worry that these ideas aren’t getting through, that they need in addition to almost endless reiteration such simplifying and clarifying. The book is Defoe’s attempt at a sort of Summa Negotiis, but even as he strives to clarify and simplify, the huge subject is troublesome and unwieldy, posing real expository problems in its limitless possibilities, as he often enough concedes. Here at the beginning of chapter three, for example, “Of the first Rise, Growth and Encrease of the Commerce of England,” Defoe admits his difficulties as he approaches an enormous subject – the origins of trade. All nations have had “some Trade, and all People some Dealing with one another from the Beginning.” but to sketch that out would not be profitable: “But this would lead us back into dull Speculations of the Nature and Original of Commerce; a dry useless Subject, and therefore carefully avoided in my Title, where it may be observ’d, that I do not call this Work a History of Trade, or a History of the English Trade; but a History of the Rise, Growth, and Increase of it; by which I mean as above, from the Time, let that Time be when you will, when standing upon the Square with the rest of the World, England gave it self a Loose, and got the Start of all the Nations about her in Trade” (p. 181). So why, we may ask, bring up the question of the origins of trade only in order to say it is too much to discuss? Defoe’s wordy defensiveness, his careful hedging of his subject, amounts to a kind of special pleading, a rhetorical weakness of a momentary kind and of course adds to the weight of words in a long, long book. 158

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 A Plan of the English Commerce is a book that needed an editor. Defoe’s lack of restraint is disfiguring, as he often follows facts and elaborates stories that aren’t really necessary. He resists tracing trade to its primitive origins, but a few pages later he explores the origins of navigation: “If I was to write a History of Navigation, I should go back here to the first Invention of Boats to row, of which they tell us the Phoenicians were the Inventers; and of Sails to make use of the Wind, of which they tell us the Fable of Dedalus and Icarus is a Representation” (p. 184). As he continues to spin out stories about ancient trade and manufacturing, he tells us how the “Carthaginians were great Friends to Trade” (p. 184) and developed both trade and manufacture. So that after the fall of Carthage the knowledge of linen manufacturing drifted over to the low countries: “The Dutch had their Linen Manufacture from the Carthaginians; they from the Tyrians or Phoenicians, of whom they were a Colony, and they from the Egyptians; the fine Linen of Aegypt is often mentioned in the Scripture History, and in others also as the most antient” (p. 185). This is rambling and off the point. There is, quite often, a kind of nearly demented pedantry in this book, as Defoe pursues his grand topic with a precise exactitude and fussy expertise that he boasts of possessing in many areas of commerce. For example, as he discusses foreign trade at one point in chapter five, he comes to hardware and its exportation: “a very great Article in the general Commerce; besides the many thousand Families employ’d in the Mines for digging Lead, Tin, Iron, Copper and Coal for Exportation; that is to say, the Lead in Sows or Pigs, call it as you please, the Tin in Blocks, and the Copper in Bars and Plates” (p. 211). Defoe’s grasp of the terms of art of these trades is exact but taken over the long haul of the book distracting and irrelevant. In short, the danger of Defoe’s encyclopedic approach is that the reader has the feeling of mere enumeration, of detail for its own sake, of a parade of particular knowledge that loses touch with the general purpose of understanding commerce. Perhaps the zaniest example of this pedantry comes in Defoe’s discussion a bit further on of the fruit trade. “Perhaps I may be cavill’d at for the Term FRUIT, the Product being so various and in its Appearance trifling; but as ’tis just to bring all such smaller Articles under one general Head, as they are a Merchandize; and that are all really the Product and Growth of the Plants, which come under the Denomination of Vegetables, I think it will be a needless Objection” (p. 237). The next few pages are full of lists of fruits, spices, nuts, and coffee and the countries from which they are exported into England. Some, Defoe admits, will think these lists are “a trifling Thing, and that Oranges, Lemons, Raisins, Almonds, &c. are all Trifles” (p. 238), but he goes on to argue that “they are very considerable, and that many Ways” (p. 239). Who can argue with that? A Plan of the English Commerce illustrates the pitfalls of particularity, and Defoe often enough finds himself defending his book, self-consciously protesting against anticipated misreadings and urging the importance of what he’s saying, as if he 159

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 realizes that he has lost his readers. Thus, as this chapter continues after listing the “great Imports of Drugs and Dye Stuffs” he notes that he “might go on here to mention the other Importations from India” (p. 241), but he forbears; his lists are already too large, even though he then goes on to list imports of naval stores from the East Indies and the North Seas. The effect is overwhelming, although such is clearly Defoe’s plan, to enumerate and thereby to evoke “the Magnitude of the English Commerce, and that it is a Prodigy of its Kind, the like of which is not to be seen any where in Europe, if it may be in any Part of the World” (p. 243). Such claims of the unprecedented magnitude and extent of English trade are, as we have seen, a recurring part of Defoe’s rhetoric and his vision of the social order, obviously so in A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, but to maintain this hyperbole in a long and specialized treatise such as this is a strain, and his prose has nowhere to go but down after such enthusiasm. A Plan of the English Commerce is a fairly technical survey of English trade that is punctuated by panegyrical bursts like this, something of a reminder to the lay reader of how important all these details are, what they tend to, as it were. To be sure, there are flashes of the old Defoe, and there are many moments of alert argumentation. For example, as he argues at the beginning of his second part, chapter one, that English trade has not “sunk” but is ever increasing, he challenges those who disagree with him, calling “for their Explanation, and to let us see the Place where our Trade is decay’d, and what Goods they are, the Consumption of which is lessen’d and decay’d either at Home or Abroad” (p. 271). So, too, Defoe’s insistent vision of England’s power as the leading European trading nation is a clear and recurrent theme that swells with special patriotic fervor in the third and last part of the book, which is full of proposals for imperial expansion and colonial development. But at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, Defoe is not always in control; one feels the excess, the selfindulgence. In old age, Defoe is writing for himself, going through the motions, we may speculate, to keep himself going mentally.

The Conduct Books . . . it is curious to mark the eagerness with which his pen after having taken up for so many years with dry debates and doctrinal points, flies for relief to the details and incidents of private life. His mind was equally tenacious of facts and arguments, and fastened on each, in its turn, with the same strong and unremitting grasp. William Hazlitt, review of Walter Wilson, Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe

160

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 When the Tories and Harley his patron fell from power in 1714, Defoe obviously needed income to maintain his mode of living, and that probably accounts for the appearance in 1715 of what would prove to be, next to Robinson Crusoe, his most popular work during the eighteenth century, The Family Instructor in Three Parts; I. Relating to Fathers and Children. II. To Masters and Servants. III To Husbands and Wives, the first of a number of conduct books in narrative format that he produced.19 Domestic conduct books like this were perennial best sellers, and Defoe’s was very successful, reaching 20 British editions in the course of the eighteenth century. Paula Backscheider suggests that he may have been drawn to this conduct manual by his own family situation, spending as he must have long periods away from home and perhaps facing domestic problems as a result.20 It is hard, however, to imagine modern secular readers (or religious ones, for that matter) taking to The Family Instructor (or its continuation in 1727, A New Family Instructor), or its successor, Religious Courtship (1722), and yet like all of Defoe’s writings, even the most heavily and piously didactic, these long books – mostly in dialogue with interspersed commentary and narrative bridges – are of interest on several counts. They are all intensely narrativized or dramatized; as dialogues they create scenes in which some of the characters are given lively and often enough strongly self-expressive speech as they rebel against the moral precepts of their elders or quarrel with their siblings.The dialogues are loaded, naturally, in favor of ultimate goodness and spiritual conversion, but their quality as dialogues (and Defoe in all his work is drawn to the freedom granted by the dialogue format in which characters are allowed to express themselves, however subversively) communicates occasional dramatic tension and the secular, worldly alternative to religious severity and submission to Christian imperatives. Here’s part of a scene from Part I between the mother and her daughter that could well be part of a play, stage directions and all: Mo. Well, and do you think that the Sabbath-Day is over when you have been at the Church? Dau. Over! Why, what would you have us do after we have been at Church? Mo. I shall take a Time to let you know, what is your Duty on the rest of the Day; but I did not design to talk of that now, nor of this neither, if you had not mov’d me to it by your undutiful Language. Dau. I don’t trouble my self about it. [Here the Daughter turns away, and with a kind of a humming low Voice, sings the Tune of a new Play-house Song. Mo. Unsufferable Insolence! Have I been telling you of the Command of God to keep holy the Sabbath Day, and of my Resolution to do it my self and to cause you to do it, and do you despise God and your Mother at this rate! It is not to be born with [She apparently laughs at her Mother, and turning away from her, sings on. (pp. 102–3)

161

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 The mother then gives the daughter “a Box on the Ear,” and the daughter “flies away in a Rage.” For Defoe’s eighteenth-century audience, this tension between the normal and heedless secular world and a state of heightened moral and spiritual consciousness clearly informs the whole work. One might argue that the very popularity of such books and their recurring scenario of secular neglect of bed rock spirituality are signs of widespread backsliding, just as the popularity of diet books in our own time tells us that many people see themselves as seriously overweight. Some historians have argued that in the early eighteenth century there was for many a sense of social and moral breakdown, a crisis of political and religious authority, and indeed The Family Instructor moves on from its opening dramatization of tensions in the family group to tell stories about rebellious servants and unruly apprentices. In a strong if implicit sense, the secular world is dramatized as dangerously dominant, for the piety to which most of the characters are converted is understood to be gained only by strenuous and difficult resistance against the competing attractions of worldly pleasures. Defoe makes the secular alternative strongly attractive in his dramatic rendering of it and thereby heightens the moral and spiritual heroism of his characters, and it was doubtless such drama that accounted for the popularity of these books. Although the dialogues are prosy and at times intolerably moralistic, relentlessly edifying, and glutinously pious, they can be said to possess a narrative and dramatic form that is independent of their moralistic content. Moreover, they are driven not just by what Defoe’s eighteenth-century readers saw as a modern culture war but also by social and psychological tensions in what we might call the family romance that a willing modern reader can respond to. Part I of The Family Instructor can even be related thematically to Defoe’s novels in that it is driven by a plot (reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe) in which the elder son in the family rebels against the advice of his father and a daughter who is saved from “wicked” courses by marriage and by a miraculous recovery from a fever that converts her at last to the religious and moral life urged upon her by her parents. The son has a fierce argument with his father, as he protests against his father’s new found severity: “Why was I not bred like a Priest? Then you might ha’ sent me to a Monastery, and I might have been us’d to a Cloyster Life; but to breed me up for a Gentleman, and then confine me as no Gentleman is confin’d; this is exposing me, and making me look like a Fool among all Company!” (p. 142). This is an almost unanswerable point, one would think, and the father’s conversion flies in the face of his earlier neglect of moral severity in favor of easy social conformity in the leisure-class world in which he and his family live. In due course, the son runs off and like a true prodigal, “spends his Estate, gets a Commission in the Army, is disbanded, comes Home a Cripple and a Beggar; and tho’ always very penitent for rejecting his Father’s Government and Instruction,

162

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 yet never submits himself to his Father, so as to be receiv’d again, and dies miserable” (p. 172). But the main plot of Part I of The Family Instructor is the coming to sharp religious awareness of the head of the household, the father who is shocked into reforming himself and his family by the inquiries of his innocent youngest child, who brings it home to him that he is really only a nominal Christian. In the process of the opening dialogue between the father and his five or six-year old son, the religious drama is accompanied by the evocation of leisure-class early eighteenth-century life; the family clearly belongs to the comfortable merchant class. When his father explains that the minister at church will teach him about the word of God, the child wonders why he was kept from going to church recently when it rained: Child. Why, Father, my Mother has carried me to Church a great many times, but I thought I was carried there only to show my new Coat, and my fine Hat, I don’t know what the Man said when I went. Fath. But you were a naughty Boy then, you should have minded what he said, you were not carried there to shew your fine Cloaths. Child. Why Father, I thought so; for when it Rain’d, and I could not wear my best Cloaths, my Mother would not let me go out; or when the Wind blow’d the Powder out of my Hair, my Mother would not let me go; and I heard you say, Father, last Sunday, that you could not go to Church, because the Barber had not brought your new Perriwig home; and another Sunday, for want of a pair of Gloves you staid at Home and play’d with me all Sunday long, or lay down on the Couch to sleep: I thought, Father, I had gone thither for nothing but to shew my fine Cloaths. (p. 32)

Casual daily domestic life thus conjured up in moments like this – a mother’s warning her child not to get his good clothes wet, a father’s staying home from church because his fashionable wig is not ready and playing with his son – is more detailed than just about anything we can find in eighteenth-century fiction, even Defoe’s, where thematic considerations tend to take the narrative away from such pure circumstantiality such as the child un-self-consciously remembers here. Defoe’s tropism for the particular and exact detail exists in an interesting tension with his general didactic purpose, at least for latter day readers; the particular moment, with its spontaneous insertion in the unremarkable course of every day life – the eruptions of emotion and the small, closely observed compulsions of vanity and pleasure – qualifies the generalizing seriousness of the theme of spiritual growth and some of the characters’ attempts to interpret daily life in strictly religious terms. The quotidian trumps, for the moment at least, the characters’

163

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 aspiration toward a refining away of individualized desires and absorption into moral and spiritual patterning. My reading of these moments in The Family Instructor is selective, of course, and I am highlighting minor details, focusing on the implicitly novelistic drift in them, since that is what matters most to me and to other modern readers of Defoe. And within that set of preferences and emphases the successor to this conduct book is I think of even greater interest. Religious Courtship: Being Historical Discourses, On the Necessity of Marrying Religious Husbands and Wives Only (1722) is like its predecessor a combination of extended dialogues (with occasional stage directions). But this book features more elaborate narrative bridges (as well as an intricate and quite novelistic plot) that make the text, overall, read like a kind of scenario for a proto-sentimental novel, with plenty of emotion as well as wit and worldly observation on offer. The dialogue in Religious Courtship is sharper and wittier than in The Family Instructor, the speakers more individualized and intelligent as characters, and their piety located as the subtitle makes clear in the context of courtship and postmarital arrangements. Religion in these dialogues is not so much a matter of intense piety and spiritual soul searching as it is a social issue and psychological problem, part of the institutional arrangements for a successful marriage, and not as in The Family Instructor a purely spiritual affair in which the characters seek to separate themselves from the mainstream of a society depicted as secular. Here is the beginning of the plot: a retired merchant lives just outside London, a widower with three unmarried daughters, who have been instructed on her death bed by their mother to marry religious men “of the same Principles and Opinions in Religion as themselves” (p. 3).21 The youngest daughter is solicited by a suitor, and the eldest asks her father if he is “a sober religious Gentleman” (p. 11). Defoe’s rendering of the interactions between the sisters and the younger sister and her suitor is fine-drawn sentimental comedy, very delicately done. The elder asks the younger why she doesn’t just ask her suitor if he is a good Christian: Yo. Sist. Why so I did; and he laugh’d at me and said, O Child, I am a mighty good Christian. Eld. Sist. I should have told him, I was afraid he wa’nt. Yo. Sist. Why I did that too, in the very Words, and still he put me off. Another time I ask’ed him, if was not a Papist? Immediately he fell a crossing himself all over, and made himself and me too so merry at it, that tho’ I was really troubled about it, I could not for my Life get the least serious Thing out of him. (p. 18)

These giggling young people are attractively plausible in their amused interactions, although soon after things turn serious, and when the suitor declares that 164

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 a husband’s religion is no concern of the wife, the younger sister refuses him. After she agrees to meet him once more to assuage her father’s anger, she is confirmed in her opinion, although she confesses to her elder sister that she does love him but decides to stick to her principles, as she says later on, “I cannot deny, but I have acted all this by a Force upon my Affection” (p. 49), and then again later in dialogue with her sister she dismisses him as “the most contemptible Fellow on Earth” but then recalls her affection for him with a sweet sincerity and intensity rare in Defoe’s fiction: “he is a lovely Creature, and the only Man in the world I could ever say I had any Affection for” (p. 119). Her spirited summary of the encounter in which she at last refused him marks her as a heroine with more than conventional piety; Defoe renders her as both sophisticated and witty: Ay, ay, just as I expected; a true Gentleman, perfectly educated, politely bred, that knows about as much of Religion as a Parson’s Horse; that is to say, knows the Way to the Church-Door, but scorns to debauch his Breeding with such a clumsey thing as Religion; is more a Gentleman, than to trouble himself with the Meannesses of Religion, and not Hypocrite enough to pretend to the sublimer Parts of it; one that has not been long enough in this World, to think of the next, nor is yet come to any Resolution about when he shall. (p. 38)

The book turns to almost pure narration for a time, as another marriage is subsequently proposed for this rejected suitor by his aunt. The lady she introduces him to has a £20,000 portion, but he is disgusted by “the Levity of her Behaviour, the Emptiness of her Discourse, the Weakness of her Conduct” (p. 52), and as he compares this woman with the daughter he had courted he begins to awaken to a religious consciousness and becomes in due course a changed man. In the end, he resumes his suit and after much back and forth and promises of reform is accepted. Religious Courtship also features the second of the three sisters, who “from the Beginning acted upon other Principles, or rather upon no Principles at all” and whose history is “tragical” (p. 183). She marries a rich English merchant from Italy but declines to question him about his religion, and the elder sister’s suspicions that he is a Papist prove true. Throughout even this melodramatic part of the book, the dialogue is sophisticated and amusing. The elder sister urges the younger that she make inquiries of her suitor in order to “know before hand what you are going to do, that you may not run into Misery blindfold, and make your Marriage be, as old Hobbs said of his Death. A Leap in the Dark” (p. 216). To which the younger replies that she thinks (and most modern readers would agree) “all Marriage is a Leap in the Dark, in one Respect or another” (p. 216). The elder sister submits at another point in their conversations that this suitor may be one of those who is no atheist and certainly not in favor of “bantering 165

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 of Religion, or making a Jest of sacred Things, and yet have nothing at all in them that is fit to be call’d Religion” (p. 197). To which the younger sister returns, wisely enough, that “if he be not a religious Man, the worst will be his own, I cannot find it out” (p. 197). These sisters are not the earnestly naive tradespeople of The Family Instructor who are shocked into discovering their lack of spirituality but poised, witty, well read, worldly as well as sincerely religious ladies of leisure who belong to a somewhat higher class of mercantile gentry than the people in The Family Instructor. This is a genuine debate with reason on both sides, not so much a conduct book with pat answers or melodramatic scenarios but rather a series of case studies of the difficulties of choosing well in marriage. The revelation of the Catholic husband’s faith is gradual and very effective (if hardly subtle), as the husband first arouses suspicion by adorning his house in the City with Italian religious paintings, including a crucifixion in the bedroom. He is at length exposed when his father-in-law sees an oratory in his closet with “a Pix of pure Gold, cover’d with a piece of Crimson Velvet, which is the Repository, as they call it, of the Host” (p. 236). The modern reader may find a scene like this comic rather than tragic. But all is more or less well in the end as the Papist merchant dies after eight years, leaving a sadder but wiser widow behind. Moreover, in the spirit of mature and complex dramatization of human relationships that Defoe’s book offers, this Papist was no tyrant or bigot, as his widow remembers in a concluding set of dialogues with her elder sister (now happily married to a suitably religious and Protestant husband). She recounts an especially vivid scene in which he attempted to convert her by giving her a diamond cross, and when she protested that he was making an idol of his wife, he responds that “he worship’d no Idols but me” (p. 265). Defoe renders this moment with a great delicacy that is as fine as anything in his fiction: Wid. Well, while he was saying this, he pulls out the Jewel, and opening the Case, takes a small Crimson String that it hung to, and put it about my Neck, but kept the Jewel in his Hand, so that I could not see it; and then taking me in his Arms, sit down, my Dear, says he, which I did upon a little Stool, then he kneeled down just before me, and kissing the Jewel, let it go, saying something in Italian, which I did not understand; and then looking up in my Face, Now, my Dear, says he, you are my Idol. (p. 265)

The handling of detail in this scene is subtle and sure; the rendering of intimacy it promotes is something that the English novel will not even approach until Samuel Richardson’s masterpiece, Clarissa (1747–8). Religious Courtship, as much as any of Defoe’s novels, demonstrates his capacity for human sympathy

166

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 and deep understanding of complex motives. As such, it stands in stark contrast to much of his nonfictional moral writing.

The Supernatural World: Angels, Devils, and Providence De Foe dwells on such subjects with so much unction, as to leave us little doubt that he was to a certain point a believer in something resembling an immediate communication between the inhabitants of this world, and of that which we shall in future inhabit. Sir Walter Scott, “Introduction,” Miscellaneous Works of Daniel Defoe

Although in his two careers as merchant and political writer Defoe spent his life totally immersed in the material and social world, he was like just about all his contemporaries worried about the existence and the effect of the spiritual world. He was deeply concerned about the relationship between the natural and the supernatural, between the secular order he knew so much about and the spiritual order that he believed in so fervently.22 Clearly a man of genuine faith, he was also by temperament skeptical (as well as satirical) and as we can see in all his writing committed to understanding a world of natural causes and material circumstances and to rendering in his historical and fictional works the value of worldly action and empirical knowledge. To put it mildly, history and politics were his special study, and in most of his work he is a resolutely secular analyst of those realms. But it is always rash to generalize about Defoe, and in some numbers of the Review he can be observed arguing confidently and by our lights extravagantly for seeing the direct hand of Providence in the conduct of the war against the French in 1706, including what he calls “a Month of wonders” in English victories at Barcelona and at Ramellies (2 July, 1706). Defoe preserves a guarded skepticism when he says in this number that he places no special faith “upon Days and Hours, Eclipses and Parallels; but I cannot believe, but they are sometimes directed,” and he proceeds to outline various chronological coincidences that “can never be human Direction, it must certainly come from God, or Devil.” In the next number, he continues to list coincidences and portents, concluding that he knows that natural phenomena such as eclipses of the sun and moon “can portend nothing; but I cannot pretend to believe but that Providence often directs the Times and Connections of their otherwise natural Causes to concur in such a manner as may point out to us his Meaning” (9 July, 1706). And several years later in the 17 May, 1711 number of the Review Defoe, with the usual caveats that he is no credulous “Enthusiastick,” adduces his own particular

167

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 experience to assert that he has never had “any considerable Mischief or Disaster attending me, but sleeping or waking I have had Notice of it before hand, and had I listened to these notices, I believe might have shunn’d the Evil – Let no Man think this a Jest.” From these hints in his life he affirms, rather grandiosely but one has to say with evident sincerity, the “Existent State of the Invisible World; the certainty of Futurity, and above all, the Government of Providence, the Prescience, Omniscience, and Goodness, as well as Being of a God.” Defoe makes the same claims in Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), the second sequel to Robinson Crusoe, a collection of essays on moral and spiritual topics presented as his hero’s meditations. In an essay entitled “Of listening to the Voice of Providence,” Defoe has Crusoe revisit the question of providential presence in human affairs which is a key theme in his novel, since God sends “silent Messengers on many Occasions,” but “whether sleeping or waking, whether directly or indirectly, whether by Hints, Impulses, Allegories, Mysteries, or otherwise, we know not.”23 These messages, he admits, are unfortunately “so imperfect, so broken, so irregular” (p. 213), and the work of God is “silent,” managed by “an invisible and powerful Hand” (pp. 231–2). Naturally, he affirms that God’s Providence is at work in the world, but he admits that the extent of particular divine intervention is necessarily uncertain so that human action and resolution are moral imperatives: “To be utterly careless of ourselves in such Cases, and talk of trusting Providence, is a Lethargy of the worst Nature . . . we are to trust Providence with our Safety, but with our Eyes open, to all its necessary Cautions, Warnings, and Instructions” (p. 221). Like his narrator a couple of years later in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Crusoe (Defoe) counsels constant alertness to one’s own circumstances, “to listen to the Voice of Providence, is to take strict Notice of all the remarkable Steps of Providence, which relate to us in particular to observe” (p. 236). To do otherwise, to act without this kind of wondering what sort of message God may be sending us, is what Crusoe labels “a kind of practical Atheism” (p. 221). There is a repeated insistence, however, in Crusoe’s meditation on the indirection of God’s Providence as well as on its silence and its invisibility, just as there is a careful distinction made between total skepticism or fatalism and the opposite errors of “Enthusiasm and Superstition” (p. 224). The result is in the end a balancing act, a narrative in which doubt is banished, but by probability and caution rather than by religious certainty. This is an old story in Defoe’s work. For example, in the Review some 14 years before the Serious Reflections, as he promotes the Union of Scotland and England, he issues this disclaimer, careful to avoid charges of superstition and enthusiasm: I have always made Room for my Defence against the Supposition of laying any such Stress and Weight upon the Circumstances of things as should be binding to their Events, or seem to lessen the Dependance, every Action has upon invisible

168

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 Providence; and therefore tho’ I take great Notice of the Concurrence of Circumstances, and the strange Revolution of Times, yet does my Observation of Days lead to no Superstition or at all bind up the Providence of GOD to such Circumstances – Which tho’ to us they are remarkable, yet when turn’d that Way, are Trifles. (November 19, 1706)

The very last essay in Crusoe’s Serious Reflections, highlighted in the book’s title, describes “A Vision of the Angelick World” and relates his hallucinatory visions of the spirit world, brought on as Crusoe admits in retrospect by isolation. But he quickly adds that this does not mean that there is no such world: “I make no Question, but that there is not only a World of Spirits, but that there is a certain Knowledge of it, tho’ to us impossible as to the Manner of it; there is a certain Converse between the World of Spirits, and the Spirits in this World; that is to say, between Spirits uncased or unembody’d, and Souls of Men embody’d or cased up in Flesh and Blood, as we all are on this side Death” (p. 14). Crusoe’s claim here in this meditation is that his dreams have been clear warnings and that if he had heeded them his life story might have been very different. Moreover, he has recently had a dream vision in which he soared above the earth and saw that all the other planets were uninhabitable (he gives us descriptions of them) and had a view of nothing less than the Devil himself in outer space. He doesn’t dwell on this spectacular sighting but instead goes on to explain how the Devil’s chief strategy is to persuade gullible human beings to atheism. Crusoe’s “Vision” mixes anecdotes of mysterious voices and visions, his and those of other people, with a Devil who works by implanting skepticism about the existence of the spiritual. Note the combination in all this of sensational visions and theologically conservative conclusions: the Devil is not an active demon and supernatural force but a tempter who cooperates with human psychology, with natural tendencies. The nature of the spiritual world is the subject of three books that Defoe turned out in rapid succession in the mid 1720s: The Political History of the Devil, as Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts (1726), An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), and A System of Magick; or, A History of the Black Art (1727). Aiming at a market that apparently could not get enough of assurances that there was indeed a world beyond the material one and bespeaking thereby one might suppose an anxiety in the culture at large about its existence, these books all seem to be hasty compilations of anecdotes and miscellaneous observations about the supernatural, but they are also extended reprisals of Defoe’s complicated attitudes to the spiritual world and include a good deal of satire of credulity and superstition. Without the pious Crusoe to tell the tale, The Political History of the Devil is far more skeptical and as the title would indicate more interested in the historical and moral dimension of the Devil, who is certainly real but is also a spirit who is unable to assume a human body. Rather, the Devil is the “Prince 169

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 of the Air” who with the other fallen angels is depicted as hovering over the earth, observing enviously as in Paradise Lost “the Felicity of his Rival, Man, and studying all the means possible to injure and ruin him; but extremely limited in Power, to his unspeakable Mortification.”24 Perhaps, Defoe continues, the Devil is “allow’d to make excursions beyond the Atmosphere of the habitable parts of the solar system; nay, of all the other solar systems, which for ought we know, may exist in the mighty extent of created space” (p. 51). Defoe revises Miltonic cosmology by invoking the infinite spaces of the new astronomy, in which he seems at times more interested than in Satan, returning to this possibility later in the book to evoke the Devil as wandering “over the whole Void or Abyss, which we want as well a Name for, as indeed Powers to conceive of . . . innumerable Planets with their Satellites or Moons, in which (again) a reciprocal Influence, Motion and Revolution conspired to Form the most admirable Uniformity of the whole” (pp. 88–9). Still, this is a book about the Devil rather than the infinite universe, so Defoe when he returns to his subject is not quite serious or fully reverent as he tells the various biblical stories of the devil. For one example, Satan’s seduction of “proud, ridiculous Mother Eve” leads to a misogynist joke: “The foolish Woman yielded presently, and that we are told is the Reason why the same Method so strangely takes with all her Posterity (viz.) that you are sure to prevail with them, if you can but once persuade them that you believe they are Witty and Handsome” (p. 103). When he comes to Part II of The Political History of the Devil, which treats the Prince of Darkness in Christian times, Defoe is even more skeptical and indeed theologically sophisticated about Satan, denying that Hell is the actual inferno of popular imagining, whose images of broiling gridirons and hooks for sinners in the sulphurous pit – “a great Mouth with horrible Teeth, gaping like a Cave on the Side of a Mountain” (p. 212) – are “as prophane as they are ridiculous” (pp. 212–13). Hell is rather “the Absence of Heaven; Expulsion, and Exclusion from the Presence and Face of the chief Ultimate, the only eternal and sufficient Good” (p. 209). In modern Christian times, Defoe explains, the Devil is certainly active in the world, although he is no longer its ruler. The comic tone continues as he says that the Devil “runs up and down Hackney in the World, more like a Drudge than a Prince” (p. 204). But he cannot act “upon Mankind brevi Manu, by his own inherent Power, as well as Rage” (p. 206). The Devil is not so much in these times a personage as a state of mind in human beings, a “devilish Spirit,” so that the Devil is a historical phenomenon and can be found in certain modern individuals such as the various Popes, and in devilish tendencies that dominate aspects of the lives and personalities of some great men: “thus we have seen a bloody Devil in a D’Alva; a profligate Devil in a Buckingham; a lying, artful, or politick Devil in a Richelieu; a treacherous Devil in a Mazarin; a cruel, merciless Devil in a Cortez . . . In a word, tell me the Man, I tell you the Spirit that reign’d in him” (p. 235). 170

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 In chapters that follow, the images of the Devil are traced to their origins and demystified. Thus, the Devil’s cloven foot is in one long chapter found to be an allegory of his duplicity as well as in its split quality a representation of his angelic origin and devilish fate. And in an extended bout of Defoe’s customary misogyny, he finds that “the walking Devils that we have generally among us are of the female Sex; whether is be that the Devil finds less difficulty to manage them, or that he lives quieter with them, or that they are fitter for his Business than the Men” (p. 313), he cannot say, but it is certain that the Devil now “walks about the World cloth’d in Beauty, cover’d with the Charms of the Lovely, and he fails not to disguise himself effectually by it” (p. 315). Although he cannot simply rule out direct human converse with the Devil and although he cannot (given the references to them in scripture) deny the existence of witches, Defoe’s emphasis is upon the devilish impulses in human beings. So it happens that dreams are instruments of the Devil, but always in Defoe’s presentation his work is assisted by human tendencies and proclivities. That same emphasis on dreams as the Devil’s only real access to humanity is Defoe’s theme in An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), whose long subtitle identifies it as a self-help book, a practical guide to examining dreams and determining whether they are good or evil: Being an Account of what they are, and what they are not; whence they come, and whence they come not. As also How we may distinguish between the Apparitions of Good and Evil Spirits, and how we ought to Behave to them. With a great Variety of Surprizing and Diverting Examples, never Publish’d before. Defoe in this book has little patience with crude ghost stories but dwells rather on the power of the imagination to form apparitions that are as subjectively real as that which we actually see with our eyes: “nay, our Imaginations sometimes are very diligent to embark the Eyes (and the Ears too) in the Delusion, and persuade us to believe we see Spectres and Appearances, and hear Noises and Voices, when indeed, neither the Devil or any other Spirit, good or bad, has troubled themselves about us.”25 As he says later in the book, ghosts walk because of “Conscience” (p. 100), and it is guilt that provokes such visions, as he illustrates with anecdotes of how apparitions appear to guilt-stricken murderers. His advice to his readers is quite clear-eyed, appropriate we might want to say for a realistic master of fact and fiction: “Let us think of things as they are, not as they are only imagined, and supposed to be; for ’tis the Reality of the thing, not the Shadow, that can fright and disorder us” (p. 320). But even with these strong statements, Defoe has to allow that there are such things as spirits, both good and evil, although they may indeed cooperate with strong imaginings, and his explanation here grows deliberately qualified and murky: “this conversing is by not only an invisible, but to us an inconceivable way; it is neither tied down to Speech or to Vision, but moving in a superior Orb, conveys its Meaning to our Understandings, its Measures to our Conceptions; deals with the Imagination, and works it up to receive such Impressions as serve for its purpose; 171

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 and yet at the same time we are perfectly passive, and have no Agency in, or Knowledge of the Matter” (p. 3). Such hedging is part of what appears to be Defoe’s strategy, whether deliberate or not it is hard to say, to position himself in these works as an opponent of modern skepticism and agnosticism – “those modern Wits, of which our Age is so full . . . who allow no God or Providence, no invisible World, no Angelick, kind and walking Spirits, who, by a secret Correspondence with our embodied Spirits, give merciful Hints to us of approaching Mischiefs and impending Dangers” (p. 218) – who is nonetheless an enlightened and judiciously skeptical observer of these phenomena. Indeed, both of these works and their successor, which recycles a good deal of diabolical background from the earlier works, A System of Magick; or, A History of the Black Art (1727), are to a large extent satirical examinations of simple credulity and popular superstitions. Defoe has absolutely no tolerance for popular beliefs in magic and witchcraft, and pure contempt for those conjurors and “cunning men” who swindle ignorant folk: “here’s no dealing with the Devil in all this. ’Tis nothing but a Bite, a kind of a Juggle; a Devil and no Devil, a Doctor no Conjurer, a Vision without a Spirit, a Dance without a Fiddle.”26 Defoe’s ridicule is the best thing about these books. The last in what we can consider a unified trilogy is perhaps the wittiest, as he indulges his talent for demotic humor with local color: The Magicians were formerly the Devil’s Servants, but now they are his Masters, and that to such a degree, that ’tis but drawing a Circle, casting a few Figures, muttering a little Arabick, and up comes the Devil, as readily as the Drawer at a Tavern, with a d’ye call Sir? Or like a Scots Caude, with What’s your Honour’s Will Sir? Nay, and as the learned in the Art say, He must come, he can’t help it: Then as to tempting, he’s quite out of Doors. And I think as the old Parliament did by the Bishops, we may e-en vote him useless” (pp. 249–50).

His case in the preface to A System of Magick is that such superstition as well as the “general Vice” that it encourages can be cured by satire: “Men are to be ridicul’d into good Manners, when they won’t be cudgell’d into it.” Defoe’s strained position is that skepticism, deism, and atheism are all forms of nonbelief for which magic prepares the mind, his logic being that since magic doesn’t work those who believe in it will turn to various forms of incredulity. Yet for all his careful Christian apologetics, for all his sincere religious orthodoxy about the possibility of a converse of spirits, Defoe in his investigations of the occult remains essentially from our latter day point of view essentially a rationalist student of human behavior, a man of the Enlightenment, and his persona in all three of these works is worldly, analytical and detached. For the best example of what I would call his dominant secular perspective, consider his Voltairean comment in The Political History of the Devil about the reality of witchcraft: “The 172

Moral, Social, and Economic Writings 1714–31 strange Work which the Devil has made in the World by this Sort of his Agents call’d Witches, is such, and so extravagantly wild, that except our Hope that most of those Tales happen not to be true, I know not how any one could be easy to live near a Widow after she was five and fifty” (p. 345). Defoe’s approach to the supernatural, outside of church as it were, when he speaks from his experience and to his core audience, is more than just skeptical; it borders on dismissing the supernatural as an irrelevant category, at best a psychologized and naturalized realm of experience. This does not mean that the pressure of the question of the existence and the presence of the supernatural in daily life was not very real. It is a recurrent, one might even call it obsessive, theme in Defoe’s work.

173

6 Robinson Crusoe

The book resembles one of the anonymous productions of the race rather than the effort of a single mind . . . we have all had Robinson Crusoe read aloud to us as children, and were thus much in the same state of mind towards Defoe and his story that the Greeks were in toward Homer. Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader

Defoe and Narrative: An Affinity Defoe’s “fiction” is the first which presents us with a picture both of the individual life in its larger perspective as a historical process, and in its closer view which shows the process being acted out against the background of the most ephemeral thoughts and action. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel

No one can say what led Defoe at 59 to write a long narrative pretending to be the memoirs of a shipwrecked English planter from Brazil on a deserted island off the coast of South America. After Harley’s fall from power in 1714, Defoe’s epistolary record goes nearly blank, and we have little to go on for those five years until Robinson Crusoe appears in 1719.1 We do know that Defoe was not idle; he was never that, and indeed writing was his main livelihood. Having been recruited by the Whig ministry to act as a subversive mole within the Tory opposition press, he wrote extensively for what Novak identifies as “the most forceful anti-government newspaper,” the Weekly Journal, or Mist’s Weekly Journal, so called after its editor, Nathaniel Mist.2 And among the various pamphlets and tracts he published separately from his periodical journalism in those years, he found time to write the substantial and very popular conduct book in dramatic 174

Robinson Crusoe dialogues, The Family Instructor (1714), which he continued in a second volume in 1718. In line with such other literary efforts, his main motive for producing extended imaginative writing like Robinson Crusoe was surely economic, since in 1719 Defoe was as necessitous as ever, with his large family and expensive way of living always in need of extra income. Travel books, both real and embellished or even fictitious voyages, were very popular and obviously a good commercial proposition, and Crusoe’s story includes a number of exotic locales that were staples of this genre – Muslim North Africa and the Americas. Defoe himself shared this interest in travel literature, and as Pat Rogers observes “one of the best-attested facts concerning Defoe is his absorption in travel.”3 Although there is no specific documentary proof of the connection, Defoe’s particular inspiration for what would prove to be his most popular work came from the publicity surrounding the return a few years before in 1711 to England of the Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk, who had been marooned on an island off the coast of Chile by William Dampier, the captain of the privateering expedition (to prey on Spanish and Portuguese shipping) with whom he had quarreled. Selkirk spent four years living in solitude on Mas à Tierra (now called Isla Robinson Crusoe), and when he returned to England, he achieved a brief measure of fame when he was interviewed by Richard Steele and his story recounted in Steele’s periodical paper, The Englishman.4 Robinson Crusoe grew out of Defoe’s eye for the commercial main chance; he saw the possibilities for profit in the early eighteenth-century equivalent of a tabloid sensation story. But he seems also by temperament to have been attracted to travel and adventure writing. He was interested, as he explained to Harley on several occasions, in promoting British settlements in South America, in what is now southern Argentina and Chile, which seems to have been the motive behind A New Voyage Round the World, By a Course never Sailed before. Being a Voyage undertaken by some Merchants, who afterwards proposed the setting up of an East India Company in Flanders (1724), an entirely fictional account Defoe presented as an authentic travel narrative.5 But in 1719 Defoe had never done anything quite like Robinson Crusoe, no fiction so elaborate, no narrative so devoted to evoking the life of a private person with no topical or political importance, and no extended prose narrative so seemingly separate from political polemic and religious controversy, although there are clearly religious themes as well as political implications in Crusoe’s narrative. But the latter, especially, require teasing out for modern readers and are never overtly polemical. There is, in retrospect however, an inevitability in Defoe’s turning to extended narrative fiction in the third decade of the eighteenth century. As we have seen, he had a native talent and deep affinity for narrative. The Review and much of his other political journalism are often enough full of anecdote and lively dramatic impersonation. There are a number of shorter works, moreover, from the second decade of the eighteenth century that represent finger exercises 175

Robinson Crusoe in preparation for what can now be seen as his later career as a writer of imaginative fiction. These are political tracts that have a basic narrative form of a minimal but occasionally interesting sort. For the best and most attractive example of this sort of overtly political fiction that can stand as an instance of a narrative much more narrowly defined and calculated for certain effects than the vein he began to mine in Robinson Crusoe (but that also anticipates his subsequent turn to a purer kind of fiction), consider Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager at the Court of England, Towards the close of the last Reign. Wherein some of the most secret transactions of that time, relating to the interest of the Pretender, and a clandestine separate peace, are detected and laid open. Written by Himself. Done out of French (1717), the fictitious memoirs of Louis XIV’s ambassador, Nicholas Mesnager, to London in 1711 in secret negotiations with the ministry to end the war and later on the French plenipotentiary at the peace conference in Utrecht in 1713 that finally ended the war. Although one can never be sure if Defoe’s bookseller concocted the book’s title, it certainly promises the inside story of a controversial episode in recent English history. Defoe’s book is the political equivalent of a chronique scandaleuse such as Delarivière Manley had offered to a public eager for sexual as well as political scandal a few years earlier during the reign of Queen Anne.6 As Harley’s confidential agent and counselor, Defoe had a good deal of inside information about these negotiations, although he did not actually know Bolingbroke. The book displays what might be called Defoe’s natural tropism for narrative creativity, for adding (that is to say, inventing) details and imagining humanizing touches among the participants in recent history that seek to offer the reader a highly personalized political scene, complete with stage directions and marked, intimate dialogue. P.N. Furbank assigns this work to what he labels the “genre of mendacity,” which is a useful term, since the book is a plausible lie rather than a pure fabrication.7 So M. Nicholas Mesnager becomes a firstperson narrator and actor, the private counselor of Louis XIV who boasts of his closeness to that monarch and renders his pride at being selected as his agent: Says the King, I must have a trusty person at the Hague; an able man never wants instruments; I think you shall be the man, Mesnager, What say you? the thought just now occurs to me; here the King paus’d as he had expected my answer, and after a little, he turn’d short on me, Does your heart fail you? says his Majesty. I was a little surprized, for I had nothing but joy in my thoughts on the motion. Not to attempt any thing, SIR, returned I, that your Majesty commands, only doubtful of my ability: I’ll take the hazard of that, says the King: Get your self ready, and see me here to morrow after vespers. (pp. 16–17)

Any reader of Defoe’s correspondence with Harley (and his evocations of the role he claimed to have played as unofficial consigliere to William III) will 176

Robinson Crusoe recognize the grandiose self-projection that he puts into this character and especially into this particular vignette and a few others like it in the book. Mesnager, at the outset, remembers Louis’s thoughtfulness and attention to style in state documents; “I found that two or three times his Majesty called for me to draw up some schemes of publick affairs which he had digested in his own thoughts.” But sometimes, Mesnager adds with the kind of false modesty Defoe himself is frequently guilty of, as he read back to the King what had been proposed, he would find his own judgments and opinions preferred: “and sometimes would ask if it were not better so or so, and oblige me to give my judgment; in which I had the good fortune to have my opinion please him better than his own” (pp. 4–5). Through touches like these, Defoe strives to create a vivid scene (and succeeds, I think, most of the time) where not only Mesnager comes alive but Louis is not the remote Sun King but a shrewd strategist in council with his advisors, as Mesnager reports. When the King insists that any negotiation with the Allies must exclude the Duke of Marlborough, all his advisors disagree and one of them even goes so far as to say that “it was impossible.” The dramatic tension of the moment is brilliantly evoked in the next sentence: “The King smiled, and said nothing; but it was easie for a man of any penetration to know it signified both anger and contempt; and the same person, though of the first rank, had the mortification soon after to understand it better” (p. 14). Mesnager shuttles between France and London as negotiations proceed, and near the end the book even grows romantic, turning Louis into a gallant as well as ambitious figure. Sending Mesnager to England again, Louis gives him his instructions and paints the scene like someone out of a historical romance: . . . you carry the fortune of France in your hand: If you manage this point well, you serve me and save your country; I need give you no other instructions than you have already, except in two things. First, as to the secret demands of assistance, in case the Queen should be insulted by her own subjects, assure her Majesty, all the forces of France shall be at her service in such a case; ‘And if it may be to render her service, I’ll come in person, as old as I am, with a hundred thousand men, to support her; I charge you tell her these very words. (pp. 210–11)

Such Gallic gallantry is deliberately placed near the end of the narrative, after an extended satiric look at English politics and pamphleteering. Defoe’s book is also a contribution to another sub genre, a satirically guided account of a foreign visitor to England in which Mesnager’s rendition of English politics from a Frenchman’s point of view is amusing and meant to be subversive, echoing in fact some of Defoe’s favorite themes in the Review: . . . the English are as easily made slaves as other nations; nay, they will make themselves slaves, for they will sell and betray their own liberties and rights for money;

177

Robinson Crusoe as they effectually do, who sell their votes in the choice of the deputies of Parliament. . . . Upon the whole, the English are a nation, who talk high of their liberty, and of the government being qualified to make the monarch great and the people happy; but are in truth as easily enslaved, and reduced to irretrievable bondage, were they politickly managed, as any nation in the world. (pp. 94–5)8

But Defoe strives for balance in this satiric picture, so that Mesnager is at the same time impressed by the extraordinary freedom of speech and political discourse to be found in London, which elsewhere in Europe would lead to physical violence or repression but here to his astonishment it does not:“I was amazed to hear of the great Lords of the court, the ministers of state, and especially Mr. H, then High Treasurer, called rogues, villains, thieves, &c. and the friends of the government, as well as those of the former treasurer, damn’d and curs’d to Hell, by the several parties in their ordinary discourse, and in the common companies in every coffee-house; and yet no quarrel all the while among people who did so” (p. 88). This description combines satire with admiration and the mixed tone is of a piece with Defoe’s defense of Harley, which is unobtrusive, implicit and oblique much of the time. Defoe has Mesnager casually insert Harley’s name. As Furbank and Owens point out, Harley was at the time on trial for treason, languishing in the Tower (and Mesnager himself was dead), and what looks like (and is) political secret history and satire is in their view also a shrewd defense of Defoe’s disgraced patron.9 Defoe “reproduces” (read “invents”) pages of dialogue between Mesnager and an “English Lord” (perhaps Bolingbroke, who had just fled to France, or perhaps Charles Talbot, the Duke of Shrewsbury, close ally of Harley’s, never named but Geoffrey Sill thinks that’s who it is10), which are nothing less than unofficial and unauthorized negotiations about ending the war. Mesnager notes that at this time rumors began to circulate that the ministry was seeking to arrange a peace separately from its allies through secret negotiations. Of course, that’s precisely what we are reading about, and the effect Defoe is hoping for by all this is to make some of Harley’s more Jacobitical allies like Bolingbroke the calculating villains of the piece and to provide a participant witness to what had been alleged in those years. (In the impeachment brought against him in the House of Commons, Bolingbroke had been charged with contriving the Queen’s authorization of a secret treaty signed by Mesnager, the Earl of Dartmouth, and Bolingbroke that ceded Spain to the Duke of Anjou, the French king’s nephew.) Harley, however, has been presented earlier in the book in a balanced fashion, his character according to Mesnager “very strangely compounded of a mixture of good and evil, no man spoke well of him in the general, all applauded him in particular; he had many virtues, and few personal vices attended him; he had less avarice than ambition, a compleat government of his passions, and seemed to be perfectly void of pride: As to money, he strove even to a fault, to merit 178

Robinson Crusoe that character given by a famous author to his predecessor, (viz.) to be frugal of the Queen’s money, and lavish of his own” (p. 50). Defoe’s French agent is by this point someone the reader is meant to trust; he is an impartial observer of English affairs and by turns impressed, amused, and puzzled by English inconsistency and eccentricity.11 But as Geoffrey Sill points out, Mesnager as a Frenchman is on the other side of the fence, and the reader is being prompted to reverse or at least to modify all his judgments. Thus, for example Mesnager thinks that in his dialogues with Shrewsbury the latter has agreed to leave open a loophole so that the Pretender will succeed Queen Anne, but the reader knows that Shrewsbury in fact assisted the Hanoverian succession three years before in 1714, so he must have been stringing Mesnager along. As Sill summarizes matters, perhaps rather too subtly, Defoe shows us here that he “had learned the knack of describing human behavior not merely as a series of public acts, but as a complex of intentions which, when properly understood, went a long way toward redeeming the apparently criminal or treasonable nature of those actions.”12 The book’s most striking aspect is Defoe’s insertion of himself into the text, illustrating thereby his need to place his distinctive signature in his fiction. In the most general terms, the Memoirs illustrates his nearly compulsive inability to leave himself out of a historical record in which he was at best a minor player. Mesnager recounts how he engaged an English pamphleteer to promote the French desire that the war be pursued in Spain rather than in Flanders. Mesnager’s description of English pamphleteers offers a wicked view of the world in which Defoe worked. These writers, he says, are “the best people of the kind that are any where to be found; for they have so many turns to impose upon their people, that nothing I have met with was ever like it” (p. 108). His summary of his writer’s abilities continues the satirical thread and might just as easily have been applied to Defoe by his enemies: “My writer had an excellent talent, and words enough, and was as well qualified to prove nonentities to contain substance, and substance to be entirely spirituous, as any one I have met with; I was no judge of his style, having but little of the tongue; but as I kept him entirely private, I found the people always eager to read what he wrote, and frequently his books were said to be written by one great Lord, or one eminent author or other” (p. 108). The sequence ends with Mesnager’s talented English hack suddenly and unfortunately dying.The Swedish ambassador, one M. Lyencroon (actually the Swedish diplomat, Christopher Leijonerona), recommends as his replacement the author of “Reasons why this Nation Ought to Put an End to this Expensive War,” that is, Defoe, who published that pamphlet in 1711! His recommendation by the Swedish ambassador is a curious in-joke, since Defoe had been in trouble with the Swedes some years earlier for writing irreverently about Charles XII, their great national hero. In all this, as Furbank and Owens observe, Defoe “lays irony upon irony,” as Mesnager is impressed by an anti-French pamphlet.13 Defoe is 179

Robinson Crusoe deliberately and playfully revising the historical record in this pseudo-historical documentary. The joke takes an odd turn when Mesnager relates that he sent Defoe a hundred pistoles, only to discover that “the man was in the service of the state, and that he had let the Queen know of the hundred pistols he had received” (p. 109). Defoe undercuts his own narrator, establishing a point of view within his narrative that surprises the unwary reader and makes the invisible author (Defoe) suddenly and effectively the political hero of the piece. For a time, at least, the main purpose of the book, to defend his old patron, Harley, is subordinated to Defoe’s need to place himself at center stage, to tell once again a self-justifying story. Indeed, as P.N. Furbank suggests there may be more than a little personal fantasy in Defoe’s identification with Mesnager; he admired Louis XIV, despite his many crimes and his persecution of Protestants, and sought to coach Harley into emulating Louis’ great minister, Richelieu.14 Rather less successful as vivid narrative that survives its historical moment but more directly related to Harley’s defense in the aftermath of the fall of the Tory ministry are two narrative tracts published in 1714 and 1715: The Secret History of the White-Staff, Being An Account of Affairs under the Conduct of some late Ministers, and of what might probably have happened if Her Majesty had not Died (Part II of this tract was published later in 1714) and The Secret History of the Secret History of The White Staff, Purse and Mitre (1715). As Alan Downie points out, the first of these is a “clever mixture of fact and fiction,” although that might be said of all of Defoe’s narrative writing.15 Composed largely of imagined speeches, reported by an observer in the third person, made by Harley in his own defense to his enemies within the ministry and most memorably to the queen herself, the tract has most of the time an exaggerated dignity, viewing Harley as an injured innocent, a heroically self-sacrificing patriot. Defoe prefaces what is largely fabricated (although in its essentials accurate enough) political gossip with a generalized historical rhetoric, as if his tract was out to illustrate important ideas rather than to defend and idealize his political patron: “We are not without Examples where such encroaching Instruments have supplanted those who went before them, nay their very Benefactors, and slipt into the Chair of Management at the Expence of those that rais’d them to that Power, and whose Creatures they were” (p. 265). Imagining speeches made by historical characters is as old as Thucydides, and Defoe’s rendition of Harley’s surrender of the white staff of his office to Queen Anne is a superb piece of evocative journalism masquerading as narrative history. “Nothing was ever acted with more Temper and Gravity, and yet with an undepress’d Gallantry of Spirit, than the Staff acted this last Scene, when putting into the Queen’s hands the Ensign of Office, he chearfully removed from the highest Station of Honour and Power” (p. 286) is how Defoe sets the scene for Harley’s speech to her (admitting that it is something of a dramatic fabrication by remarking that he has “heard that it was something like what follows” (p. 286): 180

Robinson Crusoe He told her it was with great Satisfaction, on his own Account, that he came to lay down what he never, but with a View to her Majesty’s Interest, enjoy’d with any Comfort. That the only Grief he conceiv’d in his Removal was, the Assurance he had that those People who pretended to succeed him, would embark her Majesty in impracticable Schemes, which if her Majesty’s own Wisdom did not prevent it, would be her Ruin. . . . that he chose to lay down the greatest Advantages, and rather to bear the present loss of her Royal Favour, than to have any hand in Measures which he was satisfy’d would tend to lessen her Safety; and he did not doubt that when her Majesty should be convinc’d, that he had lost her Favour to preserve her Person and Government, she would not lay that Sin to his Charge.’ (pp. 286–7)

Defoe follows this speech with the quite outrageous suggestion that the queen was so moved by Harley’s speech that she secretly determined “In a short while to restore it [the White Staff] to the same hands again, upon the foot of such Schemes as he had laid before her Majesty” (p. 288). At the end of this scene, he proposes that the queen’s subsequent death was hastened by this incident (as indeed it may have been, but she had not been well for years), since the autopsy he claims found that she was healthy enough “but that something which affected her Heart was supposed to occasion her Death” (p. 290). Defoe’s tabloid evasiveness as he insinuates all this is fairly shifty and even dishonest, whatever one thinks of Harley’s displacement, and he couches his accusations in a quasilegalistic and self-protective fashion that affirms and then withdraws or qualifies: “This Tract shall no farther inquire into the melancholly Part, viz. How much the Disturbance, these things were to her Majesty, gave any assistance to the Distemper which seized her so violently, or hastened her Death; Nor has it any Relation to the Design in Hand” (p. 290). Defoe’s claims to omniscience are also qualified by occasional phrases (“I have been inform’d,” “which I have heard was in Terms something like what follows” [pp. 288, 286]), as he admits that he was not actually present at these scenes: “These things, and many more to this purpose,” he admits after Harley’s speech to the queen and to his supplanters, “as I am inform’d, were said on this Occasion” (p. 289). Moreover, the morally superior tone of the pamphlet is at least once compromised (and enlivened) by Defoe’s racy evocation of the backstairs gossip about the influence of the queen’s female advisors, such as Sarah Churchill and her successor in Anne’s affections, Abigail Masham: “That Female Buz which had, for many Years past, too much influence in publick Managements, began now to work; and Men of State thought fit to plough with the Heifers of the Court” (p. 281). This is substantially true, since Bolingbroke had used Lady Masham to win the queen over to his side away from Harley and the Marlboroughs. After his resignation of the White Staff, Harley in Defoe’s version then turns “to some of his Supplanters, who it seems were present at this part of the Act” (the dramatic implications of that last word are obvious) and “with a smart, yet 181

Robinson Crusoe modest Address” exposes and indeed ridicules their “new Schemes” and “foretold them to what Distresses they would reduce themselves in a little time” (p. 288). If Harley is thus painted heroically noble, his opponents in the ministry are the blackest of treacherous Jacobite devils, and the pamphlet ends with them raging (in Defoe’s version) after the queen has told them “that she was resolved to be Mistress of her own Measures, and to Reign without them” (p. 293). Giving us a sample of “the black Designs of Great Numbers of Men” (p. 294), Defoe concludes with an advertisement for the second part of the book, the continuation necessary to do justice to “a Scene of such Consequence, fill’d with such a Complication of Villany . . . It must be related in a Volume by itself ” (p. 294). Next to this simple story of good versus evil Defoe offers another strand in his narrative that complicates it and is closer to the truth about Harley, that master strategist and consummate politician. Thus in summarizing some of Harley’s earlier successes, Defoe tells us that attacks upon him “turn’d all into Victories; every one of which fortify’d his Interest, and made him stronger than before” (p. 271). In Defoe’s plausible account of things, it was precisely this skill at management that most infuriated Harley’s rivals and led them on to undermine him. So Bolingbroke and Bishop Francis Atterbury concocted the Bill for Preventing the Growth of Schism, which sought to close the Dissenting academies. If Harley opposes it to please his supporters among Whigs and dissenters, they reasoned, he will lose the queen’s support and if he supports it he will lose his strength with the dissenters. “Yet even here the Staff stood its ground . . . he baffled them both ways; for he, as it were, castrated the Bill, took out all the malicious and persecuting Part . . . let it pass with all in it that really useful for the Church’s Advantage, and yet left it unable to do the Mischief which it was design’d for” (p. 277). Eventually, Harley’s enemies (in Defoe’s highly distorted version of events) succeed in associating him with their support for the Pretender and in convincing the queen that “he govern’d all things with such an absolute Authority, and carried it in so superior a manner, that it was become insupportable to all the rest of the Ministry” (p. 281).Yet even as the queen was finally convinced, Defoe concludes as he spins out this set of complex political moves, she “began, even in two days, to see that her Goodness was impos’d upon” (p. 281), since the White Staff went not to Bolingbroke, the head of the anti-Harleyeans, but to the Whig Duke of Shrewsbury: “fix’d, by the Royal Direction, in Hands as different from their Views who obtain’d it to be removed, as it was before, and as unexpected and surprising to the People we are speaking of, as a Clap of Christmas Thunder to a Female Soothsayer” (p. 281). Even in defeat, in Defoe’s narrative, Harley gains an upper hand, turning his own defeat into a victory over his enemies. This is the kind of story Defoe clearly loved to relate, a tangle of turn and counter-turn, of directions established by indirections and feints. To be sure, it isn’t really accurate. As Sutherland points out, in his last days in power 182

Robinson Crusoe Harley had been drinking hard and losing touch and control of affairs, and with his fall from power, Bolingbroke, a young man of 36, was virtual head of the government.16 Defoe’s own writing in the next few months exhibits this same kind of tactical tangle. Apparently, many readers thought that Harley had himself written both parts of The Secret History of the White Staff, and he was understandably displeased to be considered so self-serving and self-aggrandizing. In fact, as Alan Downie points out, just before he was sent to prison in the Tower Harley inserted an advertisement in the Gazette for July 5–9, 1715 denying that he had anything to do with both The Secret History of the White Staff and the 1715 An Account of the Conduct of Robert, Earl of Oxford, also by Defoe.17 Defoe sought to cover both their tracks by publishing the extraordinarily devious The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff, Purse and Mitre (1715), in which he exposed his own books in defense of the White Staff as a fraud, “prepar’d either on Purpose to get a Penny by the Books, or to Deceive the People, or both” (p. 297). Defoe’s persona in this tract imagines, as well he might, the pleasure the books’s author (Defoe himself, of course) derived from the confusion of his enemies, who know the books were to some extent fabricated but “they could not avoid the Snare of taking the Books for Genuine, and for a Design of the Staff, to start something into the World in his own Vindication” (p. 299). Defoe imagines a dialogue in a coffee house where the books are a topic of discussion between a Quaker and another citizen, the latter maintaining that they were written by Robert Harley, the Earl of Oxford, or at least that he “furnish’d Materials for this Book to Daniel De Foe, or some such other Scribler, as for Money he might get, to do such a piece of Drudgery for him?” (p. 300). The Quaker responds that he doesn’t know who Daniel De Foe is but he does know that Harley did no such thing. The Quaker refuses to give his reasons for this assertion, so Defoe’s author follows him to try to find out what they might be. He takes him to a public house and after mentioning several Quakers he knows to establish his good faith tells him his own doubts about the books, articulating all the obvious objections to the White Staff pamphlets: “I often thought the whole was a continu’d Fiction; that some Things were put in, which were not probable, sundry Speeches fram’d, which I believ’d were never spoken” (p. 301). The Quaker reveals, and here is the real plot as Defoe wants readers to believe it, the real secret history of the secret history, that a friend of his has spoken to Harley and received the truth from him. And further that this friend has sought out the friend of “that Person, who common Fame had tax’d with it in Publick” (p. 302). That person is of course Defoe himself, who turns out according to the Quaker’s friend to be very ill, “in a very Dangerous Condition, having had a Fit of an Apoplexy . . . insomuch that his Life was despair’d of ” (p. 301). From his sick bed, this Defoe denies that either he or Harley had any hand in the tracts, although he does concede that he was asked to revise some of the copy at the 183

Robinson Crusoe press. As the Quaker reports, “My Friend told me, he could not question the Truth of what a Man, as it were stepping into the Grave, had so freely declar’d” (p. 303). As Downie notes in his edition, there is no evidence that Defoe was ill at this time. But the effrontery and self-promotion in all this is truly breathtaking. Defoe has an inexhaustible capacity for staging complicated in-jokes about himself and his work, and in this case he shares the spotlight with Harley. The effect here, especially from our informed latter day perspective, is of a fictional narrative constructed within and against the truthful narrative about Defoe’s writing in fictionalized fashion about Harley’s fall. The rest of the pamphlet is a sustained auto-critique of Defoe’s own modus operandi as a writer of political pamphlets and in particular of the liberties with truth taken in “The Secret History of the White Staff.” As we have seen on many occasions, Defoe likes to think of himself as morally and intellectually superior to the degrading commercial conditions in which he had to operate, and he protests entirely too much, here and elsewhere. Of course, this edgy defensiveness gives his prose an interesting tension. In addition, Defoe’s author fulminates against the devices of publishers and their hacks “who write and Print whatsoever they find the People foolish enough to buy; and who watch the Inclinations of the People to see, what will take with and please their Humour; not valuing whom they deceive, or whom they expose, so that they can make their Books sell off which they print, and bring them to a second or third Edition” (p. 310). This evocation of authorial connivance is pretty near the bone, not an unfair description of the strategies Defoe himself by necessity employed in his writing career, although obviously his pamphlets in defense of Harley can’t be accused of this. Defoe is, nonetheless, defensive and goes out of his way to evoke a situation in which booksellers like the notoriously unscrupulous Edmund Curll publish books on both sides of an issue, often enough written by the same hired hand. But the main issue in this odd pamphlet is truth versus fiction. Pressed by his patron’s uneasiness with the patently fictionalized defense of his actions, Defoe writes a retraction and disavowal that indicates that he is always aware of the shaky foundations of quasi-fictional reporting, his gnawing sense that these are polemical and transitory, merely instrumental fictions rather than truth.

Robinson Crusoe, Part I Was there every yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress? Samuel Johnson

184

Robinson Crusoe These journalistic narratives are in the final analysis thin fare, lacking that fullness, that open ended quality we associate with novelistic fiction, which subordinates particular ideological or political purposes to the evocation of distinct characters, who may lack the historical reality of actual persons such as Nicholas Mesnager or Robert Harley, but who in their imaginative elaborations are their own justification for being by virtue of their expansive experiences and the deeply dimensional personalities they thus project. Defoe’s leap from dramatized propaganda and polemic to extended autobiographical impersonation in his longer fictions is hugely transformative, and no one has ever fully explained this momentous transition in his work. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe conceives a character of archetypical significance, with deep and abiding resonances for modern European self-consciousness. James Joyce described him as an imperial prototype. In a lecture he gave in Trieste (in Italian) in 1911, he found “the whole AngloSaxon spirit” in Crusoe, “the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.”18 Crusoe has as well a less exclusively nationalistic significance: he is, although reluctantly, the ultimate individualist, the man alone, surviving by his wits and relying very quickly as a slave in Morocco on his own resourcefulness, and as such he is a type of modern man, the self-constructed individual who exists (somehow) outside of the social or communal world. With a few other characters such as Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust, Crusoe has thus passed into the collective understanding of western humanity, and my discussion of the novel is in a way an attempt to extract his somewhat neglected early eighteenth-century significance as a character, or better, to see what the relationship might be between that initial set of meanings he had for Defoe and his original readers and Crusoe’s ultimate enshrinement as a mythical personage for later generations.19 Robinson Crusoe and the novels that follow it in this intensely creative period from 1719 to 1724 have since then come to be understood by literary historians as crucial to that revolution in narrative technique that leads in the 1740s in Britain to the modern realistic novel. Crusoe is very much an archetype, an epitome of cultural identity and consciousness summed up mainly in our idea of the modern individual. But Defoe’s narrative is also insistently particularized; his hero is an exactly rendered, actualized person, Robinson Crusoe, of York, with a unique identity, a vehicle for generalized significance but also a speaker who claims first and foremost to be a real person (despite the extraordinary nature of his life) just like each individual reader of his meticulously rendered story. In a classic formulation of Defoe’s originality at what he labels “formal realism,” Ian Watt says that in Robinson Crusoe and his other narratives Defoe develops the “circumstantial view of life,” and he offers the following evocation of what this means for the history of prose fiction in English: “that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to 185

Robinson Crusoe satisfy its readers with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their action, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms.”20 In part, this specificity is what characterizes each of Defoe’s narratives, and the question is whether the rendition of plausible individuals and their lives actually works, or whether such personages remain convincing for modern readers. As we will see, Defoe’s fictions deserve to be labeled proto-realistic rather than full anticipations of later, more deliberate realisms, since his narrators are eighteenth-century individuals first and foremost, defined by their specific historical circumstances and their own forms of self-consciousness and not simply vehicles for a universalized humanity. As characters who tell their own stories, Defoe’s narrators express a subjectivity rather than an objectivity; the external world as they observe it is filtered through their responses, and readers are implicitly invited to question the coherence of their moral and psychological observations. What early twentyfirst-century readers should not forget is that Crusoe and the others, however familiar and vital they may sound at times, lived in a world quite distinct from ours and that eighteenth-century authors (like Defoe) and readers brought different assumptions to their understanding of character and its derivation from circumstances and events. In my discussions of these novels, which begins here with Robinson Crusoe, I will try to bear these differences in mind. At the same time, it may be impossible to maintain our absolute historical distance from these narratives, since their claim on us is precisely how well they have weathered, how easily they adapt themselves to our modern assumptions about individuals, how they predict our own modernity and sense of individual identity without being identical with those always-altering conceptions. Thus, in the second sequel to Robinson Crusoe, the Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.With His Vision of the Angelick World. Written by Himself (1720), Defoe has his hero defend the truth and the usefulness of his story and in the process articulate some ideas about narrative meaning that may surprise a modern reader. Against accusations that his story is a “romance,” an “invention to impose upon the world,” Crusoe protests “that the story, though allegorical, is also historical; and that it is the beautiful representation of a life of unexampled misfortunes.”21 Partly, Crusoe is simply asserting that despite the story’s generalized applicability he is a actual person, but Defoe is also in the very next paragraph making the allegory almost embarrassingly personal: “there is a man alive, and well known too, the actions of whose life are the just subject of these volumes, and to whom all or most part of the story most directly alludes” (pp. ix–x). Crusoe is made to say, yet again in the preface, that his story is an allegory with generalized moral meaning: “Here is invincible patience recommended under the worst of misery, indefatigable application and undaunted resolution under the greatest and most discouraging circumstances” (p. xii). That 186

Robinson Crusoe summary clearly points to Defoe’s bitter view of his own life. Crusoe caps this insistence by concluding that he has not taken the “common way of writing a man’s private history” but if he had it would have been “the conduct or life of a man you knew, and whose misfortunes and infirmities perhaps you had sometimes unjustly triumphed over” (p. xiii). Besides illustrating again Defoe’s defining self-absorption and his need to respond to his critics, such comments outline a defense of narrative fiction as simultaneously literally true and allegorical in a general sense.22 Like the narratives that followed it, Robinson Crusoe features a great variety of scenes and actions, although it has more unity than his later, more picaresque criminal narratives. Nonetheless, there is rather more to it than the island sojourn, even if that constitutes the defining core of the book. Such deliberate variety was clearly a key part of the popular appeal of Defoe’s fiction, written for an audience whose horizons were by necessity much narrower than those of a modern readership and who were therefore hungry for evocations of exotic places that they could never hope to see. And the variety has another function. Before Crusoe arrives on his island, Defoe builds him up as a character, providing him with a specific history and a number of experiences that in fact prepare him for his extraordinary solitary survival and also insure that he will wonder why fate has chosen this painful destiny for him. Chief among these formative experiences is his time as a slave in Sallee, present day Morocco, and his daring escape from slavery and subsequent voyage with a young Moorish boy, Xury, in a small boat along the western African coast until he is picked up a Portuguese ship that takes him to Brazil, where he sets up as a planter. But of course his young man’s impatience with the safe career his old father counsels him to choose is the seed for this and all of his subsequent adventures, as he himself reminds readers frequently. From the first, Crusoe is ambivalently ambitious, eager to go to sea and make a fortune, thirsting for advancement and experience and as such showing the way for centuries of young male novelistic heroes, but also in the retrospect of his narrative remorseful for his rash, misguided ambition. A good part of Defoe’s originality lies in his narrator’s autobiographical curiosity, his own consuming interest in the pattern of his life, which he explains to some extent in spiritual or religious terms as the result of his youthful indifference to God’s place in his life, although as we will see that is far from the whole story, even for him. Defoe is careful from the opening paragraph of the narrative to place Crusoe in exact contemporary circumstances of a mundane sort, even tracing the Crusoe family’s recent origins in Germany (a reader of Defoe’s early work will be reminded of his popular satiric poem, “The True-Born Englishman,” (1701) which dwells to comic effect on the mixed ethnic heritage of all Englishmen). Crusoe’s father is an immigrant from Bremen, in Germany, and the family name there was “Kreutznaer; but by the usual corruption of words in England, we are 187

Robinson Crusoe now call’d, nay we call our selves, and write our name, Crusoe, and so my companions always call’d me.”23 So perhaps the most famous character in English literature is in fact half German, a first-generation Englishman. And he also notes at the outset very precisely that he “had two elder brothers, one of which was Lieutenant Collonel to an English Regiment of Foot in Flanders, formerly commanded by the famous Coll. Lockhart, and was killed at the Battle near Dunkirk against the Spaniards.What became of my second brother I never knew any more than my father or mother did know what was become of me” (p. 5). Defoe goes out of his way, in short, to place Crusoe’s family in recent English and European history – Lockhart was one of Cromwell’s generals who had captured Dunkirk from the Spaniards in 1658 – and to derive his family history from the particular circumstances of recent European immigration. In addition, Crusoe and his soldier brother are typical instances of what Defoe’s novels represent as the dispersal and the not uncommon disappearance of young people into the vortex of attractive but dangerous modern adventure in war and commerce. This radical severance of young individuals from family and traditional social groups is the central and defining experience in Defoe’s fiction, the facet of contemporary life that his novels depend on for their basic plots and that sets up their central theme of individualized identity. From its opening pages, however, Robinson Crusoe has two parallel narrative tracks, two competing perspectives on the meaning of the hero’s life – secular and religious – hardly surprising given what we know about Defoe’s own life and writing before 1719. At 18, young Robinson Crusoe disregards his old father’s commands that he stay at home and study law to become a mercantile adventurer who after a few false starts and a near-shipwreck goes with a captain he meets in London on a profitable trading voyage to Guinea (west Africa) and makes a considerable profit: “I brought Home L. 5. 9 ounces of gold dust for my adventure, which yielded me in London at my return, almost 300 l. and this fill’d me with those aspiring thoughts which have since so compleated my ruin” (p. 16).24 Crusoe’s mature retrospection on his youthful rebellion and even on this profitable expedition is dominated by the religious regret in that last phrase; his story from the first is structured as one influential critical account has it “on the basis of a familiar Christian pattern of disobedience – punishment – repentance – deliverance, a pattern set up in the first few pages of the book.”25 These twin tracks and the relationship between them create a perennial dilemma for readers, for Crusoe’s story is of physical survival and secular prosperity that are accompanied by a psycho-religious transformation. The religious element has largely dropped out for modern readers, but it was an essential part of the book’s initial appeal and still part of the secret of the hero’s complexity, as well as a crucial aspect of his psychological accommodation to his situation. Once Crusoe finds himself on the island he will naturally search for an answer to the ques-

188

Robinson Crusoe tion of why his destiny has led him there. Most of the time, however, he will be preoccupied with the practical business of survival. His narration necessarily turns to the details of that survival: how did he manage it? is the question Defoe seeks to answer. But then and especially nowadays a related question would be how Crusoe learns to live with his almost unimaginable isolation and to cope with the paralyzing anxiety that it brings. Robinson Crusoe is first and foremost remarkable by virtue of its attention to the realities, internal as well as external, of an extreme situation, and nothing is more extreme nor more illustrative of the special qualities of Defoe’s innovative realistic narrative practice than his rendition of Crusoe’s washing up on the island as his ship is wrecked, a passage worth quoting at some length:

Nothing can describe the confusion of thought which I felt when I sunk into the water; for tho’ I swam very well, yet I could not deliver my self from the waves so as to draw breath, till that wave having driven me, or rather carried me a vast way on towards the shore, and having spent it self, went back, and left me upon the land almost dry, but half-dead with the water I took in. I had so much presence of mind as well as breath left, that seeing my self nearer the main land than I expected, I got upon my feet, and endeavoured to make on towards the land as fast as I could, before another wave should return, and take me up again. But I soon found it was impossible to avoid it; for I saw the sea come after me as high as a great hill, and as furious as an enemy which I had no means or strength to contend with; my business was to hold my breath, and raise my self upon the water, if I could: and so by swimming to preserve my breathing, and pilot my self towards the shore, if possible; my greatest concern now being, that the sea, as it would carry me a great way towards the shore when it came on, might not carry me back again with it when it gave back towards the sea. The wave that came upon me again, buried me at once 20 or 30 foot deep in its own body; and I could feel my self carried with a mighty force and swiftness towards the shore a very great way; but I held my breath, and assisted my self to swim still forward with all my might. I was ready to burst with holding my breath, when, as I felt my self rising up, so to my immediate relief, I found my head and hands shoot out above the surface of the water; and tho’ it was not two seconds of time that I could keep my self so, yet it reliev’d me greatly, gave me breath and new courage. I was covered again with water a good while, but not so long but I held it out; and finding the water had spent it self, and began to return, I stroock forward against the return of the waves, and felt ground again with my feet. I stood still a few moments to recover breath, and till the water went from me, and then took to my heels, and run with what strength I had farther towards the shore. But neither would this deliver me from the fury of the sea, which came pouring in after me again, and twice more I was lifted up by the waves and carried forwards as before, the shore being very flat. (pp. 37–8)

189

Robinson Crusoe Thanks to retrospective narration, Crusoe can evoke panic (“the confusion of thought”) and refer us to emotional states that cannot be adequately described. What can be rendered with some fullness are the exact circumstances surrounding those states, the particulars of experience delineated with a clarity and calmness that readers quickly come to see are his hallmarks as a narrator. This purity and clarity of description, this sharp focus on things and on phenomena, on sequences and exact movements, is Defoe’s great talent as a narrator. Note at the very end the crucial fact in a phrase, “the shore being very flat,” which makes it clear why he is driven such a long way toward land. Crusoe not only describes the motions of the waves and estimates their exact height; he instinctively cooperates with them, not so much struggling against them as letting them carry him forward and attempting to supplement their forward motion with his own, thus anticipating the kind of alert positioning and observation vis à vis natural process that will sustain him on the island. He knows precisely what his “business” is – to hold his breath in order to take some advantage of the motion of the waves. Note, too, the images for evoking the sea, which is not only “as high as a great hill” but “as furious as an enemy,” thus prefiguring Crusoe’s terrified isolation and paranoid uncertainty on the island, obsessed with erecting defenses, mainly against shadowy human enemies he fears are bound to come. Fear of the other is built into Crusoe’s psyche, reinforced by his earlier capture by Moroccan pirates. This successful navigation to the shore is followed immediately by Crusoe’s realization that he alone has escaped to tell the tale, so that resourcefulness as so often in the narrative that follows is accompanied by an isolation and self-doubt akin to existential despair. The following brief paragraph sums up a great deal about Crusoe’s new world: I walk’d about on the shore, lifting up my hands, and my whole being, as I may say, wrapt up in the contemplation of my deliverance, making a thousand gestures and motions which I cannot describe, reflecting upon all my comrades that were drown’d, and that there should not be one soul sav’d but my self; for, as for them, I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them, except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows. (pp. 38–9)

Crusoe chooses not to attempt the description of his thousand involuntary gestures; there are too many of them and they are not fit, by implication, for realistic narrative rendition, which in Robinson Crusoe, more so than any of Defoe’s other narratives, is selective, relatively controlled and contemplative, turning over facts and processes so that they can be grasped and made part of a clear and coherent material world. Crusoe says that even as he suffered these grotesque paroxysms of anguish over his situation he was contemplating his deliverance and “reflecting” on his drowned comrades, terms that sit oddly with the 190

Robinson Crusoe hysteria he admits possessed him. And yet, note that wonderfully bleak enumeration of all that ever turns up from his missing comrades – “three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows” – a list that shadows the clear light of realistic narration with the darkness of the random, arbitrary, and unpredictable nature of the material world. Who among us, resident in contemporary cities, cannot remember the similar pathos of, say, a single shoe or shirt abandoned in the street? The shoes, hats, and cap (note the careful distinction of kinds of head wear) are just a brief observation among the thousands that constitute Crusoe’s long narrative, but Crusoe’s cryptic inventory invests this moment with an existential pathos surrounding all of Defoe’s realism, whereby things and persons are linked and objects often enough survive their owners and dramatize the dispersal and essential fragility of being. “Realism” derives ultimately from the late Latin word, realis, from Latin res, thing. However, when we apply the notion of “realism” to Defoe’s narratives, perhaps “nominalism” is more accurate, since his focus on things, on facts and phenomena as they are experienced, implicitly denies the comforting reality of universals. But in what follows, Crusoe’s detailed rendition of his survival is accompanied by his attempt to find something like universals in his own very particularized experience, as he searches for signs of providential disposition in the events of his life. There is, in other words, a sustaining tension in Defoe’s firmly anchored narrative realism, since the actual and observable world needs a psycho-religious compass if it is not to overwhelm his characters by its directionless phenomenal flux. Of course, not all the lists in Robinson Crusoe have this existential bleakness. More often than not, enumeration is the beginning of practical knowledge, a laying out of what is available and of possibilities for survival. Thus, Crusoe gives readers several inventories of what he salvages from the wrecked ship, never losing his touch for exactness in quantitative reporting: I first got three of the seamens chests, which I had broken open and empty’d, and lower’d them down upon my raft; the first of these I fill’d with provisions, viz. bread, rice, three Dutch cheeses, five pieces of dry’d goat’s flesh, which we liv’d much upon, and a little remainder of European corn which had been laid by for some fowls which we brought to sea with us, but the fowls were kill’d; there had been some barley and wheat together, but, to my great disappointment, I found afterwards that the rats had eaten or spoil’d it all; as for liquors, I found several cases of bottles belonging to our skipper, in which were some cordial waters, and in all about five or six gallons of rack . . . My next care was for some ammunition and arms; there were two very good fowling-pieces in the great cabin, and two pistols, these I secur’d first, with some powder-horns, and a small bag of shot, and two old rusty swords; I knew there were three barrels of powder in the ship, but knew not where our gunner had stow’d them, but with much search I found them, two of them dry and good, the third had taken water, those two I got to my raft, with the arms, and now I thought my self pretty well freighted. . . . (pp. 41–2)

191

Robinson Crusoe Some modern readers (but not children, I have found) tend to grow impatient with such enumerations, as well they might, but the numbers – three or five of this and two of that – and the specificity – Dutch cheeses, dried goat’s flesh – are part of the verisimilitude Defoe is aiming for, at the risk of the reader’s boredom. The sympathetic reader will in due course know how important such salvage truly is: without his arms and ammunition Crusoe could not live, either as a hunter first and only later a gatherer and then eventually as a farmer, or as the efficient defender of his island against the cannibal visitors and English mutineers. Moreover, that corn and those depleted stocks of grain will eventually help to sustain him both physically and spiritually. Finally, Crusoe’s salvaging of just about everything useful from the ship makes one thing clear from the very start of his island experience. He does not survive, as some later commentators like Rousseau liked to think, by living strictly according to Nature. Rather, he survives precisely because he has just enough in the way of tools and equipment to supplement his own resourcefulness and determination. He acquires in this salvage operation a basic stock of crucial manufactured goods and implements, without which as he says later on he would have been reduced to an untenable primitive state: “I should have liv’d, if I had not perish’d, like a meer savage. That if I had kill’d a goat, or a fowl, by any contrivance, I had no way to flea or open them, or part the flesh from the skin and the bowels, or to cut it up; but must gnaw it with my teeth, and pull it with my claws like a beast” (p. 104). The mythic essence of the book, its rich metaphorical substratum, lies in this recurring opposition between the merely natural and to that extent degraded and violent human state (represented by the cannibals and later the mutineers) and the regulated cultural order that Crusoe establishes for himself on the island. Defoe would have agreed only in part with Benjamin Franklin’s definition of man as a tool-making animal, since he can only survive with tools others have made. Crusoe laments his lack of technology even as he improvises with the carpenter’s tools he has salvaged from the ship and becomes a crude version of homo faber: “I had never handled a tool in my life, and yet in time by labour, application and contrivance, I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have made it, especially if I had had tools; however I made abundance of things, even without tools, and some with no more tools than an adze and a hatchet, which perhaps were never made that way before, and that with infinite labour” (p. 55). In addition to such basic improvisations, Crusoe painfully recapitulates a good many of the stages of civilization, as he moves from hunting and gathering to domesticating animals (the goats he finds in abundance on the island) for milk and meat, to agriculture – farming various crops, some of which he finds growing wild like the limes and grapes – as well as to minor practical arts such as baking bread, making pots, and even tailoring. All this is to say that Crusoe comes in due course to see the island as an opportunity for more than mere survival. The 192

Robinson Crusoe island becomes a means of self-expression – his island. At length, he achieves what we might label its development; he seeks to appropriate the island, to possess it by turning a wilderness into a domesticated space rather like England. In the fashion described by John Locke whereby a man possesses land by working it, he becomes the owner of the island by his laboring on it and exploring it, claiming it by virtue of his European exceptionalism. Here in part is his account of his first exploration of the other side of his island: the country appear’d so fresh, so green, so flourishing, every thing being in a constant verdure, or flourish of Spring, that it it look’d like a planted garden. I descended a little on the side of that delicious vale, surveying it with a secret kind of pleasure, (tho’ mixt with my other afflicting thoughts) to think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, and had a right of possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in inheritance, as compleatly as any lord of a manor in England. (p. 80)26

Crusoe’s untroubled imperial appropriation of his island (improbably uninhabited and unexplored despite its fertility and abundance27) is clouded as he says by “other afflicting thoughts” induced by solitude and his fears of shadowy others, wild beasts or wild men, against which he spends a good deal of his time building more and more elaborate fortifications. He inhabits something like the state of nature as notoriously evoked by Hobbes, which that philosopher admitted in Leviathan was a philosophical abstraction that was only approximated in “the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust, have no government at all, and live at this day in that brutish manner.”28 Hobbes’ evocation of the state of war that accompanies the natural state underlines Crusoe’s achievement: where every man is enemy to every man . . . wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth . . . no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (Leviathan, p. 82)

Despite his deep anxieties, Crusoe gradually modifies this Hobbesian picture, which is otherwise an accurate evocation of the solitary life he leads. His industry is motivated to a large extent by his fear of others, as he erects elaborate defenses. But all of his conquests of the natural world are accompanied by the pains of isolation and the search for answers that eventually lead him to a religious conversion. The confident imperialist Crusoe eventually becomes is 193

Robinson Crusoe twinned by a paranoid and deeply insecure seeker for security and ultimate meaning, since even by our modern secular lights survival is a double business, requiring inner as well as outer constructions. In this search for answers, a revelation seems to occur when Crusoe early in his time on the island sees some green shoots that upon closer examination to his astonishment turn out to be “perfect green barley of the same kind as our European, nay, as our English barley” (p. 63). Crusoe is much moved to find barley growing “in a climate which I know was not proper for corn,” and he begins to think that God has intervened in his case, miraculously “caus’d this grain to grow without any help of seed sown, and that it was directed purely for my sustenance on that wild miserable place” (p. 63). But as he thinks back, Crusoe realizes that he had earlier shaken out what looked to him like some husks and dust in a bag that had contained grain to feed chickens. His “wonder began to cease” as he finds that this miracle is simply the result of an accident. Upon further reflection he extrudes another kind of more subtle providential operation from meditating on this incident: I ought to have been as thankful for so strange and unforeseen Providence, as if it had been miraculous; for it was really the work of Providence as to me, that should order or appoint, that 10 or 12 grains of corn should remain unspoil’d, (when the rats had destroy’d all the rest,) as if it had been dropt from Heaven; as also, that I should throw it out in that particular place, where it being in the shade of a high rock, it sprang up immediately; whereas, if I had thrown it any where else, at that time, it had been burnt up and destroy’d. (p. 64)

Providence as Crusoe here begins to understand cooperates with the random and the accidental, which is all the more reason for his narrative to be as precisely circumstantial as possible.The deity does not any longer as in biblical times intervene dramatically in human affairs, and he certainly doesn’t interfere with the material and temporal order of things. Crusoe is only temporarily chagrined, then, for he is learning to read phenomena with the kind of attention that reinserts providential purpose into the material world. God truly works in a mysterious way. And yet this conversion of what is on one level the accidental into a vehicle for providential workings is not quite enough to provide the steady selfconfidence Crusoe so clearly requires for effective survival.29 Like many of his contemporaries, Defoe sought a via media between simple credulity and a (presumably) frightening materialist agnosticism, and the almost incessant and to that extent insecure discussion in all his works of the possible immanence of the supernatural in our experience is what lends the novels especially a productive tension. 30 What a modern reader would recognize as Crusoe’s unconscious quickly takes over as he works on building his shelter and contrives to keep a “Journal” of his 194

Robinson Crusoe daily activities, which he reproduces for us (noting that he was forced to give it up when he ran out of ink). As a debilitating ague takes hold of him, he records a terrible dream that came to him in his sickness in which a figure, demon or angel he cannot tell, is about to kill him with the following terrifying preamble: “Seeing all these things have not brought thee to repentance, now thou shalt die” (p. 71). Crusoe describes himself as “wicked and prophane to the last degree . . . not having the least sense, either of the fear of God in danger, or of thankfulness to God in his deliverances” (p. 71). In his sickness he grows deeply reflective, seeking counsel in his bible and at length finding in the New Testament what he takes to be particular and pertinent: It was not long after I set seriously to this work, but I found my heart more deeply and sincerely affected with the wickedness of my past life: The impression of my dream reviv’d, and the words, All these things have not brought thee to repentance, ran seriously in my thought: I was earnestly begging of God to give me repentance, when it happen’d providentially the very day that reading the Scripture, I came to these words, He is exalted a prince and a saviour, to give repentance, and to give remission: I threw down the book, and with my heart as well as my hands lifted up to Heaven, in a kind of extasy of joy, I cry’d out aloud, Jesus, thou son of David, Jesus, thou exalted prince and saviour, give me repentance! This was the first time that I could say, in the true sense of the words, that I pray’d in all my life; for now I pray’d with a sense of my condition, and with a true Scripture view of hope founded on the encouragement of the word of God; and from this time, I may say, I began to have hope that God would hear me. (pp. 77–8)

Although this confidence in God needs periodic reaffirming as Crusoe goes along, the episode marks his acquisition of a serene trust in something like particularized providential purpose, the beginning of a conversion that will provide psychological strength in the conviction that there is some moral coherence and divine arrangement in his relegation to his island prison. Crusoe now dwells upon “deliverance” in a precise religious sense, as it becomes “deliverance from the load of guilt that bore down all my comfort” (p. 78) rather than simply deliverance in the secular sense from his island prison: Now I began to construe the words mentioned above, Call on me, and I will deliver you, in a different sense from what I had ever done before; for then I had no notion of any thing being call’d deliverance, but my being deliver’d from the captivity I was in; for tho’ I was indeed at large in the place, yet the island was certainly a prison to me, and that in the worst sense in the world; but now I learn’d to take it in another sense: Now I look’d back upon my past life with such horror, and my sins appear’d so dreadful, that my soul sought nothing of God, but deliverance

195

Robinson Crusoe from the load of guilt that bore down all my comfort: As for my solitary life it was nothing; I did not so much as pray to be deliver’d from it, or think of it; it was all of no consideration in comparison to this . . . (p. 78)

But Crusoe does all this in entirely personal terms; there is no compromise in a way with the absolute secular realism of the novel in which there is from one perspective only a bleak materiality rather than signs of consoling providential intervention. Even after this conversion, Crusoe continues to puzzle over the mysterious ways of Providence. Defoe does not hesitate to record his hero’s backslidings and continued perplexities.Thus, after the discovery of the footprint, “fear banish’d all my religious hopes, all that former confidence in God, which was founded upon such wonderful experiences as I had had of his goodness, now vanish’d” (p. 123). Crusoe reflects here on the variability and unpredictablility of human experience and the essential inscrutability of Providence: “How strange a checquer work of Providence is the life of man! and by what secret differing springs are the affections hurried about, as differing circumstances present!” (p. 124). Moreover, unspeakable loneliness continues to press on Crusoe in spite of his pious attempts to accept his fate as God’s will, and some 24 years later when he sights a ship in distress near his island he is devastated when there are no survivors and records his involuntary and violently physical reactions to the disappointment: “that but one man had been sav’d! O that it had been but one! I believe I repeated the words, O that it had been but one! a thousand times; and the desires were so mov’d by it, that when I spoke the words, my hands would clinch together, and my fingers press the palms of my hands, that if I had had any soft thing in my hand, it would have crush’d it involuntarily; and my teeth in my head would strike together, and set against one another so strong, that for some time I could not part them again” (p. 149). As Crusoe takes us through his 28-year sojourn on his island, he is transformed from a terrified and then lonely castaway into a determined, capable, and resourceful survivor, and then at the very end into a supremely confident military leader, outwitting the mutineers who have marooned their ship’s officers on his island. Modern readers take such development in novelistic narrative quite for granted, although in Defoe’s subsequent novels the patterns are not as clear and straightforward as in Robinson Crusoe. Defoe’s hero illustrates the ultimate proposition, basic to the new species of narrative called the novel, that personality is produced by and within circumstances, that there is a progression through experience and a cumulative process of interaction with the world whereby individual identity is acquired or at least shaped and modified. And of course the idea that identity is developed in experience rather than chosen by an act of moral will or somehow imposed by social status and destiny is a revolutionary idea, an Enlightenment notion that the novel as a genre helps to promulgate as a fundamental assumption about human nature. 196

Robinson Crusoe For all of his steady grasp of the material world, Robinson Crusoe is preoccupied with the existence of a spiritual or supernatural world, but Crusoe also articulates an extreme caution and fear of becoming merely credulous or even superstitious. Some 15 or 16 months after he learns of the cannibals’s visits, Crusoe tells us that he hears one stormy night the sound of a gun: “As I was reading in the Bible, and taken up with very serious thoughts about my present condition, I was surpris’d with a noise of a gun, as I thought, fir’d at sea.” Sensing that a ship is foundering near the island, Crusoe rushes out, lights a signal fire and watches through the night, desperately hoping for survivors, for an end to his aching solitude. But by the morning the dismal truth is clear, and Crusoe’s disappointment is intense and his self-analysis equally intense and searching: I cannot explain, by any possible energy of words, what a strange longing or hankering of desires I felt in my soul upon this sight; breaking out sometimes thus; O that there had been but one or two; nay, or but one soul sav’d out of this ship, to have escap’d to me. . . . There are some secret moving springs in the affections, which when they are set a going by some object in view, or be it some object, though not in view, yet render’d present to the mind by the power of imagination, that motion carries out the soul by its impetuosity to such violent eager embracings of the object, that the absence of it is insupportable. Such were these earnest wishings, that but one man had been saved! O that it had been but one! I believe I repeated the words, O that it had been but one! a thousand times; and the desires were so mov’d by it, that when I spoke the words, my hands would clinch together, and my fingers press the palms of my hands, that if I had had any soft thing in my hand, it would have crush’d it involuntarily; and my teeth in my head would strike together, and set against one another so strong, that for some time I could not part them again. Let the naturalists explain these things, and the reason and manner of them; all I can say to them, is, to describe the fact, which was even surprising to me when I found it; though I knew not from what it should proceed; it was doubtless the effect of ardent wishes, and of strong ideas form’d in my mind, realizing the comfort, which the conversation of one of my fellow-Christians would have been to me. (pp. 148–9)

This very moving passage says nothing about providential presence or the lack of it in Crusoe’s rendering of this event, which is outlined as a series of purely psychological and physical phenomena that elude as he notes carefully the energy of words to evoke their spontaneous intensity. Crusoe is in dialogue with the “naturalists,” who presumably think they can explain such phenomena as part of natural process, as he cannot. He simply sees these things or rather remembers his experience of them with cruel clarity, testifying to their reality as well as their mystery. Such longing for society is accompanied by an interestingly equivocal 197

Robinson Crusoe invocation of providential pattern in the next paragraph. Whose “fate” was it? he wonders, “either their fate or mine, or both, forbid it” (p. 149). As the hope of finding a survivor persists, Crusoe “could not be quiet, night nor day, but I must venture out in my boat on board this wreck; and committing the rest to God’s Providence, I thought the impression was so strong upon my mind, that it could not be resisted, that it must come from some invisible direction” (p. 149). So psychological explanation of a detailed kind is balanced against (or overbalances) providential invocation, which even in its articulation finds its proof in personal experience of a quasi-philosophical kind (“the impression was so strong upon my mind”). This sequence (and others) marks the question Robinson Crusoe explores with urgency and intensity: how is personal identity constructed? Shall our stories dwell on God or man, matter or spirit? Or to echo the title of Leopold Damrosch’s book, is it a matter of God’s plots and man’s stories?31 Looking back even at his youthful beginnings, Crusoe renders them as irresistible impulses, and his “fate” is generally an interior and personal (although nonetheless inexplicable) tendency, however much he tries to identify his desires as part of a larger pattern imposed somehow from outside of himself. There is an implicit dialogue between these two kinds of explanations. Here is a very young Crusoe in the grip of what he now sees as his guiding obsession: Had I now had the sense to have gone back to Hull, and have gone home, I had been happy, and my father, an emblem of our Blessed Saviour’s parable, had even killed the fatted calf for me; for hearing the ship I went away in, was cast away in Yarmouth Road, it was a great while before he had any assurance that I was not drown’d. But my ill fate push’d me on now with an obstinacy that nothing could resist; and tho’ I had several times loud calls from my reason and my more composed judgment to go home, yet I had no power to do it. I know not what to call this, nor will I urge, that it is a secret over-ruling decree that hurries us on to be the instruments of our own destruction, even tho’ it be before us, and that we push upon it with our eyes open. Certainly nothing but some such decreed unavoidable misery attending, and which it was impossible for me to escape, could have push’d me forward against the calm reasonings and perswasions of my most retired thoughts, and against two such visible instructions as I had met with in my first attempt. (pp. 13–14)

The Prodigal Son story is part of the pious Crusoe’s gloss on what might have happened if he had gone home, but his rendition of his fate as a “secret over-ruling decree” actually explains it as an effectively interiorized compulsion (“that propension of Nature tending directly to the life of misery which was to befal me” [p. 5]) that his narrative up to now has in fact accounted for in his

198

Robinson Crusoe opening paragraphs by his particular social circumstances: “Being the third son of the family, and not bred to any trade, my head began to be fill’d very early with rambling thoughts” (p. 5). These opening pages seem to express an interesting confusion (or dialogue) between opposing explanations of the origin and significance of behavior. Perhaps Defoe was not quite sure where his tale would take him, and perhaps he naturally inclined to pose for himself and his readers the real possibility of what it is called “figural” explanation whereby particular events in an individual’s life repeat patterns that are ultimately scriptural. Certainly, that is what his friend’s father, the captain of the ship in which he has nearly been wrecked, insists upon: “Young man, says he, you ought never to go to sea anymore, you ought to take this for a plain and visible token that you are not to be a seafaring man. Why, sir, said I, will you go to sea no more? That is another case, said he, it is my calling, and therefore my duty; but as you made this voyage for a trial, you see what a taste Heaven has given you of what you are to expect if you persist; perhaps this is all befallen us on your account, like Jonah in the Ship of Tarshish. . . . He afterwards talk’d very gravely to me, exhorted me to go back to my father, and not tempt Providence to my ruin; told me I might see a visible hand of Heaven against me, And young man, said he, depend upon it, if you do not go back, where ever you go, you will meet with nothing but disasters and disappointments, till your father’s words are fulfilled upon you” (p. 14). Crusoe never commits himself to figural explanation, never speaks in this positive and traditional way of providential signs or of the “visible hand of Heaven,” which even from mature retrospection seem to remain for him mysterious and inseparable from his own errors, impulses, and hunches. What he does speak of consistently is his obsession, which leads to wrong choices. The situation that he evokes is a moral debate between fancy and reason. Thus, when he decides to lead the slave-buying expedition with his fellow Brazilian planters his explanatory emphasis is biographical, a matter of personal circumstances and individual agency. Crusoe is “born to be my own destroyer,” “hurried on, and obey’d blindly the dictates of my fancy rather than my reason” (p. 34). There is a concession in this sequence to external causality, however, as Crusoe notes that he embarked “in an evil hour, the [first] of [September, 1659], being the same day eight year that I went from my father and mother at Hull, in order to act the rebel to their authority, and the fool to my own interest” (p. 34). But even in such a portentous observation of retrospective symmetry in his story, Crusoe inserts his own crucial although blundering agency, in this case a misguided independence that he has chosen. His emphasis in this sequence falls upon economic miscalculation and a sense of secular probability: “had I used half as much prudence to have look’d into my own interest, and have made a judgment of what I ought to have done, and not to have done, I had certainly never gone away from so prosperous an undertaking, leaving all the probable views of a thriving

199

Robinson Crusoe circumstance, and gone upon a voyage to sea, attended with all its common hazards; to say nothing of the reasons I had to expect particular misfortunes to my self ” (p. 34). That balance, established early in the narrative, between a kind of (misguided) sense of personal freedom and some sort of (mysterious) necessity which is nonetheless inserted in circumstances that serve as the efficient if not the final cause of things, is the novelistic essence of Defoe’s narrative and constitutes a dialogue (in the heightened sense of that word made current by the Russian literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin) between the secular and the religious. For one example among a number of such passages, Crusoe wonders why he has ignored providential signs in his life, but then adds that his seafaring company encouraged him in that fatal inattention: “falling early into the sea-faring life, and into sea-faring company, all that little sense of religion which I had entertain’d, was laugh’d out of me by my mess mates, by a harden’d despising of dangers, and the views of death, which grew habitual to me, by my long absence from all manner of opportunities to converse with any thing but what was like myself, or to hear any thing that was good, or tended towards it” (p. 105). The island in this regard is embodied necessity, the punishment for Crusoe’s ambitions as he reckons things. But as the scene of a natural realm of necessity, the island is full of opportunity for the extraction through work and moral-religious meditation of a new understanding of the nature of freedom, of the possibilities for Crusoe of selfcreation or self-realization. Crusoe says as much in one of his balancing of accounts as he comes to understand the island in this double sense: With these reflections I work’d my mind up, not only to resignation to the will of God in the present disposition of my circumstances, but even to a sincere thankfulness for my condition, and that I who was yet a living man, ought not to complain, seeing I had not the due punishment of my sins; that I enjoyed so many mercies which I had no reason to have expected in that place; that I ought never more to repine at my condition, but to rejoyce, and to give daily thanks for that daily bread, which nothing but a croud of wonders could have brought. That I ought to consider I had been fed even by miracle, even as great as that of feeding Elijah by ravens; nay, by a long series of miracles, and that I could hardly have nam’d a place in the unhabitable part of the world where I could have been cast more to my advantage: A place, where as I had no society, which was my affliction on one hand, so I found no ravenous beasts, no furious wolves or tygers to threaten my life, no venomous creatures or poisonous, which I might feed on to my hurt, no savages to murther and devour me. In a word, as my life was a life of sorrow one way, so it was a life of mercy another; and I wanted nothing to make it a life of comfort, but to be able to make my sense of God’s goodness to me, and care over me in this condition, be my daily consolation; and after I did make a just improvement of these things, I went away and was no more sad. (pp. 105–6)

200

Robinson Crusoe

Action, Adventure, and Identity in Robinson Crusoe Defoe may have calculated that his narrative required some tension now that his hero had achieved this relative serenity. He was not content, obviously, with mere spiritual autobiography, and it seems safe to suppose that he was aware that his audience also wanted excitement and narrative tension. In a brilliantly opportunistic and inventive moment, true to the randomness of Crusoe’s material world but introducing newly troubling mystery and danger into the narrative, Defoe brings Crusoe to “a new scene of my life” (p. 122) that begins with him stumbling upon a solitary footprint. The details of the moment are worth quoting at length: It happen’d one day about noon going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surpris’d with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand: I stood like one thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an apparition; I listen’d, I look’d round me, I could hear nothing, nor see any thing. I went up to a rising ground to look farther, I went up the shore and down the shore, but it was all one, I could see no other impression but that one, I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my fancy; but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the very print of a foot, toes, heel, and every part of a foot; how it came thither, I knew not, nor could in the least imagine. But after innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confus’d and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrify’d to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man; nor is it possible to describe how many various shapes affrighted imagination represented things to me in, how many wild ideas were found every moment in my fancy, and what strange unaccountable whimsies came into my thoughts by the way. (p. 122)

Absolutely verifiable and measurable and yet precisely in its empirical actuality as the outline of a human foot – toes and heel – the footprint violently returns Crusoe to his initial state when he was thrown up on the island. From his confident resignation to providential purpose, he lurches back to confusion, wonder, and fear, undoing we may say all the psychological and moral-theological work that has gone into his new sense of himself and putting him as he says exactly “out of myself.” Moreover, in its inexplicable manifestation as an unaccountable physical phenomenon, the footprint disrupts Crusoe’s ordering of his island. Even though it turns out in due course to be the result of the random work of wind and water, which erases all the other prints and leaves just one to bedevil Crusoe, the footprint works to blur Crusoe’s hard-earned division of the material and the spiritual worlds (“as if I had seen an apparition”), nullifying for the moment 201

Robinson Crusoe his moral serenity and rational stability. His inability to describe his fantasies (he uses the word “fancy” twice) as he makes his terrified way back to his encampment marks the sudden blurring of his consciousness, as both the objective and subjective worlds he has learned to render with clarity now interpenetrate or oscillate wildly and defy his powers of description. As Crusoe gradually solves the mystery of the footprint and acquires horrifying evidence of the cannibal visits, that discovery occasions an intense inner dialogue as he struggles to work out his relationship, emotional, moral, and intellectual, to these terrifying visitors. This is a large step away from the selfcentered introspection, retrospective breast-beating, and bibliomancy that have been Crusoe’s main intellectual and moral pursuits on the island. Crusoe at this point moves beyond his earlier longing for affirmations of direct divine workings in which he has derived solace and relative tranquility from meditating on the possibility of God’s presence in his life.The dialogue with self has been deeply therapeutic, by Crusoe’s own account: “I was no more sad.” But the enemies that Crusoe has provided against obsessively from the very beginning of his shipwreck are now specifically identified, so that he can pass from free floating apprehension and obsession to particular and urgent defensive strategies as well as ideological accommodations. The long sequence from the discovery of the cannibals’s visits to the arrival of Friday and thence to the appearance of the mutineers is definitive in his transition to another kind of thoughtfulness and thence to action and enterprise that are entirely secular and historico-political. In Crusoe’s debate with himself about the cannibals, over many years, he explores the evolution of his moral and social relationship to them. After surveying the remains of “their inhuman feastings upon the bodies of their fellow-creatures” (p. 131), Crusoe is plunged into a twoyear depression: “I entertain’d such an abhorrence of the savage wretches that I have been speaking of, and of the wretched inhuman custom of their devouring and eating one another up, that I continu’d pensive, and sad, and kept close within my own circle for almost two years after this” (pp. 131–2). From murderous obsessions and disgusted moral superiority (“for night and day, I could think of nothing but how I might destroy some of these monsters” [p. 133]), he passes to a complex tolerance, a retreat from European ethnocentrism, in which he articulates a comparative historical sense, going so far as to say that the Spaniards in their cruelties in the conquest of the Americas are far more culpable than these people, who are only following their limited lights and for whom killing and eating an enemy is no more wrong for them than it is for Europeans to eat mutton. On the one hand, these meditations are grounded in history (the Spanish conquest of the Americas, which English propaganda, often called “The Black Legend,” dating back to the sixteenth century tended to depict as far worse than their own imperialism), political theory, and moral theology: the cannibals, he reasons, must answer to God and not to him, and the practical and political 202

Robinson Crusoe take precedence in any case over moral absolutes. “I concluded, that neither in principle or in policy, I ought one way or another to concern myself in this affair. . . . Religion joyn’d in with this prudential, and I was convinc’d now many ways, that I was perfectly out of my duty, when I was laying all my bloody schemes for the destruction of innocent creatures, I mean innocent as to me” (p. 137). Robinson Crusoe is thus as much a novel of ideas as of personal experience, and its memorable realistic particularity consistently moves toward general implications, or we might say that the particular and the general are productively intertwined. From the outset, Crusoe is reflective and articulate; he examines and argues any number of controversial positions about individual destiny and personal agency. He is a good deal of the time nothing less than an essayist, a thoughtful and polemical controversialist, which is hardly surprising given Defoe’s own identity and experience as both for most of his life. Of course, there’s nothing like total solitude to make one thoughtful, and Crusoe’s mind when he comes to his island is forced by isolation toward intellectual exertion, but it can be argued as many have that Crusoe’s isolation is in one sense a literal version of the thoughtful apartness from social structures that defines the novelistic sensibility. Defoe in all his longer narratives is a proto-novelist and instructive precursor of his mid-century successors precisely by virtue of this attention to ideas and arguments and by the essayistic fluency and intellectual curiosity that he lends his thoughtful narrators, isolated and therefore forced to become thoughtful as they look back on their lives. What this sequence clarifies, I think, is that the eighteenth-century English novel needs to be reexamined for what Defoe’s precursor narratives render so clearly: the emerging novel as a new form of narrative exists precisely in its complicated relationship to ideas and issues; the novel can be located at the intersection of popular or demotic journalism (where Defoe of course lived and worked on a daily basis for most of his life) and the serious periodical essay. The novel can be defined often enough as a dialogue between personalized expressivity and older forms of “objective” discourse, or to put it more simply, between an interest in important ideas and issues for their own sake and an appropriation of ideas to project those verbal energies and accents that signify novelistic character at its fullest and most complicated. The coming of the cannibals distracts Crusoe, he tells us, from a project that had come into his head to brew beer from his barley, as night and day he can “think of nothing but how I might destroy some of those monsters in their cruel bloody entertainment, and if possible, save the victim they should bring hither to destroy” (p. 133). Even though he realizes the odds are against him, Crusoe broods upon how he might accomplish this destruction of the cannibals, going so far as to prepare his ammunition and position his muskets for an ambush. Crusoe records in these pages the alterations in his passions and thoughts that time and his isolation bring for him, and the internal debate that will ensue is 203

Robinson Crusoe remarkable in grounding ideas in time and personal circumstances. In deriving his versions of those ideas exactly from his circumstances, Crusoe not only thinks but dramatizes the conditions of thought, narrates the function of thinking within his personal development, and defines himself as a mind making its way through a series of positions, each of which has a distinct validity and personal rightness for him at different points in his experience. Or to echo Bakhtin’s terms we might want to say that he locates his personality at the “dialogic” intersection of competing explanations – rational, emotional, socio-historical, religious, political – of cannibalism, with his own personal situation as the lone European inhabitant of the island.32 In a larger sense, Crusoe records in his autobiographical narrative his conversation with himself, a long dialogue of one that stretches for 25 years or so on the island. Crusoe has a shifting and improvisational dialogue with circumstances and events, with problems in which final understanding is always postponed to serve local and provisional necessity, to create moments of coherence and sanity in situations potentially full of emotional and ideological chaos. Although the central object in Robinson Crusoe may be the adventures themselves, Crusoe’s retrospective thoughtfulness as narrator brings his text into suggestive alignment with Bakhtin’s theories about the role of ideas in the nineteenth-century novel. Writing about Dostoevsky’s novels, Bakhtin notes that there “every thought [is] the position of a personality . . . Through this concrete consciousness, embodied in the living voice of an integral person, the logical relation becomes part of the unity of a represented event. Thought, drawn into an event, becomes itself part of the event and takes on that special quality of an ‘idea-feeling,’ an ‘idea-force,’ which is responsible for the unique peculiarity of the ‘idea.’ ”33 It seems to me that Crusoe delivers to readers an essentially dialogic world, in Bakhtin’s special terms, since in such a situation “there can be no firm image of the hero answering to the question ‘Who is he?’ The only questions here are ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Who is he?’ ”34 From the minute he is thrown up on the island, Crusoe defines himself through an implicit dialogue with absent interlocutors, with God of course, but also with unknown others, fellow Europeans (Hobbesian rivals in this state of nature) who do not materialize for many years, and of course with unknown savage others, the cannibals and cannibal culture as he comes to imagine it. Crusoe needs to keep talking to himself, especially in the absence of actual interlocutors on the island. There is an explicit dialogue with his old self, with the self in action and in thought upon those actions, and with the new and mature self that is retrospectively thoughtful about all that. Providential pattern or, in actual fact as he renders it in his narrative, some looser and more intuitive set of hunches and hints about the meaning of his life is what Crusoe talks to himself about in the first few months and years on his island. Almost as important, these issues are also what he continues to discuss with his readers years later as he writes the book we’re reading. Crusoe is defined by that 204

Robinson Crusoe effort at self-knowledge, but the effort by definition is continuous and unresolved. It is the expressive effort itself and not any particular or final result from his speculations that in the long run seems to matter for him. In what Bakhtin calls the monological world, “a thought is either affirmed or repudiated,” and his insight is that an idea can only be presented artistically “when the idea is posed in terms beyond affirmation and repudiation, but at the same time not reduced to simple psychical experience deprived of any direct power to signify.”35 In trying to be a self-conscious Christian, in awakening as he does to a sense of purpose and rightness even in his terrible isolation and sense of unearned survivorship, Crusoe occupies a series of positions, attempting over and over again to justify and explain himself and his situation. The result is dialogical, for the explanations vary with developing circumstances. Crusoe fits in this regard not only Bakhtin’s but the philosopher Charles Taylor’s evocation of how identity is achieved: “To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by my commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.”36 As Taylor remarks, in a sentence that bears on Crusoe’s unique situation, “one cannot be a self on one’s own. I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors.” A self, he adds, exists within “webs of interlocution.”37 As Taylor traces the development of a distinctively modern self, he comes to what he calls a historically new sense of self in thinkers like Locke and identifies “a new, unprecedently radical form of self-objectification” whereby there emerges a “punctual self.” That self conceives of itself as an object; it operates instrumentally, finding “what brings the best results, pleasure, or happiness” and identifies itself “with the power to objectify and remake, and by this act to distance oneself from all the particular features which are objects of potential change.”38 Whether Crusoe becomes such a self is a good question. It is a selfhood he often achieves but never articulates in just these terms to himself, and in revising his first emotional response to the cannibals his approach is not personal but general. Crusoe’s reflections are cross-cultural, well considered and rational, for him a revelation of tolerant moral and cultural relativity. Thanks to his solitude and his opportunities for reflection, he moves from raw emotional, even visceral, response to articulate a progressive and comparative cultural relativism, which leads him at last to a thoughtful critique of unexamined European imperial/colonial ideologies. But now when, as I have said, I began to be weary of the fruitless excursion, which I had made so long, and so far, every morning in vain, so my opinion of the action itself began to alter, and I began with cooler and calmer thoughts to consider what

205

Robinson Crusoe it was I was going to engage in. What authority or call I had, to pretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals, whom Heaven had thought fit for so many ages to suffer unpunish’d to go on, and to be, as it were, the executioners of his judgments one upon another. How far these people were offenders against me, and what right I had to engage in the quarrel of that blood which they shed promiscuously one upon another. I debated this very often with my self thus; how do I know what God Himself judges in this particular case; it is certain these people either do not commit this as a crime; it is not against their own consciences reproving, or their light reproaching them. They do not know it to be an offence, and then commit it in defiance of divine justice, as we do in almost all the sins we commit. They think it no more a crime to kill a captive taken in war, than we do to kill an ox; nor to eat humane flesh than we do to eat mutton. (p. 135)

In attacking the cannibals for their “bloody and barbarious rites,” he concludes after this meditation he would simply repeat and thereby justify the “conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practis’d in America” (p. 136). Crusoe begins, he tells us, “little by little to be off of my designs.” General principles are followed in this sequence by tactical and prudential considerations that combine principle and policy: Religion joyn’d in with this prudential, and I was convinc’d now many ways, that I was perfectly out of my duty, when I was laying all my bloody schemes for the destruction of innocent creatures, I mean innocent as to me. As to the crimes they were guilty of towards one another, I had nothing to do with them; they were national, and I ought to leave them to the justice of God, who is the governour of nations, and knows how by national punishments to make a just retribution for national offences; and to bring publick judgments upon those who offend in a publick manner, by such ways as best pleases him. (p. 137)

This is a shrewdly observed moment, when intellectual sophistication and tactical advantage come together, and who can say which is primary for Crusoe? For all that, however, the finality of such reasonable (and in this case political and historical) resolutions is always threatened by Crusoe’s particular and deeply personal experiences of the cannibals, both the recurring but unpredictable signs of their threatening presence and his vivid imaginings of what he would like to do to them and what they might do to him. Next to Crusoe’s rational resolutions and intellectual discoveries, set down retrospectively and of course calmly in his narrative, are his accounts of his day-to-day uncertainties, fears, and murderous fantasies over a period of years, his terrified realization that he has been lucky in settling on that part of the island where the cannibals do not pay their visits, his constant anxiety for several years after his first sighting of the remains of one of their feasts that they will encounter him by accident, his dreams after he actually witnesses one of their feasts of killing many of them – in short, 206

Robinson Crusoe Crusoe’s narrative balances his carefully thought out rational and moral insights (statements with real cognitive value, meaningful contributions as it were to contemporary moral and political debates about culture and empire) against the dayto-day climate of personal bewilderment and deep anxiety in which spontaneous emotions and uncontrollable apprehensions necessarily prevail or at the least modify particular intellectual positions. Thinking exists for Crusoe in a vividly rendered context of experience and emotion, but thought as Crusoe experiences it in his isolation provides leisure for reflexive self-observation that is entirely of a piece with his empirical investigations of the island world. The final resolution Crusoe comes to in this sequence of thinking hard about the cannibals is to observe without prejudging, to take no action except preparatory and patient vigilance for an advantage in the face of unpredictable phenomena. Note how in the following final account of his deliberations he evokes his conclusions as something observed rather than initiated; his bold plan a matter of purposeful waiting for opportunity, an activity that is paradoxically an active passivity, a shrewdly opportunistic deferral to circumstances.Thought in this context is qualified, as perhaps thought always is, by ideological need. However at last, after many secret disputes with myself, and after great perplexities about it, for all these arguments one way and another struggled in my head a long time; the eager prevailing desire of deliverance at length master’d all the rest; and I resolved, if possible, to get one of those savages into my hands, cost what it would. My next thing was to contrive how to do it, and this indeed was very difficult to resolve on. But as I could pitch upon no probable means for it, so I resolv’d to put my self upon the watch, to see them when they came on shore, and leave the rest to the event, taking such measures as the opportunity should present, let be what would be. (p. 158)

Who am I? (to recall Bakhtin’s questions that the hero of the novel implicitly asks of himself ) is inseparable from and simultaneous with the question,Who is he? – in this case the cannibal other, the presence that from the first haunts Crusoe’s Hobbesian imagination – in Crusoe’s dialogue with himself these questions are continually answered and modified, subject to the shifting pressures of experience and counter-pressures from rationality and moral-religious systems that Crusoe invokes to counter his fears, anxieties, revulsions, and so on. Are the cannibals a moral and philosophical opposite? Or are they simply a cultural other, something to be understood and managed for personal advantage? Crusoe’s debate with himself, a more intense version of his whole narrative, is a meditation on fate and motive and a dramatization of how both are conditioned by circumstances. Crusoe’s dialogue within himself is pure dialogism, I think, in Bakhtin’s sense. Positions are both cognitively and historically valid (relativistic, progressive) and self-expressive, valid in themselves and also true to the shifting, 207

Robinson Crusoe volatile emotions of Crusoe’s island situation and his changing circumstances year by year or even moment by moment. The cannibal sequence is also the beginning of a turn in Crusoe’s development toward a pure heroism that takes leave of the delineation of moralpsychological states. Crusoe’s obsessional disgust with the cannibals shades over at first into a confused amalgam of fellow feeling and a fantasy of capturing one of them. And so he has a precisely enumerated dream, quite distinct from the vision of divine vengeance from his sickness many years ago when he first came to the island: I saw upon the shore, two canoes, and eleven savages coming to land, and that they brought with them another savage, who they were going to kill, in order to eat him; when on a sudden, the savage that they were going to kill, jumpt away and ran for his life; and I thought in my sleep, that he came running into my little thick grove, before my fortification, to hide himself; and that I seeing him alone, and not perceiving that the other sought him that way, show’d myself to him, and, smiling upon him, encourag’d him; that he kneel’d down to me, seeming to pray me to assist him . . . and he became my servant; and that as soon as I had gotten this man, I said to my self, now I may certainly venture to the main land; for this fellow will serve me as a pilot, and will tell me what to do, and whither to go for provisions; and whither not to go for fear of being devour’d, what places to venture into, and what to escape: I wak’d with this thought, and was under such inexpressible impressions of joy at the prospect of my escape in my dream, that the disappointments which I felt upon coming to my self, and finding it was no more than a dream, were equally extravagant the other way, and threw me into a very great dejection of spirit. (p. 157)

The dream indicates that for Crusoe the island has truly become his, his psychic space as it were, where his fantasies can become realities. Fantastically enough, things fall out almost exactly this way, although not for a year and a half, as the cannibals land once more and one of their captives takes to his heels in the direction of Crusoe’s camp. Crusoe’s formulation of his state of mind as he sees the cannibal fleeing is worth quoting, as it marks precisely his transformation from prisoner of the island to its master: “It came now very warmly upon my thoughts, and indeed irresistibly, that now was my time to get me a servant, and perhaps a companion or assistant; and that I was call’d plainly by Providence to save this poor Creature’s life” (p. 160). Up to now, Providence (a word which appears on nearly every page of Crusoe’s text) has been a mystery, spoken of with wonder but with puzzlement, a kind of last explanatory resort in Crusoe’s meditations. But now Providence speaks clearly to Crusoe. He becomes its instrument, and from here on after he rescues and domesticates his man, Friday, Crusoe passes from passive reaction and adaptation on his island to an active and controlling presence, the master to Friday’s servant in other words. To be sure, he 208

Robinson Crusoe retains his strategic relationship to circumstances, and he knows how to watch and to wait for advantage, just as he has done from the very moment he was seized by the waves after the shipwreck. Thus, when Friday reports the return of cannibals Crusoe takes up arms and begins to march, coldly infuriated, on his enemies. But he hesitates, listening again to his own reasonable analysis of his necessary neutrality in the matter and positioning himself in readiness as the occasion prompts him to act or not: “I resolv’d I would only go and place myself near them, that I might observe their barbarous feast, and that I would act then as God should direct; but that unless something offer’d that was more a call to me than yet I knew of, I would not meddle with them” (p. 183). Crusoe occupies in these last parts of his book a secure position, both literal and figurative; he is no longer as he was in the shipwreck and during his early years on the island within the phenomenal flow but rather just outside it, watching and waiting to act when his own advantage dictates. Moreover, with the arrival of Friday he leaves his religious fear and trembling behind and assumes the confidence of the Master, assured by recent history that God or Providence is very much on his side, as he becomes nothing less than the fearful representative of Providence in his dealings with the cannibals and with the mutineers. As it happens, Crusoe observes (thanks to his “glass,” his telescope, a sign of technological mastery and effective distancing like the firearms he and Friday carry) that the cannibals are about to murder and consume a white man, “an European, and had clothes on” (p. 184), and he and Friday let loose a barrage of gunfire, followed by a charge and hand to hand combat that saves the Spaniard, as he turns out to be, and also as it happens Friday’s father, who is tied up and next in line for slaughter. The resulting carnage is calmly added up at the end of the one-sided battle that pits western fire power against wooden swords, a final, definitive accounting that reduces the hitherto shadowy and threatening cannibals to one frighteningly objective list, of a piece with his cold-eyed and exact observation from afar of the cannibals as they prepare for their feast. 3 2 2 2 1 3 4

Kill’d at our first shot from the tree. Kill’d at the next shot. Kill’d by Friday in the boat. Kill’d by ditto, of those at first wounded. Kill’d by ditto, in the wood. Kill’d by the Spaniard. Kill’d, being found dropp’d here and there of their wounds, or kill’d by Friday in his chase of them. 4 Escap’d in the boat, whereof one wounded if not dead. —— 21 In all. (pp. 186–87)

In these final sequences on his island, many others arrive, not only the cannibals but the English mutineers who maroon the captain of their vessel and 209

Robinson Crusoe several of his faithful officers. Crusoe watches what is in effect a repetition of his own story that he is now in a position to rewrite, to bring to these men the moral clarity and providential symmetry that he never enjoyed. Still watching carefully and cautiously, Crusoe sees the marooned men, as “they sat down all three upon the ground very pensive, and look’d like men in despair,” and it is like looking in the mirror of his past: “This put me in mind of the first time when I came on shore, and began to look about me; how I gave my self over for lost: How wildly I look’d round me, what dreadful apprehensions I had” (p. 198). Robinson Crusoe shifts in scenes such as this one from spiritual autobiography into adventure fantasy, with Crusoe transformed into the all-powerful imperialist and avenging angel. To be sure, there is a kind of ironic gloss on the action that Crusoe himself provides as he reveals himself to the bewildered captain, a frightening and sudden sight as he notes: I resolv’d to discover my self to them, and learn something of their condition: Immediately I march’d . . . my Man Friday at a good distance behind me, as formidable for his arms as I, but not making quite so staring a spectre-like figure as I did. I came as near them undiscover’d as I could, and then before any of them saw me, I call’d aloud to them in Spanish, What are ye gentlemen? They started up at the noise, but were ten times more confounded when they saw me, and the uncouth figure that I made. They made no answer at all; but I thought I perceiv’d them just going to fly from me, when I spoke to them in English, Gentlemen, said I, do not be surpris’d at me; perhaps you may have a friend near you when you did not expect it. He must be sent directly from Heaven then, said one of them very gravely to me, and pulling off his hat at the same time to me, for our condition is past the help of man. All help is from Heaven, sir, said I. . . . The poor man, with Tears running down his face, and trembling, looking like one astonish’d, return’d, Am I talking to God, or man! Is it a real man, or an angel! Be in no fear about that, sir, said I, if God had sent an angel to relieve you, he would have come better cloth’d, and arm’d after another manner than you see me in; pray lay aside your fears, I am a man, an English man, and dispos’d to assist you. . . . (p. 200)

This moment is the culmination of Crusoe’s transformation from the receiver of providential pattern to the enacter of his own almost parodic version of that pattern. A comic and fraudulent version of Prospero, the magician master of another island, Crusoe in this sequence appears to the stricken captain of the vessel and his mates like an apparition, dressed in his extravagant island costume made of the skins of beasts and sporting his enormous moustaches, armed to the teeth with a cannibal by his side. He salutes them in Spanish, which surely adds to the effect. Throughout this fast-paced adventure sequence, Crusoe devises 210

Robinson Crusoe tactics and strategies, including the charade of impressing the mutineers as the “governor” of the island. He emboldens the captain by pointing to his own experiences on the island as exemplary and encouraging. His survival, he says, is proof of providential arrangement; he dramatizes his preservation on the island as evidence of God’s plan. What has been throughout a recurring problem of faith now becomes in the moment of decisive action a clear sign of fate and divine sanction. Belief is transformed into part of action, turned from a difficult act of faith into an adjunct of efficient operation. In the following exchange, it is noteworthy that Crusoe has recourse to that resonant and ambiguous concept of “deliverance,” complicating it in the process to indicate the new congruence between his own agency and providential arrangement. When the captain hesitates and observes that the mutineers are desperate and worries that “they would be too powerful for us,” this is Crusoe’s reaction: I smil’d at him, and told him, that men in our circumstances were past the operation of fear: That seeing almost every condition that could be was better than that which we were suppos’d to be in, we ought to expect that the consequence, whether death or life, would be sure to be a deliverance: I ask’d him, what he thought of the circumstances of my life? And, whether a deliverance were not worth venturing for? And where, sir, said I, is your belief of my being preserv’d here on purpose to save your life, which elevated you a little while ago? For my part, said I, there seems to be but one thing amiss in all the prospect of it. What’s that? says he; why, said I, ’tis, that as you say, there are three or four honest fellows among them, which should be spared; had they been all of the wicked part of the crew, I should have thought God’s Providence had singled them out to deliver them into your hands; for depend upon it, every man of them that comes a-shore are our own, and shall die, or live, as they behave to us. As I spoke this with a rais’d voice and cheerful countenance, I found it greatly encouraged him; so we set vigorously to our business. (p. 205)

“Deliverance” and “deliver” look two ways here, but that resonant term has been just about emptied of sacred meaning. Crusoe sees this, of course, as his moment of deliverance from the island, and he manages things with skill and daring, revising the notion somewhat by aligning it with his confidence that any outcome, victory and life or defeat and death, will be a “deliverance.” But part of those tactics involves his dramatization to the captain of his own deliverance on the island as an indicator of divine encouragement of their bold plan. Crusoe’s talk of Providence is part of his strategy to embolden the captain, and he notes in the last sentence I quote above the effect of his stirring words. At last, Crusoe is directly in a web of interlocution, to use Taylor’s term, as he exhorts and encourages the Captain and his mates, creating the alliance and planning the strategy that will liberate him from his island prison, urging them on by pointing to his own embodied dramatic history. The language of providential purpose is 211

Robinson Crusoe appropriated and exploited within that web. Crusoe acquires distance from the very consolations he has so painfully extracted from his island experience; in effect in this sequence he treats even that religious transformation of his experience into an aspect of his instrumental reason at its most dramatic. And of course he becomes for the captain and his mates nothing less than a subtle and cunning Providence just like the elusive deity who rescued him somehow from the wreck. The tension between secular and religious explanations that Crusoe has struggled with from the beginning of his shipwreck dissolves under the requirements of solidarity and community and of course under the pressure of the local and temporal necessity of physical survival and domination over savage others, who in this case are precisely those Hobbesian others Crusoe has fantasized about from the beginning. So Robinson Crusoe is a series of dialogues between alternative and mutually reinforcing notions of the secular and the religious, as Crusoe in his narrative retrospection balances confused secular self-seeking and bewildered spiritual autobiography and moves on to confident internalization and effective appropriation of the religious frame of reference. In the dialogue between those two, a synthesis emerges in which Crusoe acquires power and confidence that propel him, or should we say deliver him, at last.

212

7 Travel, Politics, and Adventure

The great object of Defoe seems to have been, to avoid the dry details of most of the accounts then existing, by marking out a new course; and thus, combining amusement, with an accurate geographical account. . . . William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings

The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: The Sequel But my poor old island’s still un-rediscovered, un-renamable. None of the books has ever got it right. Elizabeth Bishop, “Crusoe in England”

After Crusoe’s “deliverance” from his island in Part I of Robinson Crusoe, his tale continues, but now very much in miscellaneous fashion as a loose string of adventures, including a dangerous crossing of the Pyrenees in winter when he and a group of fellow travelers are attacked by ravenous packs of wolves, as he and Friday make their way back to England. In the “Author’s Preface” to The Farther Adventures, Defoe offers a defense of the sequel that betrays his sense of its inferiority and its merely sequential character: “The second part, if the Editor’s opinion may pass, is (contrary to the usage of second parts,) every way as entertaining as the first, contains as strange and surprising Incidents, and as great a variety of them; nor is the application less serious and suitable, and doubtless will, to the sober as well as ingenious reader, be every way as profitable and diverting.”1 This emphasis on variety calls attention to what the sequel lacks – the clear focus and depth of character development produced by Crusoe’s long isolation on the island. Most modern readers have been puzzled or even bored by this 213

Travel, Politics, and Adventure part of the book, which is rarely reprinted. Perhaps Defoe sensed that what his eighteenth-century audience was most interested in after the phenomenal popularity of the first part was the fully-formed character of Crusoe articulated over and over again in his adventures rather than the process of his inner development. Crusoe really has nowhere to go after Part I. The sequel depends upon that particular personality and special frame of reference Crusoe has acquired during his long sojourn on his island; his farther adventures follow directly from his personality as he embarks upon them to maintain himself as the character he has become in the aftermath of his island sojourn, hungry for new experiences and sights, a proto-Tennysonian Ulysses who becomes a part of all he sees.Thanks to his formative experiences in Part I, Crusoe looks around him in England and sees a world from which his island sojourn has alienated him.Where the denizens of that world are busy with schemes and labors, caught up in unresolved striving for pleasure or just subsistence, Crusoe is a thoughtful observer of himself as well as of others. I saw the world busy round me, one part labouring for bread, and the other part squandering in vile excesses or empty pleasures, equally miserable, because the end they proposed still fled from them; for the man of pleasure every day surfeited of his vice, and heaped up work for sorrow and repentance; and the man of labour spent their strength in daily strugglings for bread to maintain the vital strength they laboured with, so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread. (p. 7).

After his long ordeal in Part I, Crusoe is a privileged person with a special outlook on life, and not just because of his independent income. His character is now definitively formed; like Cervantes’ Don Quixote in the sequel to his story, he is a literary character who cannot be altered substantially. Like Quixote in Cervantes’ sequel, he meets various people who remember his exploits from the original volume. For example, when he eventually returns to revisit his island and sees the Spaniards and the English mutineers he left there, the Spaniards marvel at what Crusoe accomplished and express wonder at his plucky resourcefulness, which would they say have been quite beyond them. “ ‘Seignior,’ says the Spaniard, ‘had we poor Spaniards been in your case, we should never have gotten half those things out of the ship, as you did: Nay, says he, we should never have found means to have gotten a raft to carry them, or to have gotten the raft on shore without boat or sail; and how much less should we have done,’ said he, ‘if any of us had been alone?’ ” (pp. 110–11). Crusoe is not only revisiting his island but in a moment like this effectively rereading Part I of Robinson Crusoe. The stories the Spaniards tell him of their quarrels with the mutineers like the quarrelsome Will Atkins and of their battles with new invasions of cannibals make it 214

Travel, Politics, and Adventure clear how much he has been missed and how his achievements on the island cannot be matched. For his colonists when he revisits the island, he is the strong and competent leader they have lacked, the heroic figure who defeated the mutineers, the founding patriarch of the colony, which he resupplies (with manufactured goods and implements, as well as supplementary inhabitants – a carpenter, a smith, a tailor, and a cooper) and restores social order before he leaves, introducing proper Christian customs, including marriage of the cohabiting English sailors and their cannibal female partners as well as missionary work among the various cannibals who have come to settle on the island as the survivors of a ferocious battle with Crusoe’s successors, all this taking place with the advice and assistance of a liberal French priest he and his nephew’s crew have rescued from a stranded ship. In his sequel, Crusoe also becomes again, ironically, what he has renounced in his earlier meditations on the island in Part I – an adventurer in the early capitalist sense of a risk-taking entrepreneur, a participant in a money-making venture. At the end of Part I, his Brazilian plantation has in the intervening 28 years made him a very rich man, and he glosses the situation grandiosely in scriptural terms: “I might well say, now indeed, that the latter end of Job was better than the beginning” (p. 224). But Crusoe is precisely no Job – quite the opposite of the heroically passive sufferer of misfortune – and in the sequel Defoe sends him wandering again, restless, eager for more adventures, in fact obsessed with going back to his island and turning it into a full-fledged colony. At 61, possessed of an ample fortune and happily settled in England, Crusoe nevertheless dreams of the island where he has lived almost a good half of his life; he begins his narrative by evoking his “strong inclination to go abroad again, which hung about me like a chronical distemper; particularly the desire of seeing my new plantation in the island, and the colony I left there, run in my head continually. I dreamed of it all night, and my imagination ran upon it all day” (p. 2). However, he struggles with these longings; he marries and has a child, but the thoughts continue, even after his wife urges him to go if he truly wishes it: “I corrected my wandering fancy, and began to argue with my self sedately what business I had, after threescore years, and after such a life of tedious sufferings and disasters, and closed in so happy and easy a manner – I say, what business I had to rush into new hazards, and put my self upon adventures fit only for youth and poverty to run into” (p. 5). Then Crusoe’s wife dies suddenly, plunging him as he tells us into a solitude that reminds him of his island and brings back his wandering inclination: “My thoughts run all away again into the old affair: my Head was quite turned with the whimsies of foreign adventures” (p. 8). Unlike Don Quixote, Crusoe claims not to be happy with his compulsions and expects us to believe that he is doing his best to reform his character and to control his propensity for wandering. Of course, he doesn’t succeed, but his reluctance and self-doubt are crucial parts of his personality, or at least such feelings are retained 215

Travel, Politics, and Adventure as a kind of qualification on his enthusiasm for mercantile-colonial adventure. Throughout this long sequel, Crusoe pauses from time to time to wonder just why he’s wandering and trading but at the same time he knows that it is his nature, his destiny. And let there be no mistake – when he is not feeling guilty, he enjoys himself thoroughly. For example, late in the volume he enters into partnership with an English merchant for various trading ventures and voyages in southeast Asia and China, but even as he does this he marvels at his own obsessions: “I might, perhaps, say with some truth, that if trade was not my element, rambling was; and no proposal for seeing any part of the world which I never had seen before, could possibly come amiss to me” (p. 214). But then a page or so later, he acknowledges both sides of his personality – a measure of regret but also of inextinguishable eagerness for seeing new places: what was all this, to a man on the wrong side of threescore, that was rich enough, and came abroad, more in obedience to a restless desire of seeing the world, than a covetous desire of getting in it? And indeed I think ’tis with great justice that I now call it a restless desire, for it was so. When I was at home, I was restless to go abroad; and now I was abroad, I was restless to be at home. I say, what gain was this to me? I was rich enough, nor had I any uneasy desires about getting more money; and therefore the profits of the voyage to me were things of no great force for the prompting me forward to farther undertakings; and I thought that by this voyage, I had made no progress at all, because I was come back, as I might call it, to the place from whence I came, as to a home; whereas, my eye, which, like that which Solomon speaks of, was never satisfied with seeing, was still more desirous of wandering and seeing. I was come into a part of the world, which I was never in before, and that part in particular which I had heard much of, and was resolved to see as much of as I could, and then I thought I might say, I had seen all the world that was worth seeing. (pp. 215–16)

In rapid order, Crusoe sets off on his travels again with his merchant-captain nephew, who just happens to going on a trading voyage by way of Brazil and near his island: “ ‘uncle,’ says he, ‘if you will go to sea with me, I’ll engage to land you upon your old habitation in the island, for we are to touch at the Brazils’ ” (p. 9). Defoe opens Crusoe’s continuation in a couple of warm family moments first with his wife and children and then with his nephew. But these domestic relationships are merely a brief prelude to a narrative that for most of the time is pure adventure in the economic sense that most of the first part of Robinson Crusoe is not. And that rejection of domestic subject matter is significant. As we look back on it from our vantage point after several hundred years of the modern novel, as Martin Green has argued, the main tradition of the English novel after Defoe that begins in the 1740s disdains adventure and action in exotic, 216

Travel, Politics, and Adventure non-European locales, aggressively preferring as its serious narrative subjects the domestic world of courtship and marriage and in time relegating stories of dangerous and profitable masculine adventure overseas (like Robinson Crusoe) to the category of boys’ books. For the tradition of the novel that emerges in the middle of the eighteenth century, the real or the serious equals the domestic realm of relationships between men and women and of course the financial gains and losses inevitably involved in such relationships; foreign settings and extravagant, violent and dangerous masculine adventures equal unreal and unserious fantasy and romance. In this light, Crusoe’s agonizing over abandoning domesticity for global wandering is a prescient allegory of the English novel’s eventual (and in fact pretty rapid) rejection of adventure for domesticity, for marriage and money at home. Green’s thesis, briefly summarized, is that the novel of adventure cuts too near the bone of the harsh actualities of English imperial expansion and colonial rapacity for comfortable novelistic representation; there is in the sentimental ideology of the period an instinctive revulsion from the brutalities and naked exploitation of indigenous peoples that in fact lie inescapably at the heart of British and European imperialism, and the domestic realism of the novel is nothing less than an evasion or even an occlusion of the historical realities that were creating much of the wealth and leisure that support the social world depicted in the novel as we have come to know it. So the novel beginning with Richardson and Fielding in the 1740s turns away, as Green puts it, from “the triumphant capitalism and militarism of eighteenth-century England” and bases its plots on courtship and marriage.2 In its broad outlines, Green’s thesis explains a lot about the novel in the eighteenth century, and the comparison it allows us to make with what becomes the main tradition of the British novel highlights the unique oddness in that tradition of Defoe’s adventure stories, which display all of his interests and strong opinions – an often contradictory mixture of admiration for economic and imperial ruthlessness, moral-religious introspection and anxiety about personal justification and salvation, and a secular cosmopolitanism with a decided Enlightenment cast.That is to say, Defoe’s adventure novels that follow Robinson Crusoe are not really boys’ books; they are too intellectual and mature, too serious and well-informed about contemporary and complex realities and social, moral, and historical issues. They are infused with ideas about an emerging global order, and they communicate something of Defoe’s excitement over the possibilities of world trade and the aggressive commercial and imperial expansionism of Britain. Although they are hardly systematic, they confront the world system of the day; they explore mercantile, technological, and imperial realities that subsequent fiction will largely ignore. To be sure, they also focus on the career and personality of the hero, and his acquisition of material wealth as well as varied and unusual experience is the driving center of Defoe’s adventure narratives. As Crusoe remarks near the end of his Farther Adventures, as he disparages the hostile and primitive Tartars whose country 217

Travel, Politics, and Adventure he is traveling through and announces frankly that he is the center of his own narrative: “I am no more to describe people than countries any farther than my own story comes to be concerned in them” (p. 299). In this light – travel-adventure as opportunity for thoughtful examination of this new world through the prism of self – Crusoe’s island colony is not what it should have been. The imperfections of his island are he comes to understand entirely his fault. In due course, as he looks back later in the book, he offers readers a quite devastating critique of his political shortcomings as a founding father, and he lays it all to his besetting sin of wandering. He should have resettled there, he confesses, instead of simply dropping in with supplies: “But I was possessed with a wandering spirit, scorned all advantages; I pleased my self with being the patron of those people I placed there, and doing for them in a kind of haughty majestic way, like an old patriarchal monarch; providing for them, as if I had been father of the whole family, as well as of the plantation” (p. 186). As Crusoe confesses, his island experiment is in the end a total failure thanks to his self-absorption and propensity for wandering: “I rambled from them, and came there no more, the last letters I had from any of them, was by my partner’s means . . . who sent me word, tho’ I had not the letter till five years after it was written, that they went on but poorly, were malecontent with their long stay there. That Will. Atkins was dead: That five of the Spaniards were come away, and that tho’ they had not been much molested by the savages, yet they had some skirmishes with them; that they begged of him to write to me, to think of the promise I had made, to fetch them away, that they might see their own Country again before they dy’d. But I was gone a wild-goose chase indeed; and they that will have any more of me, must be content to follow me thro’ a new variety of follies” (p. 187). Crusoe’s thoughtful regret is also provoked by the misbehavior of his nephew’s crew, who commit atrocities in Madagascar after they are attacked by the local people in revenge for the sexual violation of a young girl. Crusoe the scourge of cannibals on his island once upon a time is now disgusted by European savagery against indigenous people, which he places in a long historical perspective: “I never was at the sacking a city, or at the taking a town by storm. I had heard of Oliver Cromwell taking Drogheda in Ireland, and killing man, woman, and child; and I had read of Count Tilly sacking the city of Magdeburgh, and cutting the throats of 22,000 of all sexes; but I never had an Idea of the thing it self before, nor is it possible to describe it, or the Horror which was upon our minds at hearing it” (p. 201). Readers of the sequel will remember, of course, the slaughter (more or less defensive and justified) of the cannibals on the island in Part I. Killing hostile indigenous people is a prominent aspect of the adventure tale, since it dramatizes European technological superiority, as the natives recoil in wonder and terror in the face of modern firepower. All of Defoe’s adventure stories feature long and detailed (at times fascinated and even gleeful) accounts 218

Travel, Politics, and Adventure of such slaughter, but here in the Farther Adventures, Crusoe at length experiences distinct moral revulsion, which grows more thoughtful as he progresses. His nephew’s sailors threaten to mutiny if Crusoe continues on their voyage, and he is put ashore in Bengal, where he meets an English merchant and goes off on trading expeditions with him. But even that new opportunity leads eventually to more self-examination.Thus, when his and his partner-merchant’s ship is attacked in Indo-China by the local people, they are repelled by the ship’s carpenter pouring boiling pitch on the invaders. Ever attentive, Crusoe notes that the cries of pain the Indochinese utter are peculiar to their culture; his observations are anthropological in spirit, marking him as an Enlightenment traveler: the natives burnt by the pitch “made such a howling and crying, that I never heard a worse noise, and, indeed, nothing like it; for it is worth observing, that though pain naturally makes all people cry out, yet every nation has a particular way of exclamation, and making noises as different from one another as their speech. . . . I never heard any Thing more like the noise of the wolves which, as I have said, I heard howl in the forest on the frontiers of Languedoc” (pp. 233–4). Nonetheless, one attacker is killed, and Crusoe is sickened: I was never pleas’d with a victory better in my life; not only as it was a perfect surprise to me, and that our danger was imminent before; but as we got this victory without any bloodshed, except of that man the fellow killed with his naked hands, and which I was very much concerned at; for I was sick of killing such poor savage wretches, even though it was in my own defence, knowing they came on errands which they thought just, and knew no better; and that though it may be a just thing, because necessary, for there is no necessary wickedness in nature; yet I thought it was a sad life in which we must be always obliged to be killing our fellow-creatures to preserve our own, and, indeed, I think so still, and I would, even now, suffer a great deal rather than I would take away the life even of the person injuring me; and I believe all considering people, who know the value of life, would be of my opinion, at least they would if they entered seriously into the consideration of it. (p. 234)

Among brutish sailors and even among his merchant associates, Crusoe is superior in terms of moral sensibility and cosmopolitan awareness and sophistication. For him, traveling through these exotic parts of the world is nothing less than an educational experience, although he retains his English chauvinism when he tells us as he visits Nanking that China is so barbarous that it isn’t worth his while or his readers’ time for him to describe it: “when I come to compare the miserable people of these countries with ours, their fabrics, their manner of living, their government, their religion, their wealth, and their glory, as some call it, I must confess, I do not so much as think it is worth naming, or worth my while to write of, or any that shall come after me to read” (p. 256). Deeply Eurocentric, as we might say today, Crusoe is appalled as he travels westward through 219

Travel, Politics, and Adventure China and into the eastern provinces of the Russian Czar by the idolatry of the Tartar inhabitants. He thanks God that he is a European: “what a blessing it is to be brought into the world where the Name of God, and of a Redeemer is known, worshipped, and adored; and not where the people, given up by Heaven to strong delusions, worship the devil, and prostrate themselves to stocks and stones, worship monsters, elements, horrible shaped animals, and statues, or images of monsters” (p. 281). On the intellectual and cultural level, then, Crusoe negates or at least seriously qualifies his secular cosmopolitanism, and the variety of scene and sweep of cultural and historical observation are overbalanced in the end by xenophobic self-satisfaction and cultural parochialism. Crusoe’s final stop as he makes the overland journey toward the Russian port of Archangel (from where he will sail to Germany and then home again to England) is in Siberia, where he waits out the long winter and meets exiled Russians, “the state criminals of Muscovy,” in a city that is as he observes “full of noblemen, princes, gentlemen, colonels, and . . . all degrees of the nobility, gentry, soldiery, and courtiers of Muscovy” (p. 303).Thanks to such congenial, cultivated, and distinctly European-Christian company, this Siberian winter is quite a relief for Crusoe after the idolatrous and hostile hordes of Russian Asia. Defoe finds a pleasing and symmetrical conclusion in this episode that links Crusoe and his defining isolation on his island and these Russian exiles, as he facetiously compares his own sovereignty over his island favorably with the Czar’s in their country and summarizes his island adventure. But a certain Prince, “one of the banished ministers of state” of the Czar, is impressed by his story and opines “with a sigh that the true greatness of life was to be master of ourselves; that he would not have exchanged such a state of life as mine to have been Czar of Muscovy; and that he found more felicity in the retirement he seemed to be banished to there, than ever he found in the highest authority he enjoyed in the court of his master the Czar; that the height of human wisdom was to bring our tempers down to our circumstances” (p. 304). This Prince even goes so far as to decline Crusoe’s offer to smuggle him out of Russia in his caravan, countering Crusoe’s incredulity at his choosing exile to freedom by praising his isolation as the highest felicity: Here I am, free from the temptation of returning to my former miserable greatness; there I am not sure but that all the seeds of pride, ambition, avarice and luxury, which I know remain in nature, may revive and take root, and in a word, again overwhelm me; and then the happy prisoner, whom you see now master of his soul’s liberty, shall be the miserable slave of his own senses, in the full of all personal liberty. Dear sir, let me remain in this blessed confinement, banished from the crimes of life, rather than purchase a show of freedom at the expense of the liberty of my reason, and at the expense of the future happiness which now I have in my view, but shall then, I fear, quickly lose Sight of; for I am but flesh, a man, a mere

220

Travel, Politics, and Adventure man, have passions and affections as likely to possess and overthrow me as any man. Oh, be not my friend and my tempter both together!’ (pp. 311–12)

Crusoe is impressed, indeed startled, by the Prince’s vehemence and eloquence, as well he might be, since this is the kind of quietism to which Defoe pays lip service in the first part of Robinson Crusoe but negates by the egocentric energy of his personality as well as by the sheer variety and inextinguishable curiosity of his adventure narratives. The implicit asceticism in the Prince’s quietism, echoing the discourse against luxury that is so much a part of eighteenth-century English moralism, is also cancelled on just about every page of The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which revels in the material goods (many of them in their raw state, but of course still full of value) of the expansive world of economic opportunity through which Crusoe travels with undiminished and ever-renewed curiosity and financial profit. After this exchange the prince insists that Crusoe accept a “very fine present of sables,” which he reciprocates the next day “with a small present of tea, and two pieces of China damask, and four little wedges of Japan gold, which did not all weigh above six ounces, or thereabout, but were far short of the value of his sables, which, indeed, when I came to England, I found worth near £200” (p. 313). These objects and their value tip the balance here and elsewhere against the static moralism and discourse of anti-luxury that Crusoe genuflects to and the exiled Russian prince articulates so enthusiastically. The Siberian episode bears an interesting relation to Crusoe’s original isolation in Part I of Robinson Crusoe, since this Russian exile has come as Crusoe never did to a positive understanding and wholehearted acceptance of isolation. In his enforced political exile, the prince finds satisfaction and resignation, whereas Crusoe in his island isolation discovers his essentially active nature, his desire to build, to change, to dominate. Overall, one can guess, The Farther Adventures would not appeal to this soulful Russian prince; the narrative is a breathless circumnavigation of the globe, full of dangers and trials, some of them nearly fatal (early in the narrative faithful Friday is killed in a battle with “savages” east of Brazil), as well as wonders and rare sights and exotic places and people. Like so much of Defoe’s work, Crusoe’s Farther Adventures testifies to his inexhaustible curiosity about everything of a sort that this world-weary prince would not comprehend and that bores or exhausts more recent readers. Crusoe tries by the sheer force of his central presence to tie all this variety together to some extent, but away from his island he has proved to be something of a fish out of water for most readers. Defoe’s hastily prepared sequel to his best-selling novel is full of fascinating moments, but Crusoe tends by the time he gets to the far East, well away from his defining Caribbean island, to be merely an interesting and alert observer who simply happens to be around when more or less interesting things happen. What the book obviously lacks, at 221

Travel, Politics, and Adventure least for modern readers, is a defining purpose, a unifying quest or goal, a clear subjective presence within the welter of objective facts and situations the narrative offers. Or to put it another way, Crusoe is so fully and finally formed that his subjectivity is simply reaffirmed by his experiences, and those experiences are in themselves not engaging enough or in any way suspenseful enough to sustain their interest. Defoe himself seems to have thought that mercantile travel-adventure, with its triumphant accumulations both of wealth and experience, was ample attraction for extended narration, and there was clearly for him and for many readers at the time a fascination in these accounts of adventure, especially in its economic sense, in exotic places. He attempted a few years later in the 1724 A New Voyage Round the World, By a Course Never Sailed Before to give readers more of the same without bothering to develop a central subjectivity or even very specific identity for his narrator, an unnamed English captain-entrepreneur who leads three ships in a trading (and occasional privateering) circumnavigation that also includes encounters with native peoples, sometimes violent but more often peaceable and profitable. At the beginning, the narrator promises a story different from the accounts of earlier round-the-world sailors; his is designed for English readers: “for the use of such readers who never intend to go to sea” but who “desire to hear how it fared with those that have, and how affairs stand in those remote parts of the world.” 3 Tremendously (and often tediously) circumstantial, the book offers a wealth of nautical, geographical, cultural, and mercantile details from this long voyage, but it also features Defoe’s characteristic delight in strategy and gamesmanship. The center of this tale is the clever duplicity of the narrator, and the observed world serves as a series of challenges for mastery rather than something of interest in its own right. This captain is determined to trade illegally in the Spanish colonies in the Philippines and in America. He devises an elaborate set of feints and shifts so that by means of a substitute Frenchspeaking captain (Mirlotte), they pass for French vessels, that nation not being, like England, recently at war with Spain. But when at sea and they happen to meet Spanish ships, says the narrator, “we were English cruisers [privateers], had letters of marque from England, had no account of the peace, and were fitted for attack” (p. 5). As the narrator enumerates them, the financial gains are regularly stupendous, partly through legal piracy, partly through trading with native peoples, exchanging cheap trinkets, toys, and simple implements for the gold they possess in abundance but do not value as Europeans do, and partly through illicit trafficking in the Spanish colonies, where their English cloth, rare and desirable in those parts, brings very high prices. If we look at a proposal Defoe made to Harley, the origins of this narrative lie in propaganda for English South American colonizing, since he seems to have been convinced that Patagonia was an ideal and uncontested area of the Spanish

222

Travel, Politics, and Adventure empire, ripe for appropriation and development.4 Toward that end, the last part of the story is an account of a trip from Chile across the Andes and through Patagonia to the eastern coast of what is now Argentina. As Defoe outlined the scheme to Harley in 1711, there should be two colonies, one in the western area near the Andes and one on the east coast, between the Rio de la Plata and the Straits of Magellan. Defoe also affirmed (how? one wonders!) that “the Plenty of Gold in Chili Exceeds that of the Coast of Guinea in Affrick” and suggested that the Spaniards had failed to exploit these riches because their pride and the “Treachery and Cruelty with which They Treat the Chileans has Ruin’d that Trade” (Letters, p. 347). Thus, just as he claimed in 1711, Defoe’s intrepid adventurers find gold in marvelous abundance as they cross the Andes, and they also find fertile country, resembling parts of southern England, but more fertile, as they come down into the plains, so that the narrator recommends “that part of America as the best and most advantageous part of the whole globe for an English colony” (p. 375). In southern Chile and even further south in unpopulated areas, as the narrator assures us, there is a temperate European climate and fertile soil, and his narrative offers extensive accounts of what might be grown and raised in these parts: “here were, or might be produced, all the plants, fruits, and grain of a temperate climate; at the same time, the orange, lemon, citron, pomegranate, and figs, with a moderate care, would come to a very tolerable perfection” (p. 265). But most of the narrative is irrelevant to this propaganda, and the spinning out of a fantasy of Andean gold for the picking up surely must have weakened the force and plausibility of the tale for Defoe’s purposes.Yet that final tall tale of the gold rush in Patagonia is of a piece with the rest of the narrative, which for all its attention to geography and the specific accountings of trade grows fantastic in its fullness. For one example, the ships trade in the Philippines, illegally, with colonial merchants and also, most profitably, with Chinese and Japanese traders.

The next day three Spanish merchants came on board us, early in the morning before it was light, and desired to see the supercargo. They brought with them a box of diamonds and some pearl, and a great quantity of gold, and to work they went with our cargo, and I thought they would have bought the whole ship’s lading; but they contented themselves to buy about the value of two-and-twenty thousand pieces of eight, which, I suppose might cost in England one-sixth part of the money . . . In short, they sold so cheap and bought so dear, that our supercargo declared he would sell the whole cargo for goods, if they would bring them, for, by his calculation, he had disposed of as many goods as he had received the value of one hundred thousand pieces of eight for, all which, by his accounts, did not amount to, first cost, above three thousand pounds sterling in England. (pp. 105–6)

223

Travel, Politics, and Adventure These profit margins are meant to amaze, of course, and these fabulous sums of money are accompanied by lists of goods that carry in the enumeration the thrill of incipient consumerism, the romance of manufactured luxuries. The Chinese and Japanese merchants bring the following: “seventy great chests of China ware, exceeding fine, twelve chests of China silks of several sorts, and some lacquered cabinets, very fine” (p. 106).There is in A New Voyage a seamless joining of travel and adventure in an exciting and exhilarating economic sense. As the narrator moves from triumph to triumph, as the balance sheet of profit records unprecedented gains, A New Voyage Round the World becomes a pure extravaganza. My summaries of Defoe’s narrative in A New Voyage are necessarily sketchy, since there is a plethora of incidents of various kinds, including a near-mutiny on the ships at the beginning, and a nearly overwhelmingly tedious accounting of movements and accumulations, of situations and encounters, of problems faced and solved, of opportunities shrewdly capitalized on. And yet the narrator claims at one point as he himself summarizes the adventure of that part of his crew that made the trans-Andean trek that there is a plenitude in it that even he cannot do full justice to: It might very well take up another volume as large as this to give a farther account of the particulars of their journey, or rather their journey and voyage; how they got through the hills and were entertained by the generous Spaniard, and afterwards by the wealthy Chilian; how the men, greedy for gold, were hardly brought away from the mountains; and how once they had much ado to persuade them not to rob the honest Chilian who had used them so well, till my lieutenant, then their captain, by a stratagem seized on all their weapons, and threatened to speak to the Spaniard to raise all the Chilians in the mountains and have all their throats cut; and yet that even this did not suffice, till the two midshipmen, then their lieutenants, assured them that at the first opening of the hills and in the rivers beyond they would have plenty of gold. . . . I say all these accounts might suffice to make a volume as large as all the rest. (pp. 327–8)5

Defoe seems to have expected his readers to be like him – inexhaustibly curious – and a book like this is yet another instance of his defining energy, his nearly infinite enthusiasm and capacity for imaginative projection. Built on his reading and his conversations in the activist and entrepreneurial world in which he dwelt (Defoe seems to have forgotten nothing he ever heard or read), A New Voyage Round the World projects a plenum, a world full to bursting and almost beyond imagining in its rich possibilities. The only thing lacking in it is a complicated central character; but for Defoe (despite his proto-novelistic flair) the objective world of facts mattered much more than the merely subjective. Or to put it another way, the objective world is in all his work primary and original, the fons et origo of meaning. 224

Travel, Politics, and Adventure

Captain Singleton and Other Pirates Simply the thing I am Shall make me live. Parolles, in Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well

For all its exuberance, then, A New Voyage hides a subjective void at the center. A few years earlier, Defoe was clearly trying to find something like a center for the adventure tale in the pirate novel, Captain Singleton (1720). This book advertises itself on its title page with simple sensationalism as a tale about a “famous” pirate, including his extraordinary trek across Africa: “Of the Famous Captain SINGLETON: Containing an Account of his being set on Shore in the Island of Madagascar, his Settlement there, with a Description of the Place and Inhabitants: Of his Passage from thence, in a Paraguay, to the main Land of Africa, with an Account of the Customs and Manners of the People: His great Deliverances from the barbarous Natives and wild Beasts: Of his meeting with an Englishman, a Citizen of London, among the Indians, the great Riches he acquired, and his Voyage Home to England: As also Captain Singleton’s Return to Sea, with an Account of his many Adventures and Pyracies with the famous Captain Avery and others.”6 Captain Singleton is a bit more complicated than that summary indicates. The book begins with Defoe’s favorite narrative problem: tracing the career of an isolated and marginal individual as he acquires identity, self-consciousness, and status. Captain Singleton is thus a kind of crude proto-Bildungsroman, although Bakhtin’s inclusion of the book in a category he labels as a sub-species of the travel novel, “the adventure-picaresque novel” is more accurate. As Bakhtin describes this kind of narrative, it certainly fits Captain Singleton: “The hero is a point moving in space. He has no essential distinguishing characteristics . . . His movement in space – wanderings and occasionally escapade-adventures (mainly of the ordeal type) – enables the artist to develop and demonstrate the spatial and social diversity of the world.”7 What’s missing from Bakhtin’s evocation is Defoe’s insistence on Captain Bob’s origins; his narrator is a waif or orphan, a pure individual from the lumpenproletariat, who grows up as a virtual blank slate (a perfect example of Locke’s famous tabula rasa, although the philosopher meant by that the mind itself) in this case kidnapped as a very young child in London and passed around as a youngster from hand to hand. Bob is a case history from a chaotic urban environment that is, presumably, terra incognita to Defoe’s middle-class readers. He remembers only that he was “disposed of to a Beggar-Woman that wanted a pretty little Child to set out her Case, and after that to a Gypsey, under whose Government I continued till I was about Six Years old; and this Woman, . . . told me at last, she was not my Mother, but that she bought me for Twelve Shillings of another Woman, who 225

Travel, Politics, and Adventure told her how she came by me, and told her that my Name was Bob Singleton, not Robert, but plain Bob; for it seems they never knew by what Name I was Christen’d” (p. 2). Although the narrative, which is sketchy at all times, moves quickly away from that childhood, readers can’t help but be aware of Bob’s accomplishment in acquiring a distinct identity, first as an adventurer, then as a pirate, and finally as repentant if rich and retired pirate. So when Bakhtin remarks of this type of novel that its hero is essentially static even as its world is also static, merely phenomenal, featuring things and events that are “simply contiguous or alternating,” he is only half right about Captain Singleton, where the hero claims to be distinct from his fellow adventurers (and of course he is nominally English while most of them are Portuguese) and to have a life trajectory of his own.8 Early in the trek across Africa when they encounter hostile natives Bob displays such leadership qualities among the Portuguese seamen that they choose him as their captain. His analysis of his fellows is curiously condescending and haughtily xenophobic: “Nothing is more certain of the Portuguese than this, take them nationally or personally; if they are animated and hearten’d up by any body to go before, and encourage them by Example, they will behave well enough; but if they have nothing but their own Measures to follow, they sink immediately” (p. 55). Although he is the youngest of the group, he is chosen by them as their leader when he helps them to defeat some hostile natives: “From this Day forward they would call me nothing but Seignior Capitanio” (p. 55). Adventure is here made all the more remarkable because the famous pirate is a prodigy of precocious ability; nothing but a boy, really, he is a self-made man, a natural leader. If only in an offhand and intermittent manner, the series of adventures that constitutes Captain Singleton gains a degree of cohesion because it is Bob who is having them; it is Bob the narrator who is to a large extent using their recital as a means of self-expression and self-dramatization. The young Bob is very quickly acquired as a sort of adopted son by a sea captain and is as a teenager on one of his voyages with his master first captured by Algerian pirates and then rescued by a Portuguese ship, winding up in Lisbon, where his master dies of his wounds: “I being then almost reduced to my primitive State, viz. of Starving, had this Addition to it, that it was in a foreign Country too, where I knew no body, and could not speak a Word of their Language” (pp. 3–4). Bob finds a new Portuguese master and very quickly finds himself in a ship of that nation, informing us, however, that he has nothing but contempt for his adopted compatriots: “a Nation the most perfidious and the most debauch’d, the most insolent and cruel, of any that pretend to call themselves Christians, in the World. Thieving, Lying, Swearing, Forswearing, joined to the most abominable Lewdness, was the stated Practice of the Ship’s Crew” (p. 6). The adventure narrative proper begins after an abortive mutiny, when Bob and about thirty of his shipmates are set ashore on Madagascar and resolve to turn pirates. The interesting turn in the book comes as Bob and his comrades 226

Travel, Politics, and Adventure necessarily acquire a collective identity as they struggle to survive in their escape from Madagascar to the African mainland and then during an enormous and epic expedition across to the continent’s west coast. Bob the narrator speaks in this part of the story in the first person plural as he describes their bond as they set out on the beginning of their adventure in Madagascar: the first thing we did was to give every one his Hand, that we would not separate from one another upon any Occasion whatsoever, but that we would live and die together; that we would kill no Food, but that we would distribute it in publick; and that we would be in all things guided by the Majority, and not insist upon our own Resolutions in any thing, if the Majority were against it; that we would appoint a Captain among us to be our Governour or Leader during Pleasure; that while he was in Office, we would obey him without Reserve, on Pain of Death; and that every one should take Turn, but the Captain was not to act in any particular thing without Advice of the rest, and by the Majority. (pp. 20–1)

In this the more interesting and original half of the book, the narrative has a unity provided not exclusively by a single titular individual like Crusoe but by the common experiences of a band of adventurers, and this part of the book is like many pirate narratives from these years informed as this agreement between Bob and his mates makes clear by the possibilities of a criminal community that is morally superior to normal society, more open and egalitarian. In this regard, we may say, the adventure novel in Defoe’s hands at least offers something like an alternative to the radically individualized perspective that obtains in his other fictions and that would come to dominate the domestic novel later in the eighteenth century. Captain Bob vividly evokes the trek across Africa as an unprecedented undertaking; but that is to be expected, and these are standard claims for any adventure worth reading: “We were now landed upon the Continent of Africa, the most desolate, desart, and unhospitable Country in the World,” he explains, and “it was here, that we took one of the rashest and wildest, and most desperate Resolutions that ever was taken by Man, or any Number of Men, in the World”: to travel over Land through the Heart of the Country, from the Coast of Mozambique, on the East-Ocean to the Coast of Angola or Guinea, on the Western or Atlantick Ocean, a Continent of Land of at least 1800 Miles; in which Journey we had excessive Heats to support, unpassable Desarts to go over, no Carriages, Camels or Beasts of any kind to carry our Baggage, innumerable Numbers of wild and ravenous Beasts to encounter with, such as Lions, Leopards,Tigers, Lizards, and Elephants; we had the Equinoctial Line to pass under, and consequently were in the very Center of the Torrid Zone; we had Nations of Savages to encounter with, barbarous and brutish to the last Degree, Hunger and Thirst to struggle with; and, in one Word, Terrors enough to have daunted the stoutest Hearts that ever were placed in Cases of Flesh and Blood. (pp. 47–8)

227

Travel, Politics, and Adventure This epic journey is an ordeal as much as an eventual triumph, especially as Bob evokes a desert they come to later after scaling some high hills: “a vast howling Wilderness, not a Tree, a River, or a Green thing to be seen, for as far as the Eye could look; nothing but a scalding Sand, which, as the Wind blew, drove about in Clouds, enough to overwhelm Man and Beast; nor could we see any End of it . . . in which we saw nothing but present Death” (p. 79). The trip is not only dangerous but at times prosaic in the telling, with Bob painstakingly describing a long series of travails and the domestic routines and drudgery of survival such as finding and carrying food and water, salting meat, trading trinkets for food with the natives and protecting themselves from the elements, trying to fashion crude clothing as theirs wears out. Here, for example, is Bob’s summary of some early reconnoitering and foraging as they try to reach the mainland of Africa from Madagascar: “As soon as we had viewed the Country a little, got fresh Water, and furnished our selves with some Victuals, which we found very scarce here, we went on board again with our Stores. All we got for Provision, was some Fowls that we killed, and a kind of wild Buffloe, or Bull, very small, but good Meat” (p. 46). This is his summary of their condition early in the voyage: “as miserable as Nature could well make us to be; for we were upon a Voyage and no Voyage, we were bound some where and no where; for tho’ we knew what we intended to do, we did really not know what we were doing: We went forward and forward by a Northerly Course; and as we advanced, the Heat increased, which began to be intolerable to us who were upon the Water, without any Covering from Heat or Wet” (p. 32). Of course, all these prosaic facts about the day-to-day business of the bewildering process of survival are an essential aspect of adventure. We’ve seen that in Robinson Crusoe. Such mundane details acquire a fascination in the context of the unprecedented cross-African trek. The special quality of all of Defoe’s adventure stories is the balancing in them of romantic and heroic extravagance by a strong sense of the daily drudgery that must accompany adventure. In this prosaic spirit, the fantastic highlight of the adventure is not the epic and unprecedented scope of the trek but rather the discovery of gold – lots of it, with regular ledgerbook summaries of its staggering value – and the amassing of fortunes by Bob and his crew. Even the strangest incident in the book – their meeting a naked Englishman living, Crusoe-like, among the natives, an African trader kidnapped and stranded, his story described by Bob as a wonder (“it was a Million to one odds, that ever he could have been relieved; nothing but an Adventure that never was heard or read of before, could have suited his Case, unless Heaven by some Miracle that never was to be expected, had acted for him” [p. 121]) – becomes essentially an occasion for improved prospecting for gold, as the Englishman shows them how and where to mine huge amounts of the stuff. By the end of the adventure, each of the men has over four pounds of gold, about three quarters of a million to a million dollars in modern purchasing power. The real 228

Travel, Politics, and Adventure wonder the adventure offers turns out to be the amassing of remarkable fortunes by ordinary seamen, and the governing fantasy in this first half of the novel is economic, reminding us again that adventure invariably returns to its root meaning of risk for financial gain. Bob and his friends, no more than common sailors, venture beyond the predictable and inevitable class limitations of their experience; the essence of the adventure often enough is precisely in that fantastic negation of economic reality in non-European locales. When they reach the western shore of Africa, Bob and his comrades disperse, he back to England, where in just two years (summarized in exactly one paragraph) he spends all of his gold “in all Kind of Folly and Wickedness; so this Scene of my Life may be said to have begun in Theft, and ended in Luxury, a sad Setting out, and a worse Coming home” (p. 138). So it’s back to sea for him, shipped on a voyage to Cadiz where another mutiny occurs, and Bob now truly sets up in very short order as part of a pirate gang. Bob is candid in his amoral satisfaction as he looks back on this turn in his life: “I that was, as I have hinted before, an original Thief, and a Pyrate even by Inclination before, was now in my Element, and never undertook any Thing in my Life with more particular Satisfaction” (p. 140). Bob and his crew prey chiefly on Spanish ships as they sail to the Canary Islands and then to the West Indies. Eventually, they make their way to the South Seas, to Madagascar, thence to the Indian Ocean and to New Guinea, plundering and trading as they go along their ill-gotten goods for cash. Then to the Philippines and back to Formosa, and on to Ceylon. Piracy includes other adventures such as battles with hostile native peoples they encounter in their travels, as well as detailed enumerations of the day-to-day chores of living at sea, with the customary wide-eyed ledger-book summaries of wealth and goods acquired and traded. But in the end all this is rather bloodless and matterof-fact, with little of the savagery one expects of the archetypal pirate. This is piracy as a business. A crucial feature of Bob’s piratical career in this regard that points to Defoe’s aversion to conventional piratical melodrama is his invention of William Walters, a Quaker surgeon captured from a ship they take in the West Indies. William reserves the right to maintain that he was taken against his will, in case they are captured: “Friend, says he, thou sayest I must go with thee, and it is not in my Power to resist thee, if I would; but I desire thou wilt oblige the Master of the Sloop which I am on board, to certify under his Hand that I was taken away by Force, and against my Will” (p. 143). Quaker William becomes in fact if not in theory one of the pirate crew and also Bob’s best friend and shrewd associate (“my Privy-Counsellour and Companion upon all Occasions” [p. 168]), moderating the crew’s useless violence and steering the whole enterprise in pragmatic and efficient ways. Among these ignorant seamen, moreover, William is an Enlightenment moralist as well as a shrewd casuist and efficient manager. When the ship comes upon a drifting slave ship on which the slaves have revolted and 229

Travel, Politics, and Adventure killed their captors, Bob and his crew are ready to slaughter them all in return, but here is William’s persuasive explication of matters: I was struck with Horror at the Sight, for immediately I concluded, as was partly the Case, that these black Devils had got loose, had murthered all the white Men, and thrown them into the Sea; and I had no sooner told my Mind to the Men, but the Thought of it so enraged them, that I had much ado to keep my Men from cutting them all in Pieces. But William, with many Perswasions prevailed upon them, by telling of them, that it was nothing but what, if they were in the Negroes Condition, they would do, if they could; and that the Negroes had really the highest Injustice done them, to be sold for Slaves without their Consent; and that the Law of Nature dictated it to them; that they ought not to kill them, and that it would be wilful Murder to do it. (pp. 160–1)

However, this doesn’t prevent William in due course from selling these slaves at a tidy profit. Perhaps Defoe’s most comic and engaging character,William complicates this odd narrative by his sly practicality and good business sense; he is just about the furthest thing we can imagine from the bloodthirsty pirate of legend. He functions as an important supplement to the weak unity and tenuous central consciousness for the narrative provided by Bob Singleton, an external addition to the captain’s diminishing ability to lend the episodic narrative some cohesion. William presents an intelligence and self-serving reservation (as well as tactical sagacity) that puts piracy in perspective as a temporary economic strategy. Or as one critic put it, William’s presence “dilutes beyond distinction what is falsely represented as a traditional buccaneering narrative filled with daring adventures and piracies.”9 In the end, he persuades Bob to give up piracy by moral and practical arguments, as he notes that they have plenty of money. William arranges a plot to get away from their pirate gang and to take with them a large amount of goods, which they turn into ready money and prepare to make their way in disguise (as Persian merchants) back to England. As William and Bob discuss their strategies in these events, moral ambiguity and religious seriousness cut across the simple pleasures and sensational reporting of pirate-adventure, globe-trotting fiction, with Bob wondering very cogently how they can repent effectively without making restitution to all those they have plundered. William satisfies him by the following casuistical reasoning: the Answer to it is short; to quit what we have, and do it here, is to throw it away to those who have no Claim to it, and to divest our selves of it, but to do no Right with it; whereas we ought to keep it carefully together, with a Resolution to do what Right with it we are able; and who knows what Opportunity Providence may put into our Hands, to do Justice at least to some of those we have injured, so we ought at least to leave it to him, and go on, as it is, without doubt,

230

Travel, Politics, and Adventure our present Business to do, to some Place of Safety, where we may wait his Will. (p. 267)

This is the culmination of a series of moral dialogues between Bob and William that could just as easily be a part of The Family Instructor, full of thoughtful, regretful examinations of their sinful career on the high seas. William urges Bob to think seriously about retirement and repentance and even about death. These dialogues are strikingly out of place (or wonderfully original) in a pirateadventure novel. Through these final interactions with William, Captain Bob becomes a somewhat more complicated character in this the end of his story, making the novel, like all of Defoe’s fictions, a hybrid affair. What is thus of great interest in the second half of Captain Singleton is Defoe’s variation on the themes of the pirate myth, which in its popular early eighteenthcentury manifestations is not just part of sensational criminal fiction but also an important strategy for the satire of corrupt modern life. The pirate and his community of outlaws often enough in the telling of their story provide in their honest aggression a commentary on the hypocrisy and injustice of contemporary society, and the pirate like the articulate criminal offers readers an unhypocritical instance of self-interest. More so than criminal heroes, the pirates in their gangs coherently dramatize a utopian and communitarian alternative to the rapacious individualism of contemporary social and political life. These satiric notions surrounding the pirate have since the eighteenth century become enduring satiric and comic conventions, as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance makes clear. Given his interest in criminal narrative, Defoe was clearly drawn to pirate narrative as well, producing a short history of the notorious Captain Avery (who makes an appearance in Captain Singleton, Bob and his crew meeting him at Madagascar), The King of Pirates: Being an Account of the Famous Enterprises of Captain Avery (1720), as well as a large collection of pirate stories published as the two-volume A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, and also Their Policies, Discipline and Government (1724), not all of which he may have written.10 A good number of these biographies of famous pirates are clearly a mixture of fact and fancy, and the ferocious pirate – the bloodthirsty enemy of mankind – -shares space with the pirate as dandified and gallant criminal-hero, something like Macheath from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. For an example of the first, consider this description of Captain Edward Teach, notorious as “Black-Beard”: Captain Teach, assumed the Cognomen of Black-beard, from that large Quantity of Hair, which, like a frightful Meteor, covered his whole Face, and frightened America more than any Comet that has appeared there a long Time. This Beard was black, which he suffered to grow of an extravagant Length; as to Breadth, it came up to his Eyes . . . In Time of Action, he wore a Sling over his

231

Travel, Politics, and Adventure Shoulders, with three Brace of Pistols, hanging in Holsters like Bandaliers; and stuck lighted Matches under his Hat, which appearing on each Side of his Face, his Eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, made him altogether such a Figure, that Imagination cannot form an Idea of a Fury, from Hell, to look more frightful. (pp. 84–5)

Contrast this demonic picture with this evocation of the stylish Captain Bartholomew Roberts, dragged (like William the Quaker) into the piratical life reluctantly when he is captured, but who takes to the life and becomes a flamboyant buccaneer. Here is his last appearance: “Roberts himself made a gallant Figure at the Time of the Engagement, being dressed in a rich crimson Damask Wastcoat and Breeches, a red Feather in his Hat, a gold Chain round his Neck, with a Diamond Cross hanging to it, a Sword in his Hand, and two Pair of Pistols hanging at the End of a Silk Sling, slung over his Shoulders” (p. 243). The narrator looks back from Roberts’ brave death to his candor about why he turned pirate: “In an honest Service, says he, there is thin Commons, low Wages, and hard Labour; in this Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power; and who would not ballance Creditor on this Side, when all the Hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sower Look or two at choaking. No, a merry Life and a short one, shall be my Motto” (p. 244). Such bravado has a perennial appeal, I suppose, and Roberts is an attractive and subversive figure. The melodramatic rendering of a Black-Beard or the cheerful romanticizing of a Roberts is what Defoe by disposition pointedly avoids in Captain Singleton. In A New Voyage Round the World, his adventurers visit Madagascar, where his narrator pauses to throw cold water on the wild stories of pirate kingdoms, sending some of his men to spy on the pirate colony there. These pirates, he discovers, are badly supplied and hopelessly divided, “with nobody to command, and therefore nobody to obey; that several things had been offered, but nothing concluded; that, in short, they thought of nothing but of shifting every one for themselves as well as they could” (p. 71). So much, in short, for the fantasy of an alternative communitarian culture among the pirates. But in two of the pirate lives in A General History that some Defoe scholars are confident he actually wrote, there is quite another use of these materials.11 The lives of Captain Misson and Captain Tew are intertwined, and both provide opportunities for political and moral speculation of a utopian and radical sort. For example, Misson comes under the influence of a radical priest turned Deist, one Caraccioli, who declares that in fact they are not pirates but rather “Men who were resolved to assert that Liberty which God and Nature gave them” (p. 392). The narrator takes the trouble of bracketing Caraccioli’s arguments, telling readers that he presents only an outline of them, since they “are too long, and too dangerous to translate . . . work’d up with great Subtlety, they may be pernicious to weak Men, who cannot discover their Fallacy” (p. 389). Misson and Caraccioli found a pirate colony, Libertalia, and call their people “Liberi . . . desiring in that might be drown’d the distin232

Travel, Politics, and Adventure guish’d Names of French, English, Dutch, Africans, etc.” (p. 417). Captain Tew engages Misson’s ship in battle, but when he is defeated he joins forces with him, later being named admiral in the new state of Libertalia, with Caraccioli as secretary of state. By the end of the story, Misson’s ship is lost at sea and Tew is killed in the Red Sea by an Indian vessel. Piracy in these two biographies provides an occasion for articulating radical ideas. Defoe is always in his fiction and journalism drawn to thought experiments, to playing with ideas for their shock value, even those we know he was skeptical about or even opposed to. These pirate lives are short and sketchy, of course, and Defoe may not actually have written them; but he contributed in some of his other work to the popularity of the pirate archetype in the early eighteenth century. We may say that in their radical and utopian quality (as well as in their teasing brevity), the stories of Misson and Tew highlight a subversive independence in the archetype that is darkly implied but never coherently articulated in the rest of Defoe’s criminal and adventure fiction.

233

8 Crime and Narrative

The aims in life of Defoe’s thieves and pirates are at bottom very little different from the ambition which he undertakes to direct in the Complete English Tradesman, and their maxims of conduct have much in common with this ideal. Selfinterest is on the look-out, and Self-reliance at the helm. William Minto, Daniel Defoe

Moll Flanders (1722) beneath the rude exterior of his characters an instinct and a prophecy. [Defoe’s] women have the indecency and the continence of beasts; his men are strong and silent as trees. English feminism and English imperialism already lurk in these souls which are just emerging from the animal kingdom. James Joyce, “Daniel Defoe”

Defoe certainly knew what the inside of a jail looked like, and although he can hardly be considered a criminal, his work as an undercover agent and anonymous pamphleteer gave him a certain affinity with the secrecy and social marginality of criminality. Perhaps not entirely seriously, Walter Scott remarked that Defoe’s “long and repeated imprisonments” enabled him to become acquainted with “the secrets of thieves and mendicants, their acts of plunder, concealment, and escape.”1 His status as a dissenter, albeit an unorthodox and rebellious one, added no doubt to his sense of himself as an outsider, and the aggrieved sense of injured self-worth and of downright resentment that he projects so often in his political journalism is a sign of that self-consciousness. After Robinson Crusoe, all of his longer fictions feature central characters who are for most of their lives 234

Crime and Narrative criminals or at the least, like Roxana, engaged in some forms of illicit or extralegal behavior. Even Robinson Crusoe when he is shipwrecked is participating with his fellow Brazilian planters in an illegal slaving expedition that he initiated. All of Defoe’s fictional narrators are radical individualists seeking to break free from a hierarchical world, special cases whose story is therefore worth telling, and that uniqueness and independence are intensified by their socially transgressive and often enough patently criminal behavior. As chronicles of intensely realized characters, Defoe’s narratives are exemplifications of that emerging concept of the person we take for granted called individualism, and they help to mark that fundamental shift in the common understanding of the modern individual. It is tempting to see his fictional protagonists as his own apparently intense projection into a number of wayward characters. At the least, they represent opportunities for Defoe to explore possibilities for identity in these emerging modern conditions, to contemplate through narrative a radical deviance such as he himself never came close to in his own life. We can, at least, view these fictions as experiments in impersonation for a curious book-buying public. Such a perspective preserves Defoe’s integrity as a novelist or as an innovator in narrative techniques, curious as a man of the Enlightenment to the point of fascination about all these possibilities, as he seems to have been about all things. All of Defoe’s narratives were aggressively advertised as the stories of singular individuals. In this regard, it is worth considering the full titles of the longer fictions, which dramatize in crude terms the appeal Defoe and his publishers presumably hoped to make to the book-buying public. As Lincoln Faller points out in Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing, criminal biography was something of an authentically new genre, dating only from about the middle of the seventeenth century, and was in his words “a well-established but relatively recent phenomenon, not something of long inheritance.”2 There seems to have been a surge in crimes in the period from 1715 to 1725 or at least a wide spread public sense that crime was on the upsurge, which coincides conveniently with Defoe’s career as a novelist, and Maximillian Novak calls Defoe “the mythologist of this crime wave.”3 During the 1720s, he was writing for a periodical called Applebee’s Journal that featured a good deal of crime reporting, and some critics have seen Defoe’s hand in a good deal of that reportage. Defoe was exploiting a popular genre, and he was contributing to its refinement in these long narratives he produced in the early 1720s. Defoe did not invent the criminal biography but as Novak remarks “he did help to give the complex of genres surrounding criminal accounts a particular shape.”4 Moll Flanders is offered on its title page as a sensational criminal life of a uniquely varied sort: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, & c.Who was Born in NEWGATE, and during a life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew 235

Crime and Narrative Rich, liv’d Honest, and died a Penitent, Written from her own MEMORANDUMS. Such tabloid breathlessness bears out Lennard Davis’s point that the novel in these early years is closely related to a uniquely modern discourse of “news,” and Moll Flanders is well described by the title of Davis’s book as a “factual fiction.”5 But its facts are there to validate a fantastical life history, as the title page makes clear. Modern “news” is always peddled under the paradoxical rubric of happenings that are both strange and actual; otherwise of course they would not be news, a category of “facts” which exists at the intersection of the ordinary and the fantastic. Moll’s story like all of Defoe’s fictions combines the deeply familiar textures of everyday existence with a set of improbable coincidences and lucky chances. For all of its sensational self-advertisement, however, Moll Flanders is not a sexy book; the heroine is a “whore” only in the moralistic eighteenth-century sense referring to any woman who has slept with a man who is not her husband. Moll simply indulges in serial monogamy with a number of unlicensed partners in the course of a long life, a pattern probably not all that uncommon among members of the lower working classes in Defoe’s time. After an initial passionate introduction to sexual experience as a servant with her young master in Colchester, her approach to sexual experience tends to be practical or even contemptuously utilitarian. Moll’s longest (about a third of the book) occupation is eventually as a pick-pocket and shop lifter, and the narrative is often enough concerned with the tricks of that particular trade, true in that respect to Defoe’s curiosity, his appetite to know everything there is to know, to master all the techniques and tools that make this underworld of petty crime work. He fits perfectly in this regard Henry James’s advice to the novelist in his essay, “The Art of Fiction,” “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” Defoe was above all else a master mimic; the numerous impersonations in his journalism were preparation for the assumed personalities in his longer fictions. What sets this novel apart from those imitations is his mimicry of a woman, a feat he would repeat in his last novel, Roxana (1724), and here moreover a woman initially from the working or servant classes and later in her story from the criminal classes.6 Female criminals, to echo an important strain in current understanding of the development of the novel, offer richer fields than law-abiding male citizens for narrative improvisation. Women are by definition without preordained social or moral identity once they are cut off from conformity to traditional female roles as wives and mothers. Or as Pope put it in the “Epistle to a Lady,” “Most women have no characters at all,” with “character” signifying an identity in the world, a public role or function. Once women break the mould or vary the pattern “natural” to their sex (or imposed by society), the field of subversive action and self-consciousness that opens up for them is potentially wide and varied, if full of dangers. From their marginal positions, women as well

236

Crime and Narrative as criminals can be said to offer fresh perspectives on the world from which they are excluded and which they struggle to penetrate or to subvert. In a sense, they are free to glimpse by virtue of their outsider status a realm of subversive potentiality.7 Defoe’s narratives from Moll Flanders onward are loosely derived from the picaresque tradition that had flourished in Spain and France in the seventeenth century as well as from a native strain of criminal and picaresque (or rogue) fiction going back to Elizabethan times. Defoe fashioned his own very English version of the picaresque, psychologizing it, complicating its essentially amoral comedy and blending it with a form of spiritual and moral autobiography, extending its geographical reach beyond England by taking Moll (twice) to Virginia, Colonel Jack to Virginia and to the Spanish Caribbean, and Captain Bob Singleton across Africa and the pirate routes in the Pacific. But the miscellaneous nature of picaresque fiction remains a distinct feature of Moll Flanders and of Defoe’s other novels. All of Defoe’s longer fictions attempt to reconcile their shambolic quality with the complexity and coherence of the individual personalities of his protagonists, to balance the sheer sequentiality of the narratives with the growth and maturation the characters themselves seek to exemplify. Defoe’s recurring pattern in these criminal fictions is toward moments of inner crisis for his protagonists, episodes of heightened self-awareness in which an individual tries to understand as morally meaningful a life that is otherwise random and improvisational. But within that tension between variety of incident and coherence of personality, all of Defoe’s novels are partial failures; his characters tend to lack in their prosperous survivals through hugely varied careers the coherence or even simple consistency we have come to expect of novelistic characters.Various critics have noted this over the years and lamented Defoe’s imperfect anticipation of the well-made novel. For example, observing that large portions of Moll Flanders are merely “uninspired summary,” Ian Watt notes that the book has over a hundred realized short scenes “and an equally large number of passages containing rapid and often perfunctory connective synapses.”8 George Starr calls the chronological sequence of events in Moll Flanders “halting and abrupt” and their connections “arbitrary at best.” 9 As Everett Zimmerman summarizes matters, Defoe’s characters are “created by a mass of external information, but their internal principles of coherence remain obscure.” Nonetheless, says Zimmerman, Defoe’s narratives “attest to there being more to the narrator’s life than a meaningless flow of disparate experience.”10 This partial success marks a crucial step in the development of the emerging modern novel. As John Bender frames the issue, Defoe’s innovation lay in constructing “apparently true life stories whose plots purport to accord with established paradigms of moral significance even though those plots contain a discordant profusion of thought and incident.”What

237

Crime and Narrative Bender sees that earlier critics did not quite grasp is that realism like Defoe’s affirms that “the flux of ordinary experience signifies” but only insofar as it gestures toward or invokes “a central consciousness” rather than some moral coherence.11 That is to say, the fragmentary and disorganized qualities of Moll’s narrative are self-expressive; they are part of the narrative’s evocation of a distinctive voice and a life behind that voice. Moll Flanders illustrates this partial moral failure, since the narrative is incoherent in its opening assumption that Moll during her criminal career has somehow been totally purged of the middle-class respectability of her earlier years as a middle-class wife and mother in Colchester. From the outset, Defoe insists that Moll’s is purely a voice from the disreputable criminal classes, and her personality is thus dramatized almost in essentialist terms – born in Newgate to a criminal mother, she is fated to that particular kind of life. The preface to Moll Flanders goes out of its way to make the point that the text represents a revision of Moll’s manner of speech as recorded in the manuscript by the “editor”: “the original of this Story is put into new Words, and the Stile of the famous Lady we here speak of, is a little alter’d, particularly she is made to tell her own Tale in modester Words than she told it at first; the Copy which came first to Hand, having been written in Language more like one still in Newgate, than one grown Penitent and Humble, as she afterwards pretends to be.”12 This rationale is completely conventional, although the moralizing justification shades over into another kind of defense. The editor protests that the text has in fact been purged of its grosser moments, but nonetheless there is much in it that might offend: “as the best use is made even of the worst Story, the Moral ’tis hop’d will keep the Reader serious, even where the Story might incline him to be otherwise: To give the History of a wicked Life repented of, necessarily requires that the wicked part should be made as wicked as the real History of it will bear; to illustrate and give a Beauty to the Penitent part, which is certainly the best and brightest, if related with equal Spirit and Life” (p. 2). The editor claims that he has retained enough of Moll’s actual speech to make the repentance convincing, that there is structural value in retaining Moll’s actual voice in its subversive selfexpressiveness to dramatize her repentance. The elaborate protestations of moral utility right next to claims for delightful variety mark an ambivalence in Defoe’s view of his audience. Of course, he could hardly hold up his heroine as a moral model, and the traditional excuse for such narratives is that they supply negative moral examples, warnings of what will happen to you if you lead a bad life. But this is a moral book in a less didactic sense. Moll is a moralizing observer; she draws from her experiences a number of conclusions about moral relationships and socioeconomic realities. Here she is reflecting on the end of her relationship with the Elder Brother in the house in Colchester where she has been a maid, as he manages things so that she marries his younger brother, Robin, who is in love with her: “So certainly does Interest 238

Crime and Narrative banish all manner of Affection, and so naturally do Men give up Honour and Justice, Humanity, and even Christianity, to secure themselves” (p. 58). That’s the sort of lesson Defoe as a student of contemporary Realpolitik would have drawn from his own experiences, and it is just the kind of observation that can be found everywhere in his journalism. A veteran of the sex wars in addition to all her other experiences, old Moll (she is over 70, we learn, when she sits down to tell her story) as she recalls her life is a somewhat cynical expert in strategies for living and tactics for survival, especially as a single woman, in an unforgiving world. As G.A. Starr argued in his Defoe and Casuistry, Moll and to some extent Defoe’s other narrators employ the techniques of refined moral analysis, presenting self-justification and moral rationalization for their actions that can be summed up as “casuistry,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines this way: The science, art, or reasoning of the casuist; that part of Ethics which resolves cases of conscience, applying the general rules of religion and morality to particular instances in which ‘circumstances alter cases’, or in which there appears to be a conflict of duties. Often (and perhaps originally) applied to a quibbling or evasive way of dealing with difficult cases of duty; sophistry.13

As Starr notes, “cases of conscience” such as casuistry specializes in, were for Defoe “the very stuff of daily existence. Experience is a constant challenge, since action involves choice and choice involves responsibility.” Moreover, as Starr observes, Defoe’s focus on the individual case is a key factor in the episodic nature of his narratives.14 Casuistical reasoning is a prominent feature of that part of the Review that Defoe called “Advice from the Scandal Club,” and Starr in his edition of Moll Flanders glosses many of the scenes and even some of the language in the novel with parallels from those cases submitted by readers of the Review, although some of them were clearly fictionalized. Moll is out in her exhaustive recollections partly to justify on an experiential, case by case basis her morally ambiguous career as manipulative woman in the marriage market and later as petty criminal. As a casuist, in Starr’s terms, she is morally suspect, and most of her rationalizations are clearly meant by Defoe to be treated skeptically or at least critically, but the overall effect of the narrative is mitigated moral blame and even sympathy. Moll herself at one key moment admits that she is not a reliable moral commentator. After the break up of her affair with a gentleman she meets at Bath, she analyzes the effects of illicit cohabitation but then catches herself in a judgmental mode she’s uncomfortable with: I cannot but reflect upon the unhappy Consequence of too great Freedoms between Persons stated as we were, upon the pretence of innocent intentions, Love

239

Crime and Narrative of Friendship, and the like; for the Flesh has generally so great a share in those Friendships, that it is great odds, but Inclination prevails at last over the most solemn Resolutions; and that Vice breaks in at the breaches of Decency, which really innocent Friendship ought to preserve with the greatest strictness; but I leave the Readers of these things to their own just Reflections, which they will be more able to make effectual than I, who so soon forgot my self, and am therefore but a very indifferent Monitor. (p. 126)

Moll is a narrator but she is not, of course, an author or moral authority; she is forthright about her own moral shortcomings and saves her rationalizations of her conduct for moments of extreme necessity. She delivers the facts and feelings of her life story, but the moral meaning, such as it is, is meant to be extracted and evaluated by a thoughtful reader. She herself makes this point more strongly while in Newgate after being condemned to death: “I Am not capable of reading Lectures of Instruction to any Body, but I relate this in the very manner in which things then appear’d to me, as far as I am able . . . It must be the Work of every sober Reader to make just Reflections on them, as their own Circumstances may direct; and without Question, this is what every one at sometime or other may feel something of; I mean a clearer Sight into things to come, than they had here, and a dark view of their own Concern in them” (pp. 287–8). The most revealing of all her several remarks in this vein is her comment just at the end of the book, when she is reunited in Virginia with her son by her brother/husband and thinks of how Providence has arranged this marvelous end despite her “past wicked and abominable Life”: “But I leave the Reader to improve these Thoughts, as no doubt they will see Cause, and I go on to the Fact” (p. 337). Moral reflection is not her business, but rather she goes “on to the Fact,” to the delivery of the facts of her extraordinary life, which she proceeds to do in the next few paragraphs in memorable fashion that undercuts even that compact remorse and returns us to the recurring tension between Moll the penitent and Moll the triumphant manipulator. She gives her son, Humphry, a present of a gold watch: “I told him, I had nothing of any Value to bestow but that, and I desir’d he would now and then kiss it for my sake; I did not indeed tell him that I had stole it from a Gentlewomans side, at a Meeting-House in London, that’s by the way” (p. 338). Since Humphry is much moved by this gift and promises that “the Watch should be a Debt upon him, that he would be paying, as long as I liv’d” (p. 338), the joke is grotesquely coherent but serves like so much else in Moll’s narrative to preserve her essential secrecy, inscribed for readers in the fact that we never do learn her actual name, and also to testify to her originality as a character. She is more than simply a reformed criminal, although she is certainly that as well; she is to the very end of her narrative a presence, a memorable, and vital entity, rather more than the sum of her experiences – a 240

Crime and Narrative novelistic character, in short, whose personality eludes final summary or type-casting. Defoe’s text gives us a particular content – the moral and social substance we extract from Moll’s narrative – and a certain narrative form – -the selfexpressive function of his narrator’s discourse that modern readers tend to value even while they probably grow bored by the substance. In all Defoe’s fictions, and it is more visible in Moll Flanders than in Robinson Crusoe, he can be seen as mining his own previously published writings for his narrator’s opinions and frame of reference; the novel is to some extent a series of dramatized rehearsals of themes from his own writing, an implicit dialogue between himself and his literary character.15 If he could not say of his creation as Flaubert did, that “Madame Bovary, c’est moi, d’apres moi!” (“Madame Bovary is myself, drawn from my life!”) there are clear affinities between Moll and the man who imagined her. There is a great deal of moral weight and social substance to Moll’s discourse; she has opinions on any number of contemporary issues. But in the development of her narrative her opinions tend to earn the reader’s attention only in so far as they contribute to our sense of her personality; they are essentially expressive rather than substantive (especially now after several centuries when the issues she confronts have faded away for readers of Defoe’s novel). Their cognitive value lies in the sounding board that they provide for the articulation of character and personality, for the particular person we know as Moll Flanders. In the end, the form of Moll’s narrative is its true substance and meaning, and the content tends to take a back seat. Despite the lack of neat narrative structure in Moll Flanders and perhaps precisely through its improvised qualities, Defoe fashions a convincing as well as a memorable voice for Moll, a seasoned veteran of a life of triumph and tragedy, a wise cracking and sometimes cynical and worldly presence on the page. But that voice needs the materials provided by contemporary ideas and controversies, by those social and moral dilemmas that turn out to be the content of a certain kind of female fate in the early eighteenth century. Moll’s personality, her presence as a character, emerges in dialogue with the specific circumstances of her times, of the historical moment she shares with Defoe. We might draw up a list of some of those social and economic circumstances, since they are distinct from what readers nowadays would have to cope with in their own lives: the lack of regular provision for orphans and discarded children like the infant Moll, the sexual exploitation of female servants by male masters, an unstable economic urban scene in which reckless merchants like Moll’s second husband can go bankrupt quickly, the unregulated flow of persons in a growing urban milieu such as early eighteenth-century London into which that second husband can disappear and in which Moll can later operate as a thief and pickpocket, the fluid and ineffective social structures for establishing and sharing identity with a partner to whom one is not legally married, the uncertain adult mortality that leaves 241

Crime and Narrative Moll at various points in her story a widow several times over, the harsh penal code that punished many acts of simple theft with death or transportation to America, the unpoliced streets and roads of London and eighteenth-century England that made crime a constant threat or opportunity, depending on your situation. The sense Moll gives us of the dynamic of personality development within (in response to) exactly-rendered sociohistorical circumstances is the essence of Defoe’s originality as a novelist. Moll insists on two concurrent and potentially contradictory factors: one, that she has been formed by her circumstances, and, two, that she has always resisted them to some extent, negotiating an individuality that is part of her nature and not produced by culture. While she is in care as a young child, working for the woman in Colchester she calls her Nurse, who has brought her up with other orphans in a little school supported by the local parish authorities, little Moll declares that she had “a thorough Aversion to going to Service, as they call’d it, that is to be a Servant, tho’ I was so young” (p. 10). Little Moll aspires, as she tells her Nurse, to be a “Gentlewoman,” and the Nurse is much amused and tells the Mayor of the town’s wife, who comes to visit the school with her two daughters, about Moll’s ambitions. But these ladies do not, as Moll recalls, really understand her childish ambition: “my good old Nurse, Mrs. Mayoress, and all the rest of them did not understand me at all, for they meant one Sort of thing by the Word Gentlewoman, and I meant quite another; for alas, all I understood by being a Gentlewoman, was to be able to Work for myself, and get enough to keep me without that terrible Bug-bear going to Service, whereas they meant to live Great, Rich, and High, and I know not what” (p. 13). When her old Nurse dies, she is taken into the house as a sort of companion to the daughters of one of the ladies of the town who had come to know her, and there as she tells us she receives in effect the same education as the daughters. Moll’s emphasis as she recounts this part of her early life is interesting, especially since in later life this genteel education doesn’t really come into play.

By this Means I had . . . all the Advantages of Education that I could have had, if I had been as much a Gentlewoman as they were, with whom I liv’d, and in some things, I had the Advantage of my Ladies, tho’ they were my Superiors; but they were all the Gifts of Nature, and which all their Fortunes could not furnish. First, I was apparently Handsomer than any of them. Secondly, I was better shap’d, and Thirdly, I Sung better, by which I mean, I had a better Voice; in all which you will I hope allow me to say, I do not speak my own Conceit of myself, but the Opinion of all that knew the Family. I Had with all these the common Vanity of my Sex (viz.) That being really taken for very Handsome, or if you please for a great Beauty, I very well knew it, and had as good an Opinion of myself, as any body else could have of me; and

242

Crime and Narrative particularly I loved to hear any body speak of it, which could not but happen to me sometimes, and was a great Satisfaction to me. (pp. 18–19)

So if we believe her, Moll has a self-consciousness (as well as beauty and brains) that makes her superior to the middle-class girls she grows up with. Her subsequent romance with the elder brother in the house and then her marriage to the younger one bear out her claims about her charms.The passage I’ve quoted exemplifies the double-edged quality of Moll’s memoirs. On the one hand, she presents herself as naturally quick and talented as well as lucky, but on the other hand she is (as she admits) propelled by impulses beyond her control. Here these look like harmless vanity, but subsequent events in the Colchester household that grow out of her attractiveness will begin her life of guile and deception. Persuaded by her first lover, the elder brother, to marry his younger brother, Robin, who loves her too, Moll is pushed into a relationship which after five years leaves her a widow with no ties to anyone, as she explains in a passage worth quoting for several reasons: It concerns the Story in hand very little, to enter into the farther particulars of the Family, or of myself, for the five Years that I liv’d with this Husband; only to observe that I had two Children by him, and that at the end of five Year he Died: He had been really a very good Husband to me, and we liv’d very agreeably together; But as he had not received much from them [i.e., his parents], and had in the little time he liv’d acquir’d no great Matters, so my Circumstances were not great; nor was I much mended by the Match: Indeed I had preserv’d the elder Brother’s Bonds to me, to pay me 500 l. which he offer’d me for my Consent to Marry his Brother; and this with what I had saved of the Money he formerly gave me, and about as much more by my Husband, left me a Widow with about 1200 l. in my Pocket. My two Children were indeed taken happily off of my Hands, by my Husband’s Father and Mother, and that by the way was all they got by Mrs. Betty. I confess I was not suitably affected with the loss of my Husband; nor indeed can I say, that I ever lov’d him as I ought to have done, or as was proportionable to the good Usage I had from him, for he was a tender, kind, good humour’d Man as any Woman could desire; but his Brother being so always in my sight, at least, while we were in the Country, was a continual Snare to me; and I never was in Bed with my Husband, but I wish’d my self in the Arms of his Brother; and tho’ his Brother never offer’d me the least Kindness that way, after our Marriage, but carried it just as a Brother ought to do; yet, it was impossible for me to do so to him: In short, I committed Adultery and Incest with him every Day in my Desires, which without doubt, was as effectually Criminal in the Nature of the Guilt, as if I had actually done it. (pp. 58–9)

Defoe chooses to bypass normal domestic life as a subject for Moll’s narrative, and his reasons are obvious enough. Instead, what he highlights from these 243

Crime and Narrative five years is Moll’s secret and guilty longing, her private emotional life rather than her public domestic existence. Note, too, that Moll is an unsparing moral observer of her own actions and feelings. Her lack of guilt about turning over her two children to her in-laws is also striking and has troubled many subsequent readers by its offhand callousness. It is a sign of her self-absorption and hard selfishness, one of many moments in the text where Defoe lets her expose herself, painting a picture that readers may wish to consider as a judgmental alternative to Moll’s own breezy rationalizations. In addition, Moll gives us the first of many financial accountings; her troubled state of mind is accompanied by a matter-of-fact balance sheet of her assets, which are in terms of eighteenthcentury purchasing power considerable.16 Many modern readers have found Moll’s accountings repellent and “materialistic” in our modern moralized sense (opposed to idealistic or spiritual), but these ledger-book entries are in fact the essence of her character. Moll is a materialist in the rigorous philosophical sense; her accountings dramatize her clear understanding that identity is grounded in material possessions and that all relationships are matters of exchange, of giving and getting value. In her selfassessments and financial reckonings, Moll calls attention to what is implicit in our modern usage whereby “worth” is both a measure of character and of economic accumulation (“net worth”). She also experiences on her pulse in her early pages the magic of money, the sense of power, of excitement and possibility that its possession brings. Thus, a bit earlier in the story of her life as a young beauty in the middle-class Colchester household she relates her first sexual experiences with the elder brother of the house, who fires her blood with his kisses and (especially) with his large monetary presents. After kissing her and flattering her with love talk, he gives her five guineas: “I Was more confounded with the Money than I was before with the Love; and began to be so elevated, that I scarce knew the Ground I stood on” (pp. 23–4). He kisses her passionately for the second time, makes her another gift of several guineas, and Moll is entranced as much by the money as the sex: “taken up Onley with the Pride of my Beauty, and of being belov’d by such a Gentleman; as for the Gold I spent whole Hours in looking upon it; I told the Guineas over and over a Thousand times a Day” (p. 26). And well she might count these gold coins over and over, since five guineas for a servant girl would be more than a year’s wages and as much as a skilled artisan even later in the century would earn in a month. However, she is still careful to balance the ledger with a moral reckoning, looking back on this episode as the beginning of her career as a sexual outlaw. But her main criticism of her youthful self reflects the varied career we are about to read. She faults herself for naivete, for a lack of tactical sophistication: Nothing was ever so stupid on both Sides, had I acted as became me, and resisted as Vertue and Honour requir’d, this Gentleman had either Desisted his Attacks,

244

Crime and Narrative finding no room to expect the Accomplishment of his Design, or had made fair, and honourable Proposals of Marriage; in which Case, whoever had blam’d him, no Body could have blam’d me. In short, if he had known me, and how easy the Trifle he aim’d at, was to be had, he would have troubled his Head no farther, but have given me four or five Guineas, and have lain with me the next time he had come at me: and if I had known his Thoughts, and how hard he supposed I would be to be gain’d, I might have made my own Terms with him; and if I had not Capitulated for an immediate Marriage, I might for a Maintenance till Marriage, and might have had what I would . . . but I seem’d wholly to have abandoned all such Thoughts as these, and was taken up Onely with the Pride of my Beauty, and of being belov’d by such a Gentleman. (pp. 25–6)

In her subsequent career, the first half of the book, Moll becomes in time just the kind of tactician in the sex wars that she isn’t here at this early stage of her life, and this part of her story is repetitive in its depiction of the various liaisons that Moll secures as a widow looking for a man to support her. Her first marriage after the hapless Robin dies is unwise and in fact disastrous, as she looks for someone with class aspirations like her own: “I was not averse to a Tradesman, but then I would have a Tradesman, forsooth, that was something of a Gentleman too; that when my Husband had a mind to carry me to the Court, or to the Play, he might become a Sword, and look as like a Gentleman, as another Man; and not be one that had the mark of his Apron-strings upon his Coat, or the mark of his Hat upon his Perriwig; that should look as if he was set on to his Sword, when his Sword was put on to him, and that carried his Trade in his Countenance” (p. 60). Without saying it in so many words, Moll realizes in retrospect that she has been seduced by a dream of social advancement, by her time as a middle-class matron in Colchester as Robin’s wife, and her second marriage illustrates the dangers of crossing class boundaries. So she marries a feckless tradesman whose gallant appearance and lavish habits captivate her: an “amphibious Creature, this Land-water-thing, call’d, a Gentleman-Tradesman, and as a just Plague upon my Folly, I was catch’d in the very Snare, which as I might say, I laid for my self” (p. 60).This draper quickly goes bankrupt and decamps, leaving Moll with the unpaid debts and making her as she says in what will be one of the book’s recurring formulations, “a Widow bewitch’d, I had a Husband, and no Husband” (p. 64). Moll is forced to change her name, to take refuge in a part of London called The Mint where debtors could claim sanctuary, where she dresses “in the Habit of a Widow, and call’d myself Mrs. Flanders” (p. 64). Moll in these early years of her life in London continues on the lookout for a husband, and her account of how she eventually secures one is wickedly funny. With the help here of a sea captain’s wife with whom she lodges and who gives it out that her young widow border has a fortune (this lady is the first of various 245

Crime and Narrative female allies and confidantes she acquires), Moll presents a false front to the world and describes it all as precisely a “game,” a recurring word throughout her narrative: I presently found my self bless’d with admirers enough, and that I had my Choice of Men, as scarce as they said they were, which by the way confirms what I was saying before: This being my Case, I who had a subtile Game to play, had nothing now to do but to single out from them all, the properest Man that might be for my Purpose; that is to say, the Man who was most likely to depend upon the hear say of a Fortune, and not enquire too far into the particulars; and unless I did this, I did nothing, for my Case would not bear much Enquiry. (p. 78)

Defoe’s essentially political approach to life is evident in the many twists and turns of Moll’s career in the marriage market that follows. During her life as a serial monogamist and then as a petty criminal, Moll is an alert negotiator for advantage, ready when one relationship fails or terminates through death or for other reasons to look around for new opportunities. She is quite equal to the game. Moll’s success in the marriage market and in the criminal trade depends upon her ability to inhabit in convincing fashion a middle-class identity, and with her second husband she even goes on a jaunt to Oxford where they pretend to be aristocrats (successfully, Moll claims). This string of relationships comes as chance and opportunity provide, and Moll’s narrative offers a world where events are random and to that extent “realistic.” However, there are moments when strange coincidences occur, when Moll’s freewheeling improvisations and manipulations seem destined to take her toward a foreordained conclusion, when something like a fateful pattern seems to superimpose itself upon the purely linear quality of her life and the wheel comes full circle. The most striking of these is her marriage (her third if we count) to a man who turns out to be her half brother, a discovery she makes some years after she has gone to live with him on his plantation in Virginia, where in conversations with her mother-in-law she discovers the awful truth and is plunged into secret agonies of guilt and disgust. If we look back over this part of the narrative, there is a balance between exhilarating trickery and triumphant maneuvering and moments like these of inner turmoil and secret anguish, as well as of intense remorse in the telling of these events. Such balance is of the essence in Defoe’s rendering of his heroine, who is not so much a bundle of contradictions as she is a convincingly divided self whose steady presence of mind in adversity is a coherent response to recurring disasters. Defoe’s narrative builds a sympathetic picture of a woman whose steady nerves and sure moves, as well as comic exuberance, in the external world of money and marriage, are in tension with a harrowing interior life. Consider, for one example, her rendition of her discov-

246

Crime and Narrative ery of the identities of her mother and her half brother/husband. As she listens to her mother-in-law tell her story, Moll realizes just who she is: I HEARD this part of the Story with very little attention, because I wanted much to retire and give vent to my Passions, which I did soon after; and let any one judge what must be the Anguish of my Mind, when I came to reflect, that this was certainly no more or less than my own Mother, and that I had now had two Children, and was big with another by my own Brother, and lay with him still every Night. I WAS now the most unhappy of all Women in the World: O had the Story never been told me, all had been well; it had been no Crime to have lain with my Husband, since as to his being my Relation, I had known nothing of it. I LEAVE it to any Man to judge what Difficulties presented to my view, I was away from my native Country at a distance prodigious, and the return to me unpassable; I liv’d very well, but in a Circumstance unsufferable in it self; if I had discover’d my self to my Mother, it might be difficult to convince her of the Particulars, and I had no way to prove them: On the other hand, if she had question’d or doubted me, I had been undone, for the bare Suggestion would have immediately separated me from my Husband, without gaining my Mother or him, who would have been neither a Husband or a Brother; so that between the surprise on one hand, and the uncertainty on the other, I had been sure to be undone. In the mean time as I was but too sure of the Fact, I liv’d therefore in open avowed Incest and Whoredom, and all under the appearance of an honest Wife; and tho’ I was not much touched with the Crime of it, yet the Action had something in it shocking to Nature and made my Husband, as he thought himself, even nauseous to me. HOWEVER, upon the most sedate Consideration, I resolv’d, that it was absolutely necessary to conceal it all, and not make the least Discovery of it either to Mother or Husband; and thus I liv’d with the greatest Pressure imaginable for three Years more, but had no more Children. (pp. 88–9)

Moll’s emotions are too terrible to describe and they can only be evoked by outlining the dreadful facts (and being sure of facts is the crucial activity in Moll Flanders) and the nearly insuperable difficulties attendant on them. Moll tends to be inarticulate at moments of extremity and exhorts her readers to imagine what she experienced even though she cannot really describe it. But obviously she remains articulate in narrative retrospection, delivering a full rendition of those circumstances, even as she fails, as she insists, to do justice to the feelings that accompanied them. Privacy and secrecy, her sources of strength most of the time, become part of her emotional problem, as she longs for a confidante and for the release of a revelation she dare not make. As we will see with Defoe’s other great female narrator, Roxana, secrecy for them is a necessary response to emotional

247

Crime and Narrative extremity, but both of them manage it partly by finding confidantes, other women who share their pain and their guilt. For this scene, however, Moll is alone, until that is she makes a confidante of her newly-discovered mother, just as later she will be aided in crime by her “Mother Midnight,” who helps her get rid of unwanted children and serves as a pawnbroker for her stolen goods. Often enough, and in her lowest moment which is after all still years in the future, Moll finds that emotional stress and strain, brought on the twist of a fate she could not have predicted, can be endured only through precise examination and dealt with by what she calls “sedate Consideration.” For Defoe’s protagonists, resolute action is always an antidote to psychological paralysis, and Moll quickly, at least in terms of narrative space, moves on from this terrifying moment of guilt and disgust and sketches out a return to England. Recently, feminist critics have made much of Moll’s incest with her half brother, and they have highlighted this scene in Virginia as nothing less than the revealing center of the novel and of Moll’s ideological profile. Ellen Pollak has observed that the incest taboo is the only boundary that Moll will not cross. Once she learns that she is in an incestuous marriage, she leaves, and her moral sense is roused as never before or for that matter afterwards. Thus, argues Pollak, Moll’s refusal in most of the novel to become simply another female object circulated among men is cancelled by her aversion to incest: “the Virginia episode has the effect of both organizing and ultimately neutralizing the subversive force of Moll’s subsequent transgressions against institutional authority.” Or, as Pollak summarizes matters, Moll Flanders is in one sense “the narrative of a woman’s initiation into a specific cultural construction of womanhood.”17 Moll’s free circulation through the male world is revealed in a moment like this as equivalent to incest, and this fall into unholy union with her half brother, as Pollak will have it, infects all her other sexual dealings, branding them as guilty and transgressive rather than liberating. Such a view of things certainly adds another layer of complexity to the narrative and of course throws a veil of irony over all of Moll’s subsequent life. In due course, Moll will look back on her life with moral regret, bearing out Pollak’s point. But here in Virginia, practical matters come first, for the husband/brother must be told and his consent for her departure is required. So Moll lays out the scene in which she tells him the dreadful fact. She handles this with careful legalism, withholding the revelation of incest until she has secured a guarantee from her husband/brother that he “will not blame me for not discovering the Secret of it before I knew it” (p. 102). Even in her matter of fact rendition, the scene has a terrific tension, and readers sense the terror of different sorts on both sides of the exchange, rendered partly in dialogue, partly in Moll’s paraphrase of their exchange. Here is her final clarification, the bald matter of fact: 248

Crime and Narrative Well then, says I, it is this, as I told you before in a Heat, that I was not your lawful Wife, and that our Children were not legal Children; so I must let you know now in calmness, and in kindness, but with Affliction enough, that I am your own Sister, and you my own Brother, and that we are both the Children of our Mother now alive, and in the House, who is convinc’d of the Truth of it, in a manner not to be denied or contradicted. I SAW him turn pale, and look wild, and I said, now remember your Promise, and receive it with Presence of mind; for who cou’d have said more to prepare you for it, than I have done? However I call’d a Servant, and got him a little Glass of Rum, which is the usual Dram of the Country, for he was just fainting away. (pp. 102–3)

Note that last gratuitous detail, the little glass of rum, the “usual Dram of the Country,” a special fact that comes in as an implicit testimony to the authenticity of the melodramatic moment, that in its quotidian quality serves to make it all more or less plausible and modifies incestuous melodrama. Looking back on a scene of nearly intolerable emotional confusion, Moll retains her sense of her representational mission to deliver a persuasive narrative of everyday life. Despite its melodrama, the scene is slightly comic as Moll remembers it, another episode in her varied career, terrible of course in one sense but also part of her momentum and testimony to her flexibility and adaptability. In purely practical terms, as well, it marks the beginning of her necessary return to England and fresh adventures, since the book would be too short if Moll stopped here. The highlight of that return turns out to be Moll’s low point, her descent into poverty that leads her into a life of crime. But before that low point, readers new to the novel should know, there is a tangled run of relationships that in summary fashion illustrate what the preface to the novel referred to as the book’s “infinite variety” (p. 3). Looking for the best place to meet a man, she goes to Bath, where she acquires a lover, and when that man repents of their adulterous connection after recovering from a serious illness, she finds another admirer, a banker, who confesses he is married, although unhappily to a “whore.” While she waits for this lover to divorce his wife, she goes on the advice of a fellow lodger north to Lancashire, where she is introduced to another man, who claims to have an estate in Ireland and whose marriage proposal she accepts. But it transpires after their marriage that he is a fortune hunter. When he discovers that Moll, too, is fortune hunting, they part amicably (although with much regret and deep affection on Moll’s part for her “Lancashire husband”), and she resumes her relationship with the banker, whom she marries in due course after his unfaithful wife is divorced and dies. But after five years with this banker, he dies when he suffers financial reversals. And so Moll runs out of options; there are no more opportunities or prospects, and she is now too old 249

Crime and Narrative for the sex game. As her resources dwindle apace, as she faces penury, she describes a long slide into helplessness and, note, isolation: “In this Distress I had no Assistant, no Friend to comfort or advise me, I sat and cried and tormented myself Night and Day; wringing my Hands, and sometimes raving like a distracted Woman . . . I LIV’D Two Years in this dismal Condition wasting that little I had, weeping continually over my dismal Circumstances, and as it were only bleeding to Death, without the least hope or prospect of help from God or Man; and now I had cried so long, and so often, that Tears were, as I might say, exhausted, and I began to be Desperate, for I grew poor apace” (p. 190). For all of her secrecy and tactical apartness she practices in most of her narrative, Moll also stresses the negative and destructive side of such individualism, the helplessness and loneliness that erode her sanity. Close to madness (“my Understanding was sometimes quite lost in Fancies and Imaginations” [p. 190]), she evokes the leaching away of self-control that precedes her transformation into a criminal. Here is how she describes the precise moment, which is as she renders it unique in her experience because it is involuntary, a trance-like state produced by desperation and sends her into the city streets, where she becomes as a subjective entity cancelled by the objective urban world that absorbs her, propels her, and causes her first crime: It was one Evening, when being brought, as I may say, to the last Gasp, I think I may truly say I was Distracted and Raving, when prompted by I know not what Spirit, and as it were, doing I did not know what, or why; I dress’d me, for I had still pretty good Cloaths, and went out: I am very sure I had no manner of Design in my Head, when I went out, I neither knew or considered where to go, or on what Business; but as the Devil carried me out and laid his Bait for me, so he brought me to be sure to the place, for I knew not whether I was going or what I did. (p. 191).

In the first of a number of precisely rendered London wanderings during her thieving days, Moll passes “by an Apothecary’s Shop in Leadenhall-street” where she sees an unattended bundle and she seizes it: This was the Bait; and the Devil who I said laid the Snare, prompted me, as if he had spoke, for I remember, and shall never forget it, ‘twas like a Voice spoken over my Shoulder, take the Bundle; be quick; do it this Moment; it was no sooner said but I step’d into the Shop, and with my Back to the Wench, as if I had stood up for a Cart that was going by, I put my Hand behind me and took the Bundle . . . It is impossible to express the Horror of my Soul all the while I did it, When I went away I had no Heart to run, or scarce to mend my pace; I cross’d the Street indeed, and went down the first turning I came to, and I think it was a Street that

250

Crime and Narrative went thro’ into Fenchurch-street, from thence I crossed and turn’d thro’ so many ways and turnings, that I could never tell which way it was, nor where I went, I felt not the Ground, I stept on, and the farther I was out of Danger, the faster I went, till tyr’d and out of Breath, I was forc’d to sit down on a little Bench at a Door, and then found I was got into Thames-street near Billingsgate: I rested me a little and went on, my Blood was all in a Fire, my Heart beat as if I was in a sudden Fright: In short, I was under such a Surprize that I knew not whether I was a going, or what to do. (pp. 191–2)

There are two contradictory narrative satisfactions in these sequences. On the one hand, Moll’s adventures in the marriage “game” look back to the tricks of picaresque and rogue fiction. Fundamentally comic and by tradition light-hearted, these adventures become in Defoe’s narrative deadly serious, oddly circumstantial and substantial in dramatizing specific contemporary social realities, giving readers information about current moral and social dilemmas, such as for example the difficulties of obtaining a divorce, or in more general terms the fluid, uncertain nature of urban identity and the problems that poses for establishing relationships based on mutuality and reliable information. But then Moll’s evocation of approaching penury, the stark realities of a social system with no effective support mechanisms for a lone woman, mark a temporary cancellation of the improvisation that Moll has displayed so richly as she played the “game.” Defoe imagines the moment of her initial transgression as purely involuntary, as she is in the grip of some sort of survival instinct. Her rationalization is the weakest possible – that forces beyond her control and welling up from a realm of inner compulsion drove her to it. From here on, the novel is an implicit debate between these two understandings of personal agency – the freewheeling individual, manipulating social and institutional circumstances for advantage, and the helpless product of irresistible socioeconomic determinants who becomes what her circumstances make her. The bleak circumstances that impel Moll into this second phase of her story cast a shadow over her subsequent success as a pickpocket and shoplifter, although Defoe sees to it that only the moralizing reader sustains that view of things.There is from this point in the novel an informing irony: pushed by necessity into crime, Moll is possessed in due course by an illusory sense of independence and power quite distinct from the careful manipulations and adjustments that characterize her life in the sex and marriage market. In no time at all, Moll becomes an accomplished thief, as she boasts at the high point of her career (“I grew the greatest Artist of my time” [p. 214]); much of her narrative seems to return to the comic picaresque mode, with her rendition of the tricks of the trade as she masters them, punctuated by the rough and ready wit she brings to her evocation of the criminal underworld. Her art of thieving involves a passivity that switches to swift and sure action as opportunity presents itself. Like Crusoe 251

Crime and Narrative deciding to position himself in readiness as the cannibals arrive and as he says “leave the rest to the event, taking such measures as the opportunity should present, let be what would be” (p. 158), Moll’s method is essentially also a matter of alert positioning, of watching and waiting for the right moment to act, albeit in London and not on a Caribbean island. From that first terrified run through the maze of its streets, London is a crucial environment for Moll’s criminal career. It provides an urban space where the anonymous individual can move freely, without the restraints of communal identity and traditional routes or boundaries. What is at first a wilderness where Moll’s tempter can whisper in her ear becomes in her very next thieving expedition a familiar maze-like ground that she seems suddenly to have mastered and to be able to exploit to advantage. The rapidity of Moll’s transition from terrified novice to expert practitioner is remarkable as well as implausible, although it may say something about Defoe’s enthusiasm for the subject and his admiration for quick learners very like himself. But most of all her rapid passage to hardened if not vicious criminality is an illustration of the force of socioeconomic circumstances as they foster a sense of illusory freedom quite distinct from her sexual/political negotiations in the first half of the book. If Moll’s initial foray into crime is a trance-like compulsion, her next adventure is a matter of alert response to urban opportunity, as Moll comes upon a little girl wearing a rich necklace, and what had been earlier a rush of confused street names (“I found I was got into Thames-street near Billingsgate” [p. 192]) is now a precisely rendered escape route: going thro’ Aldersgate-street, there was a pretty little Child had been at a DancingSchool, and was going home all alone, and my Prompter, like a true Devil, set me upon this innocent Creature; I talk’d to it, and it prattl’d to me again, and I took it by the Hand and led it a long till I came to a pav’d Alley that goes into Bartholomew Close, and I led it in there; the Child said that was not its way home; I said, yes, my Dear it is, I’ll show you the way home; the Child had a little Necklace on of Gold Beads, and I had my Eye upon that, and in the dark of the Alley I stoop’d, pretending to mend the Child’s Clog that was loose, and took off her Necklace and the Child never felt it, and so led the Child on again: Here, I say, the Devil put me upon killing the Child in the dark Alley, that it might not Cry, but the very thought frighted me so that I was ready to drop down, but I turn’d the Child about and bad it go back again, for that was not its way home; the Child said so she would, and I went thro’ into Bartholomew Close, and then turn’d round to another Passage that goes into Long-lane, so away into CharterhouseYard, and out into St. John’s-street, then crossing into Smithfield, went down Chicklane, and into Field lane to Holbourn-bridge, when mixing with the Crowd of People usually passing there, it was not possible to have been found out; and thus I enterpriz’d my second Sally into the World. (p. 194)

252

Crime and Narrative Instead of wandering in a daze as she did in her first foray, Moll is now on familiar, clearly marked territory (Defoe’s home turf), moving purposefully, professionally alert for whatever turns up, and the glint of that gold necklace and the exact observation of a child on its way home from dancing school (how Moll knows that is never made clear) marks a new identity quickly formed by circumstances but made very much her own. An exhilarating sequence of varied adventures follows that features a resourceful, quick-witted Moll who steals by stealth and cunning, by disguise and impersonation, by improvised and almost balletic movements that pointedly avoid awkward and violent crimes. Moll does have twinges of guilt, and after tricking one of the victims of a fire into giving up a bundle of prized possessions saved from the flames, she is struck by “the inhumanity of this Action” and “made me relent exceedingly, and Tears stood in my Eyes” (p. 207). But in what she describes shortly after as a hardening that success brings, Moll goes on and grows richer by crime for over five years. At length, after a number of close calls, Moll is arrested and in due course she is sent to Newgate Prison (a place Defoe knew well enough), where her reflections abruptly shift her tone from the often light-hearted and seemingly open-ended rogue’s memoirs to the grim contemplation of the doom-laden inevitability that has been implicit in her criminal career from its opening moment, which nonetheless in her last clause in this paragraph retains a reminder of her success at eluding that fate. That boast turns out to be her last: I was carried to Newgate; that horrid Place! my very Blood chills at the mention of its Name; the Place, where so many of my Comrades had been lock’d up, and from whence they went to the fatal Tree; the Place were my Mother suffered so deeply, where I was brought into the World, and from whence I expected no Redemption, but by an infamous Death: To conclude, the Place that had so long expected me, and which with so much Art and Success I had so long avoided. (p. 273)

Moll marks in this prelude to her time in Newgate the narrative implications of this moment, as her past catches up with her present and the fate that has been brooding for so long seizes her. As she says at the beginning of the next paragraph, she is “now fix’d indeed” (p. 273), no longer free but cabined and confined, and her recollection of her repentance is theologically accurate and unforgiving. As she remarks, her repentance brings no relief, because “it was repenting after the Power of farther Sinning was taken away” and comes not out of remorse but out of fear of her punishment, “and this took away all the Comfort, and even the hope of my Repentance in my own Thoughts” (p. 274).

253

Crime and Narrative Moll’s Newgate sojourn is the most strictly novelistic part of the book, as the loose-jointed narrative gives way to an intensely coherent study of the failure of repentance and then eventually to what Moll says is a genuine conversion experience. At first, Newgate is an interlude in which Moll discovers the determining power of circumstances, in which her free-wheeling improvisatory talents for survival and self-preservation are nullified, and in which she loses her agency, becoming in due course an extension of the prison itself in all its determining materiality. This episode negates everything that Moll has come to stand for in her narrative thus far, surpassing in its erasure of will and purpose even the descent years before into criminality. In its irresistible force, Newgate offers a suggestive image of social and historical determination of individual destiny such as Defoe’s novels evoke but avoid confronting directly as they delineate the evasive movements of resourceful individuals. But of course, those evasions testify precisely to the power of those determinants. Moll has some four or five weeks, as she explains, before her case comes to trial, and in that time: I ought to have esteem’d it, as a space given me for Repentance, and have employ’d it as such; but it was not in me, I was sorry (as before) for being in Newgate, but had very few Signs of Repentance about me. On the contrary, like the Waters in the Caveties, and Hollows of Mountains, which petrifies, and turns into Stone whatever they are suffer’d to drop upon; so the continual conversing with such a Crew of Hell-Hounds as I was with had the same common Operation upon me, as upon other People; I degenerated into Stone; I turn’d first Stupid and Senseless, then Brutish and thoughtless, and at last raving Mad as any of them were; and in short, I became as naturally pleas’d and easie with the Place, as if indeed I had been Born there. (p. 278)

The natural image Moll uses here is perhaps unique in the novel, which is focussed on human relationships and positioning for advantage rather than natural process. Embodied in Newgate, society and history now have a threatening solidity and coherence that they have lacked before, since all such abstractions have been reduced by Moll’s energetic personality to particular and temporary circumstances. Newgate produces in Moll is a numbness, a lack of self-consciousness as she yields to the pure determining circumstantiality of the place: “a certain strange Lethargy of Soul possess’d me, I had no Trouble, no Apprehensions, no Sorrow about me, the first Surprize was gone; I was, I may well say, I know not how; my Senses, my Reason, nay, my Conscience were all a-sleep; my Course of Life for forty Years had been a horrid Complication of Wickedness; Whoredom, Adultery, Incest, Lying, Theft . . . and now I was ingulph’d in the misery of Punishment, and had an infamous Death just at the Door, and yet I had no Sense of my Condition, no Thought of Heaven or Hell at least, that went any farther 254

Crime and Narrative than a bare flying Touch, like the Stitch or Pain that gives a Hint and goes off ” (p. 279). Defoe’s solution to this moral and psychological dead end for Moll is a daringly romantic reassertion of human relationships, which occurs as part of her past life unexpectedly appears in the prison. One night she learns that three highwaymen have been captured after a fierce battle and are the next morning to appear. And among those “brave topping Gentlemen” she recognizes the man she always calls her Lancashire husband, the fortune hunter who married her years before, her handsome and gallant Jemy, for whom she has carried a torch. As she observes Jemy she is struck by her responsibility for his fate, and in the process of realizing that she is transformed and redeemed from her brutish content among the besotted Newgate-birds: I WAS overwhelm’d with grief for him; my own Case gave me no disturbance compar’d to this, and I loaded my self with Reproaches on his Account; I bewail’d his Misfortunes, and the ruin he was now come to, at such a Rate, that I relish’d nothing now, as I did before, and the first Reflections I made upon the horrid detestable Life I had liv’d, began to return upon me, and as these things return’d, my abhorrance of the Place I was in, and of the way of living in it, return’d also; in a word, I was perfectly chang’d, and become another Body. (p. 281)

The stakes for narrative coherence Defoe plays for are very high. Moll reaches back, as it were, and finds a guilty responsibility in her past that she has never been conscious of before, and she thereby redeems her present. This is a narrative moment within the larger narrative; seeing Jemy in Newgate Moll replays the criminal part of her life, and she comes to understand it in a different and redeeming sense. It is almost as if at this point Defoe realizes that he needs to do something to make up for the scattered, miscellaneous and merely sequential quality of Moll’s recollections and to find a way to make her repentance more than fear of punishment and more than just another automatic response to circumstances. She begins here to tell her life story to herself, understanding a crucial part of it in new terms. Her feelings about Jemy stands in for the guilt she never quite articulates about any number of other shortcomings in her life. Thus, when she is called not long after this to her trial, she finds herself rid of her Newgate torpor as “conscious Guilt began to flow in upon my Mind: In short, I began to think, and to think is one real Advance from Hell to Heaven; all that Hellish harden’d state and temper of Soul, which I said so much of before, is but a deprivation of Thought; he that is restor’d to his Power of thinking, is restor’d to himself ” (p. 281). For thinking, we might want to substitute remembering, or, better, narrating the story of one’s life. In Moll’s particular case at this point in her life, her narration is a form of rearrangement or reconstruction of her life in response to 255

Crime and Narrative “guilt.” This moment is hardly a “restoration” of a selfhood that Moll possessed before; she claims nothing less than a newly-developed personality, fashioned under and out of the stress of Newgate. And it serves her well. It is the prelude to her actual conviction for “Felony,” a hanging offense, and her technical religious conversion and repentance at the hands of a minister sent by her old female accomplice and receiver of her stolen goods. Next to the relief she acquires by imagining her responsibility for Jemy, this is a conventional experience, although Moll presents it at some length and characterizes it as yet another of her lifesaving narrations: “I gave him an Abridgement of this whole History” (p. 288). Her conversion is completed on the minister’s next visit: “he reviv’d my Heart, and brought me into such a Condition, that I never knew any thing of in my Life before: I was cover’d with Shame and Tears for things past, and yet had at the same time a secret surprizing Joy at the Prospect of being a true Penitent, and obtaining the Comfort of a Penitent, I mean the hope of being forgiven; and so swift did Thoughts circulate, and so high did the impressions they had made upon me run, that I thought I cou’d freely have gone out that Minute to Execution, without any uneasiness at all, casting my Soul entirely into the Arms of infinite Mercy as a Penitent” (p. 289). And after this same minister returns a few days later to bring news that she has been reprieved for now (and some time later she petitions successfully for transportation rather than execution), Moll pauses to chide readers who may not be enjoying this part of her narration: This may be thought inconsistent in it self, and wide from the Business of this Book; Particularly, I reflect that many of those who may be pleas’d and diverted with the Relation of the wicked part of my Story, may not relish this, which is really the best part of my Life, the most Advantageous to myself, and the most instructive to others; such however will I hope allow me liberty to make my Story compleat: It would be a severe Satyr on such, to say they do not relish the Repentance as much as they do the Crime; and they had rather the History were a compleat Tragedy, as it was very likely to have been. (p. 291)

This is, presumably, Defoe speaking, the social and moral critic who likes to hector his audience, and we can take this parting shot as testimony to his own ambivalence about his material and about his audience, here and in his other fictions about successful criminals. It is an odd and temporary insult, since Moll has a fair amount more to tell us, as new scenes are about to open up with Jemy in Virginia, and there will be fresh (if legal and quite moral) tricks and deceptions before she’s through. Why not stop here if Defoe means it? I do think that he had a compulsion to write, a manifest delight in articulation. And of course this passage is the bridge to yet more exhilarating adventures for his heroine. Defoe is teasing his readers but also testing his own capacity for sheer inventiveness. 256

Crime and Narrative The taunt establishes his own bona fides and moral superiority, so that he can go on to provide readers with what he knows they want more than the conversion narrative or the spiritual autobiography that Moll’s story has for the moment become.This turn in the text is Defoe’s implicit response to what modern critics and readers have faulted, and it would seem to mark his awareness of the tension in Moll Flanders between picaresque variety and psychological unity and focus. Moll may be said to achieve an integrity and coherence in these Newgate scenes that the demands of the marketplace and the logic of the criminal/picaresque format (part of a taste for sheer narrative fullness and variety) shove to the side and send her on to fresh American adventures.

Colonel Jack (1722) Moll Flanders, Roxana, Colonel Jack, and Singleton, are selfish to the last extremes of baseness: their whole lives are only one struggle to secure their own interests, regardless not only of the welfare of other, but of gratitude, natural affection and decency. Anonymous review of Bohn’s edition of Defoe, National Review

The “infinite variety” on offer in Moll Flanders is extended in the next pseudoautobiography/novel Defoe published in 1722, and its title page sets a new standard for extravagance: The History and Remarkable Life of The Truly Honourable Col. Jacque Commonly Call’d Col. Jack Who Was Born a Gentleman, put ‘Prentice to a PickPocket, was Six and Twenty Years a Thief, and then Kidnapp’d to Virginia. Came Back a Merchant, married four Wives, and five [sic] of them prov’d Whores; went into the Wars, behav’d bravely, got Preferment, was made Colonel of a Regiment, came over, and fled with the Chevalier, and is now abroad compleating a Life of Wonders, and resolves to dye a General. This narrative is not really a picaresque romp, but it is more serious, less frantically miscellaneous than its title page indicates. Colonel Jack makes a case from its preface on to be a roman à thèse, an experiment designed to show that blood will out, that Jack inherits from the gentleman he is told by his nurse was his father an instinct for gentility and its accompanying morality, or at least that having been told he is a gentleman’s son Jack will carry that hint into his life: his father, his nurse tells him, instructed her that “she should always take care to bid me remember, that I was a Gentleman, and this he said was all the Education he would desire of her for me, for he did not doubt, he said, but that sometime or other the very hint would inspire me with Thoughts suitable to my Birth, and that I would certainly act like a Gentleman, if I believed myself to be so.”18 Defoe had no illusions about gentility being somehow natural. He saw himself as having achieved upper middle-class status by virtue of his own efforts. In The 257

Crime and Narrative Compleat English Gentleman, a work never published in his lifetime, he proclaims his membership in that class: “I have the Honour to be rank’d by the Direction of Providence, in the same class, and would be so far from lessening the Dignity Heaven has given us, that I would add Lustre . . . to the constellated Body, and make them still more illustrious than they are.”19 But that book is also mainly a satirical attack on the stupid and supine English gentry, on gentlemen “brought up in the most obstinate ignorance and folly, and fill’d early with the most riveted aversions to learning and improvement in the very face of an improving and knowing age” (p. 69). As always, Defoe is alert to the nature of historical and political process; he makes a case he is very fond of – that the English ruling classes are being transformed and reinvigorated by the ambition and energies of the new merchant class: “trade, especially in this country, raises innumerable families from the dust, that is to say, from mean and low beginnings to great and flourishing estates” (p. 266). In this spirit, Jack in due course becomes a gentleman by dint of luck, hard work, self-education, and a driving ambition. His halfbaked youthful notion that somehow his aspiration to gentility is bred in him is corrected by a narrative that shows very specifically that gentlemen are made rather than born. And yet Jack’s sense of his own uniqueness plays a role in his rise, for Defoe was shrewd enough to understand the force of ideology; Jack’s childish faith in himself is an important part of his success story, and his sense that he is somehow distinct from his fellow thieves provides steady motivation for his eventual transformation. The book also addresses a more general issue. As the preface would have it, the story is meant to highlight a pressing social problem, “the Blessing, and Advantages of a sober and well govern’d Education, and the Ruin of so many Thousands of Youths of all Kind, in this Nation, for want of it” (p. 1).Yet Defoe’s narrative relishes in its opening sequences the particularized underworld of petty crime and juvenile delinquency. Like Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack gives readers insight into the tricks of the pick-pocketing trade. However, Jack is essentially an onlooker and hanger-on. He is most of the time an almost- innocent accomplice who never masters the trade. In fact, crime (or criminal association) in these early pages of Colonel Jack is simply a means toward the hero’s sentimental selfdiscovery, as he listens to his “strange kind of uninstructed Conscience” (p. 55) that torments him and leads him to make restitution to victims where he can. In particular, he broods over the robbery his rampaging gang committed on two poor women from Kentish-town, in which he played as brutal a part as his friends but suffered even as he did it: don’t be frighted Sweetheart, said I, to the Maid, a little of that Money in the bottom of your Pocket will make all easie, and I’ll do you no harm; by this time Will came up to us, for they did not see him before; then they began to scream out; hold, says I, make no Noise, unless you have a mind to force us to murther

258

Crime and Narrative you whether we will or no, give me your Money presently, and make no Words, and we shan’t hurt you; upon this, the poor Maid pull’d out 5s. 6d. and the old Woman a Guinea, and a Shilling, crying heartily for her Money, and said, it was all she had left in the World; well we took it for all that, tho’ it made my very heart bleed to see what agony the poor Woman was in at parting with it, and I ask’d her where she liv’d, she said her Name was Smith, and she liv’d at Kentish-Town (p. 64)

A year later, Jack restores the money, hiding his identity as he pretends to represent the thief (and he gives her an extra crown when she tells him that she prays that the thief will not be hanged and hopes that he repents), feeling deep remorse, giving readers a sentimental farewell to his career, quite brief really, as an urban thief, and setting the moral implications very starkly:“I thought it would have broke my very Heart, to think how this poor Creature work’d, and was a Slave at near Threescore, and that I a young Fellow of hardly Twenty, should Rob her of her Bread to Support my Idleness, and Wicked Life; and the Tears came from my Eyes, in spight of all my strugling to prevent it” (p. 85). Jack thus becomes a proto-sentimental hero, sensitive and, most important, guilty from the start about his crimes, unlike his companions – thoroughly callous street urchins and brutal thieves. One can imagine eighteenth-century readers treating the book as a revelation (and the tone Defoe give his hero is not indignant or moralistic but matter-offact) of the juvenile counter-culture of crime in their midst, and in its fascination with criminality the book is not unusual in this regard during the 1720s. In his 1723 attack on the so-called “charity schools” established to provide the poor with a minimal education, Bernard Mandeville draws a vivid picture of urban crime in London and other “over-grown cities”: “they harbour Rogues and Villains as Granaries do Vermin; they afford perpetual Shelter to the worst of People, and are places of Safety to Thousands of Criminals, who daily commit Thefts and Burglaries, and yet by often changing their places of Abode, may conceal themselves for many Years.”20 Mandeville evokes juvenile crime as an inevitable part of the urban scene: “In a populous City it is not difficult for a young Rascal, that has pushed himself into a Crowd, with a small Hand and nimble Fingers to whip away a Handkerchief or a Snuff-Box from a Man who is thinking on Business, and regardless of his Pocket.”21 Next to Mandeville’s cynical analysis, Colonel Jack is unabashedly sentimental. With its picture of gangs of nearly naked street boys scrambling for a precarious living, sleeping in picturesque and pathetic fashion on the streets – “as for a Bed we knew nothing what belong’d to it for many Years after my Nurse died, and in Winter we got into the Ash-holes, and Nealing-Arches in the Glass-house, call’d Dallows’s Glass-house, near Rosemary-Lane, or at another Glass-house in Ratcliff-high-way” (p. 9) – the opening pages of Colonel Jack anticipate nineteenth-century “two 259

Crime and Narrative nations” exposés of social problems. These early scenes are both touching and sensationalistic. Young Jack exists in a criminal demi-monde below normal standards; he doesn’t have a surname, as he explains in the following scene in which for returning a letter case full of valuable securities to a goldsmith he receives a substantial reward. The dialogue dramatizes his perfect innocence, his touching naivete and social marginality, and it alerts us to the double appeal of the book, a compound of pathos and sensation: the Gentleman gave me 25 l. in good Guineas; when he gave it me, he bad me hold out my Hand, and he told the Money into my Hand, and when he had done, he ask’d me if it was right, I said, I did not know, but I believ’d it was: Why, says he, can’t you tell it? I told him no, I never saw so much Money in my Life, nor I did not know how to tell Money: Why, says he, Don’t you know that they are Guineas; no, I told him, I did not know how much a Guinea was. Why, how then, says he, did you tell me you believ’d it was Right? I told him, because, I believ’d he would not give it me wrong. Poor Child! says he, Thou knowest little of the World, indeed; what art thou? I am a poor Boy, says I, and cry’d. What is your Name, says he . . . My Name is Jack, said I. Why, have you no Sir-Name? Said he. What is that? Said I. You have some other Name, besides Jack, says he, han’t you? Yes, says I, They call me, Col. Jack. But have you no other Name? No, said I. How come you to be call’d, Col. Jack, pray. They say, said I, my Father’s Name was Col. (p. 36)

Jack is formed by his life in the juvenile criminal underworld, but he also resists that life by his deep discomfort and even alienation from it. He insists on his relative innocence and sensitivity (as well as the vague feeling that he was meant for better things as the son of a gentleman). He is also, he lets us know, precociously intellectual despite his total ignorance, fascinated by history in ways that predict his ultimate career in the European and American theatres of war and imperial and commercial rivalry: I was always upon the Inquiry, asking Questions of things done in Publick as well as in Private, particularly, I lov’d to talk with Seamen and Soldiers about the War, and about the great Sea-Fights, or Battles on Shore, that any of them had been in; and as I never forgot any thing they told me, I could soon, that is to say, in a few

260

Crime and Narrative Years give almost as good an Account of the Dutch War, and of the Fights at Sea, the Battles in Flanders, the taking of Maestricht, and the like, as any of those that had been there, and this made those old Soldiers and Tars love to talk with me too, and to tell me all the Stories they could think of, and that not only of the Wars then going on, but also of the Wars in Oliver’s time, the Death of King Charles the first, and the like. (pp. 10–11).

Colonel Jack (much more so than any of Defoe’s other narratives) is a protoBildungsroman or novel of education. Jack quickly learns not only sentimental/moral lessons but intellectual ones like this that point him in the direction of an external historical world of which Moll, for example, seems to have absolutely no awareness. Colonel Jack features the hero’s adventures as a thief, a soldier and deserter, as an indentured servant and then an overseer and planter in Virginia, but the center of the narrative is his progress to an increasingly sophisticated grasp of the moral and social issues that surround his adventures. Thus, in Virginia Jack quickly rises to become an overseer on a large plantation, and he single-handedly reforms the treatment of his master’s African slaves, practising a form of shrewdly calculated reprieve from the customary cruelty that seems closely modelled on early eighteenth-century British penal strategies. Unless ruthlessly suppressed, the masses of slaves might easily rise up and destroy their masters, so the slave masters reason, and Jack understands that. But he comes to develop a more sophisticated position, partly out of his sentimental nature but also out of his quick intelligence and practical good sense: “I began to see at the same time, that this Brutal temper of the Negroes was not rightly manag’d; that they did not take the best Course with them, to make them sensible, either of Mercy, or Punishment; and it was Evident to me, that even the worst of those tempers might be brought to a Compliance, without the Lash, or at least without so much of it, as they generally Inflicted” (pp. 128–9). In addition to that “natural” moral sensitivity and intelligence that we have already seen in his narrative, Jack stands out in this sequence (and in others) for his ability to articulate, his talent for explaining and persuading; his natural gift (and the book proves it) is speech. Much of the sequence is rendered as dialogue, both with his master and with one of the recalcitrant slaves, Mouchat, who is transformed by Jack’s calculating mercy. His method is simple enough in principle but requires as Jack shows a lot of tact in the management, as he remarks in dialogue with his master: My Method was just the same, and if you please to inquire of Mr. –, your other Servant, you will be satisfy’d that it was so; for we agreed upon the same Measures as I took with Mouchat; Namely, first to put them into the utmost Horror and Apprehensions of the Cruelest Punishment that they had ever heard of, and thereby enhaunce the Value of their Pardon, which was to come as from your self, but not without our great Intercession: Then I was to argue with them, and Work upon

261

Crime and Narrative their Reason, to make the Mercy that was shew’d them sink deep into their Minds, and give lasting Impressions; explain the Meaning of Gratitude to them, and the Nature of an Obligation, and the like, as I had done with Mouchat. (pp. 143–4)

Jack has so manipulated Mouchat that the slave has become his faithful servant. Jack has spread a rumor that he has offended the “Great Master” and “was to be hang’d; your Honour knows that sometime ago, you sent me upon your particular Business into the Potuxent River, where I was absent 12 Days, then I took the opportunity to have this Report spread about among the Negroes to see how it would work” (p. 140). Mouchat, he reports, offers to be hanged instead of Jack, and this is his explanation: Neg. O! he beggèè the great Master for me, now me beggèè for him; the great Master mucheé good, mucheé good; he pardon me when the other Master beggéé me; now he pardon him, when me beggéé for him again. Clerk. No, no, your begging won’t do; will you be hang’d for him? if you will do that, something may be. Negr. Yes, yes, me be hang, for de poor Master that beggeé for me, Mouchat shall hang, the great Master shall hangeé mee, whippeé mee, any thing to save the poor Master that beggeé me, yes, yes, indeed. Clerk. Are you in earnest Mouchat? Negr. Yes indeed, me Telleé de true, the great Master shall know me telleé de true, for he shall see the White-Man hangeé me Mouchat, poor Negroe Mouchat will be hangeé, be whippeé, any thing for the poor Master that beggeé for me. With this the poor Fellow cry’d most pitifully, and there was no room to Question his being in earnest . . . and indeed neither the Clerk, nor I could bear it any longer; so he came out to me, go to him, says he, you have made an Example that will never be forgot, that a Negroe can be Grateful; go to him, adds he, for I can talk to him no longer; so I appear’d, and spoke to him presently, and let him see that I was at Liberty; but to hear how the poor Fellow behav’d, your Honour cannot but be pleas’d. (pp. 141–2)

As this sequence develops, Jack’s master wonders how his proposed system can possibly work, since “ ’tis against the receiv’d Notion of the whole Country.” Without missing a beat, the former illiterate street boy, responds with an audacity that challenges the whole system of colonial slave management: “There are it may be Publick and National Mistakes and Errors in Conduct, and this is One” (p. 135). Jack’s system is a distinct advance beyond his master’s soft-hearted, guilty inability to correct the cruelty that he knows enriches him. “Nothing,” he tells Jack, “has so much robb’d me of the Comfort of my all my Fortunes, as the Cruelty used in my Name, on the Bodies of those poor Slaves” (p. 145). Jack corrects such ineffectual sympathies, progressing in his own moral development 262

Crime and Narrative from the mere guilty sentimentality of his boyhood to the practical, efficient morality of his manhood, observing to his master that the system is not only “barbarous and cruel; but it is wrong too, as it is the worst way of Managing, and of having your Business done” (p. 145). Jack is transformed from illiterate urchin thief to a pretty good imitation of a managerial intellectual, a master of instrumental rationality (rather like Defoe, of course). Jack’s acquisition of information and creative ideas represents an innovation in Defoe’s sense of character development. Although Colonel Jack lacks the psycho-sexual complexity of Moll Flanders or of Roxana, it adumbrates possibilities for a more complicated consciousness of the social/historical world and for meaningful action in that world. Having learned to read when he was in Scotland, and now as a planter having leisure, he reads widely in history, ancient and modern: “I began now to love Books, and particularly I had an Opportunity of Reading some very considerable Ones; such as Livy’s Roman History, the History of the Turks, the English History of Speed, and others; the History of the Low Country Wars, the History of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, and the History of the Spaniard’s Conquest of Mexico” (p. 157). Moreover, Jack unlike Moll (and the isolated Crusoe) progresses to more complex states of self-consciousness most often through dialogue with others (for example the merchants in London). Once in Virginia he not only advances himself by means of long exchanges with his master but also passes into a new stage of moral and religious awareness in a series of key dialogues with a transported felon in his plantation who happens to be “an excellent Schollar” (p. 158), who becomes his Latin tutor and in due course a kind of alter ego for Jack. As his tutor rehearses the sins of his own criminal past and his joy at repentance, Jack is secretly and strongly affected: “This was a strange Relation to me, and began to affect me after a manner that I did not understand; I lov’d to hear him talk of it, and yet it always left a kind of a Dead Lump behind it upon my Heart, which I cou’d give no Reason for, nor imagine to what it should tend; I had a heaviness on my Soul without being able to describe it, or to say, what ailed me” (p. 165). His tutor thus sets Jack on the road to religious self-realization: “my Life has been as full of Variety, and I have been as miraculously deliver’d from Dangers and Mischiefs, and as many of them, as ever he has; and if it has all been brought to pass by an invisible Hand in Mercy to me, what have I been doing, and where have I liv’d? that I only should be the most Thoughtless, and Unthankful of all God’s Creatures!” (p. 168). But at the end of this religious instruction, Jack finds that “it wore off again Gradually, as such things generally do, where the first Impressions are not deep enough” (p. 171). And instead of repentance, the ultimate result of his education is a restless longing that Jack describes as “a secret Resolution, to see more of the World, if possible, and reallize those things to my Mind, which I had hitherto only entertain’d remote Ideas of, by the helps of Books” (p. 172). Jack’s imagination is fired by events in Europe, 263

Crime and Narrative as his tutor gives him “Ideas of those things which had not been Recorded by our modern Histories” (p. 171). Such stories increase Jack’s sense of him self “as one Buried alive, in a remote Part of the World, where I could see nothing at all, and hear but a little of what was seen” (p. 172). As Jack tells it, his tutor thus “rais’d an unquenchable Thirst in me, after seeing something that was doing in the World, and the more because all the World was at that time engag’d more or less, in the great War wherein the French King might be said to be engag’d with, and against all the Powers of Europe” (p. 172). Throughout this sequence, Jack stresses his secret sense of himself even in the midst of these intimate dialogues with his tutor, and such privacy is a defining concern of Defoe’s fictional autobiographers. Their narratives evoke a separate consciousness, a sense of self as fractured into a public and a private and to some extent scandalous or inadmissible identity. Secrecy is of the essence. Defoe’s narratives exist to let readers in on the secrets of their narrators’s inner lives and private personalities. As David Blewett in his study of Defoe’s fictional art remarks, Colonel Jack is preoccupied “with the ambiguities of identity and disguise, reality and illusions, and with the irony that gentility itself may be a mode of deception.”22 Illusion and disguise are central in the rest of Jack’s narrative, which once again as in Moll Flanders seems to be Defoe’s response to his audience’s desire for variety of incident. Variety in this case is in tension with the fairly coherent novel of development Colonel Jack has been up to this point. Upon his return to Europe he is caught up in a series of adventures in which he is at first rather a passive figure, responding (in alert fashion to be sure) to events, both military and amorous, that carry him along and make him a husband and soldier as well as a merchant and gentleman. In place of the progressive improvement in his situation and the maturing of his identity that takes him from the London streets to the Virginia plantations, his narrative is now a random sequence with no particular logic or pattern to it, except that provided by the tide of historical events that move him from pillar to post. When the ship taking him back to England from Virginia is captured by a French privateer, Jack is at length ransomed but winds up in France and then in the Netherlands. Eventually, he finds himself enmeshed – partly by circumstances, partly by inclination – in European wars, serving with an Irish regiment in the army of Louis XIV of France against the Austrians in Italy, then as an officer with French troops supporting the Old Pretender in an abortive invasion of England, and finally as a would-be volunteer in the 1715 Jacobite rebellion in Scotland. Readers in 1723 would have considered Jack’s participation in these foreign armies manifestly treasonous, but Jack goes out of his way to stress his initial indifference to politics, his essential spectatorship. For him, military experience begins as something of a lark, the equivalent of the gentleman’s grand tour. Here he is at Ghent after being ransomed from the French privateer, quartered as an observer with an English officer, unin264

Crime and Narrative volved in the causes others fight for, a tourist and an onlooker rather than a participant: as to the Merit of the Cause on either side, I knew nothing of it, nor had I suffer’d any of the Disputes about it, to enter into my Thoughts: The Prince of O[range] had been made King of England, and the English Troops were all on his side; and I heard a great deal of Swearing and Damming for King William among the Soldiers, but as for Fighting, I observ’d the French Beat them several times, and particularly the Regiment my Friend belong’d to, was surrounded in a Village where they were Posted; I know not upon what Occasion, and all taken Prisoners: But by great good hap, I being not in Service, and so not in Command, was stroll’d away that Day to see the Country about, for it was my Delight, to see the strong Towns, and observe the Beauty of their Fortifications; and while I Diverted my self thus, I had the happy Deliverance of not being taken by the French for that time. (pp. 183–4)

Jack’s characteristic move is to take his reader aside and reveal what he could not otherwise admit. For example, after serving in an Irish regiment in the French armies fighting against the Austrians in Italy, Jack confides: “I Had now a secret Design to quit the War, for I really had enough of fighting” (p. 222). But as he explains that “was counted so Dishonourable a Thing to quit, while the Army was in the Field, that I could not Dispense with it” (p. 222), but luckily Jack finds himself able to volunteer for service with the Old Pretender in a Frenchsponsored invasion of Scotland. Jack’s description of this adventure stresses his hypocrisy and self-satisfaction, to say nothing of his foolhardiness in thinking he can use this dangerous expedition to his own advantage: I pretended a great deal of Zeal for this Service, and that if I might be permitted to sell my Company in the Irish Regiment I was in, and have the Chevalier’s Brevet for a Colonel, in Case of raising Troops for him in Great Britain, after his arrival, I would embark Voluntier, and Serve at my own Expence; the latter gave me a great advantage with the Chevalier; for now I was esteem’d as a Man of Consideration, and one that must have a considerable Interest in my own Country; so I obtain’d leave to sell my Company, and having had a good round Sum of Money remitted me from London, by the way of Holland, I prepar’d a very handsome Equipage, and away I went to Dunkirk to embark. I Was very well receiv’d by the Chevalier, and as he had an Account that I was an Officer in the Irish Brigade, and had serv’d in Italy, and consequently was an old Soldier; all this added to the Character which I had before, and made me have a great deal of Honour paid me, tho’ at the same time I had no particular attachment to his Person, or to his Cause, nor indeed did I much consider the Cause, of one Side or other, if I had, I should hardly have risqu’d not my Life only, but Effects too, which were all as I might say, from that Moment forfeited to the English Government and was too evidently in their Power to confiscate at their Pleasure. (pp. 222–3)

265

Crime and Narrative After he separates from his unfaithful second wife, Jack finds that he is lonely but not so much that he can think of returning to Virginia: “I had got a wandring kind of Taste, and Knowledge of Things begat a Desire of encreasing it, and an exceeding Delight I had in it” (p. 233). Consider the narrative logic of this moment: Jack’s miscellaneous life suits him; he has developed a taste for the world so that the very looseness of the narrative, as well as Jack’s disengagement not only from political causes but from other people, is proposed as a selfexpressive gesture, as the essence of his personality. Jack returns to England and lives perfectly incognito on the considerable income from his new world plantations, but considers that returning to Virginia “was to be bury’d alive”: so I put off all Thoughts of it, and resolv’d to settle somewhere in England, where I might know every Body, and no Body know me. I was not long in concluding where to pitch, for as I spoke the French Tongue perfectly well, having been so many Years among them, it was easy for me to pass for a French Man. So I went to Canterbury, call’d my self an English Man, among the French; and a French Man among the English; and on that Score, was the more perfectly concealed, going by the Name of Monsieur Charnot, with the French, was call’d Mr. Charnock among the English. Here, indeed, I liv’d perfectly Incog. I made no particular Acquaintance, so as to be intimate, and yet I knew every Body, and every Body knew me; I discours’d in Common, talk’d French with the Walloons; and English, with the English; and living retir’d and sober, was well enough receiv’d by all Sorts; but as I medled with no Bodies business, so no Body meddl’d with mine; I thought I liv’d pretty well. (pp. 233–4)

Jack sounds just like Defoe in Edinburgh, working for the Union, spying for Harley and taking pleasure in impersonating various kinds of private citizens, a perfect chameleon. However unlikely this satisfaction may be for our own notions of coherent character and sustainable personality, Jack claims like Defoe that he is now most himself when he is occupying various roles, suiting his identity for changing circumstances, taking his various colors from the world as it shifts around him. But in addition to this satisfaction in reserving himself, Jack is also in this part of his narrative unsuccessful in several marriages and in danger of financial ruin and even imprisonment from various miscalculations. Jack’s candour about his own foolishness dominates this last third of the narrative, which is truly miscellaneous, with the various incidents (Jack’s four marriages for example) essentially interchangeable, one of his first three wives making him a cuckold and involving him in dangerous affairs of honour with her lovers, one of them a duel that forces him to flee France. When Jack returns to Virginia after the death of his best wife, a simple local girl, Moggy, who saves his life by dissuading him from joining the Jacobite rebels at Preston, Defoe attempts to refocus the narrative by 266

Crime and Narrative sending him off (in fearful response to the arrival in Virginia of transported Jacobite rebels) to the Spanish Caribbean, Cuba and Mexico, in a new guise as a cunning and fabulously successful merchant, evading by bribery the complex Spanish prohibitions against English traders. Throughout this rambling and diffuse part of Jack’s story, Defoe’s energy and narrative invention are never in question, and these final pages of Colonel Jack have their own satisfactions as an exemplification of those qualities. But its patched-together quality also dramatizes Defoe’s harried and hurried life, as a writer of narrative and of so much else. That is to say, both Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack, in their drive to accumulate experiences, their virtually perpetual motion to the last page of their memoirs, are in an important sense allegories of Defoe’s own life of writing, as much symptoms of his insatiable appetite for language and the joys of articulation as records of imaginary events and experiences.

267

9 Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment

Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop: “What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?” Robert Browning, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”

Accumulation and Remorse In energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power; and from directing in the dissemination and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

There is general agreement that among Defoe’s fictional protagonists Roxana has the most distinctive voice and presence.1 She is his most complex (and most disturbing) character. The Fortunate Mistress or, a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, afterwards called the Countess de Wintselsheim in Germany Being the Person known by the Name of the Lady Roxana in the time of Charles II (1724) is the closest Defoe comes to producing what deserves to be called a novel in very nearly the full, formal sense of the term, since his narrator/heroine confronts with unsparing clarity the contradictions in her personality, coming in due course to a tortured self-understanding that is more complex in both a psychological and a moral sense than that of Defoe’s other narrators. As Everett Zimmerman observes, she differs from Defoe’s previous fictional transgressors in one crucial respect. They all record a process of gradual hardening and the necessary acquisition of a certain insensitivity, so that they all come to repentance and moral self-consciousness late in life or indeed only as they sit down to tell their stories. Roxana, as Zimmerman says, “remains generally con268

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment scious of her evil choices. She sins knowingly, although unrepentantly, at the end of her career as well as at the beginning.” Although I do think she expresses remorse at the end of her story and suffers greatly by her own account in her final days, Zimmerman is correct to speak of her self-presentation as “a lifetime of insisting on her evil.” She has a complex moral consciousness that is defined by an unsparing candor about her motives throughout the book, giving her narrative a tense self-awareness that, for example, Moll Flanders distinctly lacks.2 And yet Roxana is, like Defoe’s other fictions, miscellaneous in that it also delivers much simpler satisfactions. Defoe attaches Roxana to recognizable popular genres of the day, in this case the amatory novella and the scandal chronicle or so-called secret history. His title echoes Eliza Haywood’s amatory novella of the previous year, Idalia: or, the Unfortunate Mistress (1723), and the Restoration setting invoked by including Charles II as one of Roxana’s lovers on the title page might have reminded readers of Delariviere Manley’s best-selling Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality, of both Sexes: From the New Atalantis, an island in the Mediterranean (1709).The preface to Roxana claims that the book is a roman à clef, with many persons still living who knew the characters: “The Scene is laid so near the Place where the Main Part of it was transacted, that it was necessary to conceal Names and Persons; lest what cannot be yet entirely forgot in that Part of the Town, shou’d be remember’d, and the Facts trac’d back too plainly, by the many People yet living, who wou’d know the Persons by the Particulars.”3 As always, though, one wonders (in vain of course) whether Defoe or the bookseller added the title page and even the preface, and one critic has gone so far as to suggest that the Restoration setting for the book’s action is a screen and that Roxana’s real royal lover would have been recognized as George I, the reigning monarch.4 Roxana is more like a scandal chronicle than an amatory novel, closer to Manley’s satiric spirit in the New Atalantis than Haywood’s melodramatic erotic romance. Defoe’s apparent horror of nonmarital sexuality (which can be seen in some of his other works, especially in the 1727 Conjugal Lewdness) permeates Roxana, which must be the least prurient memoirs of a former courtesan imaginable. Roxana the femme fatale might be considered deeply unconvincing in her utter lack of sexuality, and in her nearly totally instrumental approach to sex. But her disdain for those physical charms she possesses that save her from ruin and propel her to a vast fortune makes perfect sense, as does her contempt for the men who maintain her in luxury in exchange for sexual favors. The emotional distance and sexual indifference she invokes (but as she admits does not always practice) are certainly consistent with her steely self-promotion. Roxana becomes in the course of her story the most powerful, the most supremely confident and even arrogant of Defoe’s narrators; her dominance of others is her raison d’être, and all her activities are means for exercising that power. 269

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment From the outset, Roxana describes herself without any modesty as a talented and beautiful girl, the daughter of wealthy Huguenot refugees in England. She is sharply intelligent, satirical and shrewdly self-critical in her capacity as a retrospective narrator. At fourteen, she was “tall, and very well made; sharp as a Hawk in Matters of common Knowledge; quick and smart in Discourse; apt to be Satyrical; full of Repartee, and a little too forward in Conversation; or, as we call it in English, BOLD, tho’ perfectly Modest in my Behaviour. Being French Born, I danc’d, as some say, naturally, lov’d it extremely, and sung well also” (p. 39). She is also smart enough to be aware of the distorting partiality inherent in autobiography and prefaces this evocation of her young self with a caution to the reader: “Being to give my own Character, I must be excus’d to give it as impartially as possible, and as if I was speaking of another-body; and the Sequel will lead you to judge whether I flatter myself or no” (p. 38).That’s an interesting challenge, since in fact Roxana seems to hide nothing from her readers, as far as we can tell. She is as skillful and successful as she claims but also totally honest, clearsighted, and ultimately amoral. On one level, Roxana is a moral cautionary tale, since the heroine ends her days full of remorse for what are apparently terrible crimes. Much of the last part of her story is of torment; her very last paragraph summarizes terrible reversals in her fortunes as the result of what is darkly hinted at, her complicity with her maid, Amy, in the murder of her own daughter: “I fell into a dreadful Course of Calamities, and Amy also; the very Reverse of our former Good Days; the Blast of Heaven seem’d to follow the Injury done the poor Girl, by us both; and I was brought so low again, that my Repentance seem’d to be only the Consequence of my Misery, as my Misery was of my Crime” (p. 379). There is a strong case for seeing the novel as a study in hubris and to assume that Defoe wanted his audience to keep their distance from his heroine, to take warning from her fall into guilt and even despair. That conventional argument about the moral meaning of the novel would make Defoe’s heroine like Milton’s Satan, fatally attractive but so deeply flawed morally that she serves as a trap for the unwary reader who takes her side and is drawn to her glamorous power and superficially appealing (especially, of course, to modern readers) feminist independence. There is an equally strong argument for reading Roxana as Defoe’s celebration almost in spite of himself of a supremely inventive economic individualist. Blake said that Milton was secretly of the devil’s party, and perhaps Defoe is at times on Roxana’s side, or at least operating in Blakean subversive mode, so that his sympathetic involvement with Roxana makes the novel much more than simply a conventional didactic exercise. One might even argue that the harrowing end Defoe invents for Roxana marks his own retreat from the subversive power he has imagined and now needs to disown.5 The preface seems to admit Roxana’s power or at least to marvel at the extent of her prosperity: “It is true, She met with unexpected Success in all her wicked Courses; but even in the 270

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment highest Elevations of her Prosperity, she makes frequent Acknowledgments, That the Pleasure of her Wickedness was not worth the Repentance; and that all the Satisfaction she had, all the Joy in the View of her Prosperity, no, nor all the Wealth she rowl’d in; the Gayety of her Appearance; the Equipages, and the Honours, she was attended with, cou’d quiet her Mind, abate the Reproaches of her Conscience, or procure her an Hour’s Sleep, when just Reflections kept her waking” (p. 36). Most modern readers have tended to see the guilty conscience as less exemplary and certainly less exciting than the career as courtesan and royal mistress. Whatever the truth, Roxana is by any reckoning a formidable character and complex person, Defoe’s last and best character. We’ll never know just what Defoe thought he was up to, but there are many familiar features and narrative satisfactions in his heroine’s story that link her to her fictional predecessors, Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack. Like them, she is an intensely imagined individual with a distinctive style. Like them, she is forced to start from nothing, facing after her first husband deserts her literal starvation. Like the earlier novels, Roxana is concerned with survival under extreme conditions, with his heroine’s construction of a new identity after being stripped down nearly to nothing by the bleakest of circumstances. Roxana’s husband, like Moll’s second one, is a feckless tradesman,“an Eminent Brewer in the City” (p. 39) who quickly goes bankrupt, wasting his substance in high living beyond his social class and earning his wife’s scorn, prompting her to issue a memorable warning to her women readers.The voice one hears in moments like this is quintessential Defoe; the style he gives his heroine a compound of proverbial homeliness, satirical bite, and polemical fullness and energy: “Never, Ladies, marry a Fool; any Husband rather than a Fool; with some other Husbands you may be unhappy, but with a Fool you will be miserable; with another Husband you may, I say, be unhappy, but with a Fool you must” (p. 40). A few pages later, Roxana’s dismissal of her fool of a husband has a wickedly specific female scorn when she remarks that she had five children with this brewer-husband: “for I had now five Children by him; the only Work (perhaps) that Fools are good for” (p. 43). The parenthetical “perhaps” is devastating, coming as it does from a sexual expert such as Roxana, and she is to the end of her career as a high-priced courtesan fairly dismissive or indeed contemptuous of her patrons. Moments like this, and there are more of them in Roxana than in any of the other narratives, raise the issue of Defoe’s ventriloquism and whether he is simply if effectively and with powerful originality creating a character in his own image or, rather, a character who speaks in a voice very like his own, as we have heard it in his journalism and other nonfiction, and in so doing sets up eventually something of a novelistic muddle or a tremendously interesting and contradictory character, depending on one’s view of things.6 One day, her bankrupt husband simply disappears, and Roxana evokes a long year in which her substance wastes away, culminating in a scene when she is 271

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment visited by some sympathetic female friends, former dependents of her family. Roxana’s evocation of her plight is unsentimental, grounded like so much of Defoe’s fiction in bleak circumstantiality that speaks louder than words and that requires no explanation, “no Need of much Discourse”: The Truth was, there was no Need of much Discourse in the Case, the Thing spoke it self; they saw me in Rags and Dirt, who was but a little before riding in my Coach; thin, and looking almost like one Starv’d, who was before fat and beautiful:The House, that was before handsomely furnish’d with Pictures and Ornaments, Cabinets, Peir-Glasses, and every thing suitable; was now stripp’d, and naked, most of the Goods having been seiz’d by the Landlord for Rent, or sold to buy Necessaries; in a word, all was Misery and Distress, the Face of Ruin was every where to be seen; we had eaten up almost every thing, and little remain’d, unless, like one of the pitiful Women of Jerusalem, I should eat up my very Children themselves. (pp. 50–1)

The scriptural allusion is an ominous prediction. Lamentations 2:20: “Behold, O Lord, and consider to whom thou hast done this. Shall the women eat their fruit, [and] children of a span long? shall the priest and the prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?” Roxana does become the desperate and destroying mother, and she does give her children away in order to survive, with her clever maid, Amy, tricking her brother-in-law into taking them in. In her appalling end, moreover, she seems to be an accessory in the murder of her daughter. Survival for Roxana and Amy now becomes a matter of sexual cohabitation with their landlord, the beginning of Roxana’s career as an illicit sexual partner to various powerful men. The landlord is kind and lets them live at first without paying rent, supplying them with food and acting as a friend to them in their need. But kindness turns at last to desire, and Roxana submits with what she portrays as great reluctance to his sexual importunities. But she adds an interesting distinction between her own clear-eyed moral awareness and his rationalization of their illicit relationship: “I receiv’d his Kindness at the dear Expence of Body and Soul, mortgaging Faith, Religion, Conscience, and Modesty, for (as I may call it) a Morsel of Bread; or, if you will, ruin’d my soul from a Principle of Gratitude, and gave myself up to the Devil, to shew myself grateful to my Benefactor: I must do the Gentleman that Justice, as to say, I verily believe that he did nothing but what he thought was Lawful; and I must do that Justice upon myself, as to say, I did what my own Conscience convinc’d me at the very Time I did it, was horribly unlawful, scandalous, and abominable” (pp. 72–3). Roxana insists throughout on her unflinching awareness of moral issues, and that adds up to moral superiority that she looks back on with an odd sort of satisfaction and pride, as well as with a measure of contempt for her easy going landlord. But as always in Defoe’s novels, and never more so than here, many-sided complexity 272

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment is the rule, and Roxana lays out all the circumstances so that the simple issue of deliberately choosing immorality as she seems to evoke it is not in the end the whole story. Thus, she adds as Moll does that “Poverty was my Snare; dreadful Poverty! the Misery I had been in, was great, such as wou’d make the Heart tremble at the Apprehensions of its Return; and I might appeal to any that has had any Experience of the World, whether one so entirely destitute as I was, of all manner of all Helps, or Friends, either to support me, or to assist me to support myself, could withstand the Proposal” (p. 73). And, moreover in contradictory and self-rationalizing mode, she adds that she “was young, handsome, and with all the Mortifications I had met with, was vain, and that not a little; and as it was a new thing, so it was a pleasant thing, to be courted, caress’d, embrac’d, and high Professions of Affection made to me by a Man so agreeable, and so able to do me good” (p. 73). But finally, she notes in exculpatory mode rather like Moll’s characteristic excuse that she had no one else to turn to but her landlord: “I had no Friend in the World to have Recourse to; I had no Prospect, no, not of a Bit of Bread; I had nothing before me, but to fall back into the same Misery that I had been in before” (p. 73). Adding to this complexity are the exchanges between Roxana and Amy, which have a startling frankness such as Defoe never approached in his earlier fictions. At the beginning of this sequence, when it becomes clear that the landlord’s generosity is bound to have a sexual price tag, he promises that they will have a wedding supper when he returns from a short trip. I started a little at the Word Wedding: What do ye mean? to call it by such a Name, says I; adding, We will have a Supper, but t’other is impossible, as well on your side as mine; he laugh’d, Well, says he, you shall call it what you will, but it may be the same thing, for I shall satisfie you, it is not so impossible as you make it. I don’t understand you, said I, have not I a Husband, and you a Wife? Well, well, says he, we will talk of that after Supper; so he rose up, gave me another Kiss, and took his Horse for London. This kind of Discourse had fir’d my Blood, I confess, and I knew not what to think of it; it was plain now that he intended to lye with me, but how he would reconcile it to a legal thing, like a Marriage, that I cou’d not imagine: We had both of us us’d Amy with so much Intimacy, and trusted her with every thing, having such unexampled Instances of her Fidelity, that he made no Scruple to kiss me, and say all these things to me before her, nor had he car’d one Farthing if I would have let him Lay with me, to have had Amy there too all Night. When he was gone, Well, Amy, says I, what will all this come to now? I am all in a Sweat at him: Come to, Madam, says Amy, I see what it will come to, I must put you to-Bed to Night together: Why you wou’d not be so impudent, you Jade you, says I, wou’d you? Yes, I wou’d, says she, with all my Heart, and think you both as honest as ever you were in your Lives. What ails the Slut to talk so? said I, Honest! how can it be honest? (p. 70)

273

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment On the comic stage, these exchanges would work very well. There is a colloquial, irreverent swing to the dialogue (“all in a Sweat,” “What ails the Slut”) that sits oddly with Roxana’s retrospective moralizing. There is as well a subversively farcical side to the situation that recalls Moll’s picaresque strategies in the marriage market and also her dilemma after her gentleman-tradesman deserts her and after she and her Lancashire husband, Jemy, go their separate ways. In these early dialogues, Roxana and Amy look backward to servant/master or mistress interactions in English comic drama and forward to maid and mistress in comic combat, such as Honour and Sophia in Tom Jones. We might say that mistress/master and servant interactions like these are essential to the heteroglossia at the heart of the early novel (with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as the original odd couple in this regard). Defoe’s originality, both in his fiction and his nonfiction, is often a matter of tonal variety (a battle of competing dialects, as it were) that matches the moral and social intricacies of the situations his protagonists find themselves in, and passages like this one add to the complexity of the moment as Roxana’s subsequent career path opens up for her. But at last, Roxana adds as an afterthought to all these various circumstances, “when this had thus made a Hole in my Heart, and I was come to such a height, as to transgress against the Light of my own Conscience, I was then fit for any Wickedness, and Conscience left off speaking, where it found it cou’d not be heard” (p. 79). In dialogue with herself, rather like Crusoe, Roxana closes off the inner debate. Roxana’s thoroughness as an observer, in short, creates those multiple perspectives proper to the novel as we now understand it, where moral simplicity is ruled out by the novelist’s presentation of mitigating circumstances and shifting moods and changes of heart and responses to external pressures and complex circumstances. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner is often enough the novelist’s motto and the heart of the moral project of the modern novel as we have come to know it in the centuries since Defoe wrote. But of course in the didactic mode of the early eighteenth century in which he worked that fluidity and relativity can’t quite be admitted as valid even if it is implicitly articulated in moments like this in Roxana. The high (or low) point of this sexual relationship comes when Roxana puts Amy to bed with her landlord/lover, in a scene which has scandalized many readers. After Amy wonders why Roxana is not yet pregnant and boasts that if she had gone to bed with the landlord, she would be, Roxana thrusts her into bed with him one night: Nay, you Whore, says I, you said, if I wou’d put you to-Bed, you wou’d with all your Heart: and with that, I sat her down, pull’d off her Stockings and Shoes, and all her Cloaths, Piece by Piece, and led her to the Bed to him: Here, says I, try what

274

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment you can do with your Maid Amy: She pull’d back a little, would not let me pull off her Cloaths at first, but it was hot Weather, and she had not many Cloaths on, and particularly, no Stays on; and at last, when she see [sic] I was in earnest, she let me do what I wou’d; so I fairly stript her, and then I threw open the Bed, and thrust her in. I need say no more; this is enough to convince any-body that I did not think him my Husband, and that I had cast off all Principle, and all Modesty, and had effectually stifled Conscience. (p. 81)

This could be a sensational anecdote out of Defoe’s own Conjugal Lewdness (1727) quite in keeping with the inflammatory promises of the book’s title page. The scene has obvious psycho-sexual implications that have not been lost on modern critics, especially given the strange intimacy that develops between Roxana and her maid, which outlasts all of her heterosexual attachments and has an intensity and duration they lack. The most suggestive reading of this scene is by Terry Castle, who argues that it is more than just an isolated pornographic moment, that it holds the key to the symbolic structure and deepest meaning of the novel. Castle finds in Amy not just another argumentative servant to a mistress but an alter ego for Roxana, or better, a secret sharer of her guilty secrets. As Castle notes in the title of her essay, Roxana suggestively refers to her maid as “Amy, who knew my Disease” (p. 239). Amy is a mother surrogate for Roxana, whose own mother dies early in her childhood, and in Castle’s reading of the novel Roxana is essentially weak, passive like a child in all her relationships with men and with her own children, while Amy acts purposefully and ruthlessly for her, her trusty, mature agent who is also often enough her counselor and encourager. So Roxana watching Amy and the landlord in her bed is the primal scene, with Amy taking her mistress’ place as the mother in the sexual act. And in the course of the novel, according to Castle, Roxana on one level regresses repeatedly into infantile passivity as Amy acts for her. Roxana, in effect, is re-enacting through Amy her own failure as a mother and expressing her own need for a powerful mother figure, and the novel is in her symbolic reading “a parable of motherless children, of doubling, projection, and fixation.”7 Castle’s psycho-sexual argument is powerful but is based on a very selective reading of events in the novel, since to call Roxana passive and weak strikes me as essentially wrong or only very partially right. At the moral (and more literal) level Roxana in this scene is obviously asserting her controlling superiority to both the landlord and Amy. The landlord ever after has an aversion to Amy; Roxana thus definitively establishes her moral superiority to the man who rescued her and the maid who pushed her into the illicit relationship. In this scene, Roxana also introduces what becomes in the rest of the novel her characteristic mode of self-dramatization: she extracts out of her own emotional

275

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment panic nothing less than her moral and psycho-sexual dominance of her intimates, Amy and her landlord-lover, just as in the scenes that follow she will enact in the same spirit of self-dramatization and self-justification her amoral triumphs as seductress, courtesan, and feminist champion. She watches from a controlling distance, as it were, and what Castle calls her passivity is actually a powerful distancing whereby others are subject to her morally superior and ironic gaze. As events unfold, Roxana’s landlord/ “husband” (he is a jeweller) is killed by robbers in France, and oddly enough she has a premonition about it in Paris, where she has accompanied him on his business: “I thought all his Face look’d like a Death’s-Head; and then, immediately, I thought I perceiv’d his Head all Bloody; and then his Cloaths look’d Bloody too; and immediately it all went off, and he look’d as he really did; immediately I fell a-crying, and hung about him” (p. 87). After he is killed, the quick-witted (hardly passive, as Castle claims) Roxana responds with ruthlessly self-serving efficiency. A well-placed bribe arranges Catholic burial for the Protestant jeweller, and a message to Amy in London directs her to strip the house so that his lawful family won’t find the things they are entitled to there. Roxana’s presence of mind and her talents for improvisatory and decisive action in a crisis are remarkable, if in this scene rather unprepared for. Such instinctive alertness and efficiency under pressure are the hallmarks of Defoe’s hero-narrators. And yet at the same time she describes herself as grief-stricken, prostrate and helpless: “I almost cry’d myself to Death for him; for I abandon’d myself to all the Excesses of Grief; and indeed, I lov’d him to a Degree inexpressible; and considering what Kindness he had shewn me at first, and how tenderly he had us’d me to the last, what cou’d I do less?” (p. 89). These rapid transitions in Roxana from the helpless and abandoned woman to the suffering and guilty mistress, to the mystical prophet of impending doom, to the smoothly self-seeking bogus widow and calculating business woman are exhilarating or even disorienting, although one might also call them instances of Defoe’s clumsiness as a narrator. I think that the coherence, consistency, and plausibility that a modern reader might expect as features in a novel are almost irrelevant at the many moments like this one in Roxana, for it is this rapidly shifting and miscellaneous quality of the narrative perspective that is essence of Defoe’s approach, the source in fact of the special richness of this novel. Roxana occupies a number of positions almost simultaneously; she is clairvoyant, terrified and distraught, but she is also shrewdly alert, trapped and helpless but hard upon that controlling and powerful, caught up in bewildering circumstances and mysterious premonitions but then amazingly cool and calculating, dishonest and utterly rapacious, exactly aware of what needs to be done for advantage and profit.8 Consider as exemplary of this dizzying narrative fullness these three paragraphs after Roxana learns of the jeweller’s death: 276

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment Then the Manner of his Death was terrible and frightful to me, and above all, the strange Notices I had of it; I had never pretended to the Second-Sight, or any thing of that Kind; but certainly, if any one ever had such a thing, I had it at this time; for I saw him as plainly in all those terrible Shapes, as above, First, as a Skeleton, not Dead only, but rotten and wasted; Secondly, as kill’d, and his Face bloody; and Thirdly, his Cloaths bloody; and all within the Space of one Minute, or indeed, of a very few Moments. These things amaz’d me, and I was a good-while as one stupid; however, after some time, I began to recover, and look into my Affairs; I had the Satisfaction not to be left in Distress, or in danger of Poverty; on the contrary, besides what he had put into my Hands fairly, in his Life-time, which amounted to a very considerable Value I found above seven Hundred Pistoles in Gold, in his Scrutore, of which he had given me the Key; and I found Foreign-Bills accepted, for about 12000 Livres; so that, in a Word, I found myself possess’d of almost ten Thousand Pounds Sterling, in a very few Days after the Disaster. The first thing I did upon this Occasion, was, to send a Letter to my Maid, as I still call’d her, Amy; wherein I gave her an Account of my Disaster; how my Husband, as she call’d him (for I never call’d him so) was murther’d; and as I did not know how his Relations, or his Wife’s Friends, might act upon that Occasion, I order’d her to convey away all the Plate, Linnen, and other things of Value, and to secure them in a Person’s Hands that I directed her to, and then to sell, or dispose the Furniture of the House, if she could; and so, without acquainting any-body with the Reason of her going, withdraw; sending Notice to his HeadManager at London, that the House was quitted by the Tennant, and they might come and take Possession of it for the Executors: Amy was so dext’rous, and did her Work so nimbly, that she gutted the House, and sent the Key to the said Manager, almost as soon as he had Notice of the Misfortune that befel their Master. (p. 90)

For Roxana as for all of Defoe’s narrators, even the most shocking experience never leads to stasis; shock and wonder wear off, as they must, but always rather quickly and resourceful action follows, “after some time.” This is not hypocrisy on Roxana’s part, and it can stand as an instance of Defoe’s psychological realism, or at least of his view of human nature as resilient and elastic. Mysteries and premonitions may puzzle and even bewilder, but then for the strong and the sane characters he imagines purposeful action is resumed. There is no transition from the mysterious to the material, and Roxana in these paragraphs slides into a reassuring accounting of her new assets.Ten thousand pounds was an enormous sum, in early eighteenth-century purchasing power well over a million pounds, and the equation (or at least the juxtaposition) of the spiritual and uncanny with the financial and exorbitant in these paragraphs and in the novel as a whole is significant; they represent the two kinds of extreme circumstances that Roxana will straddle as it were, as she scales financial heights and descends into the depths of guilt and remorse in the rest of her narrative, acquir277

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment ing vast sums of money by means of a sequence of amoral adventures and the accumulating guilt that they ultimately bring. The premonition about the jeweller’s death is the sort of thing that always fascinated Defoe. He inserts such phenomena into several of his novels, and he would go on to examine many such cases at length in his An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727). However, the skepticism he clearly had about supernatural phenomena is mitigated in his longer narratives by the sheer force of the individual personalities he imagines: Crusoe, Moll, and Roxana are granted mysterious hints of the future and they have what amount to extra-sensory perceptions that remain all the more powerful because they lack clear explanation, natural or supernatural. In Roxana’s case, that uncanny moment is part and parcel of the events that make her story worth reading, her great good luck and/or misfortune, her transformation by terrible events from a starving abandoned wife into a fabulously rich widow in Paris who shortly after becomes the mistress of the Prince to whom her jeweller/ “husband” was to deliver the jewels his murderers were after. Roxana is transformed by these events into a public character in Paris, and she in response cooperates with that reputation she acquires by fashioning herself into a stereotype as old as the hills, the sexually available young widow : “I was soon made very publick, and was known by the Name of La Belle veuve de Poictou; or, The pretty Widow of Poictou: As I was very well pleas’d to see myself thus handsomly us’d in my Affliction, it soon dry’d up all my Tears; and tho’ I appear’d as a Widow, yet, as we say in England, it was of a Widow comforted” (p. 93). This cunning self-consciousness sets a pattern for most of the rest of the novel, thereby introducing an effective set of performances in Roxana, which culminate in the dance before the King in London that earns her the sobriquet we know her by, her nickname a sign of her quasi-legendary status in the annals of English whoredom, as Defoe might well have put it. As a professional mistress and courtesan, Roxana responds to what she knows others want her to be; she manipulates the expectations of her audience, practising to perfection in short order the art of self-promotion and theatricalized presentation, that art which Defoe the spy and polemical writer seems to have loved more than anything else. One of the late jeweller’s customers, a German Prince living in Paris, comes to see “La Belle veuve,” and in her memory of his visit she claims that she was uncertain how to behave, but that is quickly changed in her account of this condolence in which she plays her role in every sense of the word.The Prince notes that her late husband was a man of substance and that he hopes that she has been left in a comfortable position suitable to her station. “I reply’d, with some Tears, which, I confess, were a little forc’d, That I believ’d if Mr. – had liv’d, we shou’d have been out of Danger of Want; but that it was impossible to Estimate the Loss which I had sustain’d, besides that of the Life of my Husband; that by

278

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment the Opinion of those that knew something of his Affairs, and of what Value the Jewels were which he intended to have shown to his Highness, he could not have less about him, than the Value of a hundred Thousand Livres” (p. 94). Pure play acting, of course, and not just because of the phony tears, since Roxana has ten thousand pounds in her pocket in addition to the jewels the Prince was going to buy. Roxana here begins a career in spectacular dissimulation that far outdoes anything Moll, or Jack, or Crusoe at the end of his story can manage. But at the same time, and this I think is what makes Roxana Defoe’s most fully novelistic text, Roxana is herself altered by her role playing. She plays to various audiences, of course, but she herself becomes something other than she was before. For example, as this Prince commences negotiations with her to become her lover, she prepares herself and he in turn begins the process whereby her personality alters: I fell down at his Feet, before he could come, to salute me, and with Words that I had prepar’d, full of Duty and Respect, thank’d him for his Bounty and Goodness to a poor desolate Woman, oppress’d under the Weight of so terrible a Disaster, and refus’d to rise till he would allow me the Honour to kiss his Hand. Levez vous donc, says the Prince, taking me in his Arms, I design more Favours for you, than this Trifle; and going on, he added, You shall, for the future, find a Friend where you did not look for it; and I resolve to let you see how kind I can be, to one, who is to me the most agreeable Creature on Earth. I was dress’d in a kind of half-Mourning, had turn’d off my Weeds, and my Head, tho’ I had yet no Ribbands or Lace, was so dress’d, as fail’d not to set me out with Advantage enough, for I began to understand his Meaning; and the Prince profess’d, I was the most beautiful Creature on Earth; and where have I liv’d? says he; and how ill have I been serv’d, that I should never, till now, be shew’d the finest Woman in France? This was the Way, in all the World, the most likely to break in upon my Virtue, if I had been Mistress of any, for I was now become the vainest Creature upon Earth, and particularly, of my Beauty; which, as other People admir’d, so I became every Day more foolishly in Love with myself, than before. (pp. 96–7)

Note the exact rendition of her place and position, of her posture, of her fashionable clothing, all rendered as part of her calculated sense of herself, precisely the sort of descriptions that Roxana will now specialize in as she quickly makes the transition from abandoned wife to professional mistress. To be sure, Roxana accompanies this scene with recriminations and remorse, and she doesn’t bother too much with exculpatory matter. The “Devil” exploited her vanity and the Prince in fact seduced her: “a black Scheme of the Way how Unhappy Women are ruin’d by Great Men . . . to be courted by a Prince, and by a Prince who was first a Benefactor, then an Admirer; to be call’d handsome, the finest Woman

279

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment in France, and to be treated as a Woman fit for the Bed of a Prince; these are Things, a Woman must have no Vanity in her, nay, no Corruption in her, that is not overcome by it; and my Case was such, that, as before, I had enough of both” (p. 100). The contradiction between such remorse and the extended delineation of Roxana’s triumphs can be resolved by applying a quantitative measure to the narrative; there is much less of this sort of pious regret than of fascinated and quite precise enumeration of the glamorous things and circumstances that surround her seduction (or is it her seduction of the Prince?). Roxana, without much of a transition here in Paris, becomes a manipulative courtesan and narcissist, an inevitable combination of course but unique in Defoe’s fiction. In her relationship with the Prince as with all her subsequent lovers, she is always the shrewd negotiator for advantage and profit. As we would expect, Defoe renders these relationships in totally unsentimental. political/mercantile terms; Roxana’s beautiful body and elegant personality are the luxury items on offer. Much of the story of her subsequent life that follows is a detailed rendering of these transactions that also features a wealth of lovingly-described luxury goods as well as financial assets that Roxana acquires. There are long stretches when Roxana more or less lists her ever-increasing pile of valuable acquisitions and charts the amazing growth of her assets. Defoe the materialist enumerator, for whom reality is essentially a series of objects and sums, is on display in these sequences, along with Defoe the political philosopher for whom all action can be summed up as negotiation and secret manoeuvring for advantage. Roxana’s self-dramatization can be observed with special clarity in a scene she arranges for the besotted Prince after he has become her lover and showers her with rich gifts. She remarks with some satisfaction that,“As he lov’d like a Prince, so he rewarded like a Prince” (p. 106), and these pages dwell on the rich dresses, jewels, and other gifts he bestows. But the high point of their liaison and a moment that foreshadows the heroine’s greatest triumph in London a few years later comes when Roxana stages a demonstration of her natural beauty. In her gratitude one day for all these presents, she lets fall a tear, and the Prince goes to wipe it off with a rich handkerchief:

but check’d his Hand, as if he was afraid to deface something . . . and toss’d the Handkerchief to me, to do it myself; I took the Hint immediately, and with a kind of pleasant Disdain, How, my Lord! said I, Have you kiss’d me so often, and don’t you know whether I am Painted, or not? Pray let your Highness satisfie yourself, that you have no Cheats put upon you; for once let me be vain enough to say, I have not deceiv’d you with false Colours: With this, I put a Handkerchief into his Hand, and taking his Hand into mine, I made him wipe my Face so hard, that he was unwilling to do it, for fear of hurting me.

280

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment He appear’d surpriz’d, more than ever, and swore, which was the first time that I had heard him swear, from my first knowing him, that he cou’d not have believ’d there was any such Skin, without Paint, in the World: Well, my Lord, said I, Your Highness shall have a farther Demonstration than this; as to that which you are pleas’d to accept for Beauty, that it is the meer Work of Nature; and with that, I stept to the Door, and rung a little Bell, for my Woman, Amy, and bade her bring me a Cup-full of hot Water, which she did; and when it was come, I desir’d his Highness to feel if it was warm; which he did, and I immediately wash’d my Face all over with it, before him; this was, indeed, more than Satisfaction, that is to say, than Believing; for it was an undeniable Demonstration, and he kiss’d my Cheeks and Breasts a thousand times, with Expressions of the greatest Surprize imaginable. (pp. 108–9)

Although the reader may be skeptical (of this and much else in Roxana’s story, even if verification is not really an issue and plausibility is served by remembering that this is her account of things and therefore expressively true if not trustworthy in all ways), her boast here is that she embodies the natural, that her body is truthful, unlike we might say everything else about her in this situation. A prodigy of physical purity, unlike other eighteenth-century beauties such as Alexander Pope’s Belinda in “The Rape of the Lock” who at her dressing table as she applies her cosmetics “sees by degrees a purer blush arise,” she uses no cosmetics, and her exceedingly erotic demonstration of that (complete with the stage magician’s gesture of having the Prince test the temperature of the water) is offered to the Prince by means of empirical process, by touch of an aggressive sort as well as by rendition of her visual splendors. The “natural” is dramatized as such and to that extent becomes part of the elaborate and artificial self-presentation Roxana employs in her relationship with the Prince and by extension in all her other interactions. The high point of her art takes place much later in her narrative, when she finds herself in London, now at her wealthiest, living in splendor and high fashion, mixing in licentious court circles, and bragging about her popularity in this glamorous world:“I soon found myself throng’d with Admirers, and I receiv’d Visits from some Persons of very great Figure” (p. 213). But as Roxana has told us a bit earlier, she has her sights set on the richest prize in England: “I was harrass’d with Lovers, Beaus, and Fops of Quality, in abundance; but it wou’d not do, I aim’d at other things, and was possess’d with so vain an Opinion of my own Beauty, that nothing less than the King himself was in my Eye” (p. 212). One night, Roxana hosts a ball, where some masked revelers appear. She dresses herself “in the Habit of a Turkish Princess,” acquired while she was in Italy, which she describes in the kind of fascinated fashion detail this part of her story specializes in: “the Robe was a fine Persian, or India Damask; the Ground white, and the Flowers blue and gold, and the Train held five Yards; the Dress under it, was a 281

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment Vest of the same, embroider’d with Gold, and set with some Pearl in the Work, and some Turquois Stones; to the Vest, was a Girdle five or six Inches wide, after the Turkish Mode; and on both Ends where it join’d, or hook’d, was set with Diamonds for eight Inches either way, only they were not true Diamonds; but no-body knew that but myself ” (p. 215). That last touch predicts the special quality of the dance that will follow shortly and win Roxana her sobriquet and in the process a royal lover. As Roxana stresses, her dance is actually French, although her costume is Turkish: I danc’d by myself a Figure which I learnt in France, when the Prince de – desir’d I wou’d dance for his Diversion; it was indeed, a very fine Figure, invented by a famous Master at Paris, for a Lady or a Gentleman to dance single; but being perfectly new, it pleas’d the Company exceedingly, and they all thought it had been Turkish; nay, one Gentleman had the Folly to expose himself so much, as to say, and I think swore too, that he had seen it danc’d at Constantinople; which was ridiculous enough. At the finishing the Dance, the Company clapp’d, and almost shouted; and one of the Gentlemen cry’d out, Roxana! Roxana! by –, with an Oath; upon which foolish Accident I had the Name of Roxana presently fix’d upon me all over the Court End of Town, as effectually as if I had been Christen’d Roxana: I had, it seems, the Felicity of pleasing every-body that Night, to an Extreme; and my Ball, but especially my Dress, was the Chat of the Town for that Week, and so the Name Roxana was the Toast at, and about the Court; no other Health was to be nam’d with it. (pp. 216–17)9

Just a few days later Roxana presides over another entertainment in her apartments, full of glamorous courtiers, and as she evokes the scene in the following sentence we should note the special force of the verb “plac’d,” as she situates herself, performs herself, watches herself being watched by others, makes herself by her own account anyway the cynosure: “I plac’d myself (exceedingly rich in Cloaths and Jewels) in the middle of my little Room, as before, and made my Compliment to all the Company, as they pass’d me” (p. 219).This time the crowd watches another dance – an authentic eastern performance actually brought back from there that fascinates the crowd but as Roxana reports lacked her particular and effective blend of the exotic and the familiar: “The Novelty pleas’d, truly, but yet there was something wild and Bizarre in it, because they really acted to the Life the barbarous Country whence they came; but as mine had the French Behaviour under the Mahometan Dress, it was every way as new, and pleas’d much better, indeed” (p. 221) Sophisticated in her understanding of dramatic effect, Roxana modifies the actual and the historical, which she knows strike the courtly onlookers as bizarre, offering them instead an artificial dance that is informed by a shrewd sense of what is culturally meaningful and performatively effective –

282

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment “the French Behaviour under the Mahometan Dress.” She repeats the special mixture of artifice and nature that so charmed her Prince; in courtly London circles she dresses richly and for a while exotically in her Turkish dress but she uses no cosmetics: “I had no Mask, neither did I Paint; and yet I had the Day of all the Ladies that appear’d at the Ball, I mean, of those that appear’d with Faces on . . . it must be confess’d, that the Habit was infinitely advantageous to me, and every-body look’d at me with a kind of Pleasure, which gave me great Advantage too” (p. 221). This narcissism, Roxana’s self-satisfied basking in the masculine gaze, is Defoe’s great achievement in imagining his heroine at the height of her powers in these sequences, although such delight in her appearance in one form or another continues nearly to the end of the narrative. Shortly after this triumph, she succeeds in acquiring the king (who has been at one of her entertainments) as her lover, although she draws a discreet veil over those years and, revealingly, slips into speaking of herself in the third person, by her nom de guerre of “Roxana,” which indicates just how famous a character she insists that she became: “There is a Scene which came in here, which I must cover from humane Eyes or Ears; for three Years and about a Month, Roxana liv’d retir’d, having been oblig’d to make an Excursion, in a Manner, and with a Person, which Duty, and private Vows, obliges her not to reveal, at least, not yet” (p. 223). Accompanying these acquisitions of pleasure and reputation in the public world is the steady accumulation of private financial assets, which Roxana has been tracing ever since the death of her jeweller/husband in Paris, which left her a wealthy woman. A substantial part of the narrative resembles a running balance sheet, periodic accountings of her mounting wealth and pretty precise delineations of the means by which she grows richer and richer. This stupendous wealth gives Roxana an independence, a libertine-feminist swagger that is certainly stirring, if taken on its own and slightly out of the context she herself gives it occasionally in her bursts of remorse and self-criticism as she looks back. Before her triumphs as a society hostess and royal mistress, she has acquired as an advisor, the financier (a historical character) Sir Robert Clayton, and thanks to his advice she makes shrewd investments and sees her capital expand steadily until she is the early eighteenth-century equivalent of a multimillionaire.10 Throughout these pages, Roxana links her financial independence to her sexual freedom, and in one especially memorable instance when Sir Robert urges her to marry a rich merchant she declares herself as existing beyond the normal female categories: This was certainly right; and had I taken his Advice, I had been really happy; but my Heart was bent upon an Independency of Fortune; and I told him, I knew no State of Matrimony, but what was, at best, a State of Inferiority, if not of Bondage;

283

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment that I had no Notion of it; that I liv’d a Life of absolute Liberty now; was free as I was born, and having a plentiful Fortune, I did not understand what Coherence the Words Honour and Obey had with the Liberty of a Free Woman; that I knew no Reason the Men had to engross the whole Liberty of the Race, and make the Women, notwithstanding any desparity of Fortune, be subject to the Laws of Marriage, of their own making; that it was my Misfortune to be a Woman, but I was resolv’d it shou’d not be made worse by the Sex; and seeing Liberty seem’d to be the Men’s Property, I wou’d be a Man-Woman; for as I was born free, I wou’d die so. (pp. 211–12)

Roxana is very specific about the foundations of her independence; she describes very precisely how her last London lover, a rich lord, pays her enough so that she is able to spend none of her capital but plows the interest it earns back into the principal to let compound interest do its magical work. Her real freedom, then, is financial rather than strictly ideological; her stirring feminist androgyny rests on the firm foundation of safe financial investments and the miracle of compound interest, which as she outlines her holdings and her privileged position vis à vis her income has a rock-steady quality like nothing else in the world in which her story takes place. Even as she alternates between triumphant social/sexual activity and retrospective remorse and contempt for her amorality, her financial life has a steady upward movement, an irresistible accumulative quality: You are now to suppose me about seven Years come to Town, and that I had not only suffer’d the old Revenue . . . to grow, as was mention’d before; but I had laidup an incredible Wealth, the time consider’d; and had I yet had the least Thought of reforming, I had all the Opportunity to do it with Advantage, that ever Woman had; for the common Vice of all Whores, I mean Money, was out of the Question, nay, even Avarice itself seem’d to be glutted; for, including what I had sav’d in reserving the Interest of 14000 l. which, as above, I had left to grow; and, including some very good Presents I had made to me, in meer Compliment, upon these shining masquerading Meetings, which I held up for about two Years, and what I made of three Years of the most glorious Retreat, as I call it, that ever Woman had, I had fully doubled my first Substance, and had near 5000 Pounds in Money, which I kept at-home; besides abundance of Plate, and Jewels, which I had either given me, or had bought to set myself out for Publick Days. In a word, I had now five and thirty Thousand Pounds Estate; and as I found Ways to live without wasting either Principal or Interest, I laid-up 2000 l. every Year, at least, out of the meer Interest, adding it to the Principal; and thus I went on. (pp. 223–4)11

Roxana’s rate of financial growth is stupendous, so much so that she acquires the reputation of having a vast fortune and draws offers of matrimony. At one 284

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment point, Sir Robert brings her a proposal from a wealthy merchant, and the two of them agree (in language echoed in many other places in Defoe’s writings) on the difference between a mere gentleman and a merchant, Roxana matching the latter in the pattern of her financial dealings: “a Merchant in flush Business, and a capital Stock, is able to spend more Money than a Gentleman of 5000 l. a Year Estate; that while a Merchant spent, he only spent what he got, and not that; and that he laid up great Sums every Year. That an Estate is a Pond; but that a Trade was a Spring; that if the first is once mortgag’d, it seldom gets clear, but embarrass’d the Person for ever; but the Merchant had his Estate continually flowing” (p. 211). However illicit and immoral her trade, Roxana represents energy and vitality such as the narrative implicitly values above all else, even above the morality it ostensibly promotes. To be sure, her spectacular financial aggrandizement is accompanied by regular bursts of retrospective remorse as she narrates, but this remorse has the paradoxical effect of heightening her accomplishments by highlighting their enormity and their daring. Modern readers sometimes tend to wonder why Defoe includes these detailed financial accountings (and there are a number of others in this part of her narrative). We do well to remember, again, just how enormous the sums in question were in eighteenth-century value; Roxana is a millionaire many times over by the time she’s through, and her stupendous wealth is part of the sensational appeal of the narrative. Moreover, these reminders of how her wealth steadily accumulates point to an organizing contrast in her narrative – between Roxana’s fluid and improvisational selfhood as she responds to her changing circumstances, at length defeated by them and descending into remorse and near madness, and the rock-solid nature of her wealth and the inexorable growth of her investments. The ultimate reality in this novel is the material financial world or the economic base where money properly invested accumulates and multiplies, thanks especially to the modern miracle of compound interest whereby interest earned is added to principal and grows with all the inevitability of a natural force, quite in contrast by the way to the fluidity and random unpredictability of the social and moral world evoked so vividly in the novel. More so than Defoe’s other fictional narrators, Roxana imitates in her personality and character that principle of financial accumulation. She can not simply be said to develop or grow in the terms we are used to employing for successfully conceived novelistic characters. Rather, she accumulates experiences, learning from them, refining her techniques for tricky survival; she constantly adds the interest of experience to the principal which is her personality. Her life as she herself presents it needs to be measured in quantitative rather than in qualitative terms. Her character acquires complexity by virtue of an accumulative process that leaves her essentially unchanged from the clever and pleasure-loving daughter of rich Huguenot refugees we are introduced to at the start of her story. That alignment with the new financial order of the early eighteenth century – a substantially new entity 285

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment that Defoe spent a good deal of his time trying to explain to his readers in his journalism – marks her as a specifically modern character.

Anonymity and Identity: Narrative into Novel [Defoe] was the last man to add fuel to a flame he was endeavouring to extinguish. With him the prosperity of the wicked always comes to an end, even in this life. William Lee, The Life of Daniel Defoe

Roxana’s defining freedom depends upon a powerful anonymity, her ability to assume various identities, to disappear into the ocean of an unregulated social and economic world that stretches across national borders, from France to England, to Holland, to Italy. Her narrative evokes a European world where there are no identity cards or even passports, and individuals can literally reinvent themselves for advantage. This fluidity of social relations along with the malleability of identity it facilitates is the great unifying theme of all of Defoe’s fictions and especially of his criminal fictions, and it represents both a problem and an opportunity for his protagonists as this social fluidity grants them operational freedom and secrecy but denies them security and stability. Such fluidity, even in its exaggerated versions in Defoe’s novels, is a measure of his grasp of an aspect of urban modern experience that in these days of organized crime and urban terrorism still haunts the cities of the western world. The final turn in the narrative that leads to Roxana’s undoing is the discovery by one of her long-abandoned daughters, Susan, of her actual identity, of the biological reality and completely ordinary (indeed sordid) marital history of a deserted wife (also named, prosaically enough, Susan, like her daughter) that her mother has spent her life evading and transforming. Before that moment, Roxana has not only obscured her originating circumstances and identity but actually secured her position and power by the surveillance of others who threaten her new identities. Thus, in Paris she discovers her feckless first husband, serving in the French Horse Guards. In Defoe’s fictional universe, people can drop completely out of sight but then, mysteriously reappear by chance and accident, so that extreme caution is necessary; coincidence within this world of random and unpredictable events is a kind of secular deus ex machina that can bring very bad luck or great good fortune.The moment when her brewer-husband appears marks one of a series of tense encounters Roxana has in which she comes close to exposure, in which she records her own heart-pounding surprise in the face of unexpected exposure as she here recognizes her husband at the chateau in Meudon, the residence of the Dauphin, where she has gone on a visit with her Prince:

286

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment I had a Sight, which confounded me at once, as, I doubt not, it wou’d have done to any Woman in the World: The Horse-Guards, or what they call there the Gensd’arms, had upon some Occasion, been either upon Duty, or been Review’d, or something (I did not understand that Part) was the Matter, that occasion’d their being there, I know not what; but walking in the Guard-Chamber, and with his Jack-Boots on, and the whole Habit of the Troop, as it is worn, when our HorseGuards are upon Duty, as they call it, at St. James’s-Park; I say, there, to my inexpressible Confusion, I saw Mr. __, my first Husband, the Brewer. I cou’d not be deceiv’d; I pass’d so near him, that I almost brush’d him with my Cloaths, and look’d him full in the Face, but having my Fan before my Face, so that he cou’d not know me; however, I knew him perfectly well, and I heard him speak, which was a second Way of knowing him; besides, being, you may be sure, astonish’d and surpriz’d at such a Sight, I turn’d about after I had pass’d him some Steps, and pretending to ask the Lady that was with me, some Questions, I stood as if I had view’d the Great Hall, the outer Guard-Chamber, and some other things; but I did it, to take a full View of his Dress, that I might farther inform myself. (pp. 121–2)

Even in a moment of breathless panic, Roxana notes everything that matters for future control, and improvised strategy accompanies spontaneous fear and temporary confusion. This is just the kind of moment Defoe’s fiction is drawn to, the special, self-defining challenge for his narrators, who manage somehow to reconcile self-possession and self-management with tumbling emotions and confusing particularity, although as we will see Roxana near her end has just such an encounter with her daughter, and the result is quite different. Guarding her own secrecy, Roxana employs her surrogate, the cunning and resourceful Amy, to cover her tracks with her first husband, to say that she has lost touch with her mistress. Amy’s inquiries into his history reveal that he is completely untrustworthy, “a meer Sharper; one that would stick at nothing to get Money” (p. 129), and so Roxana goes to the length of hiring a spy: “a Fellow, who was compleatly qualified for the Work of a Spy, (for France has Plenty of such People,) this Man I employ’d to be a constant and particular Attendant upon his Person and Motions; and he was especially employ’d, and order’d to haunt him as a Ghost; that he should scarce let him be ever out of his Sight; he perform’d this to a Nicety, and fail’d not to give me a perfect Journal of all his Motions” (p. 131). Roxana’s summarizing comment as she sees the last of her husband tells us a great deal about her sense of herself as a kind of dispensing as well as supervising deity: “Seeing therefore, no Remedy, I was oblig’d to withdraw my Hand from him, that had been my first Destroyer, and reserve the Assistance that I intended to have given him, for another more desirable Opportunity; all that I had now to do, was to keep myself out of his Sight” (p. 131).

287

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment Such intersections between past and present modify the accumulative, purely sequential drive of Roxana’s narrative, as she traces her experiences – those improvisations, manipulations, double relationships, and negotiations for pleasure, power, and (most of all) money. As in all of Defoe’s narratives, there is a tension between the episodic string of events in which the protagonist is a free wheeling opportunist who moves along like a rolling stone and a unifying thread or unity in the diversity that contains within it a limiting (and looming) destiny that fixes and defines character. A fateful pattern lurks in what looks like mere sequentiality, the past and its implications waiting to reassert themselves, just as in Moll Flanders the heroine’s trolling for a husband lands her in an incestuous bed with her half brother in Virginia and reunites her with the mother she never knew. When the Prince repents of their adulterous connection, Roxana drifts as whim, inclination, opportunity, and most of all profitable business take her. Hoping to return to England with her fortune but wondering how to convert it to bills payable there, she meets a Dutch merchant in Paris and asks his help. The merchant calls in a Jewish dealer in jewels to buy her gems, and Roxana is terrified when he recognizes them as belonging to the murdered jeweller, her dangerous past returning to threaten her: “As soon as the Jew saw the Jewels, I saw my Folly; and it was ten Thousand to one but I had been ruin’d, and perhaps, put to Death in as cruel a Manner as possible” (p. 150). Thanks to the efforts of her Dutch merchant, however, she just manages to elude the Jew’s threats to expose her and takes up residence for a time in Rotterdam, where she becomes by her own account skilled in finance: “by managing my Business thus myself, and having large Sums to do with, I became as expert in it, as any SheMerchant of them all; I had Credit in the Bank for a large Sum of Money, and Bills and Notes for much more” (p. 170). But it has been a close call; there are in those jewels ineradicable traces of the guilty past, and these two sequences, in which she shadows her feckless husband and spies on him and in which she herself is detected and nearly ruined by her past, point to the double motion of the narrative, as Roxana looks back to a life in which she is herself always looking back over her shoulder, as it were, in which her efforts are to move forward and upward, barely surviving and then prospering mightily, but always under threat from the past and its implications, from the fate and the identity she has tried to leave behind by a series of constructed or assumed identities. And in this regard, ironically enough, she is just like her feckless first husband when she is in turn discovered and nearly exposed. Moments like this, and there will be more at the end of the story, point to the great theme of Roxana, unique in its fullness and complexity to this novel among Defoe’s works, the inescapability of the past, the inevitable return of the repressed. And these coincidences – finding her first husband in Paris, the Jew finding her and her jewels again, and later her meeting her Dutch merchant quite by accident again in London – go against the grain of Defoe’s evocation of a shifting mass 288

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment urban society in which individuals can simply disappear or form new identities. To be sure, in the realistic novel, here at its beginnings or much later in the nineteenth century, unlikely coincidences are by their strangeness a kind of secular miracle and in being coincidences rather than evidences of a meaningful order, these accidental encounters that occur within the randomness of modern life validate that very randomness. In the course of events, her Dutch merchant from Paris follows her to Rotterdam, partly to escape the menaces of the vengeful Jew. There they grow intimate and trade “the History of our Affairs on every side” (p. 175). Roxana tells him everything but not of course the hidden truth about herself. She recounts her fears in a storm at sea when she and Amy feared for their lives, and he answers gallantly that “so good a Lady, and so pious, you wou’d but have gone to Heaven a little the sooner, the Difference had not been much to you” (p. 176). Roxana’s reaction is involuntary and nearly revealing in its self-satisfaction at the efficiency of her disguise in this man’s eyes: “ I thought I shou’d have fainted; poor Gentleman! thought I, you know little of me; what wou’d I give to be really what you really think me to be!” (p. 176). These dialogues with the merchant, who proposes marriage and is amazed by what Sir Robert Clayton later in the book calls Roxana’s “Amazonian” language, dramatize her continuing self-promotion and proto-feminist transformation in which she scorns conventional notions about marriage: “the very Nature of the Marriage-Contract was, in short, nothing but giving up Liberty, Estate, Authority, and every-thing, to the Man, and the Woman was indeed, a meer Woman ever after, that is to say, a Slave” (p. 187). When Roxana continues to refuse his marriage proposals, although she is willing to continue their intimacies and tells him she is pregnant, he is shocked and amazed and puts her defiance of convention in these terms: “I have been surpriz’d with such a Denial, that no Woman in such Circumstances ever gave to a Man; for certainly it was never known, that any Woman refus’d to marry a Man that had first lain with her, much less a Man that had gotten her with-Child; but you go upon different Notions from all the World; and tho’ you reason upon it so strongly, that a Man knows hardly what to answer, yet I must own, there is something in it shocking to Nature, and something very unkind to yourself ” (p. 196). We can be sure that Defoe and most of his audience would have agreed with the merchant. In early eighteenth-century terms, Roxana is a libertine monster, albeit a fascinating and even persuasive character. As the masculinized, sexually aggressive woman she represents a recurring figure in imaginative amatory writing in the period, and one can find numerous instances in the works of Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood. But such is the power of Roxana’s self-presentation, such the sheer intelligence and drive for power and pleasure that Defoe instills in her, that she is a kind of sacred monster for most of the book. For example, here is how she records the transition from her sojourn in Holland to a return to England: 289

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment Having thus spent nine Months in Holland; refus’d the best Offer ever Woman in my Circumstances had; parted unkindly, and indeed, barbarously with the best Friend, and honestest Man in the World; got all my Money in my Pocket, and a Bastard in my Belly, I took Shipping at the Briel, in the Packet-Boat, and arriv’d safe at Harwich, where my Woman, Amy, was come, by my Direction, to meet me. I wou’d willingly have given ten Thousand Pounds of my Money, to have been rid of the Burthen I had in my Belly, as above; but it cou’d not be; so I was oblig’d to bear with that Part, and get rid of it by the ordinary Method of Patience, and a hard Travel. I was above the contemptible Usage that Women in my Circumstances oftentimes meet with; I had consider’d all that before-hand; and having sent Amy beforehand, and remitted her Money to do it, she had taken me a very handsome House, in – Street, near Charing-Cross; had hir’d me two Maids, and a Footman, who she had put in a good Livery, and having hir’d a Glass-Coach and four Horses, she came with them and the Man-Servant, to Harwich, to meet me, and had been there near a Week before I came; so I had nothing to do, but to go-away to London, to my own House, where I arriv’d in very good Health, and where I pass’d for a French Lady, by the Title of __. (pp. 203–4)

Such eloquent independence effectively if temporarily disarms criticism and moral judgment, especially for a modern reader. Roxana’s boasting is the pride that goeth before a fall, but her success is nonetheless impressive as well as longlasting. She remarks at the end of her courtesan’s career, when she looks in the mirror for us, as it were, and observes, “I carried my Age, which was above Fifty, very well too” (p. 229). And she goes on to underline her singularity: “I may venture to say, that no Woman ever liv’d a Life like me, of six and twenty Years of Wickedness, without the least Signals of Remorse; without any Signs of Repentance; or without so much as a Wish to put an End to it” (p. 229). When this self-possession meets its ultimate challenge, as Roxana struggles with her persistent daughter and retreats for a time into a private world, the narrative enters a new phase that marks the last and best achievement of Defoe’s fictions. Consider the implications of her daughter’s presence as a cook-maid in Roxana’s household. At her most triumphant moment, her most outrageous performance that gains her fame and a name, her past in the figure of her daughter, Susan, is lurking there, employed as a servant in her household, signifying in her subservient social position the circumstances that Roxana has evaded. Her very wealth and privilege harbor the fate that will destroy her; her elaborate household contains a destiny it is designed to obscure or deny. Flying free, improvising her spectacular dance, dressed in a Turkish costume acquired in Italy as the mistress of the Prince, about as a result to become the toast of the court and

290

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment then the king’s mistress, amassing unprecedented wealth, Roxana will discover that this flowering of her career carries within it the seeds of her downfall. Roxana’s moment of greatest freedom, then, is the precise moment when the determinants from her past begin to gather – a profoundly novelistic moment in which freedom and necessity are inextricable, a subterranean movement beneath the surface of events that undermines the heroine’s powerful agency. And what marks Roxana as more properly novelistic than Defoe’s other fictions is precisely the heroine’s coming to realize the nature of this process, coming to understand with tragic knowledge that her apparent freedom was really part of the mechanism of a fateful necessity that she spends her last days struggling with. There is just a hint of this ultimate development during her exhilarating triumphs. Flush with money and power, Roxana dispatches Amy to find her longabandoned children and provide for their futures.This attempt to exercise control and to rearrange her past contains an irony, since it is precisely because of this scheme that her daughter becomes suspicious when she visits her brother, who has been saved from a future as a manual laborer through Roxana’s secret beneficence, as administered by Amy and assisted by Sir Robert Clayton, to make him a “Turkey merchant.” Getting wind of the girl’s suspicions and alerted now to her identity as Roxana’s daughter, Amy without telling Roxana discharges her as a servant in the household, but maternal remorse proves too powerful, as is her continuing sense of her own ability to manipulate the lives of others. When she discovers what Amy has done, Roxana looks into the probable future for her daughter, seeing a commonplace fate determined by gender and class: “I was too tender a Mother still, notwithstanding what I had done, to let this poor Girl go about the World drudging, as it were, for Bread, and slaving at the Fire, and in the Kitchin, as a Cook-Maid; besides it came into my Head, that she might, perhaps, marry some poor Devil of a Footman, or a Coachman, or some such thing, and be undone that way; or, which was worse, be drawn in to lie with some of that course cursed Kind, and be with-Child, and be utterly ruin’d that way; and in the midst of all my Prosperity this gave me great Uneasiness” (p. 239). So through an intermediary, Susan is groomed for a middle-class future, and once again Roxana’s confident manipulations are clearly meant to give one pause by virtue of their presumptions and their calculations drawn directly from her own experience: The Girl . . . was directed to put herself into a good Garb, take Lodgings, and entertain a Maid to wait upon her, and to give herself some Breeding, that is to say, to learn to Dance, and fit herself to appear as a Gentlewoman; being made to hope, that she shou’d, sometime or other, find that she shou’d be put into a Condition to support her Character, and to make herself amends for all her former Troubles;

291

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment she was only charg’d not to be drawn into Matrimony, till she was secur’d of a Fortune that might assist to dispose of herself suitable not to what she then was, but what she was to be. (p. 247)

But Roxana shortly after these arrangements are made enters her last transformative stage, giving up her courtesan’s career in disgust with her last lover, a rich Lord she milks for an extravagant maintenance, and fashioning a newly modest identity as the rich lodger of a Quaker lady in the City. Her retreat to private life is rendered in complicated detail, a self-admiring continuation of the heroine’s previous manipulations. Defoe manages in all these shifts and potentially tedious outlines of moving house and making arrangements to communicate, at first, Roxana’s undiminished vitality, her inventive resourcefulness and irrepressible vanity. For example, she takes to Quaker garb, and she explains herself this way: I pretended, after I had been there some time, to be extreamly in Love with the Dress of the QUAKERS, and this pleas’d her so much, that she wou’d needs dress me up one Day in a Suit of her own Cloaths; but my real Design was, to see whether it wou’d pass upon me for a Disguise. Amy was struck with the Novelty, tho’ I had not mention’d my Design to her, and when the QUAKER was gone out of the Room, says Amy, I guess your Meaning; it is a perfect Disguise to you; why you look quite another-body, I shou’d not have known you myself; nay, says Amy, more than that, it makes you look ten Years younger than you did. (p. 254)

For Roxana, this is a perfect situation – “Nothing cou’d please me better than that” (p. 254) – as secrecy and vanity mesh. For all her resolve to give over the courtesan’s trade, she retains her old profile and habits of self-dramatization and pleasure in secrecy. Thus, she adopts Quaker dress and admires her own cleverness as well as her continuing attractiveness in yet another mode of dress: “Come, I’ll be a QUAKER to-Day, and you and I’ll go Abroad; which we did, and there was not a QUAKER in the Town look’d less like a Counterfeit than I did: But all this was my particular Plot to be the more compleatly conceal’d, and that I might depend upon being not known, and yet need not be confin’d like a Prisoner, and be always in Fear; so that all the rest was Grimace” (p. 256). This entire sequence may just be the most subtle piece of narrative Defoe ever wrote, as his heroine thinks she is still in control as she transforms her life in order to evade her past, but she is in fact continuing her old self and about to come face to face with situations in which her experiences will switch from the serene exercise of power (“Grimace,” making faces) to a pervasive anxiety that modulates at last into terror and a loss of control. 292

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment All these postures of disguise and self-satisfied display seem at first to be full of the same old luck and confidence. Roxana sees a picture of her younger self in the Quaker landlady, whose husband has deserted her and run off to New England. She also discovers that her Dutch merchant lover is in England. Meanwhile, she has sent Amy to France to look for this gentleman, but she sends instead tantalizing news that her German Prince has sought her in vain. Still as it happens covetous of power and privilege, even as she cultivates private retirement and entertains the renewed courtship of the modest Dutch merchant (who is enormously wealthy), Roxana dreams of marrying her Prince, and her account of this hard-hearted vacillation as she plays a complicated hand testifies to her candor with readers but underlines her manipulative hypocrisy. During this time, I had a strange Elevation upon my Mind; and the Prince, or the Spirit of him, had such a Possession of me, that I spent most of this Time in the reallizing all the Great Things of a Life with the Prince, to my Mind; pleasing my Fancy with the Grandeur I was supposing myself to enjoy; and withal, wickedly studying in what Manner to put off this Gentleman, and be-rid of him for-ever. I cannot but say, that sometimes the Baseness of the Action stuck hard with me; the Honour and Sincerity with which he had always treated me; and, above all, the Fidelity he had shew’d me at Paris, and that I ow’d my Life to him; I say, all these star’d in my Face; and I frequently argued with myself upon the Obligation I was under, to him; and how base wou’d it be now too, after so many Obligations and Engagements, to cast him off? But the Title of Highness, and of a Princess, and all those fine things, as they came in, weigh’d down all this; and the Sence of Gratitude vanish’d, as if it had been a Shadow. (p. 279).

These selfish plans come crashing down when Amy writes to say that the Prince has been wounded while hunting in Germany and has repented and resolved to have nothing more to do with his Roxana. Such duplicitous yearnings add yet another layer of secrecy to Roxana’s life in this last set of sequences, as she prepares to marry (faut de mieux) her trusting Dutch merchant and makes an ally of her Quaker landlady.This last third or so of the book features a Roxana who can no longer quite manage her increasingly complex privacy and threatened secrecy, who has confusingly multiple secrets that she attempts to juggle. Thus, after her marriage to the Dutch merchant, she recounts that they were put to bed by Amy and the Quaker, neither of them aware “we had been a-Bed together eleven Years before; nay, that was a Secret which, as it happen’d, Amy herself did not know” (p. 289). And most important of all, her eleven years as a courtesan in London and on the continent are a closed book to her honest Dutch merchant. As she summarizes matters, Roxana’s life in Holland is outwardly serene; her Dutch husband has made her not only even richer but also 293

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment legitimate, not only a wife again but also a countess: “I was now in the height of my Glory and Prosperity, and I was call’d the Countess de __; for I had obtain’d that unlook’d for, which I secretly aim’d at, and was really the main Reason of my coming Abroad: I took now more Servants; liv’d in a kind of Magnificence that I had not been acquainted with; was call’d Your Honour at every word, and had a Coronet behind my Coach” (p. 307). Behind all that regularity and newly-found public legitimacy the past broods and torments her. Roxana fears the intrusion of what she sees as the random and the accidental, those aspects of experience that are the base of her story, since the essence of her personality is that she has by alertness mastered them. Whereas her narrative up to now has been centered on the vividly-realized present and the expansive future that it promises, now Roxana is obsessed with her past.That is to say, the accidental is intertwined with necessary and inevitable consequences that have been bred by her past actions; the accidental in the shape of her daughter, Susan, cooperates in deadly fashion with moral and biological destiny. And let no-body conclude from the strange Success I met with in all my wicked Doings, and the vast Estate which I had rais’d by it, that therefore I either was happy or easie: No, no, there was a Dart struck into the Liver; there was a secret Hell within, even all the while, when our Joy was at the highest; but more especially now, after it was all over, and when according to all appearance, I was one of the happiest Women upon Earth, all this while, I say, I had such a constant Terror upon my Mind, as gave me every now and then very terrible Shocks, and which made me expect something very frightful upon every Accident of Life. In a word, it never Lightn’d or Thunder’d, but I expected the next Flash wou’d penetrate my Vitals, and melt the Sword [Soul] in this Scabbord of Flesh; it never blew a Storm of Wind, but I expected the Fall of some Stack of Chimneys, or some Part of the House wou’d bury me in its Ruins; and so of other things. (pp. 305–6)

There are several key moments somewhat earlier in the chronological sequence of her life with the Dutch merchant, as he and Roxana prepare to sail to Holland to live there, that not only explain this particular, tremendously apt focus of her fears on the unpredictable and the accidental – a recurring word in the last quarter or so of the story – but also play out her last lacerating encounter with her daughter, when she comes closest to fatal exposure and mark the beginning of Roxana’s transition from strength to suffering, from control and command to confusion and disorganization. It is crucial to note that in these closing pages of her story, as she marries the Dutch merchant and moves to Holland, the straightforward chronological movement of the novel (with all that it implies for the narrator) alters and veers confusingly.“I must now go back to another Scene,”

294

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment says Roxana suddenly, “and join it to this End of my Story, which will compleat all my Concern with England, at least, all that I shall bring into this Account” (p. 311). In circling back to part of her past, replaying it just as Roxana’s daughter has attempted (as we are about to learn) to replay an earlier part of it, Defoe reinforces his narrator’s new uncertainty as well as her understanding that her past is not quite what she thought it had been, is not in fact in terms of its effects over at all. So from her settled married life in Holland, Roxana looks back to her last months in London when she feared exposure, mainly from her tenacious daughter but also from her lingering notoriety as Roxana, which her daughter threatened of course to reveal (and note, now one properly should speak in the past tense, since Roxana is telling us of events that have just recently happened to her). Accordingly, she explains that she had persuaded her Dutch merchant to avoid “the ordinary publick Passage-Boats” (p. 321), so that he books private passage to Holland for them in a merchant vessel. The captain of this vessel dines with Roxana and her husband, and he invites them to dine with him on board his ship, suggesting that she come and meet his wife and her kinswoman.Through an absolutely unpredictable turn of events, another one of those magical coincidence, what Roxana calls an “Event . . . the oddest that cou’d be thought of ” (p. 321), which is as she explains in retrospect attendant in fact upon Roxana’s and Amy’s providing for Susan, her persistent daughter. This same daughter turns out to be the “kinswoman” of the captain’s wife, the two of them having met at the boarding school in Camberwell where Roxana’s generosity had placed her to gain social poise. Roxana’s shock at seeing her daughter and of maintaining her outward calm is one of Defoe’s greatest novelistic moments: I cannot but take Notice here, that notwithstanding there was a secret Horror upon my Mind, and I was ready to sink when I came close to her, to salute her; yet it was a secret inconceivable Pleasure to me when I kiss’d her, to know that I kiss’d my own Child; my own Flesh and Blood, born of my Body; and who I had never kiss’d since I took the fatal Farewel of them all, with a Million of Tears, and a Heart almost dead with Grief, when Amy and the Good Woman took them all away, and went with them to Spittle-Fields: No pen can describe, no Words can express, I say, the strange Impression which this thing made upon my Spirits; I felt something shoot thro’ my Blood; my Heart flutter’d; my Head flash’d, and was dizzy, and all within me, as I thought, turn’d about, and much ado I had, not to abandon myself to an Excess of Passion at the first Sight of her, much more when my Lips touch’d her Face; I thought I must have taken her in my Arms, and kiss’d her again a thousand times, whether I wou’d or no. (p. 323)

Readers of Moll Flanders will remember the scene in which Moll on her return to Virginia meets her son by her half-brother and asks readers to imagine

295

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment how she felt, a mother reunited after so many years with her son. The contrast between the scenes is striking, for Moll can only claim, unconvincingly and even grotesquely, to be moved by the sight of the son abandoned so many years before, whereas Roxana evokes a moment of genuine emotional intensity quite unlike anything else in her narrative. Her inability to do justice to her feelings is all the more striking because of her supremely articulate and sophisticated narrative persona, quite unlike Moll’s of course, given her superior social status and wider experience. And secrecy, which has all along been a weapon for control, is now a symptom of emotional breakdown. In the visit that follows, Susan sees a resemblance between Roxana and the great lady she worked for but seems not to recognize her. A few days later, Roxana having claimed illness as an excuse for not repeating the visit to the Captain’s wife, she and Roxana’s daughter come to call on her at the Quaker’s, and this scene is a more elaborate and much longer version of the first. Repeating the scene with significant variations and thereby escalating the pressure on Roxana is a mark of Defoe’s narrative sophistication.Whereas the story up to now has featured the heroine’s variety and creative adaptation of circumstances, it now turns to repetition, to the return and reprise of the past in these succeeding scenes, the second slightly different from the first. Roxana’s fashionable dress in this scene, a “Dishabille . . . like a Morning-Gown, but much after the Italian Way . . . the Colour was green, figur’d; and the Stuff a French Damask, very rich” (p. 330), would seem to signify her undiminished physical attractiveness as well as her wealth, power, and sophistication. But instead her dress reminds Susan and the Captain’s wife of Roxana, and the ordinary female chat about fashion slides into pure danger for Roxana, and fashionable and unusual dress, her distinctive weaponry as a courtesan, turns into a landmine under her feet: This Gown, or Vest, put the Girl’s Tongue a-running again, and her Sister, as she call’d her, prompted it; for as they both admir’d my Vest, and were taken up much about the Beauty of the Dress; the charming Damask; the noble Trimming, and the like; my Girl puts in a Word to the Sister, (Captain’s Wife) This is just such a Thing as I told you, says she, the Lady danc’d in: What, says the Captain’s Wife, the Lady Roxana that you told me of? O! that’s a charming Story, says she; tell it my Lady; I cou’d not avoid saying so too, tho’ from my Soul I wish’d her in Heaven for but naming it; nay, I won’t say but if she had been carried t’other Way, it had been much at one to me, if I cou’d but have been rid of her, and her Story too. . . . However, as I have said, her Talk made me dreadfully uneasie, and the more when the Captain’s Wife mention’d but the Name of Roxana; what my Face might do towards betraying me, I know not, because I cou’d not see myself, but my Heart beat as if it wou’d have jump’d out at my Mouth; and my Passion was so great, that for want of Vent, I thought I shou’d have burst: In a word, I was in a

296

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment kind of a silent Rage; for the Force I was under of restraining my Passion, was such, as I never felt the like of: I had no Vent; no-body to open myself to, or to make a Complaint to for my Relief; I durst not leave the Room by any means, for then she wou’d have told all the Story in my Absence, and I shou’d have been perpetually uneasie to know what she had said, or had not said; so that, in a word, I was oblig’d to sit and hear her tell all the Story of Roxana, that is to say, of myself, and not know at the same time, whether she was in earnest or in jest; whether she knew me or no; or, in short, whether I was to be expos’d, or not expos’d. (pp. 330–1)

Like a diabolical mix of Jane Austen and Dostoyevsky, the scene combines the calm observation of external manners with an evocation of Roxana’s explosive internal state. As the conversation flows, Susan retells Roxana’s triumphs in great detail, and the scene acquires a comic edge as Roxana can’t help (still vain) but be pleased to hear her triumphs recounted and her beauty praised: “when she talk’d how handsome and how fine a Lady this Roxana was, I cou’d not help being pleas’d and tickl’d with it; and put in Questions two or three times, of how handsome she was? and was she really so fine a Woman as they talk’d of? Indeed, says she at last, she was a most beautiful Creature, as ever I saw in my Life: But then, said I, you never had the Opportunity to see her, but when she was set-out to the best Advantage” (p. 334). But this last question leads to a wounding and quite specific reprise of her own earlier boast about her perfect complexion: “she was a very fine Woman” replies Susan, “and that which was more still, everybody said she did not paint” (p. 334).The high point of this conversation is Susan’s decription of the extraordinary Turkish dance and the dress; Roxana’s triumphs are revisited and revised, and she is amazed by her daughter’s exact recall: she “did it so exactly, that I was surpriz’d at the Manner of her telling it; there was not a Circumstance of it left out” (p. 335). In the end, we learn that Susan knows all of Roxana’s secrets, and she receives a letter from the good Quaker telling her that Susan’s visits have ceased and that she has had a conversation with Amy to the effect that “she wou’d take Care she shou’d trouble her Mistress (meaning me) no more; and that after Amy had said so, she had indeed, never heard any-more of the Girl” (p. 372). Fearing that Amy has murdered her daughter; Roxana tells us that she was plunged (remember, she’s now narrating from the end point of her life, looking back) into moral despair by this suspicion, which is never confirmed by the way. What matters is that the heroine is now definitively transformed, her powerful secrecy and apartness transformed into pure guilt, and her hawk-eyed observation and manipulation of the external world exchanged for terrifying and involuntary visions such as this: “As for the poor Girl herself, she was ever before my Eyes; I saw her byNight, and by-Day; she haunted my Imagination, if she did not haunt the House; my Fancy show’d her me in a hundred Shapes and Postures; sleeping or waking, 297

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment she was with me: Sometimes I thought I saw her with her Throat cut; sometimes with her Head cut, and her Brains knock’d-out; other-times hang’d up upon a Beam; another time drown’d in the Great Pond at Camberwell: And all these Appearances were terrifying to the last Degree; and that which was still worse, I cou’d really hear nothing of her” (p. 374). Consider, then, the significance of this shift in the pure chronological sequence of Roxana’s story; the tale she tells of her encounters with her daughter, Susan, and of Amy’s possibly murderous solution to that problem, is recounted in fact from a subsequent and final (and present tense) part of her life, when she is safely married to her Dutch merchant husband and living in affluence in Rotterdam. Thus, as she records Amy’s conversations with Susan and the threat that she poses, Roxana locates all this in the exact sequence of her life and for the first time in her narrative positions herself in the present space from which she is narrating: “for it happen’d just after I was marry’d, and serv’d to hasten my going over to Holland; for I wou’d not have been seen, so as to be known by the Name of Roxana, no, not for ten Thousand Pounds; it wou’d have been enough to have ruin’d me to all Intents and Purposes with my Husband, and everybody else too; I might as well have been the German Princess” (p. 317).12 Only one critic, Michael Boardman, has seen the important implications of this odd shift in the sequence of the story, unique in Defoe’s fictions. In looking back on these last episodes in her life, says Boardman, Roxana becomes a truly novelistic character, ceasing as he puts it “to be just a highly developed collocation of fascinating but divergent traits and becomes a consistent character.” She looks back on an aspect of her past that “becomes determinative of the present, which then becomes another determinative past,” says Boardman, as the “episodic, pseudofactual mode” gives way “to the coherence of the action.”13 In other words, as she recounts these concluding sequences about her inquisitive daughter, Susan, she is aware as she has not been earlier of how she has been turned by her past into the person she is now. She is aware of the surprising and in her case nearly tragic implications of what she has done in her past that led her to her current guilty suffering, and these events acquire an almost unbearable tension for her and for the alert reader. Such apprehension and such self-understanding, as Boardman emphasizes, are the essence of the novelistic project as it would emerge in the next two decades in British fiction. As he notes, Roxana does not herself actually murder her daughter and lose all our sympathy.14 Rather, and in more complex fashion, she comes to desire her death, to wish it would happen by natural means (“had she dropp’d into the Grave by any fair Way, as I may call it; I mean had she died by any ordinary Distemper, I should have shed but very few Tears for her” [p. 350]), even as she recounts her intense emotions when she kisses her in the shipboard scene. In this retrospective look at this part of her life, she arrives at the realization that she has been complicit in her daughter’s death or at least that she is guilty of not preventing Amy from doing away with 298

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment her daughter. Alert readers, moreover, are aware that these events now being narrated, unlike the rest of the novel, are inflected by this newly-intense guilt and self-awareness that is distinct from the factual recounting in a virtual sort of present that characterizes the earlier part of the novel, and in that regard resembles all of Defoe’s previous narratives. Looking back in horror from a comfortable life in Holland that she has made certain of to some extent by acquiescing in the elimination of her daughter, Roxana’s narrative dramatizes in these final pages a nearly tragic self-knowledge that resonates within the present tense of her narration, that looks back to a past now painfully understood as selfdestructive and determinative of her intolerable remorse, a past that continues to resonate in the present moment in which she may be said to narrate her tale. Defoe’s Roxana, then, is his best or at least most complex narrative, a protonovel in the sense that it engages fully with the central problems of fate and individual agency that novelists to come in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would wrestle with. His heroine-narrator is a profoundly ambiguous character, tremendously attractive but also deeply flawed and self-destructive in those individualistic energies and appetites. Like Defoe’s other narrators, Roxana confronts a world of random events, an unpredictable and material order of things, by exercising an alert and essentially pragmatic, not to say amoral, instrumentality. The narrative style Defoe invents for her (and for his other narrators, of course, but here he extracts more fully the implications of that style) enacts this randomness in its loose and lightly punctuated manner, its piling up of particular facts and closely-observed situations, its improvisatory and constantly qualified run through the shifting actualities and nearly endless possibilities of experience. But in the end, Roxana anticipates latter day novelistic complexity by exploring patterns of inevitability in that material flux, as psycho-sexual as well as socioeconomic conditions appear as conditioning and even determining circumstances in the life of even the freest and most successful individual. Narrative transparency is clouded in Roxana’s last pages; she loses control not just of herself but of her story, which dissolves into uncertainty and vagueness, although that vagueness is thematically meaningful. We can’t be sure that Amy has in fact murdered Susan, just as we don’t know the nature of those terrible events at the end of Roxana’s life, too horrible for her to summarize. Moral ideology and biological/cultural forces play their role as well, and what looks like the last of many strange coincidences in the appearance of the tenacious and obsessed daughter is really the working out of a hidden set of inevitabilities in the heroine’s actions. To look back on life as novelistic characters do (and as readers themselves in due course are bound to do in their own lives) is to observe and for the first time to understand how freedom is always mixed in with necessity and with moralpsychological consequences that erode integrity and the illusion of full agency. Until the very end of her narrative, Roxana appears to be an extraordinarily free individual; her accumulation of material wealth and her attainment of the 299

Roxana: A Novel of Crime and Punishment pinnacle of luxury as well as power are exhilarating. But the novel sees to it that she pays a heavy price for exercising and enjoying that freedom. Her power, wealth, and privilege (far beyond what any reader can hope to possess) have inscribed in them their negation in guilt and alienation. Among Defoe’s narrators, Roxana is the only one who has to suffer this way, and she is thereby unique in her complexity and pathos.

300

10 History, Facts, and Literature

But I leave the Reader to improve these Thoughts, as no doubt they will see Cause, and I go on to the Fact. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders

Due Preparations for the Plague and A Journal of the Plague Year This dreadful disease, which, in the language of Scripture, might be described as “the pestilence which walketh in darkness, and the destruction that wasteth at noonday,” was indeed a fit subject for a pencil so veracious as that of De Foe; and, accordingly, he drew pictures almost too horrible to look on. Walter Scott, Lives of the Novelists

Second only to Robinson Crusoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) has been for recent posterity Defoe’s most widely-read book, and even outside of the Englishspeaking world it has proved a resonant book for modern readers.1 Of all Defoe’s narratives from that productive half decade from 1719 to 1724, it is his most interesting formal experiment: a pseudo-history and a proto-novel. Defoe offers a convincing account of the great plague of 1665 in London, delivered with calm matter-of-factness (or barely-suppressed, mounting horror). The most intensely urban of Defoe’s narratives, it evokes certain qualities we now associate with urban experience at its most alienating and threatening. The plague in London produces conditions which are a heightened, quasi-metaphorical version of life in the modern city at its worst (and also its best) as later observers in the 301

History, Facts, and Literature nineteenth and twentieth centuries came to understand it. In the plague-infected city that Defoe evokes, isolated individuals like his narrator contemplate a seemingly infinite variety of experiences and possibilities that can’t be summed up or organized or for that matter predicted. Urban individuals like him are conscious of their own distance from the mysterious mass of other people. Everyone the narrator meets in this world is a stranger to him, and each person lives like him in fear, constantly suspicious of others, as danger and uncertainty lurk around every corner.The book’s original purpose, however, was intensely practical rather than imaginative. The threat of bubonic plague, the Black Death of the Middle Ages which had killed millions over the centuries, was very real in the early eighteenth century, and Defoe was concerned more than most of his contemporaries about its pressing danger. As early as 1709 in the Review he had warned against supporting Sweden in its wars with the Poles, Russians, Danes, and Prussians, since war as he argued plausibly (although we now know incorrectly) bred and spread pestilence. (Bubonic plague is spread by infected fleas and carried by rats who harbor the fleas; nowadays, the disease still exists and there are it is estimated several thousand cases each year. Plague can if caught early be cured by anti-biotics but is still fatal if not treated.)2 The topic became for Defoe an obsession to which he returned in the Review in 1712.3 And again in the fall of 1720 with the outbreak of plague in Marseilles and draconian French government action there in the face of it, he warned of the dangers of the plague spreading to England in the periodicals for which he was writing in those years, The Daily Post, Applebee’s Journal, and Mist’s Journal. That outbreak had caused Walpole’s government in February of 1722 to renew the original Quarantine Act passed during Queen Anne’s reign in 1710. Given his concern about the likelihood of plague, Defoe clearly approved of these strict domestic measures, although they were met with dismay by merchants and opposition from libertarians who denounced them as repressively “French” in their infringement on individual rights. Under pressure Walpole’s government relaxed many of the original provisions in the act. In 1722, nonetheless, Defoe published in quick succession two books that dramatized the threat of plague: in February, Due Preparations for the Plague, as well for Soul as Body. Being some seasonable THOUGHTS upon the Visible Approach of the present dreadful CONTAIGON in France; the properest Measures to prevent it, and the great Work of submitting to it, and the next month, A Journal of the Plague Year being Observations or Memorials of the most Remarkable Occurrences, as well Publick as Private, which happened in London during the last Great Visitation in 1665 Written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London. Never made publick before.4 The former is a heavily didactic work, part narrative and part moral and religious polemic, a warning about the danger of the plague. In its dire analysis of the condition of England, the book resembles some of Defoe’s polemics from the mid-1720s such as Every-body’s Business is No-Body’s Business (1725), when his 302

History, Facts, and Literature disgust with society seems to have reached a fever pitch. Here Defoe’s analysis is much more generalized, not simply as in the later polemics an attack on a loosening of class boundaries and proprieties but a denunciation of a pervasive moral and spiritual degeneration rendered in specifically medicalized language. Purge now, says Defoe, to avoid the coming infection, although this revulsion sounds a bit odd coming from someone who was a part-time wine merchant and something of an oenophile: six Months or more before the Infection comes . . . then there is time to recover the Spirits and restore the Blood, before the time of the Distress comes upon them. Then is the time, to Cleanse the Jakes, as I call it, I mean the Stomach, and to Purge off the foul, corrupted Humours, colected by long Intemperance, luxurious Eating, Gorging the Stomach with Sauces and high Diet, Inflaming the Blood with innumerable Debauches of Wine and the like: I say now is the time for Cleansing the Stomach and Bowels, and for preparing the Body, by delivering Nature from all the Burthens she was loaded with before.5

A good deal of this disgust is conventionally Christian, as when a page later the speaker asks rhetorically, “what a Sink and Receptacle of Filth is the Body of Man?” (p. 50). But Defoe’s attack is specifically local and historical (“our ordinary way of Living in England, requires these Evacuations more than is the case of the People of other Nations” [p. 51]). He describes with revulsion those English habits of feeding that he says leave the nation’s inhabitants vulnerable to contagion: “It is a most unaccountable Habit that we are brought to by our vitiated Appetites in this Nation, Namely, to Eat our Flesh Meat, of which also we feed immoderately, almost Raw: Indeed some People may be said to feed little different from the Tartars, who eat their Horse-flesh Raw” (pp. 51–2). English “foul Bodies and gross Feeding” (p. 52) will propagate and spread the infection when it comes. “Our Vices which are already a Plague upon our Morals,” he argues, “are a dreadful kind of Fuel for a Contaigon” (p. 56). Moreover, the dangers are peculiar to this generation: “Our Fore-fathers had Sins enough, no doubt, and for which Heaven brought Judgments upon them most righteously; but our Fore-fathers never were guilty of the Luxury that we practise, neither in kind or in degree” (p. 56). The threat of plague offers Defoe the seemingly always-outraged contemporary moralist yet another occasion to rail. But Due Preparations is not entirely a fire and brimstone sermon and cranky dietary polemic. The rest of it is a collection of narratives and dialogues of presumably fictionalized and vividly imagined experiences from the 1665 pestilence meant to bring home by past examples the urgent necessity of preparing, physically but also spiritually, for the plague that is bound to come again in the 1720s. Defoe first tells the story of a wholesale grocer and his extended family, 303

History, Facts, and Literature including his servants and apprentices, in St. Albans, on Wood Street, who shut themselves up in their house during the plague; he describes with characteristically specific enumerations all their ingenious survival techniques, as the grocer begins with the “standing Rule, that the Door should not be opened upon any Account whatever, that the dearest Friend he had in the World should not come in to him, nor the greatest Necessity in the World, Fire excepted, oblige any one of his House to go out of the Doors into the Streets” (p. 60). Sealing all the windows of his house, the grocer, Defoe explains, has a special wooden window built by which goods can be safely delivered, “cover’d with thin Plates of Latin or Tin, that nothing Infected or Infectious should stick to it” (p. 60). He also describes at much greater and even more precise length all their provisions for the long siege: not only flour to bake bread (“Twenty Barrels of fine flour” are packed up carefully, air-tight, “so that no Air can get to it” lest it will spoil [pp. 60–1]), but beer as well as “Wine, Cordial Waters and Brandy” (and here follows a list of the “Canary,” “Malmsey,” “Malaga Sack” and so on), medicinal waters and herbs and roots, cured meats, cheeses (“particularly out of Wiltshire and Warwickshire, and Gloucestershire, about Six Hundred Weight in the Whole” [p. 62]), and “Also Salt and Pickles in abundance, being judg’d very wholesome, with some Hams, Neats-Tongues, and Hung Beef for Dainties, with about 20 small Jarrs of some Bottles of good Oil, rather for Physical Uses, than for Salads, for these they were sure to be without” (p. 62). In this almost absurdly detailed rendering of the grocer’s preparations, we can see again Defoe’s obsessive powers of attention to the material world, to human arrangements and substances, of things and techniques, memorably summarized by Louis A. Landa when he observes that in Defoe’s world “weights, measures, numbers are not dry things: they are infused with vitality.”6 There is something deeply incongruous between this mesmerizing catalogue of techniques, strategies, and (especially) provisions and the narrative context of the plague and the peculiarly English vulnerability to it owing to gross living and high feeding. Defoe, however, doesn’t seem to care about the incongruity, and to some extent a moment like this is an instance of his habit of losing control of his writing on occasion, of introducing discords and contradictions, of mixing moral revulsion and dire prophecy with the magnetic appeal of the material world in all its fullness and fertility. Such contradictions are almost his signature as a writer. In A Journal of the Plague Year this kind of nearly Homeric gusto and Breughel-like intensity of observation with which he renders the grocer’s preparations will seem to have faded away, although I think something like that same fascination with the material world and with ingenious human arrangements within it remains a strong feature of the narrative. Although they seem secure, thanks to their elaborate preparations and provisions, the grocer and his family can hear the ominous sounds of suffering outside their house: “they heard the Knells continually Sounding” (p. 65), and they learn 304

History, Facts, and Literature from their porter of the “dreadful Havock the infection made in the Town round about them” (p. 65). Shut up in their house, they also hear the rumble of the cart that comes along to collect the dead: “the dismal Bell with the Cart, and the Voice following it in a mournful Tone, Bring out your Dead” (p. 67). But then the knells cease. The silence then evoked is even more frightening; the grocer is told by his porter that the number of dead has become so great that the ringing of bells has been stopped, “and People were all fetch’d away by the Carts, Rich as well as Poor” (p. 69). The exhilaration of provisioning and fortifying the house gives way to terror at the prospect of those dreadful uncertainties outside that surround their fortress-like enclave. Clarity and certainty, the exact sources and origins of all those foodstuffs, those English cheeses and Spanish wines, the blueprint specificity of the workings of the shut up house – all of these controlling and ordering gestures are threatened by an external world where nothing is certain or clear or specific and where an arbitrary infection moves in mysterious, unpredictable ways. One might take this as a recurring scene in Defoe’s imaginative world: the individual barricaded as well as provisioned (like Crusoe in his island, hunkered down in his fortified hideaway) against a hostile and threatening, and most terrifying of all a totally unpredictable outside environment, where God’s Providence is extremely hard to locate in any useful or comforting specific sense. This is a specifically modern world of not quite understood second causes and of unresolved material and physical processes. This story of the grocer and his family is Part one of Due Preparations, but this section ends with another fiery sermon and with an argumentative concluding few pages about the nature of contagion in which Defoe rails at those who dispute what he calls the common sense view that the plague is communicated by human contact, “whether by Effluvia from their Bodies; by Animalcula mixt and drawn into our Bodies with our Breath . . . and that Conversing with those who are Infected gives the Infection” (p. 81). He is also careful to say that these are in fact second causes and that the ultimate control lies with “the Agency of Providence” (p. 81), just as he is sensitive enough to claim that he doesn’t want to turn the book into “a Scene of Debate” (p. 81), although that is what a good deal of it is. We can hear the fractious tones of Mr. Review in sentences like this as he argues with those who say that “we are in no danger of Infection from Conversing with infected Bodies; But who do these Gentlemen think they shall perswade to run the Hazard of the Experiment? Nay, will the Gentlemen themselves show us the Way? and if they should we must see through the whole Visitation, before we can tell whether they are in the right or no” (p. 82). From debate at the end of Part I, Defoe returns to sermonizing and moral polemic in the opening of the next section of the book, as he turns to the second (and he insists) the more important and more difficult aspect of preparation for 305

History, Facts, and Literature the plague – the spiritual, which is “infinitely of greater Consequence” (p. 88). In moments like these, it is almost as if he can’t keep the discourse on an even keel; the rational debating and spirited ironies of the end of part one shifting without much transition to exhortations and warnings like this: “O Sinner! remember that the Terrors of thy Conscience will be a Weight too heavy to be born at the same time with the Terrors of Death” (p. 88). Ever shrewd, however, Defoe goes on in this paragraph to note that inner terrors often have external and physical consequences, as the anguish and anxieties of conscience and religious fear “throw the Body into Fevers and Convulsions, and at least assist those Distempers to destroy us” (p. 88). His tract, says Defoe, is written to calm those spiritual terrors so that the horrors of the plague may not be doubled by inner suffering: “that when the Call is heard, no other Noise may drown out their Comforts; and that the Business of Life, may now without any delay be to prepare for Death” (pp. 88–9).The aggressive defense put up by the grocer and his family is now exchanged for another kind of posture, the clear-eyed acceptance of the possibility of death and the resolute preparation for it in spiritual terms, or so Defoe claims. Mostly dramatic dialogue, with occasional stage directions and short narrative bridges, this second part of Due Preparations tells the story of two merchant brothers, their sister, and their mother who decide after much agonized debate to move for protection into one of their own ships in the harbor. Defoe accompanies this tale with a far less detailed set of enumerations such as he provided for the grocer. This second dialogue and narrative is, however, more complicated than the grocer’s, since Defoe presents the distinct spiritual preparations of the two brothers and the pious mother and sister, and fulfills the title’s promise to include preparations “as well for Soul as Body.” The work recalls in its moral dialogues earlier works such as The Family Instructor and Religious Courtship, although there is little of their dramatic tension here. Putting off “the evil day,” the elder merchant brother is immersed in his business affairs, and indeed both of them “had not made the Concern of Eternal Life the chief Business of the present Life” (p. 90). Both brothers find the warnings of their mother and sister gradually grow upon them as signs mount that the plague has arrived, but the younger is more concerned about the effects of his past life, which he evokes melodramatically: “I have a long mispent Life to look back upon, I have an Ocean of Crimes to launch thro’, a Weight that sinks the Soul” (p. 114), as he says to his sister. Moreover, the younger brother acknowledges his own lack of resolution and weakness, so that “if the Sickness shou’d go off, I shall be just the same again” (p. 115), and this proves to be the case, even after several intense and uplifting dialogues with his pious sister, accompanied by their meeting “every Tuesday and Friday, and kept the whole Day as a Solemn Fast, neither Eating or Drinking ’till about Four a Clock in the Afternoon . . . with Fasting, with Weeping, and with

306

History, Facts, and Literature Mourning” (p. 121). In spite of all this intense soul searching, the younger of the brothers is spiritually and therefore psychologically unprepared for the anxiety the plague brings; he lives “in a continual hurry of Mind, and in a terrible Fright, even to Amazement and Discomposure: He thought himself secure no where” (p. 149), not even on the ship where they take refuge. The long dialogues with his pious sister are relentlessly edifying, as Defoe gives the sister especially an eloquent Christian calm, but in the end their effects seem to be in Defoe’s dramatization quite temporary. His elder brother holds out against all this spiritual agonizing until the plague begins to rage, when he urges them to flee, “to leave the Town and shift all for themselves” (p. 131). But it is too late for that, and this brother despairs until the happy proposal by one of their captains that the family take refuge in one of their ships in the Thames. Although Defoe declares that the provisioning of this ship is not material to “the religious Preparations for the Plague,” he cannot omit it, “because it may be a direction for others to take the same happy Measures in the like Danger” (p. 136). So we learn that this captain “was a good Agent Victualler,” who lays in a good store of provisions, including “two Cows, making a platform for them in the Hold, which had vacancy enough” (p. 136) along with other livestock such as sheep and pigs, and feed for them. Livestock on board for later slaughter looks very odd in the midst of all this spiritual agony, and this juxtaposition of the glaringly physical and pragmatically material with the spiritual as Defoe arranges it is the most jarring of the many effects of the plague. The drama in these dialogues lies precisely in that juxtaposition, with the physical and material always looming behind these intense religious exchanges, provoking them and also compromising them, as Defoe seems to admit. As the story moves away gradually from Christian contemplation of death, the physical environment of the plague and the material circumstances of it all take center stage. Thus, shortly after this plan to go aboard ship, the sister falls ill (not of the plague, they learn eventually), and the elder brother is troubled by the dreadful, souldestroying atmosphere of the plague and its effects. Here is Defoe’s evocation of that condition: He got no sleep that Night, when in the middle of the Night, between Twelve and One a Clock, he heard for the first time, that dismal Cry, Bring out your Dead! the Cart beginning to go thro’ the Street where he liv’d, being the Parish of St. Margaret Pattons, that very Night. The Noise of the Bell, the doleful Cry of the Bell-man, and the rumbling of the Cart Wheels, you may suppose, join’d together to present to his Mind the most frightful Ideas, especially increased by the Apprehensions that the Plague was already in his House, and that his own Sister might perhaps be to be fetch’d out by the Cart and the Bearers the next Night or two at farthest. (pp. 136–7)

307

History, Facts, and Literature The spiritual is trumped or, better, overwhelmed by the physical, and the dreadful sounds of the plague-infested night-time city acquire a power that for the moment cancels Christian preparation and the necessary acceptance of whatever God wills. In the pages that follow, Defoe reproduces the Bills of Mortality (public postings of the death toll) as his characters take safe refuge on shipboard.They are encouraged by news of the plague’s abatement, signs of which include appropriately enough the appearance in the river of trading vessels, some of them coming “from the Coast of Suffolk, with Butter and Cheese” (p. 147). Our family plays it cautiously, staying the whole month of November on board, “by which time the Distemper was so far abated in London, that the Burials for the whole Week, amounted to but 428, whereof of the Plague but 210; abundance of Parishes entirely clear of the Plague, and but 24 dead of it in the whole City” (p. 147). Add to the fresh dairy products these comforting statistics and you have Defoe’s version of the inevitability, the dependable plenitude of the material world, which next to the difficult and elaborately articulated world of spiritual comfort is simple and stark. Predictably enough, Due Preparations dramatizes the gap between the material world Defoe loved to render and the realm of spiritual longing that he tried to present as more important but wound up undermining to some extent by virtue of its contrasting instability and variability. Due Preparations is not a work that has outlived its historical moment. Like The Family Instructor and Defoe’s other religious/didactic dialogues, it is fascinating for the close student of Defoe, but one can’t imagine even the most patient of non-specialized readers finding it anything but a curiosity. Its main importance in this chapter is as prologue and contrast to A Journal of the Plague Year. The miscellaneous and diffuse qualities of Due Preparations serve to highlight the intense focus, thematic intensity, and narrative unity of A Journal. The difference between these two works is the distinction between telling and showing. Due Preparations is Defoe at his most bossy, nagging, and opinionated, an annoying know-it-all who is exploiting these accounts of the 1665 plague to prove his point here in 1722. So Due Preparations is for the most part didactic in a simple sense. A Journal of the Plague Year is not at all didactic or moralistic; its lessons are deeply ambiguous and its method and effects primarily dramatic. The big difference between the two books comes from Defoe’s inspired suppression of his own fractious persona in A Journal of the Plague Year in favor of a modest narrator identified only at the very end of the book as H.F., who seems to have been modelled on his uncle, Henry Foe. Defoe was, of course, only about five years old when the plague struck in London in 1665 (and possibly evacuated to the country for his safety), so this detailed account is a triumph, perhaps, of family research or, more likely, of pure imagination and projection. Defoe’s immersion in this narrator is total, absolutely convincing, and in the process the obnoxious, hectoring insistence of Due Preparations is exchanged for a patient and humble, 308

History, Facts, and Literature often heroic and anguished observation of the plague, of its dreadful progress and appalling effects, as well as a deeply puzzled and anxious interrogation of the mysteries of its causes and transmission and of its ultimate meaning in terms of providential purpose. A bachelor and a merchant (a saddler, we learn), H.F. chooses against all good sense to stay in London when all his relations and friends seek the safety of the countryside, and the narrative is impelled in a fashion by the mystery of his curiosity, stretching to the point of obsession, about the plague and its effects. The saddler’s consuming interest in the pestilence is as much the subject of the book as the plague itself, and this intertwining of subjective presence and the objective reality of the plague gives the book its novelistic qualities and makes the narrator himself the subject of the book. So the saddler begins by wondering about his own motives and obsessional preoccupation – why he stayed in London when, as he admits to himself, others like his brother and his family did well to escape to the country, where he reports most privileged Londoners including the court took refuge. Although he never quite articulates it, Defoe’s narrator stays in the plague-infected city because like his creator he demonstrates that he is fascinated not only by this unparalleled natural phenomenon – the plague in London – but also by the complex range of moral, social, and political issues that the pestilence brings along with it. One of his primary initial aims is to explore the mystery of the natural aspects of the plague: how is it spread? what is the best way to prevent that spread? He has his own views – shared by Defoe – that the plague works by contagion, “by Infection, that is to say, by some certain Steams, or Fumes, which the Physicians call Effluvia, by the Breath, or by the Sweat, or by the Stench of the Sores of the sick Persons, or some other way, perhaps, beyond even the Reach of the Physicians themselves, which Effluvia affected the Sound, who come within certain Distances of the Sick” (p. 74). This intellectual examination of the plague’s causes and progress is an important factor in the book’s power. Although H.F. is contemptuous of the “manifest Ignorance and Superstition” that saw the plague as “an immediate Stroke from Heaven” and equates these notions with another theory that the plague was carried by insects or “invisible Creatures who enter into the Body with the Breath” (p. 75), his certitude quickly dissipates in the face of experience which renders theory, however coherent, irrelevant. Much later in the narrative, he returns to the central mystery of the transmission of the plague, which unlike its effects cannot be observed or determined. Some people who looked well and sound, he reasons, were in fact carriers of the infection: “it is impossible in a Visitation to prevent the spreading of the Plague by the utmost human Vigilance, (viz.) that it is impossible to know the infected People from the sound; or that the infected People should perfectly know themselves” (p. 191). A Journal of the Plague Year thus is forced to offer a nonjudgmental fullness, a sympathetic and comprehensive rendering of all the myriad and interlocking facts and situations surrounding the plague, and as such it is a kind of 309

History, Facts, and Literature epitome of Defoe’s implicit and cumulative encyclopedic project as a writer – to record, as it were, every single thing and every experience in his world and to render his historical moment with a fullness and specificity no other writer ever attempted. And since the mature Defoe had never actually experienced plague, this book is his attempt to extend his project to the hypothetical realm, and in the context of his aggressively empirical claims A Journal of the Plague Year is nothing less than his most daring piece of writing. It is also yet another instance of his fondness for hoaxes; it pretends very aggressively to be a true account from 1665, and it succeeds in this pretense better than any of his other works. A Journal of the Plague Year is absolutely convincing, although we know from contemporary observers like Samuel Pepys that Defoe’s account is a heightened, melodramatic version of life during the plague time, which was not quite the harrowing and total disruption of ordinary life Defoe imagined. As Novak observes, Pepys was more excited about English victories against the Dutch than about the plague,7 and he looks back in his diary to the plague year of 1665 with equanimity: “I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague-time. . . . My whole family hath been well all this while, and all my friends I know of, saving my aunt Bell, who is dead, and some children of my Cosen Sarah’s of the plague.”8 A Journal of the Plague Year has deep affinities with Puritan spiritual autobiography; the saddler examines his daily conduct in a journal to find assurances that he is following God’s will. As J. Paul Hunter pointed out, the book belongs to “the providence and diary traditions” that were a key aspect of seventeenthcentury Puritan religious consciousness.9 As he begins his story, the saddler seems merely conventionally pious, searching for a signal from God about whether he should stay in London. But his anguish and uncertainty exist quite specifically in the context of early eighteenth-century moral-theological anxiety, visible very often in Defoe’s fiction, about the reality and force of providential design, and we may say that here and elsewhere in Defoe’s fictions such anxiety dramatizes by its frequency a profound unease at the heart of Christian experience. The saddler wonders if particular circumstances in his life during these days of danger point to directions from God. He is quite minute about this, telling us that as he was about to go into the country the servant he was to take with him fled, fearing that his master would not go. The saddler takes this circumstance as a sign; his examination of events is methodical and he recommends it to others: it is “the best Method I can advise any Person to take in such a Case, especially, if he be one that makes Conscience of his Duty, and would be directed what to do in it, namely, that he should keep his Eye upon the particular Providences which occur at that Time, and look upon them complexly, as they regard one another, and as altogether regard the Question before him, and then I think, he may safely take them for Intimations from Heaven of what is his unquestion’d Duty to do in such a Case” (p. 10). In due course, such confidence in the 310

History, Facts, and Literature providential import of personal circumstances will dissipate, for Defoe’s narrative is inevitably in its realistic honesty a rendering of the difficulties attendant upon maintaining such certainty and using such a method. Just after this, the saddler recounts how he set about to reassure himself of the justness of his decision not to flee.This back and forth is the recurring pattern of the narrative: exploration and contemplation of the experience, certainty or confidence, followed by doubt in the face of appalling circumstances and renewed danger and a search for new confidence, which even as it is gained is threatened anew by further terrible experiences. After a discussion with his elder brother, who has told him in no uncertain terms that he should leave London, that to do otherwise is a form of foolish and un-Christian presumption such as he (a merchant who has done business in foreign parts) observed among “the Turks and Mahometans in Asia” (p. 11), and the saddler again changes his mind. But that evening irresolution again takes over. His thoughtfulness is a matter, as he tells us, of attending to what he calls his “impressions,” his inner feelings and hunches, which like all of Defoe’s fictional protagonists he considers carefully as potential signals from God: against his brother’s convincing arguments he sets, he tells us, “the strong Impressions which I had on my Mind for staying; the visible Call I seem’d to have from the particular Circumstance of my Calling, and the Care due from me for the Preservation of my Effects, which were, as I might say, my Estate; also the Intimations which I thought I had from Heaven, that to me signify’d a kind of Direction to venture, and it occurr’d to me, that if I had what I might call a Direction to stay, I ought to suppose it contain’d a Promise of being preserved, if I obey’d” (p. 12). To fortify himself in these convictions, he resorts to bibliomancy and finds confirmation in the scriptures, in the ninetyfirst psalm that his finger falls on, which seems wonderfully apt: “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day: Nor the pestilence that walketh in darkness: nor for the destruction that wasteth at noon-day. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand: but it shall not come nigh thee” (p. 13). But A Journal of the Plague Year is by no means a traditional spiritual autobiography, and this startling scriptural aptness the saddler’s finger finds exists in constant tension with the fearful career of the plague in London that the saddler traces with grim exactness in the rest of the book. Or to put it another way the consolations of the sacred book and the inner conviction of particular providential care collide with the terrifying specificity of the actual experience of the plague, with its random and radically unexpected explosions of infection, with all those extended and complicated physical horrors and moral confusions that the saddler will now find himself delineating, many of them taxing his powers of enumeration and representation or even of evocation. He even goes out of his way quite early on in the book to describe various kinds of religious delusion among the terrified urban masses. As he reports, many of the 311

History, Facts, and Literature poor “saw Apparitions in the Air; and I must be allow’d to say of both, I hope with out breach of Charity, that they heard Voices that never spake, and saw Sights that never appear’d; but the Imagination of the People was really turn’d wayward and possess’d” (p. 22). And shortly after this, he recounts in startling detail an actual case of religious delusion, although as he says significantly this is only one of many such he might have inserted into the journal. For all its fullness, that is to say, A Journal of the Plague Year is a slice of life rather than a full report: “I could fill this Account with the strange Relations, such People gave every Day,” he says, and goes on to describe an especially vivid group hallucination: seeing a Crowd of People in the Street, I join’d with them to satisfy my Curiosity, and found them all staring up into the Air, to see what a Woman told them appeared plain to her, which was an Angel cloth’d in white, with a fiery Sword in his Hand, waving it, or brandishing it over his Head. She described every Part of the Figure to the Life; shew’d them the Motion, and the Form; and the poor People came into it so eagerly, and with so much Readiness; YES, I see it all plainly, says one. There’s the Sword as plain as can be. Another saw the Angel. One saw his very Face, and cry’d out, What a glorious Creature he was! One saw one thing, and one another. I look’d as earnestly as the rest, but, perhaps, not with so much Willingness to be impos’d upon; and I said indeed, that I could see nothing, but a white Cloud, bright on one Side, by the shining of the Sun upon the other Part. The Woman endeavour’d to shew it me, but could not make me confess, that I saw it, which, indeed, if I had, I must have lied: But the Woman turning upon me, look’d in my Face, and fancied I laugh’d; in which her Imagination deceiv’d her too; for I really did not laugh, but was very seriously reflecting how the poor People were terrify’d by the Force of their own Imagination. (pp. 22–3)

Right along side of his piety, as this incident dramatizes, the saddler is occasionally contemptuous of the superstition of ordinary folk, and he remarks that the common people during these days “were more addicted to Prophesies, and Astrological Conjurations, Dreams, and old Wives Tales, than ever they were before or since” (p. 21). But even as he stands apart from popular delusions and hysterical convictions, he records the presence in the sky of comets and is not ashamed to admit that he “had so much of the common Notion of such Things in my Head, that I was apt to look upon them, as the Forerunners and Warnings of Gods Judgments; and especially when after the Plague had followed the first, I yet saw another of the like kind; I could not but say, God had not yet sufficiently scourg’d the City” (p. 19).10 Despite being moved by this clear portent of what looks like divine wrath, the saddler is moderate and rational in his conclusions, noting that “natural Causes are assign’d by the Astronomers for such Things; and that their Motions, and even their Revolutions are calculated,

312

History, Facts, and Literature or pretended to be calculated; so that they cannot be so perfectly call’d the Forerunners, or Fore-tellers, much less the procurers of such Events, as Pestilence, War, Fire, and the like” (p. 20). Much later in the narrative, he returns to the notion that there is no contradiction between natural explanations and providential workings. God, he insists, works through natural causes: “nor is it at all the less a Judgment for its being under the Conduct of humane Causes and Effects; for as the divine Power has form’d the whole Scheme of Nature, and maintains Nature in its Course; so the same Power thinks fit to let his own Actings with Men, whether of Mercy or Judgment, go on in the ordinary Course of natural Causes, and he is pleased to act by those natural Causes as the ordinary Means; excepting and reserving to himself nevertheless a Power to act in a supernatural Way when he sees occasion” (p. 194). In much of his other apologetical writing and at various points in his novels, Defoe makes just this point. But here in the dramatic narrative of A Journal of the Plague Year, these theological commonplaces acquire another implication.What is at stake here and throughout the saddler’s journal is a productive, wavering moderation and a tentative uncertainty that produce a dialogue among various kinds of explanations for these horrifying events, and the result for modern readers is a sense not just of the plague itself but of the moral confusion and intellectual mystery that it induces in those who experienced it. The saddler thus at one point admits that shutting up the sick in their houses, for all he knows, may not have prevented the spread of the plague: “the Infection was propagated insensibly, and by such Persons as were not visibly infected, who neither knew who they infected, or who they were infected by” (p. 158). We now know what caused the plague, but A Journal of the Plague Year preserves that feeling of mystery and pervasive danger that still surrounds epidemics. Once he leaves his house, the saddler is a strictly empirical observer, like Defoe himself in that regard; he trusts the evidence of his senses, which is of course what his journal is a record of, and as he says here he is not like those in the crowd willing to be imposed upon. In this scene and in others like it early in his journal, therefore, his reports lead outward from his own feelings and thoughts about his situation to an external and objectively meticulous rendering of the newly strange world around him, as his narrative moves from the personal to the social, from his particular experiences to those of the inhabitants of the city of London as the plague advances. His report is complicated by the enormity of the calamity, by the limits of his observation, and finally by the nature of urban reality, where the size of the city provokes conflicting stories and rumours, partial accounts and distortions. For example, the saddler often enough tells us of remarkable things he heard but did not see, such as the story of the man tormented by the plague who escaped from his house and plunged, naked, into the Thames:

313

History, Facts, and Literature and, being a good swimmer, swam quite over the River; and the Tide being coming in, as they call it, that is running West-ward, he reached the Land not till he came about the Falcon Stairs, where landing, and finding no People there, it being in the Night, he ran about the Streets there, Naked as he was, for a good while, when it being by that time High-water, he takes the River again, and swam back to the Still-yard, landed, ran up the Streets again to his own House, knocking at the Door, went up the Stairs, and into his Bed again; and that this terrible Experiment cur’d him of the Plague, that is to say, that the violent Motion of his Arms and Legs stretch’d the Parts where the Swellings he had upon him were, that is to say under his Arms and his Groin, and caused them to ripen and break; and that the cold of the Water abated the Fever in his Blood. I have only to add, that I do not relate this any more than some of the other, as a Fact within my own Knowledge, so as that I can vouch the Truth of them, and especially that of the Man being cur’d by the extravagant Adventure, which I confess I do not think very possible, but it may serve to confirm the many desperate Things which the distress’d People falling into, Diliriums, and what we call Lightheadedness, were frequently run upon at that time, and how infinitely more such there wou’d ha’ been, if such People had not been confin’d by the shutting up of Houses; and this I take to be the best, if not the only good thing which was perform’d by that severe Method. (p. 162)

The stability of truth is put in jeopardy by the plague, which provokes all manner of strange and grotesque happenings like this one, and the saddler’s calm empiricism is eroded by the larger truth of the plague’s disruption of the normal and the predictable. Although he persists in his moderate balance of piety and enlightened awareness of second causes, the saddler is still shocked not just by the superstitious gullibility of the poor, who flock to fortune tellers and quacks, but notably at one point by the behavior and the language of a group of profane revellers who gather at the Pye Tavern, near one of the great burial pits and mock the suffering they witness. They sat generally in a Room next the Street, and as they always kept late Hours, so when the Dead-Cart came cross the Street End to go into Hounds-ditch, which was in View of the Tavern Windows; they would frequently open the Windows as soon as they heard the Bell, and look out at them; and as they might often hear sad Lamentations of People in the Streets, or at their Windows, as the Carts went along, they would make their inpudent [sic] Mocks and Jeers at them, especially if they heard the poor People call upon God to have Mercy upon them, as many would do at those Times in their ordinary passing along the Streets. (p. 64)

The saddler reproves these revellers, “being well enough acquainted with their Characters, and not unknown in Person to two of them” (p. 65). When he warns them that they risk divine punishment for their cruelty and blasphemy, they turn 314

History, Facts, and Literature upon him in language that the saddler claims was so shocking that he has forgotten it: “nor if I could remember, would I fill my Account with any of the Words, the horrid Oaths, Curses, and vile Expressions” (p. 65). But that which was the worst in all their devillish Language was, that they were not afraid to blaspheme God, and talk Atheistically; making a Jest at my calling the Plague the Hand of God, mocking, and even laughing at the Word Judgment, as if the Providence of God had no Concern in the inflicting such a desolating Stroke; and that the People calling upon God, as they saw the Carts carrying away the dead Bodies was all enthusiastick, absurd, and impertinent. I made them some Reply, such as I thought proper, but which I found was so far from putting a Checque to their horrid Way of speaking, that it made them rail the more, so that I confess it fill’d me with Horror, and a kind of Rage, and I came away, as I told them, lest the Hand of the Judgment which had visited the whole City should glorify his Vengeance upon them, and all that were near them. (p. 66)

These drunken atheists simply add one more twist to the bizarre variety of the plague city, but their levity and drunken indifference to the topics that concern the God-fearing saddler shift the discourse to the possibility of a subversive nihilism, further complicating the problem of representing something like truth as the journal explores the unprecedented conditions brought on by plague. That the saddler claims (unlikely given his total recall of everything else) not to remember their shocking words, their oaths and imprecations, signals that on some level he’s aware of how they dramatize in their contempt for the fearful piety of ordinary folk (a contempt shared to some extent, as we have seen, by the saddler himself) the radical disruption and destabilizing of certainty, the cognitive dissonance we might call it, provoked by the plague. Of course, the saddler tells one set of truths that are incontrovertible: his own reactions. He continues throughout the narrative to talk about himself, and his view is eminently personal and self-expressive, but his experiences intersect productively and dramatically with those of others he encounters and observes in the city, which very early on acquires as many commentators have observed a communal identity all its own. He notes very exactly at the outset that London in these years had grown enormously, thanks to the Restoration and other factors, perhaps by as many as a hundred thousand people, and he marvels that even with the exodus after the plague struck “there was yet so great a Multitude left” (p. 19). H.F. is a historian of the metropolis he lives in as well as an observer of the plague; he places against the enormity of the pestilence the tremendous reality and in the very end the irrepressible vitality of the great city, when the plague through its very devastations brings its own economic benefits and helps to regenerate the city. The saddler at the very end of his narrative notes that plague 315

History, Facts, and Literature was followed by the Great Fire, but that these two disasters led to an even greater and more prosperous London: It is incredible what a Trade this made all over the whole Kingdom, to make good the Want, and to supply that Loss: So that, in short, all the manufacturing Hands in the Nation were set on Work, and were little enough, for several Years, to supply the Market and answer the Demands; all Foreign Markets, also were empty of our Goods, by the stop which had been occasioned by the Plague, and before an open Trade was allow’d again; and the prodigious Demand at Home falling in join’d to make a quick Vent for all Sorts of Goods; so that there never was known such a Trade all over England for the Time, as was in the first seven Years after the Plague, and after the Fire of London. (pp. 223–4)

So general economic good comes out of a host of particular evils, as Defoe is by temperament alert to the global picture to which individual suffering is always subordinate to larger productivity and in which process the particular acquires meaning. Defoe’s intense rendition here in A Journal of the Plague Year of the agonizing particulars of individual experience is related to his sense of the supervising larger situation, and what I would call the deep plot of his narrative is the inevitability of larger systems like the city and the economy to adjust to what seem to be otherwise for individual experience incomprehensible, randomly destructive facts. A Journal of the Plague Year is, of course, a collection of factual particulars, and one of its weaknesses is just that journal-like quality of accumulation of experiences organized by the calendar, chronologically and more or less day by day. Undeniably, the book is repetitive and at times rambling as well as digressive. Sympathetic readers, to be sure, have seen these qualities as designed to produce a realistic effect, and such features are effectively expressive of the situation, dramatically appropriate up to a point, controlled and limited by Defoe as part of his plan to make his narrative plausible and life-like. But those particulars manifestly cohere for readers as the evocation of that larger communal entity, the city of London.This sense of London as a living whole, a kind of indestructible organism, is very strong in the journal. In one especially moving generalized observation, the saddler says very simply that London is in mourning. This evocation of the scene, made up of sharply rendered sights and sounds, must be one of the most powerfully imagined moments Defoe ever wrote: London might well be said to be all in Tears; the Mourners did not go about the Streets indeed, for no Body put on black, or made a formal Dress of Mourning for their nearest Friends; but the Voice of Mourning was truly heard in the Streets; the shriecks of Women and Children at the Windows, and Doors of their Houses, where their dearest Relations were, perhaps dying, or just dead, were so frequent

316

History, Facts, and Literature to be heard, as we passed the Streets, that it was enough to pierce the stoutest Heart in the World, to hear them. Tears and Lamentations were seen almost in every House, especially in the first Part of the Visitation; for towards the latter End, Mens Hearts were hardned, and Death was so always before their Eyes, that they did not so much concern themselves for the Loss of their Friends, expecting, that themselves should be summoned the next Hour. (p. 16)

This affirmative evocation of the city contains, we should note, the narrator’s necessary drift toward the terrible particular sights and sounds he himself experienced, and the city is a collective entity but also a series of separate and disparate phenomena. There is, thereby, an organizing tension between the scattered particularities, the radical disparateness, of the saddler’s observations and the sense of the whole that he struggles to maintain. The saddler, that is to say, much more often in his journal depicts his own isolation and a bewilderment akin to vertigo as he walks in the midst of the plague confronted with experiences that can’t be explained or even adequately evoked. H.F. is an urban spectator, a kind of inverted flâneur, a negative and horrified reversal of Addison and Steele’s cheerful observer of life and manners in early eighteenth-century London. The Spectator finds unity in the city’s rich variety; Defoe’s plague narrator is nearly overwhelmed by a different kind of variety and struggles to find unity amid the confusion and the distracting horrors he witnesses. The literal reality of the city, its grid of streets and districts, is always crystal clear in A Journal, but that clarity is in sharp contrast to the disorienting strangeness of the plague. Necessarily, the saddler keeps his distance from what he sees, since infection clearly lurks everywhere, and the rule is that one never knows just what to expect. His narrative is a record of sights and sounds glimpsed in the plague-stricken city, and the saddler dwells, inevitably, on grotesque and surprising moments, sudden eruptions of pain and unbearable agony. Sometimes, although rarely, the grotesque and nearly comic merges with the horror. Going to his brother’s office to see that all is safe, he finds that the neighborhood women have broken into one of the warehouses that contained women’s “high Crown’d Hats,” and when he takes some away from them he looks and sees others quite unconcerned, trying on hats: “there were six or seven more, all Women, fitting themselves with Hats, as unconcerned and quiet, as if they had been at a Hatters Shop, buying for their Money” (p. 87). More seriously and more often, he remembers with special vividness the sounds of the plague, the screams and groans of the infected. Here is a passage that can stand for many others: it is scarce credible what dreadful Cases happened in particular Families every Day; People in the Rage of the Distemper, or in the Torment of their Swellings, which was indeed intollerable, running out of their own Government, raving and distracted, and oftentimes laying violent Hands upon themselves, throwing themselves

317

History, Facts, and Literature out at their Windows, shooting themselves, &c. Mothers murthering their own Children, in their Lunacy, some dying of meer Grief as a Passion, some of meer Fright and Surprize, without any Infection at all; others frighted into Idiotism, and foolish Distractions, some into dispair and Lunacy; others into mellancholy Madness. The Pain of the Swelling was in particular very violent, and to some intollerable; the Physicians and Surgeons may be said to have tortured many poor Creatures, even to Death. The Swellings in some grew hard, and they apply’d violent drawing Plasters, or Pultices, to break them; and if these did not do, they cut and scarified them in a terrible Manner: In some, those Swellings were made hard, partly by the Force of the Distemper, and partly by their being too violently drawn, and were so hard, that no Instrument could cut them, and then they burnt them with Causticks, so that many died raving mad with the Torment; and some in the very Operation. In these Distresses, some for want of Help to hold them down in their Beds, or to look to them, laid Hands upon themselves, as above. Some broke out into the Streets, perhaps naked, and would run directly down to the River, if they were not stopt by the Watchmen, or other Officers, and plunge themselves into the Water, wherever they found it. (pp. 81–2)

Although this is an especially memorable (and grotesque) incident, one could multiply these sights and sounds many times over, and the saddler records them and his own vivid and disturbing memories of them: “I wish I could repeat the very Sound of those Groans, and of those Exclamations that I heard from some poor dying Creatures, when in the Hight of their Agonies and Distress; and that I could make him that read this hear, as I imagine I now hear them, for the Sound seems still to Ring in my Ears” (p. 104). Naturally, he is unable to do justice to their unforgettable qualities of horror and desolation, and that ineffability, or at least the problem of evoking or representing the phantasmagoria that he has seen and heard, is always at the heart of his discourse. For example, much later in the book, as H.F. wavers in his resolution to stay and even stays shut up in his house, the sights and especially the sounds are still there on his street: “It is impossible to describe the most horrible Cries and Noise the poor People would make at their bringing the dead Bodies of their Children and Friends out to the Cart” (p. 178). The many moments like this, the bulk of the Journal or at least the most memorable for any reader, highlight the question the saddler himself keeps coming back to: why did he stay? what drives him to wander the streets and observe this phantasmagoria of suffering and death? And these questions become most urgent in the section when H.F. driven by what he calls his “curiosity” (a recurring term in the narrative), seeks out the enormous burial pit at Aldgate near his home. As he describes it with an exactness that underlines its horror – “about 40 Foot in Length, and about 15 or 16 Foot broad; and at the Time I first looked at it, about nine Foot deep; but it was said, they dug it near 20 Foot 318

History, Facts, and Literature deep afterwards, in one Part of it, till they could go no deeper for the Water” (p. 59) – the saddler dramatizes his fascination with the spectacle of mass death, declaring that he resolved to see it in all of its horrifying fullness, not in the daytime when the bodies had been covered up with earth but one night as the dead are unloaded by the cartful into this enormous pit. His choice of words is revealing: “my Curiosity led, or rather drove me to go and see this Pit again, when there had been near 400 People buried in it; and I was not content to see it in the Day-time, as I had done before; for then there would have been nothing to have been seen but the loose Earth; for all the Bodies that were thrown in, were immediately covered with Earth, by those they call’d the Buryers, which at other Times were call’d Bearers; but I resolv’d to go in the Night and see some of them thrown in” (p. 60). When he does see the pit and the bodies it holds, his response is muted, the pit presenting a spectacle that can’t be measured or evoked adequately: “it is impossible to say any Thing that is able to give a true Idea of it to those who did not see it, other than this; that it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no Tongue can express” (p. 60). He watches as the cart approaches. The sight is “awful and full of Terror.” In a brief visual evocation – about all that he can stand, it would seem, as he comments that “this Sight . . . almost overwhelm’d me” and filled him with “afflicting Thoughts, such as I cannot describe” (p. 63) – the saddler tells us that the cart held “sixteen or seventeen Bodies, some were wrapt up in Linen Sheets, some in Rugs, some little other than naked, or so loose, that what Covering they had, fell from them, in the shooting out of the Cart, and they fell quite naked among the rest; but the Matter was not much to them, or the Indecency much to any one else, seeing they were all dead, and were to be huddled together into the common Grave of Mankind, as we may call it” (p. 62). The saddler acquires in this moment, we may say, a new identity and perspective; he confesses himself an embarrassed and inarticulate voyeur, a slightly prurient or at least morbidly fascinated observer of the obscenity of mass slaughter. In what may be one of Defoe’s most subtle moments in the book, the saddler’s morbid impulse is paired with the motives of another observer, a man who does not speak and remains anonymous, known only to the saddler as the man “muffled up in a brown Cloak, and making Motions with his Hands under his Cloak, as if he was in a great Agony” (p. 61). It emerges that the cart he is following contains the bodies of his wife and several of his children. As he watches the cart empty its burden into the great pit, the bodies “shot into the Pit promiscuously” this poor man is shocked, and his “Masculine Grief, that could not give it self Vent by Tears” (p. 62) gives way to a great cry and he swoons away. The man in the brown cloak’s involuntary and unbearably intense grief, complicated by the terrible sight of his loved ones’ corpses flung into the open grave with many others, refers readers to a level of suffering that the narrator as curious observer cannot hope to match. For the moment, Defoe’s Journal evokes depths 319

History, Facts, and Literature its narrator can’t begin to understand, and the special art of the narrative lies in simply outlining the scene and the saddler’s inability to do more than describe the sights and sounds that outline it. For a modern reader, this striking moment in the journal at the great pit at Aldgate may bring to mind the unforgettable images of piles of corpses, stacked like firewood, caught on film in the liberated Nazi death camps. Defoe’s strategy is to keep his narrator’s gaze steadily, unflinchingly, on these precise and terrible facts of mortality, so that the tables of the dead in the city, the “Bills of Mortality,” have a force that needs no other comment but their bare listing. Here are two such lists, the first much worse than the second: I am now come, as I have said, to the Month of September, which was the most dreadful of its kind, I believe, that ever London saw; for by all the Accounts which I have seen of the preceding Visitations which have been in London, nothing has been like it; the Number in the Weekly Bill amounting to almost 40,000 from the 22d of August, to the 26th of September, being but five Weeks, the particulars of the Bills are as follows, (viz.) From August the 22d to the 29th To the 7th of September - - - To the 12th - - - - - - - - - - To the 19th - - - - - - - - - - To the 26th - - - - - - - - - - ------38195

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

7496 8252 7690 8297 6460

This was a prodigious Number of itself, but if I should add the Reasons which I have to believe that this Account was deficient, and how deficient it was, you would with me, make no Scruple to believe that there died above ten Thousand a Week for all those Weeks, one Week with another, and a proportion for several Weeks both before and after. (p. 179) From the 12th of September to the 19th. St. Giles’s Cripplegate - - - - - - - - - - - - - 456 St. Giles in the Fields - - - - - - - - - - - - - 140 Clarkenwell - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 77 St. Sepulchers - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 214 St. Leonard Shoreditch - - - - - - - - - - - - - 183 Stepney Parish - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 716 Aldgate - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 623 White-Chapel - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 532 In the 97 Parishes within the Walls - - - - - 1493 In the 8 Parishes on Southwark Side - - - - - 1636 -------

6060

320

History, Facts, and Literature And now the Misery of the City, and of the said East and South Parts was complete indeed; for as you see the Weight of the Distemper lay upon those Parts, that is to say, the City, the eight Parishes over the River, with the Parishes of Aldgate, White-Chapel, and Stepney, and this was the Time that the Bills came up to such a monstrous Height, as that I mention’d before; and that Eight or Nine, and, as I believe, Ten or Twelve Thousand a Week died; for ’tis my settled Opinion, that they never could come at any just Account of the Numbers, for the Reasons which I have given already. (pp. 188–9)

Recording such statistics is a means of managing the horror, and of course these tables along with the saddler’s calm correction of the numbers upward represent an alternative to the chaos the book also records. Statistical recording is the antithesis of the anarchy and arbitrariness of infection, and it may be said to work toward staving off the madness that lies in the saddler’s immersion in the sights and sounds of the plague. In this same balancing of control and human agency in the face of the plague, the saddler also finds instances of heroism, of resourceful coping and inspiring cooperation and solidarity as Londoners struggle to escape the plague. For the most elaborate example, he tells the story, almost a fairy tale in his rendition, a modern myth of resourceful survival, of the three men from Stepney, two brothers and their kinsman, a soldier (now a biscuit maker), a sailor (now a sail-maker), and a joiner or carpenter, who set forth from London, against all odds, to escape the plague, their journey becoming a domestic adventure as they acquire companions also fleeing the plague, deal with hostile country folk, fashion shelter, and find food as they travel. The saddler tells this story over quite a number of pages, describing it as “a very good Pattern for any poor Man to follow” (p. 58), and returning to it from time to time so that it acts as a consoling distraction from the other dismal side of his narrative. The saddler dwells on the trio’s courage and ingenuity, and he also notes the charity and compassion of some of the people they encounter in the countryside. This band of brothers, this effective communal effort in which strangers meet and form bonds to survive, stands in stark opposition to urban anomie, to the fear of others that dominates the infected metropolis. So this quasi-folk tale of the three men from Epping is a counter-narrative to the journal itself, both in implicit form and in its position on human nature in the face of calamity. Defoe’s tropism for things and techniques, so much in evidence in Due Preparations for the Plague, surfaces at the end of the story, as the saddler records how the trio and their friends survived at last by camping out in Epping, noting with admiration the cleverness of the carpenter in fashioning their shelter: they receiv’d every Day some Benevolence or other from the People, but chiefly from the Gentlemen who dwelt in the Country round about; some sent them

321

History, Facts, and Literature Chairs, Stools, Tables, and such Houshold Things as they gave Notice they wanted; some sent them Blankets, Rugs and Coverlids; some Earthen-ware; and some Kitchin-ware for ordering their Food. Encourag’d by this good Usage, their Carpenter in a few Days, built them a large Shed or House with Rafters, and a Roof in Form, and an upper Floor in which they lodged warm, for the Weather began to be damp and cold in the beginning of September; But this House being very well Thatch’d, and the Sides and Roof made very thick, kept out the Cold well enough: He made also an earthen Wall at one End, with a Chimney in it; and another of the Company, with a vast deal of Trouble and Pains, made a Funnel to the Chimney to carry out the Smoak. (p. 145)

But this heroic working-class trio are the exception to the behavior in the plague of the London Poor, for whom the saddler has a good deal of contempt, although mixed with an understanding of how circumstances led many of them to desperate courses. But, overall, A Journal of the Plague Year evokes the urban poor (imagined as “the Poor,” a collective noun requiring no explanation, and the only social group that receives its own noun in the book) as presenting almost as great a danger as the plague itself, and it is their behavior that in fact exacerbates the dire results of the plague. Unlike the aristocracy and the middle classes, the Poor could not flee, and the saddler understands that and notes the charity that was extended to them by the city authorities. But he also makes a point of berating the Poor: “it was impossible to beat any thing into the Heads of the Poor, they went on with the usual Impetuosity of their Tempers full of Outcries and Lamentations when taken, but madly careless of themselves, Foolhardy and obstinate, while they were well” (pp. 210–1). He sums things up by acknowledging the force of necessity on the Poor but deploring their lack of discipline, which contributed to the ravages the plague made among them and by implication extended the duration of the plague.

It is true Necessity was a very justifiable warrantable Plea, and nothing could be better; but their way of Talk was much the same, where the Necessities were not the same: This adventurous Conduct of the Poor was that which brought the Plague among them in a most furious manner, and this join’d to the Distress of their Circumstances, when taken, was the reason why they died so by Heaps; for I cannot say, I could observe one jot of better Husbandry among them, I mean the labouring Poor, while they were well and getting Money, than there was before, but as lavish, as extravagant, and as thoughtless for to Morrow as ever; so that when they came to be taken sick, they were immediately in the utmost Distress as well for want, as for Sickness, as well for lack of Food, as lack of Health. (p. 210)

322

History, Facts, and Literature This improvidence is bad enough, but the saddler here and elsewhere finds class antagonism and deep resentment. In what we might say is the hidden unity in A Journal of the Plague Year, the plague reveals in a dramatic fashion the structure of society, as certain members of the Poor add to their physical infection the taint of class rage and resentment, since they are helpless against the threat of infection. The saddler notes that poor people would claim to be infected as a means of begging: “the Poor would go about and beg at peoples Doors, and say they had the Plague upon them, and beg Rags for their Sores, or both, or any thing that delirious Nature happen’d to think of ” (p. 160). He then proceeds to tell a story that is rich with class antagonism, wherein “a poor unhappy Gentlewoman, a substantial Citizen’s Wife” (p. 160) is accosted by a raving and drunken man, who manages to kiss her in his attempt to infect her: “he caught hold of her, and pull’d her down also; and getting up first, master’d her, and kiss’d her; and which was worst of all, when he had done, told her he had the Plague, and why should not she have it as well as he. She was frighted enough before, being also young with Child; but when she heard him say, he had the Plague, she scream’d out and fell down in a Swoon, or in a Fit, which tho’ she recover’d a little, yet kill’d her in a very few Days, and I never heard whether she had the Plague or no” (p. 160). Inserted into the narrative, although receiving strong emphasis again very near the end of his journal, this depiction of “the Poor” as both predictably improvident and erratically dangerous and destructive aligns them with the plague itself, an infection of another sort that lies at the heart of the social order. The saddler’s complaints about the feckless London multitude are given the same kind of empirical authority, by virtue of juxtaposition, as his observation of the dreadful facts of the plague. Profoundly attuned to facts, unflinchingly attentive to the physical horrors he stayed to bear witness to, the saddler also turns out to be an ideologue, his discourse about the Poor edging over from observation to generalization from a few vivid examples. Moreover, the visibility of the poor as a class points to the implicit permanence of social structures, which despite the democratic levelling brought on by pestilence remain operative. So even in 1722 the plague in London is more than simply an epidemic; it provokes a range of social and moral issues, and Defoe’s precise factuality produces a series of resonances and implications beyond the literal dimension of pestilential horror.

A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) Defoe achieved the true English epic. Pat Rogers, The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour

323

History, Facts, and Literature A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain may be Defoe’s best work, the book that most clearly represents him and does full justice to his talents as a shrewd journalist, engaging story teller, and socioeconomic visionary, as it combines a wealth of neatly-summarized information and a unifying thread of personal observation and anecdotes about his own rides across the length and breadth of Britain.11 In A Tour Defoe seems to be enjoying himself, and the book is full of his crotchets, pet ideas, and preoccupations such as we have seen beginning with his earliest work. As a factual record of his real (for the most part) travels around Britain, A Tour is true to the commercial, architectural, topographical, and sociohistorical actualities that Defoe clearly valued most and that in this case stirred him to more eloquence than we can find in his other writing. Some of A Tour is cribbed from written sources, although Defoe of course never admits this.12 The book is a combination of notes from his own extensive travels through all the counties and the major cities and towns of Britain and his own wide reading in travel literature over the previous 40 years, and it is to that extent a work if not of fiction then of heightened or reconstructed reality.13 It is also, as Pat Rogers has observed, yet another example of a Defoe who in his fecundity eludes our understanding: how did he manage this without an “electronic data bank” or “word processor or even typewriter” or any other modern instrument of compilation? It is, says Rogers, “a mystery how he was able to retain so much – not just facts in the raw sense, but impressions and vistas, sights, anecdotes too.”14 Not Defoe’s last work, (he continued to write copiously until virtually the day he died), A Tour is the triumphant culmination of his writing career, since in the end it delivers a vision of Britain as a national and economic entity in the third decade of the eighteenth century that offers a triumphalist prophecy of the world domination that was not too far in the nation’s future.15 And in so far as it is not addressed to any particular controversy of the day, A Tour has an enduring general appeal, and it is also thereby just about wholly free of the often disfiguring fractiousness, that polemical bad temper and aggression, to be found in much of his other writing. Purged of all his sour qualities as man and writer, Defoe’s persona in the Tour displays a charming urbanity, mature equanimity, and self-deprecating irony that we can guess he possessed most of the time in real life interactions beyond the vicious paper political warfare that was otherwise the center of his writing life.16 A fellow guest at an English inn in the early decades of the eighteenth century who met this traveller might well have found him a fascinating companion. A Tour offers a distinctly different persona for Defoe – the ingratiating man of the world, the ironic recorder of local superstitions, vulgar errors, and dubious traditions, but also the well-informed panegyrist of modern Britain, who exalts its new wealth and expanding commercial power, and who celebrates its cultural monuments and most of all its architectural treasures, cathedrals like St. Paul’s in London but mainly those rich palaces and country houses that are the equal (nay, 324

History, Facts, and Literature the superior) of all that European nobility or even royalty can boast. For example, as he begins to explore Middlesex, he finds himself short of superlatives to evoke Cannons, the opulent estate of the immensely wealthy James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos, which has been built in three years and in its magnificence outdoes the age-old palaces of France and Italy: “no Nobleman in England, and very few in Europe, lives in greater Splendour, or maintains a Grandeur and Magnificence, equal to the Duke of Chandos.”17 (Praise of Chandos, it should be noted, involves an awareness of his history as a man who had grown wealthy from his years as Pay Master General to the army and later even wealthier as a real estate developer in London and Bath.The implication here is that new wealth is just as good or better than old and landed riches.) At Cannons and elsewhere on his travels, Defoe is a connoisseur of architecture, secular and ecclesiastical; his interests are predominantly socioeconomic but not exclusively so, and appreciation of art and nature plays an important role in his account. He visits Wilton House, for example, the stately home in Wiltshire of the Earl of Pembroke, to whom he offers a graceful tribute – “that Ornament of Nobility, and Learning” (I, p. 226) – and he not only describes with exact admiration the features and furnishings of the house and gardens but evokes the estate in much the way Ben Jonson praises the Sidneys at Penshurst: “Nor is the blessing of this noble Resident extended to the Family only, but even to all the Country round, who in their Degree feel the Effects of the general Beneficence; and where the Neighbourhood, however Poor receive all the good they can Expect, and are sure to have no Injury, or Oppression” (I, p. 226). Most of the time, however, he dwells on much more prosaic, work-a-day realities, characteristically precise and fine grained in noting not just natural sights and architectural and cultural monuments but all the gear and tackle of everyday trades and common occupations, the techniques of industry and agriculture, and the paths, processes, and procedures of commerce, especially the inland trade of Great Britain. Much more than just an alert tourist, Defoe is an economic geographer who presents the entire range of British socioeconomic data. He measures, he surveys, he provides lists and inventories, he offers nothing less than a balance sheet of British wealth and possessions. In A Tour Defoe’s energetic curiosity about modern Britain is indefatigable and omnivorous. But he admits as he comes to his third volume, there is a fullness, a dynamic plenitude at the heart of early eighteenth-century Great Britain that increases even as he travels, so that his enumerations and evaluations are just a bit behind the times even as he writes: “every New View of Great Britain would require a New Description; the Improvements that encrease, the New Buildings erected, the Old Buildings taken down; New Discoveries in Metals, Mines, Minerals; new Undertakings in Trade; Inventions, Engines, Manufactures in a Nation, pushing and improving as we are: These Things open new Scenes every Day, and make England especially shew a new and differing Face in many Places, on every 325

History, Facts, and Literature Occasion of Surveying it” (III, p. 3). For Defoe, here and in all his writing, the material world is never merely a collection of inert objects but a mighty, ongoing social as well as natural process, which is in this case specifically, uniquely British. For modern Britain is he tells us so dynamic that if a book like his were to be written every year the author would find something out “which was overlook’d before, or something to describe, which had its Birth since the former Accounts” (II, p. 3). New Foundations are always laying, new Buildings always raising, Highways repairing, Churches and publick Buildings erecting, Fires and other Calamities happening, Fortunes of Families taking different Turns, new Trades are every Day erected, new Projects enterpriz’d, new Designs laid; so that as long as England is a trading, improving Nation, no perfect Description either of the Place, the People, or the Conditions and State of Things can be given. (II, pp. 3–4)

Defoe’s unerring eye for the global picture, the larger structure, the unifying natural cycle, is sometimes homely, as when he observes sheep grazing on the downs near Dorchester, where “The Grass or Herbage of these Downs is full of the sweetest, and the most Aromatick Plants, such as Nourish the sheep to a strange degree, and the Sheeps Dung again Nourishes that Herbage to a strange degree” (I, p. 242). The most spectacular example of nature cooperating with commerce in one grand synthesis comes as he describes how cloth is made in Yorkshire, where what looks like unpromising geography cooperates with manufacturing in a unique and providential way: “such has been the Bounty of Nature to this otherwise frightful Country, that two Things essential to the Business, as well as to the Ease of the People are found here, and that in a situation which I never saw the like of in any part of England . . . I mean Coals and running Water upon the tops of the highest Hills” (III, p. 64). As Defoe evokes it with unflagging exactitude, the water is diverted into small streams so that each house has water for the manufacture of cloth. And then this water is “ting’d with the Drugs of the Dying Fat, and with the Oil, the Soap, the Tallow, and other Ingredients used by the Clothiers in Dressing and Scouring, &c. which then runs away thro’ the Lands to the next, the Grounds are not only universally watered, how dry soever the Season, but that Water so ting’d and so fatten’d enriches the Lands they run through” (III, pp. 64–5). Defoe renders a compelling drama of economic discovery, a pleasing revelation of man made concordia discors. So what looked as he rode into this district like an unpopulated country turns out to be bustling with indoor industry, in the manufacturing “Cottages or small Dwellings, in which dwell the Workmen which are employed, the Women and Children of whom, are always busy Carding, Spinning, &c. so that no Hands being unemploy’d, all can gain their Bread, even from the youngest to the antient; hardly any thing above four Years old, but its hands are sufficient to its self ” (III, 326

History, Facts, and Literature p. 65). Defoe’s observations here in Yorkshire penetrate past superficial appearances, as he reveals a utopian scene of rural labor where nature and manufacturing cooperate perfectly. The landscape and the constructed environment blend productively, and what looks barren and lonely is actually fruitful and populous. Defoe’s enthusiasm for this unfolding economic dynamic in Britain impels A Tour from its opening pages, although his description of it is more of a rhetorical creation than a strictly objective observation. Published in three separate volumes from 1724 to 1726, A Tour from the preface to the first volume onwards claims to be of and in the present moment, and to attempt to render fully or even completely (in vain, of course) the vitality of contemporary British commercial and social reality. As he remarks early in his first volume as he travels from Yarmouth to the eastern coast of Norfolk, his boast is to offer his fellow countrymen an entirely new view of Britain: “Matters of Antiquity are not my Enquiry, but principally Observations on the present State of Things, and if possible, to give such Accounts of Things worthy of Recording, as have never been observed before; and this leads me the more directly to mention the Commerce and the Navigation when I come to Towns upon the Coast as what few Writers have yet meddled with” (I, p. 112). True to his word, especially in the counties close enough to London to serve the rich merchant class he so much admired, he celebrates the wealth and power of the new commercial gentry in their splendid rural and suburban retreats: “the present encrease of Wealth in the City of London, spreads it self into the Country, and plants Families and Fortunes, who in another Age will equal the Families of the antient Gentry, who perhaps were Bought out” (I, p. 60). A Tour is more than a guide book and a record of Defoe’s circuits on horseback around (most of) Britain. Thematic coherence and a good degree of unity emerge from the very beginning, provided first of all by Defoe’s strongly opinionated guiding presence; this is very much an account of his travels around the country; as he says in his preface to volume one, “seventeen very large Circuits, or Journeys have been taken thro’ divers Parts separately, and three general Tours over almost the whole English Part of the Island” (I, p. 49). Although his persona is smoothly urbane and detached, the book is a projection of Defoe’s particular economic (but also moral) vision of the nation. That vision like so many of Defoe’s ideas throughout his intellectual life is articulated in sharp tension with competing older notions that he evokes as he goes along. As we have seen so often before, Defoe’s statements are essentially counter-statements, energized by opposition, and there is a polemical thread even here in the urbane and tolerant persona of his tourist. For one example among many, he remarks as he travels through Surrey and observes a river called the Mole, those writers who have preceded him have committed “an unaccountable Error” (I, p. 183) in claiming that the Mole flows underground for a stretch near Beechworth and 327

History, Facts, and Literature Leatherhead. He wonders that “Error should prevail in this manner” among men of learning like his predecessors, and this reflection leads him to remind his readers with some of his old effrontery of the purpose of his work: “nor is it at all remote from the true design of this Work, to undeceive the World in the false or mistaken Accounts, which other men have given of Things, especially when those mistakes are so demonstrably gross” (I, p. 184). The combative Defoe we’ve come to know, albeit smartly dressed here in smooth urbanity and sophistication, is still very much present in A Tour. Defoe ridicules from his enlightened and rational perspective, for example, not just the credulity of local traditions and the exaggerated claims the local inhabitants make for the natural “wonders” in the Peak District but also the pedantry and gullibility of his predecessors in the business of surveying Britain, who have been misled and, clearly, taken their eye off the facts of the case. Extravagantly and predictably, I would say, Defoe claims an originality in his perspective on things and faults those who have contemplated these scenes before him. He dates the origins of A Tour from a ride through Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire when “it occurr’d to my Thoughts that it would be a very useful and good Work, if any curious Observer would but write an Account of England, and oblige himself to speak of such things only, as all Modern Writers had said nothing of, or nothing but what was false and imperfect” (II, p. 153). There is more to Defoe’s vision than such self-promotion and chauvinistic boosterism, although there is a great deal of both of those. The preface to the first volume opens by calling Britain “the most flourishing and opulent Country in the World” (I, p. 47). Pat Rogers has traced the many forms of superlatives and downright hyperbole in A Tour, which he describes quite appropriately as its main rhetorical figure.18 This unqualified enthusiasm for British modernity is tempered, surprisingly enough, by a classical, elegiac sense of mutability, of the grand, natural rhythms of nature and empire. In a sentence like the following, Defoe sounds almost like the Sir Thomas Browne of works such as Hydriotaphia. or Urn-Burial (1658); he achieves at moments like this in A Tour a rare eloquence, even if his subject matter is predominantly socioeconomic and to that extent prosaic, and so his Preface sets the elegiac tone: “The Fate of Things gives a new Face to Things, produces Changes in low Life, and innumerable Incidents; plants and supplants Families, raises and sinks Towns, removes Manufactures, and Trade; Great Towns decay, and small Towns rise; new Towns, new Palaces, new Seats are built every Day; great Rivers and good Harbours dry up, and grow useless; again, new Ports are open’d, Brooks are made Rivers, small Rivers navigable Ports; and Harbours are made where none were before, and the like” (I, p. 48). Even as he aggressively claims to push aside the past, it intrudes as part of natural process and the cycle of growth and decay. As he muses in autumnal mood, Defoe distinguishes between mere antiquarian sentimentality (for which he claims to have no tolerance) and actual local and specifically British decline. Thus, as he rides 328

History, Facts, and Literature around Suffolk early in the first volume he sees in Dunwich “a Testimony of the decay of Publick Things” and he waxes fairly eloquently if a bit pedantically, reminding us that Persepolis, Nineveh, Rome, and Carthage are gone because the nations they were capitals of were conquered: The Ruins of Carthage, of the great City of Jerusalem, or of antient Rome, are not at all Wonderful to me; the Ruins of Nineveh, which are so entirety sunk, as that ’tis doubtful where the City stood; The ruins of Babylon, or the great Persepolis, and many Capital Cities, which Time and the Change of Monarchies have Overthrown; these, I say, are not at all Wonderful, because being the Capitals of great and flourishing Kingdoms, where those Kingdoms were Overthrown, the Capital Cities necessarily fell with them; but for a Private Town, a Sea-Port, and a Town of Commerce, to Decay, as it were of itself (for we never read of Dunwich being Plundered or Ruin’d by any Disaster, at least not of late Years); this, I must confess, seems owing to nothing but to the Fate of Things, by which we see that Towns, Kings, Countries, Families, and Persons, have all their Elevation, their Medium, their Declination, and even their Destruction in the Womb of Time, and the Course of Nature. It is true, this Town is manifestly decayed by the invasion of the Waters, and as other Towns seem sufferers by the Sea, or the Tide withdrawing from their Ports, such as Orford, just now named, Winchelsea in Kent, and the like: So this Town is, as it were, eaten up by the Sea, as above; and the still encroaching Ocean seems to threaten it with a fatal Immersion in a few Years more. (I, pp. 98–9)

Some local changes are purely socioeconomic, and Defoe’s old polemical instincts come back from time to time. In one fascinating moment in the first letter of the first volume of A Tour, as he rides around Essex, he continues his admiring contemplation of the relatively new country houses, many of them built by “the citizens of London” (I, p. 30) but pauses to single out “the magnificent palace of the Lord Castlemain.” But then a dark note enters, as Defoe observes that Lord Castlemain sustained great losses in the recent (1722) South Sea Bubble in which many people lost everything, although “it was not a mortal Wound, as it was to some Men, who once seem’d as much out of the reach of it” (I, p. 131). This reflection leads to a couple of paragraphs that seek to place recent disasters in a larger elegiac context: This cannot be said of some other Families in this County, whose fine Parks and new-built Palaces are fallen under Forfeitures and Alienations by the Misfortunes of the Times, and by the Ruin of their Masters Fortunes in that South-Sea Deluge. But I desire to throw a Veil over these Things, as they come in my way; ’tis enough that we write upon them, as was written upon King Harold’s Tomb at Waltham-Abbey, INFÆLIX, and let all the rest sleep among Things that are the fittest to be forgotten. (I, p. 131)

329

History, Facts, and Literature Defoe is honest enough not to hide the inevitable and inescapable risks that are a necessary part of the commercial prosperity he celebrates. In his first volume as he travels through Surrey he marvels at the mansions of the financial city gentry, those who “have exceeded even the greatest Part of the Nobility of England in Wealth, at their Death, and all of their own getting” (I, p. 203). But he also a paragraph later admits the precariousness of such wealth: “It would also take up a large Chapter in this Book, to but mention the overthrow, and Catastrophe of innumerable Wealthy City Families . . . sunk under the Misfortunes of Business and the Disasters of Trade, after the World has thought them pass’d all possibility of Danger” (I, p. 203).19 In similar fashion, he enters the town of Wellington in Somersetshire from Devon and is startled when he is “immediately surrounded with Beggars, to such a Degree, that we had some Difficulty to keep them from under our Horse Heels” (II, 19). Throwing them some small coins, he is again surprised as another crowd of them emerges, “as if the whole Town was come out into the Street” (II, p. 19). But despite its honesty about poverty and the perils of commerce, as well as its recurring and vivid elegiac thread, A Tour is broadly progressive and optimistic, and even the very recent and destructive scandal of the South Sea Bubble or the instability of commercial fortunes is not to be dwelt on, although such facts need to be noted. Defoe celebrates the present in no uncertain or ambiguous terms and anticipates an even better future for Britain. But the past, with its historical weight, gloomy precedents, and reminders of mortality and transience, may be said to press on Defoe’s narrative and qualify his optimism. In spite of his recurrent disclaimers that he is not interested in antiquity and his many refusals to speculate about a past that is as he observes very often encrusted with untrustworthy legend or with tokens of popular credulity and superstition, the past keeps coming up in the narrative as a kind of negative chorus or cautionary qualification to the epic song that celebrates the glorious British present and looks forward to the future. At times, this is simply a matter of the pleasures of tourism, as Defoe sees for example Roman and old British remains as he travels from Winchester to Salisbury. He notes often enough the sad scars of the English Civil Wars, just as he scornfully records the inequities of the archaic parliamentary system that apportions seats so unfairly, with small and decayed towns sending as many to parliament as large and prosperous cities. And near the end of his tour of the northern counties – Yorkshire and Northumberland – he says that he has many times “repented that I so early resolved to decline the delightful View of Antiquity, here being so great and so surprizing a Variety” (III, p. 120). There are even aspects of the past that deserve close attention for present purposes, and there is one instance especially apparent to the traveller where the past outdoes the present.The Romans, Defoe notes at various times with unqualified admiration, built roads that have endured, and the deplorable road system of early eighteenth-century Britain might well emulate Roman methods, to 330

History, Facts, and Literature which he devotes several pages of close explanation of their construction, displaying in the process his fascination with their engineering techniques. But the Romans were masters of the world and could command the resources and, most important, the slave labor necessary for proper road building. Not so now, when “the Case is alter’d, Labour is dear, Wages high, no Man works for Bread and Water now; our Labourers do not work in the Road, and drink in the Brook; so that as rich as we are, it would exhaust the whole Nation to build the Edifices, the Causways, the Aqueducts, Lines, Castles, Fortifications, and other publick Works, which the Romans built with very little Expence” (II, p. 236). As a moment like this makes clear, Defoe is at least occasionally the moralist and the satirist as much as he is the panegyrist. For all of his enthusiasm and awe in the face of modern Britain, for all his attention to the roles of analytical traveller and economic geographer, he retains something of the autodidact we have seen in earlier chapters. As in his moral polemics from this decade, he is laudator temporis acti, and there are aspects of the present that are morally and economically unsatisfactory. These themes and pressures come together early in the first volume, as Defoe finds himself at the Newmarket races in Norfolk, where he finds “a great Concourse of the Nobility and Gentry” but he is disappointed by the vulgarity of it all: “they were all so intent, so eager, so busy upon the sharping Part of the Sport, their Wagers and Bets, that to me they seem’d just as so many Horse-coursers in Smithfield, descending (the greatest of them) from their high Dignity and Quality, to picking one another’s Pockets, and Biting one another as much as possible” (I, p. 117). So he diverts his attention and focuses on useful observation of the natural processes involved in horse racing and then on imaginative transformation of the scene to produce a satiric contrast: I was so sick of the Jockeying Part that I left the Crowd about the Posts and pleased my self with observing the Horses; how the Creatures yielded to all the Arts and Managements of their Masters; how they took their Airings in Sport and played with the daily Heats which they ran over the course before the Grand Day; but how, as knowing the Difference equally with their Riders, would they exert their utmost Strength at the time of the Race itself; and that to such an Extremity, that one or two of them died in the Stable when they came to be rubb’d after the first Heat. Here I fancied myself in the Circus Maximus at Rome, seeing the antient Games and the Racings of the Chariots and Horsemen; and in this warmth of my Imagination I pleas’d and diverted myself more and in a more Noble manner than I could possibly do in the Crowds of Gentlemen at the weighing and starting Posts and at their coming in; or at their Meetings at the Coffee-Houses and GamingTables after the Races were over, where there was little or nothing to be seen but what was the Subject of just Reproach to them, and Reproof from every Wise Man that look’d upon them. (I, p. 118)

331

History, Facts, and Literature This is fanciful, of course, but it serves a satiric purpose and reveals, in passing, Defoe’s neoclassical sympathies. It also underlines his own morally and intellectually superior curiosity, encompassing here the horses and their riders, the sport itself rather than the vulgar betting of the nobles and gentry. And yet on other occasions, he resists these urges toward imaginative transformation along classical lines. He sometimes feels the need to separate his exact, hard-headed approach from what he defines as its fanciful alternative; he insists that he is aggressively modern and plain-spoken, sometimes it would seem unnecessarily or defensively so. Thus, as he tells us of the clear and clean Thames near Hampton Court, he also refuses (as if someone were asking this of him!) to glamorize: I shall sing you no Songs here of the River in the first Person of a Water Nymph, a Goddess, (and I know not what) according to the Humour of the ancient Poets. I shall talk nothing of the Marriage of old Isis, the Male River, with the beautiful Thame, the Female River, a Whimsy as simple as the Subject was empty, but I shall speak of the River as Occasion presents, as it really is made glorious by the Splendor of its Shores, gilded with noble Palaces, strong Fortifications, large Hospitals, and publick Buildings; with the greatest Bridge, and the greatest City in the World, made famous by the Opulence of its Merchants, the Encrease and Extensiveness of its Commerce; by its invincible Navies, and by the innumerable Fleets of Ships sailing upon it, to and from all Parts of the World. (I, p. 208)

Such a paragraph picks a very irrelevant quarrel; the refusal of classical mythology works merely as a rhetorical contrast to the specifically modern ideology of A Tour and to the promotion of modernity. Here at least the tension between past and present is a set up; the present in all its factuality is hardly in danger of losing its sharp focus through archaic mythologizing. This passage and a few others like it are distractions from the real tension between past and present, between Defoe’s optimism and his occasional sense of mutability and mortality. Yet, overall, in the implicit plot of A Tour the present age as Defoe experiences it and renders it in all its incredible fullness, its unprecedented plenitude, triumphs decisively over the past, which is as the traveller encounters its remains fragmentary and incomplete, a melancholy record often enough of war and wasteful destruction. As a Londoner through and through, as what we might want to label a metropolitan intellectual, Defoe in A Tour places the capital at the vital center of his book (a whole section, Letter V in Volume II, is devoted to it) as the economic engine that drives the nation. The most excited moments in the book are Defoe’s evocations of the immense city whose size is a true wonder, a prodigy (a recurring noun in this part of A Tour) of energy, in our context as readers of his work over his whole career a positive counter-statement to the mysterious and threatening city of A Journal of the Plague Year: “New Squares, and 332

History, Facts, and Literature new Streets rising up every Day to such a Prodigy of Buildings, that nothing in the World does, or ever did, equal it, except old Rome in Trajan’s time, when the Walls were Fifty Miles in Compass, and the Number of Inhabitants Six Millions Eight hundred thousand Souls” (II, p. 65). Equally important for Defoe, given his interest in systems, is the vast inland trade that sustains the city. The roads going into London as Defoe depicts them are crammed with such quantities of produce and other goods that enumeration is impossible and quantities can only be estimated. As he guesses, a million and a half turkeys are driven from Suffolk to London, and uncountable numbers of mackerel from the Dorsetshire coast are consumed in London, along with many other foodstuffs that he describes with unfailing wonder at the quantities. As he lists the many wholesale markets in London, from fish to broad cloth, Defoe is awed by this sheer quantity: “Smithfield Market for living Cattle, which is, without Question, the greatest in the World; no Description can be given of it” (II, p. 91), and in similar fashion the corn sold at the London markets is such that “the whole World cannot equal the Quantity bought and sold here” (II, p. 93). So, too, the most important aspect of the city, the port of London defies accurate enumeration: “the Shipping and the Pool; but in what Manner can any Writer go about it, to bring into any reasonable Compass? The Thing is a kind of Infinite, and the Parts to be separated from one another in such a Description, are so many, that it is hard to know where to begin” (II, p. 95). Then his account of London also dwells on the great government institutions that make the city run, such as the Bank, the Excise Office, the Navy Office, and the various stock companies – the South Sea, the East India, the African. The effect is, in Novak’s nice phrase, the “economic sublime,” phenomena that are so breathtaking in their quantity that they defy any reaction except silent wonder.20 But here at the end of these moments of awe-struck contemplation, Defoe inserts a skeptical and even an apocalyptical note, as he looks forward to a time when all the speculative essence of such institutions will have run its course, when the public debts are reduced and the government funds that are now the engines of commerce will cease: “What will be the Condition of this overgrown City in such a Case, I must leave to Time . . . Then, I say, will be a Time to expect the vast Concourse of People to London, will separate again and disperse as naturally, as they have now crouded hither: What will be the Fate of all the fine Buildings in the Out Parts, in such a Case, let any one judge” (II, p. 86). In the end, A Tour doesn’t quite escape the miscellaneous and merely geographic unity of its subject. In its rambling around Britain, however purposeful and guided by a totalizing vision of the nation, the book is like Defoe’s various fictions essentially an inspired improvisation that acquires a measure of unity and coherence only in the process, we may say, of composition and compilation. Defoe displays in A Tour the same drive toward the actual and the factual that Moll Flanders speaks of when she says “I leave the Reader to improve these 333

History, Facts, and Literature Thoughts, as no doubt they will see Cause, and I go on to the Fact.” The sustaining tension in A Tour for a modern reader lies, I think, in those moments of what Defoe claims to render as almost pure factuality where the vision of the nation is suspended or even temporarily subverted by the sheer fascination of the moment and the strange oddness and even the irreducible uniqueness of the thing itself. The single clearest instance of this comes in the Peak district in Derbyshire when Defoe discovers the distinctive lives of the lead miners, modern troglodytes who dwell in caves and scratch out a living deep in the bowels of the earth.The extended scene has a proto-Wordsworthian quality of pathos about it, as Defoe marvels at the lives the poor miners’ families endure as he questions one of their wives: good wife, why, where do you live. Here, Sir, says she, and points to the Hole in the Rock. Here! says I; and do all these Children live here too? Yes, Sir, says she, they were all born here. Pray how long have you dwelt here then? said I. My Husband was born here, said she, and his Father before him. (III, p. 35)

And a bit later Defoe and his party meet the lead miner husband, who materializes piece by piece out of a small shaft, “we were agreeably surprized with seeing a Hand, and then an Arm, and quickly after a Head, thrust up out of the very Groove we were looking at” (III, p. 36). Once out of his shaft, the lead miner presents an appropriately ghastly appearance for one who descends, as Defoe tells us, up to a hundred and fifty yards into the earth (“a Hole as deep in the Earth as the Cross upon St. Paul’s Cupolo is high out of it”) [III, p. 38]. This miner is “lean as a Skeleton, pale as a dead Corps, his Hair and Beard a deep Black, his Flesh lank, and, as we thought, something of the Colour of the Lead itself,” and Defoe imagines him as ascending “ab Inferis.” His strangeness is increased by his discourse, his local dialect, of which they cannot “make out a whole Sentence” (III, p. 37). As what Defoe calls a true “wonder” (as opposed to the vaunted “Wonders of the Peak” such as the Giant’s Tomb or Poole’s Hole, which he dismisses as dull and uninteresting natural sites), the lead miners of the Peak are like nothing else in Britain and therefore worth presenting in detail, but of course they contribute nothing to his national vision and to some extent represent a serious qualification of the present glories. The sequence has obvious moral overtones and social implications. Defoe says that he includes it to show the “discontinued [sic] Part of the rich World how to value their own Happiness, by looking below them, and seeing how others live” (III, p. 34). He and his friends give the miner some money (a few shillings, which is more than he could earn underground in three days) and then find him drinking it away in an alehouse. But they buy him some drink and send him home with the money to his wife and children in his cave. The lead miners are to some extent outside of the modern Britain Defoe 334

History, Facts, and Literature celebrates, even more so than the beggars in Somersetshire. Defoe dramatizes social exploitation and misery; he and his friends are moved by the plight of the poor, although hardly to the point of proposing to improve their working conditions. The sequence seeks to strike a balance between fascinated observation of the unique and the strange and their social-moral implications. But the sheer fact is what interests Defoe most, and it is the strangeness and rarity of the sequence that lingers for a modern reader. To that extent, a moment like this in A Tour marks very clearly the subversive drift in Defoe’s narrative writing away from didactic purpose and toward a more nearly pure apprehension of the actual.21 In A Tour there are some moments when Defoe can only defer to actuality, when he encounters parts of the British landscape that do not provoke useful commentary because they are waste and wild or when he finds creatures in nature that look like anomalies, such as the Soland goose in Scotland, which is so puzzling an animal that Defoe wonders “What Nature meant by giving these Singularities to a Creature, that has nothing else in it worth Notice” (III, p. 161). In similar fashion, in Cumberland and Westmoreland, where a century later the Lake Poets would find inspiration, Defoe sees only “horror,” “the wildest, most barren and frightful” countryside in England (III, p. 136). A bit earlier, in Lancashire on the road to Manchester he passes through a bog or waste called Chatmos, and he is careful to describe it even though he also remarks that it is hard to imagine “What Nature meant by such a useless Production” : The Substance of the Surface seems to be a Collection of the small Roots of innumerable Vegetables matted together, interwoven so thick, as well the bigger Roots as the smaller Fibres, that it makes a Substance hard enough to cut out into Turf; or rather Peat, which, in some Places, the People cut out, and piling them up in the Sun, dry them for their Fewel. The Roots I speak of are generally small and soft not unlike the Roots of Asparagus or of Bearbind, they have no Earth among them, except what they contract from the Air, and Dust flying in it, but the Rain keeps them, as it were, always growing, though not much encreasing. (III, p. 128)

Descriptions such as these show how powerfully focussed, how almost preternaturally alert an observer Defoe at his best can be. Moreover, such a close up of the surface of this Lancashire bog offers itself as purely objective, both in a physical and a historical sense. This peat the locals dig up is not part of modern Britain; like the bog, the peat and its burning are as old as the hills, perennial activities amid the earth at its most ancient. Such moments are very revealing, I think, since in their resistance to become anything other than what they are, their resistance to appropriation into Defoe’s vision of British modernity, they dramatize Defoe’s honesty, his fidelity to particular facts, to at least part of the 335

History, Facts, and Literature world as it is or has been that is beyond all those grand themes that A Tour seeks to extract.22 And, finally, in their irrelevance to his vision moments like this in A Tour dramatize his urge to completeness, to rendering the totality of the world as it is experienced. In this compulsion toward fullness and completeness, even when it creates a distraction and takes him away from his organizing purpose, a passage like this exemplifies an oddly essential quality in Defoe’s writing, which to him must have been akin to breathing.

336

11 Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31

The one thing in Defoe’s life that never failed him was his writing. . . . As his personal life became more troubled, Defoe turned to the arena he could control, and an almost unimaginable two and a half million words flowed from his pen. Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life

After Harley’s Fall: Whig Mole and Periodical Writer, Secrecy and Anonymity From a vile Presbyterian, with a Jacobite Face, Who writes on both Sides with an insipid Grace. Yet demurely on Sundays in the Meeting takes Place; Libera nos. “The loyal Litany,” Read’s Weekly Journal

For all his recurring complaints to Harley about the irregularity of his emoluments during the years he was his secret agent, Defoe was extremely well paid for his services, to the tune of £300 to £400 a year (some 30 to 40 thousand pounds, very roughly, in modern purchasing power), and he was able to live like the prosperous merchant he never quite succeeded in being at his large house in the London suburb of Stoke Newington, which with its four acres of land surrounding it was a virtual country estate with well-tended gardens and walks.1 His son-in-law, Henry Baker, described this establishment as “a very handsome house . . . a retirement from London” where Defoe “amused his time either in the cultivation of a large and pleasant garden, or in the pursuit of his studies.”2 We also know that he accumulated a substantial library for such pursuits. He 337

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 enjoyed this extremely comfortable life thanks to what he earned from his writing and his work for the government, supplemented by occasional business ventures in commodities like wine, ale, pickles, tobacco, and linen. Later, in the 1720s as Novak reports he had a warehouse on a street near Tower Dock where he kept merchandise that he dealt in such as cheese, bacon, honey, oysters, and anchovies.3 He also seems to have been a horse dealer in a fairly substantial way, and as the many references in A Tour to horse fairs around the country make clear he understood that trade very well.4 Moreover, any notion of him as a dour Puritan needs to be dispelled. He was, as Paula Backscheider observes, stylish in his dress to the point of foppishness. We know from miscellaneous comments in his letters and elsewhere that he was when it came to food and drink and other good things in life something of a bon vivant.5 As early as the 1690s as a young merchant about town, he fancied himself a dandy, in Michael Shinagel’s words “aping the style of life of the gentry and playing the role of the gentleman.”6 In that light, we can understand his assumption of the patronymic French prefix to add to plain English “Foe” and his acquisition of a coat of arms, featured in the elaborate frontispiece of the 1703 edition of A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-born Englishman. When it came to literary taste, he was no gloomy sectarian, for in his writing he quotes from a wide range of reading in imaginative secular literature. His writings reveal that he was well read in the great English poets, not only the Milton of Paradise Lost but also Dryden (some of his plays as well as his poems), and even the scabrous Rochester, a poet he quotes frequently. He claims, moreover, in one of his very last works, Augusta Triumphans (1728) that he has been from his infancy not only a lover of music but in his younger days “was accounted no despicable Performer on the Viol and Lute” but that may simply be an invented detail to flesh out the fictional narrator of this tract, Andrew Moreton.7 For all of his fulminating against the theater elsewhere, he shows in this work at least an intimate knowledge of the London musical and operatic scene of the time, although typically for Defoe he is unhappy that there are no English composers to rival foreigners prominent in the London music scene like Handel and Corelli. With the fall of the Tories in 1714, Defoe was very quickly employed in another capacity by the new Whig administration but probably had to endure quite a large reduction in pay from that source (from about £400 to about £50 a year). He was still doing very well for a writer in those days. As Paula Backscheider outlines his arrangements, one of his printers, John Baker, paid him two guineas on every five hundred six-penny pamphlets printed, with editions ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 copies. From another printer, Richard Janeway, he received four guineas plus 20 or 25 copies of the pamphlet for every 1,000 sold, and Defoe would arrange for these personal copies to be sold by other book-

338

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 sellers. These were generous and unusual terms.8 When he began to write for various Tory journals, he acquired a fair amount of income from their editors for his contributions. Defoe, then, continued to live very well, mainly on the proceeds of his writing. Beginning in 1714 with the death of Queen Anne and the arrival of the Hanoverian monarchs in the person of George I, however, there was an element of uncertainty in his new circumstances. He lurched at times from crisis to crisis and had a good number of anxious moments. Enlisted by the new administration as a Whig mole and secret agent, Defoe was assigned, bizarrely enough, to moderate attacks on the government in Tory periodicals, chiefly in his association with the journalist, Nathaniel Mist, publisher of the anti-government Weekly Journal (more often called Mist’s Weekly Journal), but he was also associated with several others, including a pseudo-Tory monthly journal, Mercurius Politicus, that he himself began in 1716. Defoe’s political masters clearly recognized that he could be both devious and convincingly flexible, and of course he clearly needed the work as well as the patronage and protection of the powerful. Moderating Mist’s Weekly Journal was a difficult assignment; it was the most popular and influential journal in England, with a circulation of about ten thousand copies a week.9 This arrangement with the government was kept secret, its exact details not coming to light in fact until 1864, when a number of letters were discovered that Defoe had written to Charles De la Faye, an under-secretary in the office of the Secretary of State for the Northern Department.10 Defoe had been recommended for the assignment to Lord Townsend, one of the new Whig Secretaries, by Lord Chief Justice Parker, the same jurist who had prosecuted Defoe for his ironic anti-Jacobite tracts a couple of years before and had been further incensed by his impertinent criticism of the government’s case against him in several numbers of the Review in 1713. But it seems that Defoe, in something less than his finest moment, had successfully groveled, dramatizing his remorse so effectively in a letter to Parker that the Justice recommended him for service to the new administration.11 In a letter written in April 1718 to De la Faye, Defoe lays out the whole story of intrigue and undercover activity in this world of rabidly partisan political journalism, conjuring up in the process the extreme difficulties of his act as a double agent: “It is a hard Matter to please the Tory Party as their present Temper Operates, without abuseing not Onely The Government but the Persons of Our Governours in Every thing they Write.”12 In his customary self-promoting fashion, Defoe outlines his cleverness at managing this affair, telling first the story of how he took over a newsletter formerly produced by his old enemy, John Dyer who had recently died, and then carried on as Dormer’s Newsletter. After informing Lord Townsend of this situation and getting his approval, Defoe went into action:

339

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 Upon This I Engaged in it, and That So far, that Tho’ the Property was not wholly my Own, yet the Conduct, and Governmt of the stile and News, was So Entirely in Me, that I Ventur’d to assure his Ldpp the sting of that Mischeivous Paper should be Entirely Taken out, Tho’ it was Granted that the stile should Continue Tory, as it was, that the Party might be Amused, and Not Set up another, which Would have destroy’d the Design, and This Part I therefore Take Entirely on my Self still. (p. 452)

Unfortunately, as Novak notes, no copies of the newsletter after Defoe claims he began to manage it survive.13 Defoe goes on in the letter to De la Faye to describe his subsequent engagement with Nathaniel Mist, summarizing his charge as a matter of keeping The Weekly Journal “within the Circle of a Secret Mannagement, also, prevent the Mischievous Part of it, and yet Neither Mist or any of those Concernd with have the least Guess or Suspicion By whose Direction I do it” (p. 453). He concludes by promising that all these journals “Will be allwayes kept (mistakes Excepted) To Pass as Tory Papers, and yet be Dissabled and Ennervated, So as to do no Michief or give any Offence to the Governmt” (p. 453). In the following weeks, Defoe outlined his efforts to make Mist more careful in his accusations against the government, and he emphasized again how difficult his task was: “to the best of my skill I Cause all letters and Paragraphs which look that Way to be intercepted and stop’t at the press” (p. 456). Defoe’s mischievous delight in deception was clearly undiminished, and his unshakable self-assurance is as always worth remarking upon, although as Sutherland observes it is unlikely that Mist did not have some idea of what was going on. He had the most skillful journalist in England working for him, and he also maintained his reputation as the main voice of opposition with his large Tory audience. He may well have tolerated Defoe’s insertions of moderation as a safety valve against government persecution.14 As Defoe wrote to De la Faye on 4 June, 1718, he had convinced Mist that the government had treated him “with Lenety and Forbearance, and he Sollemnly Engages to me to give no more offence” (p. 457). Many copies of the other journals he infiltrated in the years to come survive, and in the past critics and biographers have confidently inserted a large body of such work into the Defoe canon. Backscheider and Novak quote freely (without always noting the uncertainty of the attributions) from his contributions to these periodicals, just as William Lee in 1869 attached to his biography of Defoe a two-volume anthology of such writings.The old version of Defoe’s activities held that with the fall of the Tories in 1714 he had retired from political controversy, and it was to this shift that we owed the great narrative works that began a few years later with Robinson Crusoe. For Lee the hagiographer this discovery of the De la Faye letters was a sensational revision of Defoe’s biography. In his two-volume collection he included over 350 pieces he said were Defoe’s; they were not all those he thought Defoe had written during those years. Lee was 340

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 confident that he could recognize Defoe’s distinctive style, his peculiar turns of phrase and expression, and Lee may have been right some of the time. Furbank and Owens caution that external evidence is necessary for attribution of particular essays to Defoe, that it really is not possible “in the present state of knowledge, to decide which exactly were his contributions.”15 This discovery of Defoe’s recruitment as a political and journalistic mole by the Whigs was sensational, if not quite in the sense Lee thought. It marks a deeply frustrating biographical moment, a complication of Defoe’s insertion in the world of political journalism in the early eighteenth century in which he becomes truly anonymous but at the same time highly visible. We know exactly what Defoe was doing in those years, but we can’t be certain just what he did. As Sutherland remarks, in those years Defoe “was turning into a sort of badger, a creature that comes out in the dark, and avoids the more dangerous daylight.” At the end of his apologia, An Appeal to Honour & Justice, published in 1715, there is a publisher’s note at the end, where the pamphlet breaks off abruptly, announcing that the author was interrupted by an apoplexy and that for six weeks he’s been indisposed – “if he recovers, he may not be able to finish what he began; if not, it is the opinion of most that know him, that the treatment which he here complains of, and some others that he would have spoken of, have been the apparent cause of his disaster.”16 So the disappearing act, as it were, is made complete. He defends himself and then stages his departure from the scene. This may just have been a feint, since we know that Defoe was as busy as he had ever been in 1715, not only writing and editing for these various Tory journals but also publishing that year the first of his conduct books, The Family Instructor. His activity as a contributor and manager of Tory periodicals merges necessarily and perhaps inextricably with the work of others so that he becomes for posterity what he sought often to become for his contemporaries – anonymous, undetectable, a secret and powerful presence, a playful and subversive editor of other people’s prose and their ideas. He becomes in these years, to adapt one of his favorite constructions, an author and no author, an elusive manipulator of print and ideas, present and clearly active in various periodicals and yet impossible to pin down or to identify with certainty. He is absorbed by the market for print and ideas, or better he submerges himself into this ocean of public print, truly and deliberately the mercurial Proteus his enemies accused him of being. Rival journalists were aware that something was going on and that Defoe’s hand was visible in a number of Tory periodicals, although they did not know that he was actually employed by the ministry. On 24 August, 1717 Read’s Weekly Journal denounced Defoe as “Corrector-General of all the News-Papers, excepting his own; which wants as much correcting as the illiterate Author” and a bit later the St. James Weekly Journal followed suit, as it jeered that Defoe “industriously 341

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 follows his old Trade of Writing against himself, and frequently scolds in Controversy, wherein no one else is concerned.”17 But there is a letter in Mist’s Journal on September 20, 1718 from “Sir Timothy Caution” that might well have been inserted by Defoe, and whoever wrote it, the advice is the sort Defoe would have been giving his employer: “Speak of the King decently, – of the Ministers respectfully, – of the Ladies modestly. Speak of Religion gravely, – of the Church reverently . . . but above all Things, have a care of Parliaments. Tell your Tales of them as of Things done without Doors, and heard at second Hand. In a Word, write a noli me tangere upon their Proceedings, and even think of them with Fear and Trembling. Be persuaded, Mr. Mist, to believe, I venture to say to you positively, that you may publish the Worst Things which you now do publish, and yet may avoid the Displeasure of the Government; whereas in the unwary manner you act now, you cannot expect that any Government in the World will bear with you.”18 But in 1718, Mist could not be reined in completely, it seems, and Defoe wrote anxiously to De la Faye that the affirmation in Mist’s Journal that the Pretender (James’ II’s son and successor, long denounced by partisans as a supposititious child) was the legitimate child of Mary of Modena, James’s queen, who had just died, was something he had no part in “but that Mr Mist did it after I had lookt Over what he had Gotten Together” (p. 455). In October and November of 1718, Mist was arrested and examined by the authorities, and he seems to have implicated Defoe, who for a while severed his connection with the journal and began to write for a new Whig paper, The Whitehall Evening Post. Mist and Defoe resumed their collaboration in 1719, but Mist went too far at last and eventually landed in prison in 1720, forced like Defoe himself years earlier to stand in the pillory as punishment for several paragraphs in Mist’s Journal that were critical of the Protestant European powers for their behavior in the Palatinate, the stronghold of German Protestantism which had suffered from French aggression and persecution. Defoe, too, was in some danger, making the case to De la Faye in a letter on 7 June of that year that he was not involved in the offending article and that Mist could not “Lay it justly to my Charge unless he has my Coppie to produce” (p. 461). But as Healey points out, Mist had told the government prosecutors that Defoe, wily as ever, always destroyed his handwritten copy after having it transcribed so that his involvement could not be traced. Despite this, Defoe ends the letter to De la Faye by hoping rather pathetically that he would “be Treated with Clemency as Well as justice in a Case where my whole study was to keep things Out of the paper which might give Offence” (p. 461). In these years, Defoe also wrote a good deal of nonpolitical journalism. In June 1720 he began to write for Applebee’s Weekly Journal. Here, again, although Defoe bibliographers differ on just what he contributed, it is very difficult to say just what he wrote for these journals. He seems to have written extensively on

342

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 crime in its pages as well as about whatever else was in the news in those years. As James Sutherland proposed, Defoe seems to have introduced to both Mist’s Journal and Applebee’s Weekly Journal the innovation of the “non-political essay,” doubtless as a means of distracting from the political extremism and violent rhetoric of Mist especially. In so doing, Sutherland says, he made an important contribution to the development of English journalism. Sutherland lists the topics of the essays Defoe seems to have contributed to these periodicals:“stock-jobbers, quack doctors, highwaymen, inoculation for smallpox, women’s fashions, gambling, debtor’s prisons, the regulation of the Press, the servant problem, and a hundred other subjects.”19 If one trawls through Lee’s two volumes of selections from Defoe’s journalism from these years in these journals, one will certainly find much that resembles Defoe’s recurring treatment of these topics in other writings over the years, although to be sure he was not alone in paying attention to these subjects. For example, in Applebee’s Journal for March 17, 1722, upon hearing of the death of the notorious John Toland, author of the deistical Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), the writer opines “that no Age, since the founding and forming the Christian Church in the World, was ever like, (in open avowed Atheism, Blasphemies, and Heresies) to the Age we now live in” (Lee, II, p. 500), which is just the sort of fulminating that Defoe (and countless other commentators at the time) likes to indulge in. And again in Applebee’s Journal for July 31, 1725 the author greets the publication of the first volume of Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey as an event in the history of “English Commerce,” pedantically listing the components of the publishing trade, just the sort of gambit he would pursue at length in one of his last major works, A Plan of the English Commerce (1728): “Composing, Inventing, Translating, Versifying, etc., are the several Manufacturers which supply this Commerce. The Booksellers are the Master Manufacturers or Employers. The several Writers, Authors, Copyers, SubWriters, and all other Operators with Pen and Ink, are the Workmen employed by the said Master Manufacturers; as the Combers, Spinners, Weavers, Fullers, Dressers, etc., are in our Clothing Manufacturers, by the Master Clothiers” (III, p. 410). Here this writer is clearly putting Defoe’s characteristic spin on this event and in the process repeating himself as he pursues his idée fixe about trade as the master key to modern English life. But if Lee’s attribution is correct, there is one item from Applebee’s Journal for July 21, 1722 that signals Defoe’s versatility and stylistic virtuosity, as he notes the death of the great Captain General, John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, whose military triumphs over the French in Europe he had celebrated in verse years before. Defoe extracts from the great man’s death an eloquent meditation on the vanity of glory and the brevity of human life: “What then is the Work of Life:What the Business of great Men, that pass the Stage of the World in seeming Triumph, as these Men, we

343

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 call Heroes, have done? Is it to grow great in the mouth of Fame, and take up many Pages in History? Alas! That is no more than making Tale for the reading of Posterity . . . Or is their Business rather to add Virtue and Piety to their Glory, which alone will pass with them into Eternity, and make them truly Immortal? What is Glory without Virtue?” (III, pp. 29–30). Moments like this make it a real pity that we can’t be sure exactly what Defoe wrote for these journals, since we can be reasonably confident that in the process of moderating the political effect of these publications he extended his range as a writer and broadened his outlook, freed as he was from the persona of prickly commentator and swaggering know-it-all that he had cultivated as author of the Review and in much of his other earlier journalism. True anonymity such as he enjoyed working for Mist and Applebee, in other words, may just have given Defoe the kind of imaginative freedom he did not have as a writer who was caught up in his own self-dramatization as an embattled commentator. For example, he (if he wrote this essay) defends Charity Schools (a movement to teach poor children basic literacy, mainly so they can read the Bible) in Applebee’s Journal in several issues in July 1723, going so far on July 13 to criticize another journal’s attacks on them as to say that “to repine that our Poor should be enabled to make themselves Rich, this is such an unnatural Piece of Policy as I never met with before” (III, p. 159). Such genial and progressive commentary on the poor is not Defoe’s normal stance, just as the piece in Applebee’s Journal for November 20, 1725 that Lee prints as his takes precisely the kind of moderate moral and historical stance that, as we will see in the next section of this chapter, he contradicts in his writings in the late 1720s: “the Times are bad enough, God mend ’em! But not quite so bad yet, as those that went before us. The Complaint then of the Degeneracy of the Times is all Grimace. All a whining modish Way that Men have got, to make us believe they are better than other People” (III, p. 444).

Defoe in Old Age: Moral Censor I hope therefore the Reader will excuse the Vanity of an over officious Old Man, if like Cato, I enquire whether or not before I go hence and be no more, I am yet to do any thing for the Service of my Country. Daniel Defoe, “Preface,” The Protestant Monastery

In the last six or seven years of his life, Defoe published many things, including the exuberant A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain as well as some of his most memorable fictions, but his often very ephemeral journalism in this period is accompanied by more substantial moralistic works that are sweeping in their 344

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 condemnation of contemporary life and represent an intensified, nearly paranoid version of the criticisms of modern life that he had been voicing for many years but which grow shriller and more urgent in these years. Despite the sympathetic representation in some of his fiction of working-class characters and servants like Colonel Jack or the young Moll Flanders, Defoe throughout his writing life worries out loud about the breakdown of social discipline among the unruly masses (the poor), and in 1724 he published his most elaborate warning against insubordination among the servant class: The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d; Or, The Insolence and Unsufferable Behaviour of Servants in England duly enquir’d into. The guiding fiction in this substantial book of over three hundred pages is the familiar satiric strategy of inventing a fictitious foreign observer in England who comments on domestic manners from his point of view, although Defoe’s narrator is not from an exotic culture like Giovanni Marana’s Letters from a Turkish Spy (1684, translated into English 1687), a satirical account of European life as presented by a spy to the Divan at Constantinople, or Goldsmith’s Chinese visitor later in the century in The Citizen of the World (1762). Defoe’s narrator is instead a European from a neighboring nation, a naturalized English citizen, a Frenchman in London writing to another Frenchman, describing how he became acquainted with the country and what he makes of its current deplorable state. Perhaps Defoe’s choice of this persona of the naturalized Frenchman casts some suspicion on his extreme opinions about the excesses of English liberty, since throughout the eighteenth century it was a commonplace of English moral and political analysis to contrast authoritarian France with liberal England. Nonetheless, all of Defoe’s reactionary crotchets are on display in this polemic, with the laboring poor coming in for special attack as shiftless, both improvident and lazy. Wages are too high, says his narrator, and “In a Glut of Trade they grow saucy, lazy, idle, and debauch’d; when they may have Work, and may get Money enough to live well, and lay up for a Time of less Business; then instead of Diligence and Good-Husbandry which might be expected from honest Men, on the contrary they will work but two or three Days in the Week, or till they get Money enough to keep them the rest of the Week, and all the other part of their Time they lie in the Alehouse to spend it.”20 As his narrator evokes it, England is a country where “the Poor govern, and the Rich submit” (p. 105), and where illegal “combinations” of workers like weavers and pump-makers are creating “a general Spirit of Insolence and Dishonesty” (p. 124). Did Defoe actually expect readers to take his sensational warnings with complete seriousness? The book is shrill to the point of paranoia from the very beginning, as the narrator predicts that if things go on as they are “the Poor will be Rulers over the Rich, and the Servants be Governours of their Masters . . . Order is inverted, Subordination ceases, and the World seems to stand with the Bottom upward” (p. 17). Defoe ends with much the same dire warning and a repetition of the evocation of England as a moral jungle:“Vice grown rampant; Drunkenness (which is the Ruin of Servants) broke 345

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 in like a Flood; Good-Manners declin’d; and in a Word, all Sence of Subordination is lost among us” (p. 286). The brink of social dissolution the book depicts provides rich opportunities for some interesting narrative episodes, for dramatic impersonation such as we have seen he was attracted to in his own improbable career as a secret agent, as his naturalized French-Englishman describes how he disguised himself and mingled secretly with footmen, spying on them and documenting their total disaffection as he learns “that they valued not their Masters a Shilling, and that they durst not be angry with them; that if they did quarrel, d__ ’em they wou’d be gone, and their Master cou’d not do without ’em” (p. 261). One wonders if such alehouse bravado were really news to anybody in 1724, or whether Defoe was in those years subsiding into a caricature of his old moralistic self. This edition of The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d includes an advertisement at the end for Roxana, which is “just Publish’d,” and if one remembers Roxana’s extraordinary servant, Amy, who is her mistress’ co-equal partner in survival and then in crime, then one might speculate that Defoe’s hyper-moralism is simply the other side of the coin, that he approached moral problems in essentially dramatic terms. The simplistic force of his polemics isn’t really helpful for understanding the moral dilemmas in his novels, which are what the eighteenth century would have called cases, each one to be judged according to circumstances, some of them mitigating. Exaggerations on both sides and from opposing points of view, the egalitarian (in the case of Amy or of Colonel Jack) and the authoritarian (the unforgiving melodrama in these moral tracts), would each make good copy. But we might also in assessing Defoe’s jeremiads from the 1720s consider them as instances of his negative capability, as yet further examples of his pragmatic approach to moral and social questions as profitable to ponder from opposing perspectives. Such an approach seems justified by the three pamphlets that followed The Great Law of Subordination, which were all written by “Andrew Moreton, Esq.,” a crusty and cranky persona Defoe invented for the first of these, Every-Body’s Business is No-Body’s Business (1725) and continued to use in The Protestant Monastery (1727), and Augusta Triumphans (1728). These polemics, especially the first, are occasions for what Defoe must have found (or expected a large audience to find) an exhilarating moral venting, a rhetorical exercise that is more or less formulaic in its outlines and to the reader of this book numbingly familiar. And yet, as W.R. Owens points out, the first of these pamphlets, especially, was popular, with five editions published within twelve months of its appearance.21 These diatribes must have struck a responsive chord with many of Defoe’s readers. But a little bit of such polemics probably goes a long way for latter day readers, and Novak is being generous when he says that in these late works there is “a pattern of repetition” as Defoe recycled old ideas.22 Nowadays, we would find Defoe guilty of self-plagiarism. His old habit of tenacious iteration, of ham346

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 mering points home again and again, understandable in the thrice-weekly Review, becomes a disfiguring mannerism in much of the nonfictional writing from the last decade of his life. Every-Body’s Business is No-Body’s Business; or, Private Abuses, Publick Grievances is a longish pamphlet. Thanks to the distinctive voice of Andrew Moreton, it is a vivid piece of reportage that attacks the “Pride, Insolence, and Exorbitant Wages of our Women-Servants, Footmen, &c.” with a particularized vehemence that marks a real attempt on Defoe’s part to submerge himself in his character, who claims at the outset that attacks on his style are not material, since “I do not set up for an Author, but write only to be understood, no matter how plain” (p. 219). Moreton is very plain indeed. His opening tirades against servant maids are a thick stew of misogynist accusations that imagines these “Pert Sluts” seducing fathers and master’s sons and impoverishing and disgracing “many good Families” (p. 221) or turning to prostitution and causing “our Streets [to] swarm with Strumpets” (p. 222). This general complaint is still attractively readable thanks to Moreton’s various personal anecdotes. For the best example, featuring a vivid scene and sharp dialogue that could belong in one of the novels, Moreton describes how he went into a coffee house and encountered one of what he identifies as a set of “handsome Bar-Keepers,” creatures who are “puff ’d up with the fulsome flattery of a set of Flesh-Flies, that are continually buzzing about ’em” (p. 229). When he is ignored after ordering a “Dish of Rice-Tea,” he describes the scene with rousing comic vigor: Madam was so taken up with her Sparks, that she had quite forgot it. I spoke for it again, and with some Temper, but was answer’d after a most taunting Manner, not without a toss of the Head, a Contraction of the Nostrils, and other Impertinencies, too many to enumerate. Seeing my self thus publickly insulted by such an Animal, I could not chuse but show my Resentment: Woman, said I, sternly, I want a Dish of Rice-Tea, and not what your Vanity and Impudence may imagine; therefore treat me as a Gentleman and a Customer, and serve me with what I call for, and keep your impertinent Repartees and impudent Behaviour for the Coxcombs that swarm round your Bar, and make you so vain of your blown Carcass. (p. 229)

Moreton even goes so far in his catalogue of abuses committed by women servants to say that their “extravagance in Dress” (p. 225) is spreading ostentation in female dress among women of all classes, as wives seek to surpass their maids in fashionable and expensive attire and their finery in turn inspires women of higher station to up the fashion ante. He tells several funny stories of his inability to tell female servants from gentlewomen: his embarrassment when at a friend’s house “and by him requir’d to salute the Ladies, I kiss’d the ChamberJade in to the bargain, for she was as well dress’d as the best” (p. 226), and then 347

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 a more elaborate narrative of how he thought a young woman who had come to him and his sister to apply for a job as a maid was a gentlewoman. When this young lady, after learning what the post entails, refuses it, Moreton is indignant, “astonish’d at the Impudence” although he admits that she has wit: “Then get you gone for a lazy impudent Baggage, said I; you want to be a Boarder, and not a Servant” (p. 227). This girl’s spirited intelligence is revealing. London in those years was (as it remains) a magnet for young people, and this applicant dramatizes in her fierce independence the sort of character that Defoe had imagined for his female protagonists in his fictions. Although Moreton is appalled by her self-assurance, this young girl knows just what she wants and can probably get; she moves beyond class stereotypes of submissive dependence on the upper classes. Moreton doesn’t go quite as far as recommending the institution of sumptuary laws, but he does propose that maids wear livery, like footmen and like charity-school children. Other authoritarian proposals follow, including one to clear the streets of shoe shine boys – “above Ten Thousand Wicked, Idle, Pilfering Vagrants . . . the Black-Guard, who Black your Honour’s Shoes” (p. 230), who for Moreton are a “Race of Caterpillars, who must be swept from out our Streets, or we shall be over-run with all manner of Wickedness” (p. 231). Moreton’s totalitarian plan is that these youths be organized and pushed into forced labor, such as is needed in the clothing trades, in the tanneries, or in collecting the silt in the Thames, thereby facilitating navigation.These proposals are very different from the considered suggestions for social reform in Defoe’s youthful An Essay on Projects. Moreton is led by his indignation to skip rapidly from one dangerous marginal group to another, and the proposals appear not so much constructive as resentful, driven by personal peevishness and accumulated grievance. He fulminates against the shoe shine boys and recommends that they and not the watermen take care of the accumulating silt in the Thames; he finds himself reminded that the watermen are also troublesome: “And now I have mention’d Watermen, give me leave to complain of the Insolencies and Exactions they daily commit on the River Thames” (p. 233) And having strayed from the shoe blackers, he returns to the topic a page or so later as the question occurs to him, “How shall we have our Shoes clean’d, or how are these industrious Poor to be maintain’d? (p. 234). His suggestions read like a parody of the sort of social engineering Defoe is good at, since he envisions the work being done by impoverished older people, “ancient Persons, poor Widows and other, who have not enough from their respective Parishes to maintain ’em” (p. 234). And just in case the shoe shine boys decide to turn link boys (that is to say, boys who carried lighted torches and for a small fee saw night travellers home through the unlit and dangerous London streets), Moreton proposes (led by his fear of these subversive groups) that badges be issued to poor people to license them to serve as link boys, so that the shoe blacks may not rob and terrorize their customers. 348

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 The most interesting aspect of the loose moralizing that characterizes all three of these pamphlets is that Defoe makes Moreton self-conscious about his lack of method. Thus, in Augusta Triumphans, he begs his reader’s indulgence, “being the most immethodical Writer imaginable; ’tis true I lay down a Scheme, but Fancy is so fertile I often start fresh Hints, and cannot but pursue ’em; pardon therefore kind Reader my digressive way of Writing, and let the Subject, not the Stile or Method engage thy Attention” (p. 275). Some commentators have taken this as Defoe’s evocation of his own methods and psychology as a writer, which is only a half truth at best. In his polemics there is always a unifying drive and coherent intelligence, although he is by temperament given to digression. Here the self-characterization seems to be mainly part of the Moreton persona, and yet in the works of Defoe’s last years one notices an increased tendency to digress and in the recycling of his favorite themes and subjects a tendency to wander and to lose a sense of structure, to divagate to the point of a self-indulgence that may be more truly self-expressive of Defoe at this late point in his life than he allowed himself to be as a younger writer. Thus, for example at the beginning of the second of the Moreton pamphlets, The Protestant Monastery (1727), Defoe’s mouthpiece declares that he’s old (the same age as Defoe in fact, sixty seven), “almost worn out with Age and Sickness” (p. 240), and he indulges in his preface in a self-dramatization that any biographer can be forgiven for seeing without direct evidence as written from the heart, closely applicable to Defoe himself and to his circumstances. He was, perhaps, simply worn out after a life of strenuous polemicizing and tireless moralizing: “If my Countrymen find what I advance practicable, I hope they will not call my Integrity in question, and if they have patience to read my well intended Thoughts . . . I hope they will find I have advanc’d nothing but what is practicable, beneficial, and without Self-Interest” (p. 240). Novak speaks of this pamphlet as possessing “the power of a prose King Lear.”23 One can at least agree that Defoe’s theme is the same as Shakespeare’s, as Moreton tells the story of visiting an old acquaintance, a rich merchant who has given all his wealth to his married daughter and gone to live with her and his son-in-law.There he finds the old man mistreated, banished to a mean garret, given poor fare, belittled by his children and ignored by their servants, and (to the detriment of his health and good spirits) forbidden to smoke. Moreton is indignant at all this and especially at the poor meal he is offered when he visits; he reports that he knows that the daughter and her husband had in fact privately dined sumptuously before sitting down with him and their father: “the Reason why Sir and Madam eat so sparingly with us was, because they had devour’d in Hugger Mugger by themselves a good handsome Fowl, and Oyster Sauce, and dispens’d with a Bottle of Wine, though they could drink none in our Company” (p. 245). Moreton treats his friend to a night out at a tavern with good wine and convivial smoking. This looks more like a television sit com than Shakespearean tragedy, but it turns sad enough as Moreton learns that his 349

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 friend has died after more abuse from his daughter in angry response to their night out. Moreton ultimately blames not the children but their parents for spoiling them, but despite that his diatribe is directed at the present generation, their “Ignorance and Impudence” brought on by “this general Corruption of Education” (p. 249). He concludes this part of his pamphlet eloquently enough, warning that parental indulgence means that “we must expect to have our Eyes pluck’d out [perhaps this triggered Novak’s comparison to King Lear] by those we have brought up. We must look for nothing in Old Age, but Contempt, Oppression, and all the Insults we have but too much reason to fear from so inhuman a Generation” (p. 251).There is, clearly, a mixture of farcical, satirical attack and genuine alarm and moral prophecy in this odd work, typical of Defoe in his later years in its tonal imbalance, and we have to add to the final mix the practical solution the problems of older folk promised in the title – a Protestant-Monastery, which turns out to be a commune cum mutual fund for elderly people of means (one for men and/or one for women) who will live together and invest their pooled assets. This proposal, as Moreton admits, is sketchy, and he asks forbearance for his “immethodical Manner of calculating” (p. 253). Defoe begins the last of these pamphlets, Augusta Triumphans (1728), with yet another reference to his narrator’s old age: “I have but a short Time to live, nor would I waste my remaining Thread of Life in Vain” (p. 259), only this time he reverts to the pugnacity of his younger years in his opening paragraph as he defiantly declares that he is not at all alarmed by the “Ridicule which Scoffers constantly pay to projecting Heads” (p. 259). This pamphlet features a few genuinely innovative proposals, the most intriguing and prophetic of which is the notion of establishing a university in London as an alternative to the corrupt ancient universities. Such a foundation, he explains, would not have residence or dining halls and could thus be funded with a modest endowment by renting “a convenient Hall or House, which if they please, they may call a College” (p. 260), and given the extent of London, what he projects is an anticipation of the present University of London in having “many Colleges, quarter’d at convenient Distances” (p. 260) in various parts of the town. He follows this with another prophetic proposal for a foundling hospital (and one such was established in 1741). Finally and most strikingly, he thinks that a music academy would enrich national cultural life by nurturing local talent. But the rest of the pamphlet tends to lose focus as Moreton moves away from particular proposals to more general complaints about the moral condition of London. For example, at the end of the discussion of the music academy, Moreton proposes that Sunday concerts be instituted, thereby offering alternative entertainment to “the publick Walks and Taverns” (p. 268).That evocation of urban moral confusion – “Drinking, Gaming, or profane Discourse” on the Sabbath (p. 268) – moves by natural association to a section with this heading: “That many Youths and Servants may be sav’d from 350

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 Destruction were the Streets clear’d of shameless and impudent Strumpets, Gaming-Tables totally suppress’d, and stop put to Sabbath Debauches” (p. 268). As this section proceeds, Moreton is drawn into topics not promised in this heading that attach themselves to his survey of urban disorder: “I cannot forbear taking Notice of the extravagant use, or rather Abuse of that nauseous Liquor, call’d GENEVA, among our lower sort” (p. 278). Even more a matter of associative linking is the transition from lamenting the prevalence of prostitutes on the streets of London, which leads to the observation that lower class men thus pass on venereal disease caught from these harlots to their wives, to a complaint that such men abuse their wives, and this latter, he says, “leads me to exclaim against the vile Practice now so much in vogue among the better Sort, as they are called” (p. 272) of imprisoning in mad houses of wives by abusive and exploitative husbands. Moreton comes at the end of this section to an admission that the discourse is running away from him as he begs the reader’s “Indulgence for his “digressive way of Writing, and let the Subject, not the Stile or Method engage thy Attention” (p. 275). As further evidence of the eroding of control in this pamphlet, consider the last section, consisting of “Omissions” or afterthoughts for his proposals, such as the need, as he now considers it, for students at the London colleges to dine there rather than go home for their mid-day meal, and the increased urgency of shutting down dishonest mad houses, since as he has learned they are being exploited by unscrupulous families to confine rich relations and exploit their estates (“if the Age improves in Wickedness, as in all Probability it may” [p. 285]). Another kind of downright rhetorical intemperance dominates Defoe’s last, most powerful moral polemic, Conjugal Lewdness; or, Matrimonial Whoredom. A Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed (1727).24 In the preface, Defoe claims that he began the piece nearly thirty years ago and that he has decided to publish it only now that he has “grown OLD, and out of the reach of Scandal . . . despising all unjust Reproaches from a vitious Age, he closes his Days with this Satyr” (p. v). For all this defiant contentiousness of his preface, this long book begins as a sweetly generous defense of the mutual affection and companionship that are the essence, says Defoe, of marriage: “the Matrimonial Duty is all reciprocal; ’tis founded in Love, ’tis performed in the heighth of Affection; its most perfect Accomplishment consists not in the Union of the Sexes, but in the Union of the Souls; uniting their Desires, their Ends, and consequently their Endeavours, for compleating their mutual Felicity” (p. 27). Quoting Milton’s depiction of it in Paradise Lost, Defoe celebrates wedded love: “Possession does not lessen, but heighten their Enjoyments; the Flame does not exhaust it self by burning, but encreases by its continuance; ’tis young in its remotest Age; Time makes no Abatement; they are never surfeited, never satiated; they enjoy all the Delights of Love without the criminal Excesses” (p. 114). Such tenderness is a startling change from Defoe’s customary tone. Often enough, in this book he speaks like a moral 351

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 essayist as well as a sermonizer, and there are many instances of eloquent persuasiveness and aphoristic exhortation that have nothing to do with satiric bitterness: “As Marriage is a state of Life in which so much of humane Felicity is really placed, and in which Men may be so compleatly happy or miserable, it seems to me the most rational thing in the World, that the Parties themselves, and them alone, should give the last Strokes to its Conclusion” (p. 98). Among other things, as this last sentence makes clear, Conjugal Lewdness is a polemic against marrying for money – a pure example he says of “Matrimonial Whoredom” (p. 101) – in which he finds that the widespread contempt for marriage stems from “the Ignorance of the Age; Ignorance of the real Felicity of their very Kind; how all that can be call’d happy in the Life of Man, is summ’d up in the state of Marriage” (p. 96). Defoe’s insistence on this point is a moral commonplace of the times, but we can’t forget that such themes are the center of the many courtship novels to come after his death in the 1740s and 1750s. Defoe’s position on the authority of parents to force their children into marriage or on merely mercenary marrying is moderate, decidedly enlightened (and for that matter modern), not quite what we might expect from so pragmatic and usually so unromantic a commentator. Defoe’s position on loveless marriage is accompanied in his argument by vivid satirical rhetoric of a reactionary kind, with quick evocations of the abominations as he sees them in such unions that lead him on to fiery sermonizing. Here’s an instance from his imagining of the aftermath of the wedding vows of a couple who are marrying for money, convenience, and temporary lust: You will! What will you do, Madam? Wilt you live with a Man, and lie with a Man you don’t love? As I said before, that such as Lady must be a Fool, I say now ’tis worse; ’tis but a kind of legal Prostitution, in the plain English of it, too gross and wicked to express. We must not say she is a Whore, because the Law makes it a literal Contract and Marriage. But GOD forbid I should ever say ‘twill pass for Matrimony in Heaven; the young Lady, in short, is willing, or has a mind, or desires, (call it what you please) to lie with a Man; and she takes a Fellow that is just in the same Condition, under the Instance of some lewd Appetite, and he desires to lie with a Woman. . . . and as they come together upon the meer Principles of Desire, as above, so they act the several Excesses, and all the conjugal Madnesses, Chamberings and Wantonnesses, mentioned or pointed at above, and all this while not one Ounce of Affection, not a Grain of original, chast, and rivetted Love, the Glory of a Christian Matrimony, and the essential Happiness of Life, is to be found between them. (pp. 105–6)

Defoe follows this passage with an account of a wife he knew who revealed in conversation with him that she and her husband had not married for love, and that her marriage is empty and unsatisfactory. Their quiet and restrained dialogue is rendered with sensitivity and without moral blame. They converse and 352

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 Defoe asks her to call her husband in: “Let him alone, says she very coldly, let him alone, you han’t so much of his Company as I have; I had rather be without him; he would have made any Woman in England a good Husband but me.” And when Defoe tells her that everyone thinks he makes her a good husband, she replies, touchingly, “I don’t know, says she, it may be I an’t so good a Wife as I should be” (p. 107). Moments like this, and there are a good number in Conjugal Lewdness, make one think that if Defoe had lived longer he might well have become a sentimental novelist of the first rank in the next two decades. And Conjugal Lewdness resembles at times in its sympathies The Family Instructor and Religious Courtship, as it features a good deal of sharply witty dialogue along with straight exposition. Conjugal Lewdness is, however, most of the time a Juvenalian satire/sermon rather than a moral dialogue, an often ferocious attack against any sort of immodest or excessive marital sensuality (“Marital Whoredom,” the refrain of the book), which as it turns out is worse than unmarried sex or adultery because it defiles the very institution, the central procreative purpose of marriage, as Defoe understands it. It is not the case, he argues, that in marriage “all Things are Decent, all Things modest, all Things lawful between a Man and his Wife; all which, in a few Words, I deny, and insist that there are several Things yet remaining, which stand as Boundaries and Limits to the Freedoms and Intimacies” (p. 59). He denounces, at great length marital sex during pregnancy, during the menstrual period (echoing the Levitical prohibition against such intercourse), and other “unnatural” sexual practices, whose exact nature is just hinted at but include explicitly birth control and abortion, that constitute for him marital whoredom. He even denounces men who marry women who are past child bearing age (and the women who seek out such necessarily barren unions). He denounces marriages in which one of the partners is still carrying the torch for an old flame, for that too is marital whoredom. He rants against widowers marrying again and having more children, thereby depriving the children from their first marriage of their full birth right. He is especially disgusted by men who marry girls young enough to be their daughters, and for that matter women who marry youths a fraction of their age, including his horrified if in the end grotesquely amusing story of a seventy-year old woman who married a nine-year old boy and lived to be a hundred and twenty seven, her boy husband by the time of her death being seventy-two years old. All of these people, says Defoe, take St. Paul’s advice that it is better to marry than to burn in a literal sense; they are thus abusing the sacred institution, turning it into merely an outlet for sexual expression which is technically legal but in violation of the procreative essence and the companionate spirit of marriage. However strange and extreme these opinions may sound to a liberal-minded reader much of Defoe’s perspective is orthodox, and the condemnation of nonprocreative sex and the scriptural warning not to use one’s wife as a harlot 353

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 (quoting Jeremy Taylor, as Defoe does extensively) are traditional (and I fear enduring) Christian emphases in these matters. But there is in this book what feels like a pathological fear of sexual irregularity and excess, and the denunciations of sexuality in general are so vehement and so reiterated that one begins to suspect that Defoe was obsessed by sexuality. Or it may be that the copiousness of Conjugal Lewdness, the reiterative energy with which Defoe attacks this topic, with an extensive collection of sexual anecdotes, grows not out of any personal pathology but springs in its fullness from Defoe’s defining energies as a writer and his capacious curiosity about human experience. Nonetheless, for all his unrelenting indignation about their abuses, sex and marriage turn out to be for Defoe sources of horrified fascination, rather like commerce in one important respect; they are nearly inexhaustible in their manifestations and permutations, and Defoe gives them the compulsive and nearly encyclopaedic attention they deserve, denouncing but at the same time marvelling at the variety and persistence of sexual need that leads to moral and often to physical self-destruction. The sexual abuses Defoe finds are related to a prevailing English corruption, and the many examples of marital whoredom that crowd the book come from “this luxurious, intemperate vitious Age, and in this City in particular” (p. 331). Sexual excess is connected to excess of other sorts, and Defoe’s satiric program is completely traditional in linking sex to what he calls “luxurious living, eating and drinking, what we call rich Diet, high Sauces, strong Wines, and other Incentives, are great Occasions of Vice; are Provocatives, and Raisers of other and more scandalous Appetites” (p. 309) “High feeding,” he continues, “is the Original of high Vices” (p. 311), and Defoe goes so far as to recommend punishing the body, fasting and mortification, even citing the example of St. Francis as a worthy model, even though it looks as he admits that he is recommending “Popery.” He remarks approvingly on the chastity of Catholic nuns, monks, and priests and asks rhetorically as he wonders, scandalized, why so many husbands have intercourse with their wives when they are pregnant: “And shall Protestants not be ashamed to say they cannot – for so little a Time, and so just an Occasion?” (p. 309). For a moment, Defoe seems to sense that he’s gone too far: “This Doctrine of Discipline and Mortification, how much soever it may look like Popery, is notwithstanding a most absolutely necessary thing . . . I am not talking of it here as a religious Exercise, at least not in the Manner and on the Principle of Merit, as the Papists practise it; yet I must own, ’tis the most effectual Means to answer the End in such Cases as these” (p. 315). There are times in this long book, unremitting in its attack on sexual excess, when Defoe’s energetic satire runs away with itself, paints him into a corner as the rhetorical inventiveness of his denunciations takes him into nearly untenable extensions of his position and forces him to explain his way out and to make evasive distinctions. He rises to the satiric occasion by developing a political and moral link to the idea of mor354

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 tification, with the “Affections, which are the grossest Part of the Man” depicted as a “Mob” that requires raising a militia for their suppression: “Violence must be suppress’d by Violence” and “the Man be reduced to the Government of himself, and brought into good Order by proper Powers” (p. 315). Defoe spins out what he labels an “Allegory” and covers over the impolitic approval of papist mortification. The like Plea for Mortifications hold good in most of the other Cases I have mentioned in this Work; for should we trace all the raging Excesses which I have touch’d at in the former Part of this Work to their true Original, we should find much of it owing to the Extravagances of our Living in England; I mean, as to eating and drinking. . . . The same Reason is to be given for other Things; the same Excesses ferment the Blood, raise the Spirits, and produce all the immoderate scandalous Things which I have been complaining of, and which there is so much Reason to complain of among us; in which the Turks and Savages appear to act more like Men of Reason than we do. (pp. 316–17)

Logic is subordinated to satiric fullness and force, and Conjugal Lewdness is self-consciously satirical, almost a theoretical exercise in satirical procedure. Looking back from his concluding chapter, he poses two questions “of which the impartial Reader is to be the Judge. 1. WHETHER the Satyr be Just. 2. WHETHER the Manner be Justifiable” (p. 379). Defoe presents his book in fact as a difficult and dangerous experiment in satire, since his problem as he explains it with some regularity in the course of the work and overtly in his conclusion is how to denounce sexual activities that at their worst cannot because of decency actually be named or fully described. He laments the necessity of withholding names and particulars and also the need to “preserve the Purity of the Design, and the Dignity of a just Satyr” (p. 384). The satire, he concludes, has been just, but he still admits that there can be objections against the “manner”: “The necessity of speaking a Language that is unpleasant to hear, and which, at least, seems to tread on the brink of the same Indecency which it reproves” or “the deficiency of the Reproof from an over-restraint, and declining to express Things fully on that very Account, for fear of offending one Way, offending too much the other” (p. 383). Notable like so much else of Defoe’s writing for its fluency and facility, Conjugal Lewdness is to some extent hindered by this rhetorical restraint. “The Difficulty before me is, to know how to reprove with Decency offences against Decency; how to expose Modestly Things which ’tis hardly Modest so much as to mention, and which must require abundance of clean Linnen to wrap them up in; how to speak of nauseous and offensive Things, in Terms which shall not give offence” (p. 7). But a few pages later he vows that he is determined, that he “shall find Words to expose them, without giving a Blow to Decency . . . so that none but the Guilty need to blush, none but the 355

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 Criminals be offended” (p. 11). And yet Defoe never becomes really explicit, appealing here in somewhat embarrassed fashion to the sexual experience of his married readers: “As I am speaking to the married Persons only, in this Part, I need explain my self no farther than to say, there are Bounds and Measures,Times and Seasons, which Nature and Decency always will dictate to them, and will regulate too, and teach them to regulate between themselves their most intimate conjugal Delights and Embraces” (p. 61). This is suggestive rather than explicit, delicate and discreet, embarrassed, almost, in a work as thunderingly forthright as Conjugal Lewdness. Alongside the book’s full and uninhibited denunciations, such reticence is odd, but it is a recurring theme and problem in Conjugal Lewdness. Literary decorum is not something we associate with Defoe, but here he seems to think that he could not simply give “a keener Edge to the Satyr” by violating decency in his language. Morality trumps literary force in this case, he says. Just as we cannot follow the example of eastern countries where a woman convicted of adultery is led about the city naked because to do that would be “a Breach of the very Modesty which it was intended to punish,” so too in Conjugal Lewdness Defoe says he is forced to “reprove by Allegory and Metaphor, that People may know, or not know what I mean, just as it may happen” (p. 386). Even so, there are some offenses that cannot be mentioned and will escape censure, as “they are too wicked to admit the least Suggestions about them, or so much as to guide the Reader to guess at them” (p. 388). On the one hand, then, Defoe claims that his satire reaches to where the law cannot penetrate – “Satyr can scourge where the Lash of the Law cannot; the Teeth and Talons of the Pen will bite and tear; and the Satyr has a Sting which is made for the Correction of such Offences and such Offenders as bully Justice and think themselves out of the reach of Prisons and Punishments” (p. 382) – but he also admits that some offenders are so indecent and obscene that to denounce them accurately would repeat their offense. In the context of all of Defoe’s work that we have been examining, his notion that there is something in sexual reality (and something crucial) that eludes enumeration, that cannot be described in specific terms is a lack only he could lament. The self-imposed taboo goes to the heart of his defining characteristic as a writer – his need to articulate, to verbalize, to render in words just about everything and anything he encounters. At the very end of his conclusion he goes so far as to say that although he is “done,” he has not “said all I had to say, but all I have Room to say here” (p. 403). Used to fullness, to representations of plenitude that claim completeness, to a prolixity that mimics virtual totality, Defoe here in this work runs up against that which cannot be said. He discovers a boundary to his satiric reach, a frustrating limitation of his moral effect. To that extent, such silence is a prediction of the end of his life of writing that would come in a few years, brought on by old debts and rapid physical rather than intellectual decline. 356

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 Sandwiched in between the Moreton diatribes and the satiric energies (and angry excesses) of Conjugal Lewdness is a book that testifies, if proof were needed, that Defoe’s alertness, intelligence, and satirical wit remained undiminished during his late sixties. Mere Nature Delineated: Or, A Body without a Soul. Being Observations upon the Young Forester Lately brought to Town from Germany (1726) is part social and political satire and part philosophical examination of the issues about language and learning raised by the discovery in Germany of Peter, the so-called Wild Boy of Hamelen, a thirteen or fifteen-year old boy who had been found, supposedly, living like a wild animal in the woods, going about on all fours like a squirrel and unable to speak. Brought in 1725 to George I’s court in Germany (where the new English king spent a good deal of his time, as Elector of Hanover), Peter was subsequently transported to London at the Hanoverian court in 1726, where he became the center of popular curiosity and notice in the papers. Eventually, he was turned over to Dr. John Arbuthnot, the king’s physician, who was to try to educate the boy. Defoe’s satire in this book is conventional, to the point ultimately of tedium, with the connection between the Wild Boy and the satiric targets in the end not really very apt. Peter wants teaching, but in his preface, Defoe declares that it is not Peter who needs instruction but rather “our modern Men of Mode, would be thought wise, when, I think, they want Teaching as much as he does, and, of the Two, something the more.”25 Peter is ignorant, but the ignorance of courtiers and society belles is far worse as well as culpable. Defoe plays with the notion that the Wild Boy’s “foolishness” can be extended to statesmen and politicians, who are “that Part of Mankind . . . thought to be most of kin to him,” and his rhetoric has at times a Swiftian savagery in its evocation of human beings: What can be more rational, than to talk of these People under the Head of Savages and wild People? They are ravenous and devouring, as the most Forest-bred Creature in the World; they prey upon their Fellow Animals with an unsatisfied Appetite. Such a Statesman, they say, is like that Sort of Wolf, which the Indians call a Wigocogocomus, which has no Intestines, but the Reception, Digesture, and Evacuation of what it takes in, is all performed in one Rectum, or great Vessel, reaching from the Os to the Anus, by the mere Heat of the Appetite; dissolving and diffusing Nourishment in the Passage, with an inconceivable Swiftness; so that it is impossible it could be ever satisfied or full. (p. 209)

But such voracity really has nothing to do with poor Peter, who is at first in Defoe’s skeptical review of his case an impossible being who cannot be what some have claimed. A man, Defoe muses, can not be a beast, and the comparison is not flattering to the human species. Sounding rather like Gulliver’s Houyhnhnm master in the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels, Defoe implicitly evokes Robinson Crusoe’s thankfulness that he salvaged tools and weapons from the ship or he would have been unable to survive on his island. 357

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 A Man is no more fit to be a Beast, than a Beast is to be a Man; the rational Part being taken away from him, his Carcass, left utterly destitute is unqualified to live; his Skin is tender, not fenc’d against Blows and Disasters, as is that of the Horse or the Ox; the very Bushes and Briers, which are the Safety and Retreat of other Creatures, will wound and tear him, and he must not come near those Woods, which are the Shelter and Cover of the Hind, and the Stag. He cannot rest on the Ground, or roost in the Bushes; the Trees that are the Habitation of the Fowls, and which cover the other Creatures, scratch and hurt him . . . the poor naked tender-skin’d Brute of Human Kind, must have a House to keep him dry, Cloaths to keep him warm, and a Door to shut him in, or he is lost. He will either be torn with wild Beasts (even Dogs would devour him) or he would be frozen to Death with Cold, or drench’d to Death with Water and Rain. (pp. 158–9)

Traditional though it is, such eloquence evokes Defoe’s recurring themes of isolation and frailty, with humankind utterly dependent upon intelligence and tools for survival. Indirectly, such satire is part of Defoe’s celebration of the superiority of modern life, of technology and trade and the civilization they make possible. But the most interesting part of Defoe’s meditation on this Wild Boy derives from what was apparently true: he could not speak, he knew no language. What might it mean, Defoe wonders, to lack speech like the untaught Peter or like a person born deaf and therefore dumb. Defoe’s interest in this topic was doubtless provoked by the work of the man who would soon become his son-in-law, Henry Baker, who had become a famous teacher of the deaf and devised methods of lip reading to that end.26 As he thought about it, Defoe tells us, he found that although Peter clearly had the use of his senses, without language his impressions of the outside world could mean nothing to him and were simply unintelligible impressions. His reflections on words in the educative process are Lockean in essence, and coming as they do near the end of a life defined by words they are immensely resonant as we contemplate Defoe’s life that is made up as one might say entirely of language. In the context of Defoe’s life of epic articulation, Peter’s muteness is full of pathos. “Words are to us, the Medium of Thought; we cannot conceive of Things, but by their Names, and in the very Use of their Names . . . we cannot muse, contrive, imagine, design, resolve, or reject; nay, we cannot love or hate, but in acting upon those Passions in the very Form of Words” (p. 178).

Last Years: a Coda it has been the injustice, unkindness, and, I must say, inhuman dealings of my own Son, which has both ruin’d my Family, and, in a Word, has broken my Heart. . . . Daniel Defoe, To Henry Baker

358

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 Defoe’s epistolary remains from mid 1720 until his death in 1731 are very small, just a few pages in Healey’s edition. But in the early 1720s, Defoe was busier than ever, and the list of his works from those years, even in Owens’s and Furbank’s purged canon, is a marvel of production in a number of genres. Yet all that seemingly inexhaustible energy runs down, as it had to, and these few letters from his very last years make depressing reading, just as the story of those years is a sad tale of renewed struggle and further financial difficulties, as well as final illness and estrangement from some of his family. A few letters survive from the man who would become his son-in-law, Henry Baker. They concern the protracted negotiations about financial arrangements for Baker’s marriage to Sophia, Defoe’s youngest daughter. Defoe refused to agree to a dowry for Sophia, proposing instead that he leave the couple money in his will. Negotiations dragged on for two years, and at last after Sophia suffered a breakdown the two men agreed on a compromise, with Defoe putting up his Stoke Newington house as security for a bond of £500. The marriage took place on April 30, 1729. In his last surviving letter, to Baker, now his son-in-law, Defoe writes on 12 August, 1730 from hiding, having been pursued again through the courts by an old and remorseless creditor, Mary Brooke, the widow of one of his creditors from many years before who claimed that the debt to her late husband had never been paid.27 This letter may just be the most revealing, the most clearly sincere piece of writing we have in all of Defoe’s life. He describes himself, quite movingly, as ill and lonely, suffering from fever and also cut off from his family – “I have not seen Son or Daughter, Wife or Child, many Weeks, and kno’ not which Way to see them” (Letters, p. 475). Defoe’s summary of his feelings at this low point is without precedent in his correspondence: “sinking under the Weight of Affliction too heavy for my Strength, and looking on myself as Abandon’d of every Comfort, every Friend, and every Relative, except such as are able to give me no Assistance” (Letters, p. 474). What pains him most, he declares is the “inhuman dealings of my own Son,” whose betrayal of the trust he placed in him (Defoe seems to have signed over his estate to one of his sons, Daniel Defoe, junior, to protect his assets from seizure) has been the final blow. Defoe is reduced – after a long life of unwearied self-expression and indefatigable articulation – to silence: “It is too much for me. Excuse my Infirmity, I can say no more; my Heart is too full” (Letters, p. 475). And yet he recovers his composure and we may say his undiminished capacity for eloquent selfpresentation, only now in another register from his characteristic insistence; the letter ends with a quite touching simplicity, with Christian hope and resignation: “I am so near my Journey’s end, and am hastening to the Place where the Weary are at Rest, and where the Wicked cease to trouble . . . I desire to finish Life with this temper of Soul in all Cases: Te Deum Laudamus” (pp. 475–6). 359

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 This letter is a miniature drama, starkly summarizing what must have been the 70-year old Defoe’s final months of lonely suffering, still embattled, still persecuted by creditors; he died ten months later on April 26, 1731, of a “lethargy” say contemporary reports (probably a stroke that occurred in his sleep), at a lodging house in Ropemaker’s Alley, just outside the boundaries of the City, as

Figure 4 The memorial stone, erected in 1870, marking Defoe’s grave in Bunhill Fields, London. Photograph author’s own

360

Political Journalist and Moral Censor: 1715–31 completely alone, James Sutherland remarks, as his own Robinson Crusoe.28 In hiding, both humiliated and embattled in his last days, Defoe was still one of the best known writers of his day, and his death was announced by a number of laudatory obituary notices. Read’s Weekly Journal, for example, commented on May 1, 1731 that Defoe “had a great natural Genius; and understood well the Trade and Interest of his Kingdom” and that he wrote “in the Interest of Civil and Religious Liberty, in behalf of which he appeared on several remarkable Occasions.”29 But even past his bitter end, his enemies continued to attack him. Thus, there appeared just after his death the following notice in The Grub-street Journal: On Monday in the evening died, at his lodgings in Rope-makers alley, in Moorfields, the famous Mr. DANIEL DE FOE, in a very advanced age. [Daily] COURANT. – It is no small comfort to me, that my brother died in a (good) old age, in a place made famous by the decease of several of our members; having kept himself out of the dangerous alleys of those high-flying rope-makers, who would fain have sent him long ago, to his long home, by the shortest way with the Dissenters . . .30

Ropemaker’s Alley was near Grub Street, proverbial home of hack writers, and this malicious mock tribute stirs up memories of Defoe’s imprisonment for his most notorious pamphlet and wonders how he had the good fortune to escape the gallows and die at an advanced age in his bed. Elusive to the end, Defoe had slipped away from his creditors and from malicious enemies such as this. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, just outside the City of London, in Islington, on April 26, 1731. His grave in this Puritan cemetery shares space with the three great dissenting Englishmen of his century – John Bunyan, Isaac Watts, and William Blake. Defoe can hold his own in this company. During his lifetime he was more prominent and certainly more notorious than any of them, just as his name continues to resonate to some extent in the mind of the larger western and European-influenced world as the author of Robinson Crusoe. My hope in writing this book is that for its readers he is now much more than simply that.

361

Notes

Notes to the Preface 1. Paula Backsheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. xi. 2. Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 3. Throughout the biographical chapters of this book, I depend for the facts on James Sutherland’s still reliable and readable biography, Defoe (London: Methuen & Co., 1937), as well as on Backscheider’s and Novak’s exhaustive accounts of the life. I am also indebted to F. Bastian’s Defoe’s Early Life (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1981) and to the invaluable notes in George Harris Healey’s edition of The Letters of Daniel Defoe (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1933). 4. W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique of J.R. Moore’s Checklist (London and Rio Grande, Ohio: The Hambledon Press, 1994), p. vii. Although the book that follows treats a good proportion of the works now more or less confidently assigned to Defoe, there are many works that I do not discuss or for that matter even mention. I hope the works I have chosen, some of them prominent in Defoe’s career, and some of them (like the novels) by common consent his best and most interesting, provide a representative sample. 5. The Works of Daniel Defoe, general editors, W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999–) projected to comprise 44 volumes, is featured in the following chapters. It is an invaluable contribution to Defoe scholarship and one of the heroic scholarly endeavors of our time. 6. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980; first published 1904), p. 928. Hesther Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., during the Last Twenty Years of his Life (1786), in Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols., ed. George Birkbeck Hill (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966; first published 1897), I, 332.

362

Notes to pp. vii–3 7. George Chalmers’ Life of Defoe, afterword to The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, London, 1804 [first published in 1785], p. 446, p. 454). The story of Defoe’s biography (and bibliography) in the careers of Chalmers and the pioneering biographers and bibliographers who followed him – Walter Wilson, William Lee, James Crossley, W.P. Trent, and J.R. Moore – is well told by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens in their The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1988), pages 51–124. And see also for more on bibliographical problems their A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998). 8. P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe, p. 137. In his excellent book on Defoe’s Tour, Pat Rogers notes that “we have grown so accustomed to the testimonies of authors that [Defoe’s] anonymity comes to seem almost sinister.” Rogers observes here as well that since he never mentions his novels in his correspondence, our ignorance of Defoe extends from the externals of his biography to his methods as a writer. See Pat Rogers, The Text of Great Britain:Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1998), p. 61. 9. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 155. Nabokov makes the remark to an interviewer. 10. “General Editors’ Preface,” Writings on Travel, Discovery, and History by Daniel Defoe, vol. 1: A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Volume I, ed. John McVeagh (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), p. 2. 11. A tremendous amount of commentary and criticism, books and essays both scholarly and popular, surrounds Defoe and his work, especially of course Robinson Crusoe, as well as the other novels that he wrote. In the following chapters, I make no effort to respond to the bulk of that commentary. That would be exhausting and pointless for both me and my readers. Rather, I choose a few commentators, especially in the chapters that deal with the novels, whose work has in my view been influential on current thinking about the importance and significance of Defoe’s work and who have helped me to articulate my own understanding of Defoe. I refer the interested reader to the bibliography at the end of this volume as well as to the following useful annotated bibliography: John Stoler, Daniel Defoe: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1900–1980 (New York: Garland Press, 1984).

Chapter 1 1. To fill in this blank childhood, a crucial set of years of course for modern notions of the development of personality, biographers have invented pleasant or dramatic narratives that are more or less plausible, although sometimes fanciful. Paula Backscheider’s summary is one of the best and most compact, and it can be accepted as likely and useful for understanding Defoe’s later life: “Even in this tumultuous, serious world, Defoe must have done the things children always do. He must have played in the vacant lots and built with the stones and boards in the wreckage from the fire. He undoubtedly knew the markets, shops, warehouses, and wharves of the city well. He surely saw pickpockets pumped, thieves hanged, and the carriages of

363

Notes to pp. 3–4

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

the wealthy crowd the narrow streets. He appears to have spent some part of his boyhood in the country, and he writes easily about boxing, wrestling, foxhunting, cardplaying, cockfighting, football, racing, and a number of children’s games. Here and there he recounts a youthful prank or adventure, as he does in An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727) when he describes making a vacant house seem haunted. His books are full of realistic domestic scenes and innocent recreations,” Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, pp. 20–1. Defoe’s Early Life, pp. 30–1. Defoe’s Review (Reproduced from the Original Editions, with an Introduction and Bibliographical Notes by Arthur Wellesley Secord. 9 Vols. In 22 volumes. Published for the Facsimile Text Society by Columbia University Press. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938). All further references to the Review are to this edition. To avoid confusion, I cite numbers of the Review simply by their original dates, omitting Defoe’s volume numbers and the facsimile edition volume numbers. I have also modernized slightly in my quotations from the Review here and throughout the book, dropping the numerous italics, but I have retained original spelling and punctuation, as well as the capitalization of common nouns. A new complete and annotated edition of the Review, part of the Pickering & Chatto edition of Defoe’s works, is under way, edited by John McVeagh. At this final writing of my book, only the first four volumes have appeared, and so I have not been able to cite this new edition. Act of Uniformity cited by N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), pp. 30–1. I take details of the Act from Keeble’s discussion. Defoe, p. 11. A Short View of the Present State of the Protestant Religion, p. 14. Cited by Keeble, p. 31. And in “The Dissenter Misrepresented, and Represented” (1704), Defoe put the number “near three Thousand.” Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 3, Dissent, ed. W.R. Owens (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), p. 214. Owens himself in a note to this pamphlet put the number at about 1,000 (n. 10, p. 373). Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity, p. 31. In The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688–1832 (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 7–8 and 16, Frank O’Gorman estimates the numbers of Protestant dissenters, including Presbyterians, Congregationalists or Independents, Baptists, and Quakers at about 300,000 out of an English population of some 5.5 million. W.R. Owens in a note to Defoe’s 1702 pamphlet, “An Enquiry into Occasional Conformity” says that historians now reckon the number of dissenters in the early eighteenth century somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 or about 10% of the population of England and Wales. See Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 3, Dissent, p. 362. In The Literary Culture of Nonconformity, N. H. Keeble points out that the term “dissenter” dates from the mid seventeenth century but that “it did not become the universal term for all the nonepiscopal congregations of England until the early eighteenth century.” (p. 41) As Keeble goes on to note, it was the punitive penal legislation at the end of the seventeenth century that lumped together nonconformists as diverse as Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Quakers. “They faced a common foe and endured a common plight. What they thus shared together

364

Notes to pp. 4–13

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

separated them as a group from the established church far more pressingly than anything which separated them from each other. It was the shared experience of persecution which created dissent out of the various nonconformities of 1660.” (p. 44). David Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; first published 1955), pp. 42–3. See Bastian, Defoe’s Early Life, p. 15. The Compleat English Gentleman, by Daniel Defoe, Edited for the first time from the Author’s Autograph Manuscript in the British Museum, with Introduction, Notes, and Index,by Karl Bülbring (London: David Nutt, 1890), pp. 208, 209–10. The Compleat English Gentleman, p. 223. The Compleat English Gentleman, pp. 199, 201. Compleat English Gentleman, p. 219. Compleat English Gentleman, pp. 218–20. In their Critical Bibliography (p. 125), Furbank and Owens admit that it is “highly probable” that Defoe wrote this tract, and since as they note so much of it deals with The Shortest Way with the Dissenters and with Morton’s academy I am treating it, I think without controversy, as Defoe’s. The Present State of the Parties in Great Britain (London, 1712), p. 295. The Present State of the Parties, p. 316. Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, pp. 52–55. The Meditations of Daniel Defoe, ed. George Harris Healey (Cummington, Massachusetts: The Cummington Press, 1946), p. 16. James R. Sutherland, Defoe, p. 28. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 75. Sutherland, Defoe, p. 30. An Appeal to Honour and Justice, in The Shakespeare Head Edition of the Novels and Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927), Volume IX, p. 213. On the pardon, see Bastian, Defoe’s Early Life, p. 122. Paula Backscheider provides the most detailed and interesting summary of what is known about Defoe’s role in Monmouth’s rebellion, and she also offers a fascinating evocation of the difficulties and dangers Defoe must have faced in surviving the aftermath of the battle. See Daniel Defoe: His Life, pp. 35–40. Daniel Defoe: His Life, p. 37. She estimates there that there were only a few hundred Londoners with Monmouth, and she notes that James had effectively sealed off the city and arrested several hundred prominent dissenters. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 84. Sutherland speculated that Defoe was probably by chance in the west country on business when Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis and joined the army on a whim, “and curiosity, high spirits, and a real interest in the young Duke’s cause induced him to ride with the rebels.” (Sutherland, Defoe, p. 11) Bastian, Defoe’s Early Life, p. 120. John Oldmixon, The History of England, During the Reigns of King William and Mary, Queen Anne, King George I. Being the Sequel of the Reigns of the Stuarts (London, 1735), p. 37. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 91. An Appeal to Honour and Justice, p. 195.

365

Notes to pp. 13–19 33. The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. George Harris Healey (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 68. All further page references in the text to the Letters are to Healey’s edition. I preserve all the original spellings and capitalizations. 34. For these details and many more in this complicated power game, see Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III, pp. 445–58. 35. Quoted in Sutherland, Defoe, p. 70. 36. Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III, pp. 462–63. 37. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, General editors, W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, vol. 2: Party Politics, ed. J.A. Downie (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), p. 59. 38. Party Politics, ed. Downie, p. 46. 39. Party Politics, ed. Downie, p. 42. 40. Sutherland, Defoe, p. 72. 41. Party Politics, ed. Downie, p. 49. 42. Party Politics, ed. Downie, p. 64. 43. An Essay upon Projects, ed., Joyce D. Kennedy, Michael Seidel, Maximillian Novak, The Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition (New York: AMS Press, 1999), p. 1. The editors note that Defoe attributed his 1692 bankruptcy to his losses sustained in the war with France, since in 1694 he petitioned the House of Commons to be one of those compensated for such losses. 44. Sutherland, Defoe, pp. 34–42. 45. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, p. 60. And see pp. 50–61, for a detailed narrative of Defoe’s tangled business affairs in these years. 46. Sutherland, Defoe, p. 44. 47. Dissent, ed. W.R. Owens, p.122. 48. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, p. 62. 49. An Appeal to Honour and Justice, pp. 194–5. 50. Frank Bastian notes in recounting this name change that Defoe continued to appear in various documents as “Foe” for years afterward. See Defoe’s Early Life, pp. 189–90. 51. Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), p. xi. Seidel’s Chronology of Defoe in this volume is the best (and most amusing) brief summary of Defoe’s life that I know. 52. Defoe’s first actual publication may have been a pamphlet that came out in 1688, “A Letter to a Dissenter from his Friend at the Hague,” which Owens and Furbank consider as “probably” by Defoe. In the book that follows, I will use their Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998) as my guide through the tangle of works that have been since the early nineteenth century attributed to Defoe on insufficient grounds, as they to mind reasonably assert. But some of the works they label as “probably” by Defoe, which other bibliographers (notably Maximillian Novak) are more certain about will be treated as if they were by Defoe. Wherever possible, however, I will avoid this can of worms by sticking to Owens’s and Furbank’s certain attributions. 53. An Appeal to Honour & Justice, p. 191. 54. Pat Rogers, ed., Defoe:The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), “Introduction,” p. 4.

366

Notes to pp. 20–32 55. A True Collections of the Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman (The Second Edition Corrected and Enlarg’d by himself), London, 1705, Sig A3v. All further references in the text are to this edition, in two volumes. See below, p. 52. 56. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 177. 57. “A Brief Explanation of a Late Pamphlet, Entituled The Shortest Way with the Dissenters,” Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 3, Dissent, ed. W. R. Owens, p. 113. 58. Francis Watson, Daniel Defoe (Port Washington, NY and London: Kennikat Press, 1952), p. 3. 59. Cited by Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 179. 60. The History and Reality of Apparitions [cited by J.R. Moore, Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19 58), as Tegg edition. pp. 120–2]. 61. Letters of Daniel Defoe, p. 8, note 3. 62. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, p.172, ll. 92–9. 63. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, p. 182, ll 427–48. As Furbank and Owens explain in a note, “the paper in his hat” refers to the judgment that sentenced Defoe to the pillory as stipulating that he should stand there “with a paper on his head on which his offenses are written.” 64. Moore, Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World, p. 104. 65. For a detailed accounting of debts and lawsuits bedeviling Defoe at this time, see Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, pp. 119–120. 66. An Appeal to Honour and Justice, p. 200. 67. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, pp. 120–1. 68. Letters of Daniel Defoe, p. 6, note 1. 69. A History of the Tory Party 1640–1714 (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1924), p. 376. 70. Defoe reprinted this poem in A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman (London, 1705), and I quote from that edition, p. 86. 71. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 211. 72. Defoe’s Review, pp. xvii, xix. 73. Defoe’s Review, Preface to volume I, p. 1. 74. Defoe’s Review, Preface to volume VIII, no pagination.

Chapter 2 1. According to the OED, from the sixteenth century on, the word “projector” has had a neutral signification (“one who forms a project, who plans or designs some enterprise or undertaking”) as well as a highly negative or invidious use (“a schemer; one who lives by his wits; a promoter of bubble companies; a speculator, a cheat”). 2. An Essay upon Projects, The Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition, ed. Joyce D. Kennedy, Michael Seidel, Maximillian Novak (New York: AMS Press, 1999), p. 123. All further references in parentheses in the text are to this edition.

367

Notes to pp. 33–44 3. For a close analysis of Defoe’s inaccuracies and mistakes in arithmetic, see the relevant notes in Joyce D. Kennedy, Michael Seidel, and Maximillian Novak’s edition of An Essay. 4. “Negoce” is an archaic term (even in Defoe’s day) for business or commerce. 5. As Bastian explains, in 1687 Sir William Phips had succeeded in salvaging over £200,000 in gold and silver from a Spanish shipwreck off the Bahamas, and this success led to various other schemes for diving engines for such purposes. Defoe invested £200 in one of these, a diving bell invented by Joseph Williams.The project soon collapsed, and Williams sued both Defoe and another investor. See Frank Bastian, Defoe’s Early Life, pp. 167–9. 6. Cited in Defoe:The Critical Heritage, ed. Pat Rogers (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 38. Defoe returned the contempt in full measure, speaking in 1726, in his Mere Nature Delineated, his book about the Wild Boy of Hamelen, of Swift as “The Copper-Farthing Author,” an allusion to his pamphlets, The Drapier’s Letters, that attacked the government’s plan to allow a private contractor to mint money in Ireland. Later in this same work, Defoe satirized “the learned Dr. S__; he that can Preach and read Prayers in the Morning, write Baudy in the Afternoon, banter Heaven and Religion, and write prophanely at Night; and then read Prayers and Preach again the next Morning, and so on in a due Rotation of Extremes.” See Mere Nature Delineated, Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, vol. 5, ed. Andrew Wear (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002), pp. 172, 182. 7. Earless on high, stood unabash’d Defoe, And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge, below: There Ridpath, Roper cudgell’d might ye view; The very worsted still look’d black and blue. (Dunciad Variorum, II. 133–6). Tutchin, Ridpath, and Roper were well-known journalists, rivals in fact of Defoe. 8. Quoted in Rogers, Defoe: The Critical Heritage, p. 34. 9. The Works of Daniel Defoe, general editors, W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000–2005). By 2008, a total of 44 volumes is projected. 10. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 3: Dissent, ed.W.R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000), p. 29. Henceforth referred to simply as Dissent. All further references to this work will be in parentheses in the text. 11. Quoted in James Sutherland, Defoe, p. 83. 12. N.H. Keeble describes occasional conformity as “a liberal and, originally, purely religious practice, defended as such as by Baxter in 1671 and 1672, against the more rigorous separatism of Edward Bagshaw, who thought ‘it a sin to hear a Conformist’. It was an attempt at once to refuse the partisan loyalty demanded by the Church of England without lapsing into another, and equally damaging, partisanship.” The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England, p. 36. 13. “An Enquiry into Occasional Conformity. Shewing that the Dissenters Are no Way Concern’d in it” (1702), in Dissent, p. 93. All further references to this work will be in parentheses in the text. 14. Dissent, ed Owens, page 358, note 4. 15. Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, p. 95.

368

Notes to pp. 44–53 16. Introduction, Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 1, Constitutional Theory (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), p. 26. Charles Leslie (1650–1722) was a prolific and rhetorically powerful High-Church and Jacobite polemicist. From 1704 to 1709 he wrote The Rehearsal, a Tory periodical aimed at Whig papers like Defoe’s Review and Tutchin’s Observator. 17. Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 250–51. 18. “Introduction,” Dissent, p. 8. 19. Dissent, p. 114. All further references to this work are in parentheses in the text. 20. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, p. 126. 21. Dissent, p. 119. All further references to this work are in parentheses in the text. 22. Dissent, p. 177. All further references to this work are in parentheses in the text. 23. “A New Test of the Church of England’s Honesty” (1704), Dissent, p. 195. Defoe acknowledged his authorship of this when he included it the following year in the second volume of A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman. 24. The Wolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Cloathing. In Answer to a Late Celebrated Book Intituled Moderation a Vertue; WHEREIN The Designs of the DISSENTERS against the Church: And their Behaviour towards Her MAJESTY both in England and in Scotland are laid open (London, 1704).The book Leslie is attacking is a defense of occasional conformity by a Presbyterian minister, James Owen, Moderation, a Virtue: or, the Occasional Conformist Justify’d from the Imputation of Hypocrisy (1703). Further references to this work are in parentheses in the text. 25. Dissent, pp. 164, 167. As Owens points out in his note to this passage, Ultra Tenementem [properly, tenementum] means beyond [i.e., out of proportion to] one’s estate (p. 368, n. 11). It’s worth noting that Defoe included this pamphlet in the second volume of A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman. 26. A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman (London, 1705), p. 281. All further references to this work are in parentheses in the text. 27. Dissent, p. 189. Further references to this work are in parentheses in the text. 28. Dissent, p. 223. Furbank and Owens call this “a punchy and forensic work” and note that although it appeared in the second volume of The Writings of the True-Born Englishman no independently published version has been found. They speculate on the basis of a letter Defoe wrote to John Fransham that he wrote it in response to the Parliamentary debate on another version of the Occasional Conformity bill and had it printed and sent it in small batches to interested parties around the country. See W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, pp. 58–59. 29. A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman, the second edition (London, 1705), Preface, Sig. A3. All further references to this edition are in parentheses in the text. 30. London, 1705. The Preface, Sig. A3 verso. 31. “The High-Church Legion: Or, The Memorial Examin’d. Being, A New Test of Moderartion. As ‘tis recommended to all that love the Church of England, And the Constitution,” in Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 2, ed. J.A. Downie, p. 109. All further references to this pamphlet are in parentheses in the text.

369

Notes to pp. 55–62 32. James Sutherland remarks with his characteristic dry wit that “it may be said that much of Defoe’s verse was obviously written at about the same speed, and with the same facility, as his prose.” Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 91. 33. Paul Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition & Innovation (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), p. 12. Backscheider cites Frank Ellis’s remark in his edition of volume 6 and notes that Defoe’s verse accounts for fully half of the lines in the volume. Poems on Affairs of State, vol. VI., ed. Frank Ellis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. xxxii. The Yale edition is a modern version of the original four volumes: Miscellanies and Collections, 1660–1750 (Poems on Affairs of State) London, 1697–1716. 34. On Defoe’s reading of Dryden and Rochester as a young man, see Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, pp. 60–1. 35. A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman (London, 1705), p. 131. Further page references in the text are to this edition. 36. See Novak on the political background of the poem, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, pp. 107–8, and also Bastian, Defoe’s Early Life, pp. 154–5, and Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, pp. 53–5. 37. Defoe reprinted this poem in the 1705 second volume of The Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman, and I quote from that edition, p. 22. 38. Defoe reprinted the poem in the first volume of The Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman (1703). My references are to the second, 1705, edition, p. 111. 39. A Collection of Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1718). 40. The Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman (London, 1705), p. 156. 41. John Tutchin, “The Foreigners” (London, 1700), pp. 5, 6. Furbank and Owens in their Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe provide a compact summary of the poem’s incredible popularity, noting that some twenty-two editions or impressions have been found in Defoe’s lifetime. They also note that in the preface to The Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman Defoe complained about widespread piracy of the poem, claiming that it had been “Twelve Times printed by other Hands” (p. 20). 42. A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman, volume one, the second edition (London, 1705), Sig. B4v. All further page references in the text are to this edition. 43. Defoe’s poem remained popular and familiar to readers for most of the eighteenth century. In Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8), for a surprising example, the fatuous and pedantic clergyman, employed by the Harlowes to report on Clarissa’s condition, Elias Brand, quotes the opening lines of “The True Born Englishman” by “Mr Daniel de Foe”, calling him “an ingenious man, though a dissenter”. Clarissa, or,The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin Books, 1985, 2004), p. 1293. 44. Owens and Furbank see this as a translation from Juvenal: Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus, Satires, VIII, 20. See their Penguin collection, The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings (London, 1997). But Defoe certainly gives it a proverbial English quality.

370

Notes to pp. 64–79 45. See above, Chapter 1, p. 24. 46. A True Collection, volume one, the second edition, p. 52. All further page references in the text are to this edition. 47. A True Collection, volume one, the second edition, p. 65. All further page references in the text are to this edition. The lines from Juvenal can be translated this way: It is hard not to write satire. For who can be so tolerant of this city, who so ironwilled, as to contain himself? 48. A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman, p. 38. All further pages references in the text are to this edition. 49. The Rochester paraphrase is noted by James Sutherland, Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study, p. 110. Rochester was one of Defoe’s favorite and most often-quoted poets, to whom as Sutherland remarked “he was always ready to grant a special kind of indulgence for the sake of his wit.” p. 110.

Chapter 3 1. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989; first published 1962), p. 54. 2. Paula Backscheider provides a clear explanation of these traditional privileges and important hierarchies in the City of London. See Daniel Defoe: His Life, pp. 22–8. 3. See on this point, J.A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 1 and passim. 4. P.N. Furbank, Introduction, Constitutional Theory, vol. I of Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, p. 17. 5. Political and Economic Writings, Constitutional Theory, vol. I, ed. P.N. Furbank. All further references in the text to these three pamphlets are to this edition. Defoe reprinted the second of these pamphlets in the first volume of A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman. 6. The World of Defoe (New York: Atheneum, 1977), p. 98. Earle notes that Defoe also used the phrase in An Essay upon Projects. 7. Political and Economic Writings, International Relations, vol. V, ed. P.N. Furbank, p. 34. All further references to these pamphlets in the text are to this edition. Both these pamphlets were reprinted in the first volume of A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman. 8. Political and Economic Writings, International Relations, vol. V, ed. P. N. Furbank, p. 46. All further references in the text to these two pamphlets are to this edition. And both these pamphlets were reprinted in the first volume of A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman. 9. Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship, and Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 49, 51. 10. Political and Economic Writings, Constitutional Theory, vol. I, ed. P.N. Furbank, p. 101. All further references in the text are to this edition.

371

Notes to pp. 79–105 11. Political and Economic Writings, Constitutional Theory, vol. I, ed. P.N. Furbank, p. 133. All further references in the text are to this edition. 12. Downie paraphrases the eighteenth-century Tory journalist, Abel Roper, and offers the following appraisal of Defoe’s self-conception: “Defoe, like Swift, indulged in self-delusion. He preferred to think he had retained his integrity as a writer. But it was precisely this feature of his psyche which rendered him so very useful to Oxford. He made no pretence to political power, and his conscience could be readily eased by the application of specie.” J.A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, p. 133. 13. Political and Economic Writings, International Relations, vol.V, ed. P.N. Furbank, pp. 61–2. All further references in the text are to this edition. This pamphlet was reprinted in A True Collection, volume I. 14. The pamphlet was reprinted in the second volume of The Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman, and I quote from that edition, p. 453. Further page references in the text are also to this edition. 15. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, p. 2. 16. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, p. 65 17. A View of the Times. Their Principles and Practices: In the first Volume of the Rehearsals. By Philalethes. London, 1708. Preface, n.p. This edition is a reprinting of Leslie’s Rehearsal, a periodical that appeared from 1705 onwards. 18. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, p. 8. In his introduction to the first two volumes of the new Pickering & Chatto edition of the Review, John McVeagh surveys estimates of the Review’s circulation by Downie and by James Sutherland and notes that “one thing is clear: the Review was a small-circulation periodical compared to its newspaper rivals.” See A Review of the Affairs of France,Volume I: 1704–1705 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), p. xxi. 19. Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), pp. 186–7. 20. Not that this was the last mention in the Review of “The Shortest Way,” since Defoe returned to it again in the months to come many times. 21. This notice was repeated verbatim in January 9, 11, 16, 21, 23, 25, 30, February 4, 6, 1706 numbers. 22. Preface to Volume VI, Defoe’s Review, ed. Secord, Facsimile Book 14. 23. James Sutherland, Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 74. 24. Introduction, A Review of the Affairs of France, p. xv. 25. See Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, p. 156–78, for a vivid evocation of the violence. 26. “Introduction,” A Review of the Affairs of France, I, p. xl. 27. In my book on Defoe for the Twayne’s English Authors series, I put it this way, a formulation I’m paraphrasing here: “Ordering a great, whirling mass of material and yet preserving something of its experiential quality as intractable, real confusion, Defoe’s style and sensibility in the Review looks forward in this sense to his fictional characters.” Daniel Defoe, (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1987), p. 24. 28. Jure Divino: A Satyr. In Twelve Books. By the Author of The True-Born Englishman (London, 1706), p. xxv. After a prose introduction and then a poetic introduction

372

Notes to pp. 105–125 paginated in lower case Roman numerals, each of the twelve books of the poem is numbered separately, and my references in the text will reflect that. 29. The lines from Juvenal are slightly misquoted: aude aliquid brevibus Gyaris et carcere dignum, si vis esse aliquid: probitas laudatur et alget. If you want to be anybody nowadays, you must dare some crime that merits narrow Gyara or a gaol; honesty is praised and left to shiver. Juvenal and Persius, with an English translation by G.G. Ramsay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 8–9. 30. The Consolidator, by Daniel Defoe, ed. Michael Seidel, Maximillian Novak, Joyce D. Kennedy (New York: AMS Press, 2001), p. xxiii. Further references in the text are to this edition. 31. “The Dyet of Poland, a Satyr” (London, 1705). I use as my text the electronic version of this edition to be found in the data base, Literature on Line (LION) produced by Chadwyck-Healey. Defoe’s Preface is unpaginated. All further line references in the text are to this edition.

Chapter 4 1. There, in that long letter, he lays out for Harley the ideal political stance of strategic patronage of those he needs to cultivate and, chiefly, how to practice a calculated dissimulation like that recommended by St. Paul, in Defoe’s favorite scriptural lines, “becoming all things to all men, that he might gain some” (Letters, p. 43), so that “In your particular post, Sir, you may so govern, as that every party shall believe you their own” (Letters, p. 42). 2. Daniel Defoe, Caledonia: A Poem in Honour of Scotland and the Scots Nation. In Three Parts (Edinburgh, 1706), p. 17. 3. Defoe, Caledonia, p. 59. 4. Introduction, Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, Union with Scotland, vol. IV, ed. D.W. Hayton (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), p. 3. 5. Ever the apologist for Defoe, Novak rejects the charge that he was dishonest: “What is certainly true is that the projector in him could not resist a good deal. If the government was going to allow an opening for some slight cheating through the provisions of the Act of Union, was it not almost his obligation to take advantage of it?” Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 321. 6. Daniel Defoe, The History of the Union of Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1709), paginated in separate parts, with this quotation taken from the third part, “Of the Carrying on of the Treaty in Scotland,” p. 5. All further references in the text are to this edition. 7. James Sutherland, Defoe, p. 161. 8. Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (New Haven:Yale Univ. Press, 1980; new edition, 2001), p. 257. 9. Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, p. 75. 10. See Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, pp. 238–9.

373

Notes to pp. 126–145 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, p. 254. Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 324. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 326 Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, p. 230. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 2, “Party Politics,” ed. J. A. Downie (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), Introduction, p. 3. Sutherland, Defoe, p. 183. Political and Economic Writings, vol. 2, p. 392. Political and Economic Writings, vol. 2, p. 222. All further references to this pamphlet are in brackets in the text. Junto Whigs: or Juncto – a term used to describe a Whig faction led by Earls Somers, Halifax, Orford, Sunderland, and Wharton who beginning in 1706 played a leading role in the Whig administration led by Godolphin. See Downie, Political and Economic Writings, p. 388. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 2, p. 172. All further references to this work are in parentheses in the text. Sutherland, Defoe, p. 195. London, 1712. All further page references in the text are to this edition. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 1, ed. P.N. Furbank, pp. 167–68. All further references in parentheses in the text to this pamphlet and its two successors are to this volume. Parker’s letter is reprinted in Healey’s edition of Defoe’s Letters, pp. 410–11.

Chapter 5 1. A contemporary of Defoe, Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) was a Dutch émigre to England, a doctor and more to the point a moral philosopher and satirist. His most well-known (indeed notorious) work was The Fable of the Bees, or: Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714), a doggerel poem (“The Grumbling Hive”) with many prose commentaries attached to it, advancing the thesis that in the words of the title society prospered chiefly through the vices of individuals, who in pursuing their appetites for goods that in truth they do not actually need supported trade and commerce and thereby created wealth. These views gave great offense to many, but their realistic view of the operations of a modern commercial society were in fact admired by many, including Defoe. 2. This pamphlet is reprinted in Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, general editors W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, vol. 8 Social Reform, ed. W. R. Owens (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000). It was a response, as the title page announces, to a bill introduced in Parliament by Sir Humphry Mackworth for “the Better Relief, Imployment, and Settlement of the Poor.” The quotation is from p. 188. All further references in the text are to this edition. 3. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, ed. P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 38. 4. Maximillian E. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), p. 10. Elsewhere, however, Novak finds

374

Notes to pp. 145–151

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

Defoe rather well-disposed to the lower classes, and in one of his essays he speaks of Defoe’s “refusal to condemn completely the mobs of his day.” He distinguished, says Novak, “between good mobs and bad mobs,” and argued that “unless deceived by false propaganda, they were usually a manifestation of some wrong that needed to be redressed.” “Defoe and the Disorderd City,” in The Journal of the Plague Year: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), p, 307. (Novak’s essay originally appeared in PMLA 92(1977): 241–52.) And see as well on these issues Peter Earle’s The World of Defoe (New York: Atheneum, 1977), which is an excellent survey of all of Defoe’s ideas, including economics. On Defoe’s unprogressive economic ideas, see p. 108, 109, and 126–27. The first pamphlet was included in the first volume of A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman. These momentous changes have been tracked by P.G. M. Dickson in The Financial Revolution in England: a Study in the Development of Public Credit (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967). Thomas Keith Meier notes that inconsistency is the essence of Defoe’s economic thinking, and he puts this case very strongly: “Defoe contradicts, in one or another of the pamphlets attributed to him, virtually every economic pronouncement he makes. He usually invokes theory only in order to reinforce particular arguments of topical interest; depending upon which political party or issue he was supporting at the time, he might invoke a theoretical position which he had formerly dismissed as invalid.” Defoe and the Defense of Commerce (Victoria, British Columbia: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1987), p. 27. Introduction to Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 7, Trade (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), pp. 13–14. Novak’s Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (1962) is the classic treatment of Defoe’s economic ideas. Peter Earle offers a somewhat different view of Defoe’s view of the poor, asserting that “few early eighteenth-century writers has such a clear idea of the causes of poverty as Defoe and, in many of his works, he is remarkably tolerant towards the poor and shows an understanding of their problems” (p. 183). But a few pages later on, Earle admits that Defoe’s grasp of the root causes of poverty was weak, since he never really considered “the endemic problem of underemployment in any depth” (p. 186). Defoe reprinted this pamphlet (in expanded form) in A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman (second edition, London, 1705), p. 171. All further references to this text are to this edition. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, ed. W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, vol. 6, Finance, ed. John McVeagh (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), p. 35. All further references in the text are to this edition. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, ed. W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, vol. 6, Finance, ed. John McVeagh, p. 152.All further references in the text are to this edition. John McVeagh, in his introduction to volume 6, Finance, of Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, cites this passage from Jure Divino and discusses Defoe’s complicated and contradictory opinions about the financial revolution. He also provides an excellent summary of the history of that revolution. Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 45. Sherman takes these

375

Notes to pp. 151–164

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

paradoxical notions and implications much further than this, as she develops the complex textual instability she claims is unleashed by Defoe’s female allegory: “The irony of Defoe’s rhetoric is that the destabilization induced by stockjobbers, sworn enemies of Lady Credit, is consistent with her own instability, both as to gender norms and in terms of physical virginity itself ” (p. 45). Her book is a brilliant working out of the proposition that there is, to use her term, a “homology” between credit instruments or financial discourse and literary texts, both afflicted by indeterminacy and uncertainty. See also in this same vein, Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: a Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), which argues more specifically and with more literary examples than Sherman for the intimate relationship between the anxiety caused by the new credit economy and literary production in writers like Alexander Pope and Eliza Haywood. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 441. Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century, p. 1. “An Essay Upon Publick Credit: Being an Enquiry How the Publick Credit comes to depend upon the Change of the Ministry, or the Dissolutions of Parliaments; and whether it does so or no. With an Argument, Proving that the Public Credit may be upheld and maintain’d in this Nation; and perhaps brought to a greater Height than it ever yet arriv’d at; Tho’ all the Changes or Dissolutions already Made, Pretended to, and now Discours’d of, shou’d come to pass in the World,” in Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, ed. W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, vol. 6, Finance, ed. John McVeagh, p. 51. All further references in the text are to this edition. I am using the edition in the Reprints of Economic Classics (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969, 2 vols., the second volume having Part I and Part II), p. 3. All further references in the text are to this edition. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, ed. W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, vol. 7, Trade, ed. John McVeagh, p. 117. All further references in the text to this work are to this edition. As popular as the book was throughout the eighteenth century, there is only one modern reprint, a facsimile reproduction edited by Paula Backscheider (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1989). Backscheider surveys the book’s eighteenth-century popularity in her introduction (p. 3). All further page references in the text are to this edition. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, p. 362. The Family Instructor, she says, “was probably written as a guide for his own children, and some parts of it may record some of his own experiences.” And indeed as she points out his children were then at “critical ages,” his oldest daughter, Maria, had just married and the other children were all under 25, “restless, occasionally rebellious, and concerned about their futures.” Of course, as plausible and even as likely as this sounds, there is no evidence for such a scenario. And if there were, what difference would it make, I wonder? There is no separate modern edition of Religious Courtship that I can find, but the book was reprinted very often throughout the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century in Britain and in America. A “twenty-first edition” was published in

376

Notes to pp. 167–175

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

London and in York in 1796, and there is an 1825 London edition. My citations are taken from the 1722 first edition published in London and page references appear in the text to this edition. Rodney M. Baine, Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1965) has surveyed all of Defoe’s works on this subject. His opening summary of the problem is worth quoting, since it points to the difficulties that believers faced in maintaining their faith in the existence of such a world. Baine says that Defoe was “a sincere Puritan trying both in his occult works and in his fiction to retain and strengthen all meaningful and credible evidence of Providence, of an invisible world of spirits, and of a communion thereby with God” (p. 13). Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflection During the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With His Vision of the Angelick World. Written by Himself (London, 1720), p. 212. All further references in the text are to this edition. Daniel Defoe, The Political History of the Devil, as Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts (London, 1726), p. 81. All further references in the text are to this edition. Daniel Defoe, An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (London, 1727), p. 2. All futher references in the text are to this edition. Daniel Defoe, A System of Magick; or, A History of the Black Art. Being an Historical Account of Mankind’s most early Dealing with the Devil; and how the Acquaintance on both sides first began (London, 1727), p. 378. All further references in the text are to this edition.

Chapter 6 1. Novak notes that between Defoe’s letter to Harley on 28 September, 1714 and a letter to Charles De La Faye, an under secretary of state on 12 April, 1718, there is only one letter extant, to one of his printers, Samuel Keimer in 1717. Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 492. 2. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 491. 3. Pat Rogers, Robinson Crusoe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979), p. 25. 4. Steele tells Selkirk’s story quite vividly, recounting how he killed sea lions and goats (which “he could take at full Speed”) for food and how he was much pestered by “Rats, which gnaw’d his Cloaths and Feet when sleeping.” He also describes how Selkirk looked when he first met him: “I thought, if I had not been let into his Characters and Story, I could have discerned that he had been much separated from Company, from his Aspect and Gesture; there was a strong but chearful Seriousness in his Look, and a certain Disregard to the ordinary things about him, as if he had been sunk in Thought.” And Steele ends the essay by remarking that although Selkirk had become rich from his share of the booty acquired by the expedition that rescued him, he told him that he had never been so happy as he was on his island, “when I was not worth a Farthing.” This last is precisely what Crusoe never claims. I quote Steele’s essay from The Englishman, No. 26 (Thursday, December 3, 1713), reprinted in Robinson Crusoe: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), pp. 237–8.

377

Notes to pp. 175–183 5. Defoe presented his proposal to Harley in a letter of 23 July, 1711, claiming that he had proposed these settlements to King William, who had approved of the scheme: “A Proposall for Seizing, Posessing, and forming an English Collony on The kingdome of Chili in the South Part of America.” Letters, p. 346. 6. Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality, of both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean (1709) by Delariviere Manley featured a combination of sexual and political scandal directed mostly at the Whigs such as Marlborough and Godolphin. It was immensely popular for many years, reaching a sixth edition in 1720, and started a vogue for such narratives. 7. “Defoe’s Minutes of Mesnager: the Art of Mendacity,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16 (October 2003): 11. 8. The most popular of such satires, featuring a visitor who observes the manners and morals of a country from his own distinct cultural perspective was Giovanni Paolo Marana (1642–93), The Turkish Spy: who lived five and forty years undiscover’d at Paris: giving an impartial account to the divan at Constantinople, of the most remarkable transactions of Europe, and discovering several intrigues and secrets of the Christian courts (especially that of France) from the year 1637 to the year 1682 / written originally in Arabick, translated into Italian, from thence into English (London, 1694). Defoe would certainly have known this very popular work, which continued to be reprinted well into the middle of the eighteenth century. 9. In A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (1998), Furbank and Owens provide an instructive guide to the book, pointing out that its fictionality is evident from several facts: that Mesnager (1658–1714) actually predeceased King Louis, even though Defoe has him speak at one point of the late king. In addition, they note that Mesnager died in 1714 and yet speaks of the period when Harley had been sent to prison in the Tower of London in 1715 (pp. 177–9). 10. Defoe and the Idea of Fiction 1713–1719 (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1983), p. 141. 11. In Defoe and the Idea of Fiction 1713–1719 Geoffrey Sill concludes that Defoe’s political writing made his move into fiction and its moral ambiguities inevitable – “it would have been a step backward for him not to write a novel at this point.” By virtue of having to defend a government he was only partly in sympathy, he was drawn to a complex understanding of human motives: his defense of the Harley ministry “led him to an interest not in the morality of specific acts, which is the domain of the writer of conduct manuals, but in the intentions behind those acts – the subjective domain of the fiction writer.” See, pp. 157–8. 12. Sill, Defoe and the Idea of Fiction, p. 144. 13. W.R. Owen and P.N. Furbank, A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, p. 179. 14. “Defoe’s Minutes of Mesnager: the Art of Mendacity,” p. 7. Furbank’s speculation – “The story that he would weave about Mesnager contains strong elements of personal fantasy.” – is plausible and suggestive. 15. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 2, Party Politics, ed. J. A. Downie, p. 397. All further page references in the text to this work and to its ultimate sequel, “The Secret History of the Secret History” are to this edition. 16. Sutherland, Defoe, p. 202.

378

Notes to pp. 183–187 17. “Whereas some months since a pamphlet entitled The Secret History of the White Staff, and lately another pamphlet entitled An Account of the Conduct of Robert, Earl of Oxford, have been printed and published, these are to inform the public that neither of the said pamphlets have been written by the said earl, or with his knowledge, or by his direction or encouragement, but on the contrary he has reason to believe from several passages therein contained, that it was the intention of the author or authors to do him a prejudice, and that the last of the said pamphlets is published at this juncture to that end.” J.A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 188. 18. “Daniel Defoe,” edited from Italian manuscripts and translated by Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies 1 (December 1964) 24–5. 19. This is not to say that contemporary popular culture hasn’t altered the archetype in predictable ways. For example, in the 1996 movie starring Pierce Brosnan (a commercial flop, by the way, never released in theaters in the U.S.A.) Crusoe becomes a Scotsman who in a duel kills a rival (his best friend) over the girl they both love and has to flee the country. He becomes a sailor and is shipwrecked on an island in the South Pacific, where he lives in a tree house (like Tarzan’s). As in the book, he rescues Friday from his rival cannibals, but they quarrel and his man goes off to live on another island. And, as in the book, Crusoe tries to convert Friday to Christianity but Friday isn’t buying it. In due course, Crusoe tells him not to call him master; he hates slavery! Wounded and captured by the cannibals who return, Crusoe is taken away to their island, where he and Friday are forced to fight to the death, the survivor to be allowed to live. Crusoe gets the upper hand but refuses (as in the duel that opened the film) to kill Friday, and just as the latter is about to kill Crusoe (with great and painful reluctance) he is felled by a shot. English slave traders have arrived and they take the whole village captive into slavery on their ship. Crusoe is rescued and returns to Scotland, after only five years away, and there is Mary, waiting for him. Happy Ending! Very little remains here of the original plot of Defoe’s book, which has had heterosexual romance, liberal political ideology, and another kind of male bonding of a clearly homo-erotic sort added to it for good measure. The best film version of Defoe’s book remains Luis Buñuel’s 1953 “The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” starring Dan O’Herlihey as Crusoe and James Fernandez as Friday. For a list of film versions see J.R. Hammond’s very useful little book, A Defoe Companion (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), p. 144. 20. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, p, 33. 21. The Works of Daniel Defoe, ed. G.H. Maynadier (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, 1903), vol. 3, p. ix. All further page references in the text are to this edition. 22. Crusoe’s preface has encouraged some interesting historical readings of Robinson Crusoe such as Michael Seidel’s “Crusoe in Exile,” PMLA 96 (1981): 363–74 which notes that Crusoe’s 28 years on his island match the twenty-eight years of Stuart rule (1660–88) before Defoe’s great hero, William III, came to the English throne. Defoe in this preface to the Serious Reflections is responding mainly to an attack (quite a witty one) on Robinson Crusoe by Charles Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D__ De F__ of London, Hosier (1719) in which Gildon imagines Crusoe angrily confronting his creator for telling lies about him.

379

Notes to pp. 188–204 23. Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richetti (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 5. All further page references in the text are to this edition. 24. Three hundred pounds was a great deal of money in the early eighteenth century, the equivalent in purchasing power nowadays of about £30,000. 25. J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematical Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), p. 19. 26. In Utopian Imagination and Eighteenth-Century Fiction (London and New York: Longman, 1966), Christine Rees has explored very precisely the Lockean complexity of Crusoe’s appropriation of the island. “Defoe uses this episode to emphasise the Lockean point that the human being is not given the fruits of the Earth to spoil them, or over-indulge himself.” (p. 82). 27. As Peter Hulme points out, it would have been extremely unlikely that an island as fertile as Crusoe’s would have been uninhabited: “the Amerindians would certainly not have ignored Crusoe’s remarkably fertile island unless they had been driven off by the European competition for Caribbean land which was in full swing by 1659.” That convenient emptiness is part of the larger European myth that the new world in America was largely unpopulated. See Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992; first published 1986), p. 186. 28. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), p. 83. All further references in the text are to this edition. 29. Michael Seidel comes closest among recent critics to my view of how Defoe’s novel responds (novelistically) to the ideological problems that are in some sense its subject but in another sense simply part of its profoundly novelistic form. Commenting on the mysterious corn sprouting episode, Seidel maintains that it is “Defoe’s way of saying that the assessments from the human perspective of providential design can never really get beyond a kind of interpretable guess. Providence is what something (everything) must mean until something else comes along that seems to mean something else.” Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991), p. 94. 30. Michael McKeon explores this tension by invoking what he calls the “secularization crisis” of early modernity as one of the contributing factors in the development of the novel in the eighteenth century, and he notes with characteristic dialectic shrewdness that “the polemical urgency and extremity” of providential argument “signifies not faith but a crisis of faith.” “Ostensibly (and sincerely),” he continues, “an acknowledgment of God’s unknowable power, the doctrine of providence also expresses the will to accommodate divinity to a plan more accessible to human rationality.” The Origins of the English Novel: 1600–1740 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 124. 31. Leopold Damrosch, God’s Plots and Man’s Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Damrosch discusses the continuities between the Puritan tradition exemplified in Milton and Bunyan and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. 32. Bakhtin’s most influential work is The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981).

380

Notes to pp. 204–230 33. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans, Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 9–10. 34. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 251 35. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 80. 36. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self:The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 27. 37. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 36. 38. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 171.

Chapter 7 1. The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Part II, in The Works of Daniel Defoe, vol. 2, ed. G.H. Maynadier (Boston: Old Corner Bookstore, 1903), p. vii. All further references in the text are to this edition, which is a modernized edition. There is, by the way, no recent reprint of this continuation of the first part of Robinson Crusoe. 2. Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 57. 3. The Works of Daniel Defoe, ed. Maynadier, vol. 14, p. 3. All further references in the text are to this edition. 4. As early as 1711 Defoe proposed to Harley in a letter of July 23 that part of the scheme he had recently announced in Parliament to establish a South Sea Company that would relieve the government of ten million pounds of debt should include establishing British colonies in Chile and Patagonia, which would he argued in a memorandum to Harley included in his letter enable the English to avoid the Spanish tax on commodities sent to that part of the world: “A Proposall for Seizing, Posessing, and forming an English Collony on The Kingdome of Chili in the South Part of America” (Letters, p. 246). This idea seems to have become something of an obsession for Defoe, and it lurks behind Robinson Crusoe but is overt in A New Voyage Round the World. 5. Defoe is fond of this trope of pointing to the potential inexhaustibility of narrative instances, and one thinks of what Moll tells us when she meets her Jemy, the Lancashire husband turned highwayman in Newgate prison: “Here he gave a long History of his Life, which indeed would make a very strange History, and be infinitely diverting”, Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr (Oxford University Press paperback edition, 1971, 1978), p. 299. 6. Captain Singleton, ed. Shiv K. Kumar. (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). All further references in the text are to this edition. 7. M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans.Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin,Texas: University of Texas Press, 1986), “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” p. 10. 8. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p. 11. 9. Manuel Schonhorn, “Defoe’s Captain Singleton: A Reassessment with Observations,” Papers on Language and Literature 7 (1971): 47.

381

Notes to pp. 231–236 10. A General History of the Pyrates in 1724 bears the name “Captain Charles Johnson” on its title page, and it was first attributed to Defoe by J.R. Moore in 1932. Manuel Schonhorn in 1972 edited a modern reprint (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press), and all page references in the text are to this edition. It is worth noting that Furbank and Owens consider this attribution perhaps the worst instance of J.R. Moore’s fanciful and even wilfully misleading expansion of the Defoe canon. In their view, his reasons for attributing this work to Defoe were “hopelessly flawed and depended on verbal ‘parallels’ so vague and generalised as to carry no conviction at all.” (See A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, p. xix). Furbank and Owens also remove The King of the Pirates from the canon. 11. Despite Furbank and Owens’s skepticism and rejection of the entire work from the canon, it seems likely that Defoe wrote at least some of these biographies, especially “Of Captain Misson.” Professor Maximillian Novak told me in conversation in September 2002 that he thinks Defoe almost certainly wrote the sections on Misson and on Captain Tew and probably the section on Captain Bellamy. He pointed out that Nathaniel Mist was behind the publication of “Johnson’s” volume, and of course Defoe was one of Mist’s chief writers.

Chapter 8 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

The Miscellaneous Works of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1834), vol. IV, excerpt in Pat Rogers, ed., Defoe: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1972), p. 67. Lincoln Faller, Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 4. In this book and his earlier, more generalized study, Turned to Account: the Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-century England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Faller makes large claims for the cultural implications of criminal biography and fiction during Defoe’s lifetime. This is how he puts the case early in Crime and Defoe when he says that criminal biographies are best understood “as a kind of cultural practice, as socially determined and socially sanctioned discourses which, in one way or another, ‘glossed’ or made tolerable sense of criminals, their crimes, and the punishments they had to suffer” (p. 6). That is to say, the criminal for Faller (and I agree with him) is an essentially mythic rather than realistic figure, and his or her life offered readers an opportunity to explain certain puzzling aspects of their world surrounding questions of human agency. Maximillian E. Novak, Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), p. 123. Novak, Realism, Myth, and History, p. 123. Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). The issue of male novelists impersonating and mimicking female voices has been provocatively addressed by Madeleine Kahn, in Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). She claims that such impersonation or as she calls it “narrative trans-

382

Notes to pp. 237–248

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

vestism” is central to the new novel’s mission: it “was an integral part of the emerging novel’s radical and destabilizing investigation of how an individual creates an identity” (pp. 6–7). Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) brought such issues very powerfully into view, and they remain essential for an understanding of the novel in the eighteenth century and especially for approaching Moll Flanders and Roxana. Ian Watt The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, p. 104. George Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 126. Everett Zimmerman, Defoe and the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 2, 5. John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 48–9. Bender’s approach was to some extent anticipated by Ralph Rader in 1973 when he observed that Defoe did not care if Moll was a coherent character. Rather, his aim was that “the reader should interpret her incoherence as that puzzling surface complexity of the real which betokens its underlying unity.” See Rader’s essay “Defoe, Richardson, Joyce, and the Concept of Form in the Novel,” in Autobiography, Biography, and the Novel: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar by William Matthews [and] Ralph Rader (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), p. 45. Lately, such formal analysis has yielded to cultural thematics. As Albert J. Rivero points out in the preface to Moll Flanders: A Norton Critical Edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2004) that with the advent of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s the main thread of critical discussion of Defoe’s novel has shifted away from the formal issues I have been tracing to thinking about “the degree to which Moll Flanders is a feminist or antifeminist novel” (p. x). Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr (Oxford University Press paperback edition, 1971, 1998), p. 1. All further page references in the text are to this edition. George Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton University Press, 1971). Starr, Defoe and Casuistry, pp. viii, ix. Starr’s notes in the Oxford Paperback edition I am using in this chapter provide an exhaustive catalogue of echoes and even quotations from Defoe’s various nonfictional works in the novel. It is exceedingly difficult to come up with accurate estimates of what the various sums that play so important a role in Defoe’s fiction are worth in our terms. Some items such as clothing were much more expensive in the eighteenth century, before the advent of mass mechanized production of textiles and clothing. Other items such as labor were much cheaper, although the cost of food fluctuated widely during the century. But it is important to stress that the various sums involved are often very large in terms of eighteenth-century value and purchasing power. One contemporary economic website that I have consulted estimates that in 1722 £100 pounds was worth over £10,000 in modern purchasing power. By that standard, Moll’s nest egg at this point in her life is worth well over a million pounds. Ellen Pollak, Incest and the English Novel, 1684–1814 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 113, 114.

383

Notes to pp. 257–270 18. The History and Remarkable Life of . . . Col. Jack, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 3. All further references in the text are to this edition. 19. The Compleat English Gentleman, ed. Karl D. Bülbring (London: David Nutt, 1890), p. 21. All further references in the text are to this edition. 20. “An Essay on Charity Schools,” in The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1924), I, 272. 21. Mandeville, I, 271. 22. David Blewett, Defoe’s Art of Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 94.

Chapter 9 1. A typical and important essay that stresses Roxana’s descent into evil and reads her career as a satire on corrupt English society is Maximillian E. Novak’s “Crime and Punishment in Defoe’s Roxana,” JEGP 45 (1966): 445–65. See also Spiro Peterson, “The Matrimonial Theme of Defoe’s Roxana,” PMLA 70 (1955): 175–91, who charts the heroine’s career as progressing from victim “to a diabolical agent of evil” (p. 175). The most subtle reading of Roxana that I know is encapsulated in G.A. Starr’s comment that despite her being portrayed as a “damned soul,” Defoe has an “imaginative oneness with her [that] often seems virtually complete.” See George Starr, Defoe and Casuistry, p. 165. In my Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975), I have argued in a chapter on Roxana for the heroine’s power and fascination as a character to the very end of her story: “Roxana’s intense participation in her own moral ambivalence is novelistically a drastic means of selfassertion, the only variation left to her in the light of her career and its total success” (p. 231). 2. Everett Zimmerman, Defoe and the Novel (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 158–9. 3. Roxana, ed. David Blewett (London: Penguin Books, 1982; rpt., 1987), p. 35. All further page references in the text are to this edition. 4. Bram Dijkstra, Defoe and Economics (London: Macmillan, 1987) makes the sensible point that such prefatory matter was often supplied by booksellers and publishers. He says that the title page is a “smokescreen” to hide “the fact that Roxana’s actual lover, if we follow the actual chronology of the book, from 1715–18, would have to be George I, whose animal appetites were well known” (pp. 78–9). 5. In Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), Hal Gladfelder puts this very well indeed, reflecting one strong strand of commentary on Defoe’s novel: “Even if Defoe’s other writings, and Roxana’s own later history of terror and remorse, argue against the claims she makes . . . she gives voice to those claims with a passion of intelligence he cannot annul” (p. 147). In Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Lincoln Faller observes that Roxana “swings readers’ feelings back and forth” and is thereby “an emotionally demanding and potentially tiring text.” One danger of such alternation, he con-

384

Notes to pp. 271–301

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

tinues, is what he labels a moral muddle (p. 250). One man’s muddle, however, is another’s terrible ambiguity, and the reader of Roxana has to choose. David Blewett in his Roxana Penguin edition notes the use of this formula in various of Defoe’s works, including Good Advice to the Ladies (1702), pp. 7–8; Reformation of Manners (1702), reprinted in A True Collection of the Writings of the True-Born Englishman (1703); and the Review, IV (4 October, 1707), 404. See Blewett, p. 382. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), “ ‘Amy, Who Knew my Disease’: A Psychosexual Pattern in Defoe’s Roxana,” pp. 44–5, and see especially p. 55. For George Starr, Roxana inspires both sympathy and revulsion, “emotional involvement” and “critical detachment,” and these states “occur successively, not simultaneously.” I think they occur so close together that they are effectively if not actually simultaneous. See Defoe and Casuistry, pp. 165–6. Blewett’s note in his Penguin edition provides the background of the name, which had in Defoe’s time “become a generic name for an oriental queen, suggesting ambition, wickedness, and exoticism” (p. 394). Blewett cites the popularity of various plays that feature a Roxana, especially, Nathaniel Lee’s play, Rival Queens (1677) and Racine’s Bajazet (1672), adapted in English by Charles Johnson in 1717 as The Sultaness. Blewett points out in his notes on these sequences that in order for Roxana to realize these vast profits her investments would have to return much more than the prevailing rate of about 5% interest in the 1720s and that Defoe would have expected readers to see these dealings as neither “admirable nor honest” (Blewett, p. 393). For a parallel but more extended discussion of the role that compound interest plays in Roxana, see my essay, “An Emerging New Canon of the British EighteenthCentury Novel: Feminist Criticism, the Means of Cultural Production, and the Question of Value, “ in The Blackwell Companion to the British Eighteenth-Century Novel, eds. Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). As Blewett notes, the “German Princess” is a reference to the notorious con artist, Mary Moders, an Englishwoman who posed as a German noblewoman and made a bigamous marriage with John Carleton in 1663 . Exposed and tried, she became something of a celebrity, with a number of accounts of her life appearing in print as well as a play, “The German Princess.” See Blewett, p. 401. Michael Boardman, Defoe and the Uses of Narrative (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), pp. 140–1. Boardman, Defoe and the Uses of Narrative, p. 150.

Chapter 10 1. Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague (La Peste), shows the influence of Defoe’s book, although Camus’ plague is more allegorical in its implications, and his real subject is the conduct of the French under German occupation. Camus’ epigraph to his novel is not from A Journal of the Plague Year but from the preface to Serious

385

Notes to pp. 302–324

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

Reflections During the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720): “It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.” As an appendix to her Penguin paperback edition of A Journal of the Plague Year, Cynthia Wall notes that there are actually three types of plague – pneumonic (or pulmonary), septicaemic, and bubonic – the last being what H.F. describes most of the time.Wall provides a description of the progress of bubonic plague that will help a modern reader visualize the physical effects of plague: “Between three and ten days after the infected flea bite, a black pustule appears, followed by enlarged lymph glands in the neck, groin, or underarm area, forming the primary swelling, or ‘bubo’. Next comes headache, vomiting, sharp pains, fever, chills, restlessness, and delirium.” Wall notes that 60 to 80% of the infected died very quickly. See A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Cynthia Wall (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 239. Louis A. Landa, “Introduction,” A Journal of the Plague Year (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. x–xi, xii–xiii. Landa’s introduction is perhaps the best short piece ever written about Defoe’s book and I have drawn upon it freely in my own discussion. All subsequent references in the text to A Journal of the Plague Year are to Landa’s edition. In their Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, p. 202, the skeptical Furbank and Owens mark Due Preparations as only “probably” by Defoe, although they acknowledge many stylistic and thematic parallels between it and A Journal of the Plague Year and of course they include it in volume five of the Pickering & Chatto edition of Writings on Travel, Discovery and History. It certainly sounds like Defoe. Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, general editors: W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, vol. 5, Due Preparations for the Plague and Mere Nature Delineated, ed. Andrew Wear (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002), p. 49. All further references in the text are to this edition. Landa, “Introduction,” A Journal of the Plague Year, p. xxxv. Maximillian E. Novak, “Defoe and the Disordered City,” in A Journal of the Plague Year: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Paula Backscheider (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), p. 305. Samuel Pepys, The Diary, eds. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), VI, 342. J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in “Robinson Crusoe” (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), p. 204. Landa notes that in mid-December 1664 and in early April 1665, comets did appear over London. See Landa, A Journal of the Plague Year, p. 256. Pat Rogers calls A Tour Defoe’s most crafted and artistic work, and he speaks of its author’s awareness of “formal design” which renders the “process of human geography” that constructs the nation around its vital center, London. See “Literary Art in Defoe’s Tour: The Rhetoric of Growth and Decay,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 6 (1972–73): 155–6. It should be noted that A Tour enjoyed considerable popularity for at least 50 years after its publication. John McVeagh notes that there were eight new editions by 1779. “Introduction,” A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, 3 vols., ed.,

386

Notes to pp. 324–330

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

John McVeagh, Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, general editors, W.R. Owens and P. N. Furbank (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), p. 41. In The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour (Newark, DE and London: University of Delaware Press, 1998), Pat Rogers provides detailed discussion of Defoe’s borrowings and outright plagiarisms. See pp. 111–16. His main sources were William Camden’s Britannia (first published in Latin in 1586 and revised and supplemented by him in various editions, the last in 1607) and John Macky’s Journey through England (1714–23). F. Bastian estimates that about a tenth of the book is taken from printed sources, especially John Macky’s Journey through England (1714 and 1722), and he notes that Defoe at times cribbed whole passages verbatim without acknowledgement of his sources. Bastian goes as far as to call the book “simply another of his anonymous fictions, made to look like fact because it was compiled from facts.” And as far as he’s concerned the Britain it presents does not portray the country of Defoe’s time but rather “a montage of details drawn from the previous fifty years.” See “Defoe’s Tour and the Historian,” History Today 17 (1967): 847, 849. Pat Rogers in The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour, convincingly refutes this extreme view, with many particulars of Defoe’s actual rides through the country. Rogers, The Text of Great Britain, p. 199. To be sure, given the superabundance of particular details, perhaps too much to take in or for anyone but an economic historian to care about, there is a good case for a modern reader turning to a good abridgement of A Tour such as Pat Rogers’s (London: Penguin Books, 1971) or W.R. Owens, A.J. Coulson, and P.N. Furbank’s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). In his Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, Maximillian E. Novak calls A Tour “at least partly a kind of imaginative autobiography” and opines that the distance between Defoe and the author of A Tour is “practically nil, and this means that we get the full Defoe, including the writer of novels and imaginary voyages” (p. 631). A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, 3 vols., ed., John McVeagh, Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, General Editors, W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), II, 131. All further references in the text are to this edition. Rogers, The Text of Great Britain, pp. 130–2. The volatility of wealth and the renewal of even the old nobility of England by commercial vigor are old themes for Defoe, and one can find them articulated memorably, for example, in the Review, where in the number for January 22, 1706 he celebrates the power of trade to rescue decayed or dissolute aristocratic families: “How has Trade thus first Encroach’d upon Nobility and Quality; and when it has first made Gaps in your most illustrious Successions, by Creeping into their Estates, has again supply’d you with Crowds of Gentry, and not a few Nobility, to patch up the Ruine of Ancient Luxury, and make good the Desolation, made by unwary Prodigality? . . . How many now Illustrious Families, have their Modern Original from the Opulency of trade; and the Merchant we find, stands as fair for a Peer as another Man, and if Wealthy enough, appears every jot as well Qualify’d for that Dignity?

387

Notes to pp. 333–341 “How have we seen English Lords Descend to Merchandizing to Maintain, or perhaps Recruit the Dignity of the Family, and make the Mechanick support the Magnificent?” 20. Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 633. 21. See my Daniel Defoe (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), pp. 135–6, for a discussion of this trend in A Tour that parallels my discussion here. 22. To be sure, Bastian says that Defoe had never been to Lancashire and that these descriptions are taken from books. But that hardly matters, I think, since passages like these (however fictional or second hand) are convincing in their specificity and density, and they are clearly related to the theme and structure of A Tour as Defoe conceived it. See “Defoe’s Tour and the Historian,” p. 848.

Chapter 11 1. On Defoe’s various residences and his improvements at his house in Stoke Newington, see Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 494. 2. Quoted in James Sutherland, Defoe, pp. 253–54. 3. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 593. 4. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 374. 5. Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, p. 128. 6. Michael Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 28. 7. Augusta Triumphans: Or,The Way to Make London the Most Flourishing City in the Universe (1728), Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, eds. W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank, vol. 8, Social Reform, ed. W.R. Owens (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000). All further page references in the text are to this edition. 8. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, p. 371. 9. Sutherland, Defoe, p. 221. 10. George Harris Healey notes this in The Letters of Daniel Defoe (p. 458, n. 1); Defoe’s connection with the Whig ministry was not discovered until five of his letters to Charles De la Faye were published in 1864. 11. In his edition of The Letters of Daniel Defoe, Healey proposes that an anecdote Defoe includes in Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is really a record of this letter, which he describes this way: “so strenuous in argument, so pathetic in its eloquence, and so moving and persuasive, that as soon as the judge read it he sent him word he should be easy, for he would endeavour to make that matter light to him” (cited by Healey, p. 451). 12. The Letters of Daniel Defoe, p. 456, To Charles De la Faye, 23 May, 1718. All further page references to this volume are in parentheses in the text. 13. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 500. 14. Sutherland, Defoe, pp. 221–2. 15. William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings, 3 vols., London, 1869). A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, p. 242.

388

Notes to pp. 341–361 16. An Appeal to Honour & Justice (1715) in The Shakespeare Head Edition of the Novels and Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. 9 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927), p. 236. 17. Cited in Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 491. 18. Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings, II, 71. All further references to Lee’s anthology of Defoe’s journalism are in parenthesis in the text. 19. Sutherland, Defoe, p. 255. 20. I quote from the 1724 London edition, p. 82. All further page references in the text are to this edition. 21. Introduction, Social Reform, p. 20. 22. Novak, Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 680. 23. Novak, Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 671. 24. Owens and Furbank label this “probably” by Defoe, although they note the presence in it of various “significant parallels with Defoe’s known writings,” including several of his characteristic quotations and proverbs. See A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, p. 228. My page references in the text are to the edition edited with an introduction by Maximillian Novak (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars’ Facsimilies and Reprints, 1967). Novak notes in his introduction that the first part of the lengthy title – Conjugal Lewdness: or Matrimonial Whoredom – was dropped from subsequent editions, probably as “too raw.” “Introduction,” p. vii. 25. Mere Nature Delineated, Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, vol. 5, ed. Andrew Wear (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002), p. 153. All further references in the text are to this edition. 26. Andrew Wear makes this point in the introduction to his Pickering & Chatto edition, p. 19. 27. As Healey tells the story in his notes to this letter, Defoe’s persistent creditor was Mary Brooke, who sued him and who in turn Defoe counter-sued. When his suit failed, Defoe went into hiding to avoid having to pay her, and he also seems to have transferred his property to his son, Daniel Defoe, junior, in order to protect it from his creditor. See Healey, Letters of Daniel Defoe, p. 474, notes 1, 2. 28. Sutherland, Defoe, p. 273. 29. Cited by Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, p. 704. 30. Cited by Pat Rogers, Defoe: The Critical Heritage, p. 40.

389

Bibliography

I Collected Editions of the Works Novels and Miscellaneous Works, 20 vols. London: 1840–41. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1973 Romances and Narratives of Daniel Defoe, 16 vols, ed. George A. Aitkin. London: J.M. Dent, 1895. The Works of Daniel Defoe, ed. G.A. Maynadier, 16 vols. Boston: Old Corner Bookstore, 1903. The Shakespeare Head Edition of the Novels and Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe, 14 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927–28. Reprint, in 9 vols. Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1974. The Works of Daniel Defoe, 44 volumes (in progress), general editors W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000–8. The Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition, (in progress) eds – Jim Springer Borck, et al., New York: AMS Press, 1999–••. Defoe’s Review. Reproduced from the Original Editions, with an Introduction and Bibliographical Notes by Arthur Wellesley Secord. 9 vols. In 22 vols. Published for the Facsimile Text Society by Columbia University Press. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938.

II Bibliographies Moore, J.R. A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1960. Novak, Maximillian E. “Daniel Defoe.” In The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, ed. G. Watson, vol. 2, 880–917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Novak, Maximillian E. “Defoe.” In The English Novel: Select Bibliographical Guides, ed. A.E. Dyson. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.

390

Bibliography Owens, W.R. and P.N. Furbank. Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique of J.R. Moore’s Checklist. London and Rio Grande, Ohio: The Hambledon Press, 1994. Owens, W.R. and P.N. Furbank. A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998. Peterson, Spiro. Daniel Defoe: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987. Stoler, John. Daniel Defoe: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1900–1980. New York: Garland Press, 1984.

III Biographies of Defoe Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Bastian, Frank. Defoe’s Early Life. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1981. Chalmers, George. The Life of Daniel Defoe. London, second edition, 1790. Healey, George Harris, ed. The Letters of Daniel Defoe. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1933. Lee, William. Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings, 3 Volumes. London, 1869; reprint, New York: B. Franklin, 1969. Moore, J.R. Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Sutherland, James R. Defoe. London: Methuen & Co., 1937. Watson, Francis. Daniel Defoe. Port Washington, NY and London: Kennikat Press, 1969; first published 1952. West, Richard. Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures. London: Harper Collins, 1998. Wilson, Walter. Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe. 3 vols London: 1830.

IV Critical Studies Alkon, Paul K. Defoe and Fictional Time. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1979. Alter, Robert. Rogue’s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Backscheider, Paula R. A Being More Intense. New York: AMS Press, 1984. Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: Ambition & Innovation. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1986. Backscheider, Paula R. Moll Flanders: The Making of a Criminal Mind. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990. Backscheider, Paula R. A Journal of the Plague Year: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992. Baine, Rodney M. Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1965.

391

Bibliography Bell, Ian. Defoe’s Fiction. London: Croom Helm, 1985. Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in EighteenthCentury England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Birdsall, Virginia Ogden. Defoe’s Perpetual Seekers: A Study of the Major Fiction. Lewisburg. PA: Bucknell University Press, 1985. Blewett, David. Defoe’s Art of Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Bloom, Harold, ed. Daniel Defoe: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Boardman, Michael. Defoe and the Uses of Narrative. New Bruswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983. Byrd, Max, ed. Daniel Defoe: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1976. Curtis, Laura. The Elusive Defoe. Totowa, NJ: Vision Press and Barner & Noble, 1984. Damrosch, Leopold. God’s Plot and Man’s Stories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Downie, J.A. Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Earle, Peter. The World of Defoe. New York: Atheneum, 1977. Ellis, Frank, ed. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Robinson Crusoe: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969. Erickson, Robert. Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. New York: AMS Press, 1986. Faller, Lincoln B. Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Faller, Lincoln B. Turned to Account: the Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Flynn, Carol Houlihan. The Body in Swift and Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Gladfelder, Hal. Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Green, Martin. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Green, Martin. The Robinson Crusoe Story. University Park and London: Penn State University Press, 1990. Hammond, J.R. A Defoe Companion. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797. London and New York: Routledge, 1992; first published 1986. Hunter, J. Paul. The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematical Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966. Ingrassia, Catherine. Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: a Culture of Paper Credit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kahn, Madeline. Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991.

392

Bibliography Kay, Carol. Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Lund, Roger, ed. Critical Essays on Daniel Defoe. New York: G.K. Hall, 1997. Mayer, Robert. History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel: 1600–1740. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. McKillop, Alan D. The Early Masters of English Fiction. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1975. Meier,Thomas Keith. Defoe and the Defense of Commerce.Victoria, British Columbia: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1987. Novak, Maximillian E. Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962. Novak, Maximillian E. Defoe and the Nature of Man. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Novak, Maximillian E. Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Owens, W.R. and P.N. Furbank. The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1988. Pollak, Ellen. Incest and the English Novel, 1684–1814. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Richetti, John J. Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969; rpt. 1992. Richetti, John J. Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975. Richetti, John J. Daniel Defoe. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987. Richetti, John. The English Novel in History, 1700–1780. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Rivero, Albert J., ed. Moll Flanders: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Rogers, Pat, ed. Defoe: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. Rogers, Pat. Robinson Crusoe. London: Allen & Unwin, 1979. Rogers, Pat. The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour. Newark, DE and London: University of Delaware Press, 1998. Schonhorn, Manuel. Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship, and Robinson Crusoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Secord, Arthur Wellesley. Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1916. Seidel, Michael. Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Seidel, Michael. Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991. Sherman, Sandra. Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Shinagel, Michael. Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.

393

Bibliography Shingael, Michael, ed. Robinson Crusoe: A Norton Critical Edition (second edition). New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. Sill, Geoffrey. Defoe and the Idea of Fiction 1713–1719. Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1983. Spearman, Diana. The Novel and Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. Starr, George. Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. Starr, George. Defoe and Casuistry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Sutherland, James. Daniel Defoe:A Critical Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Trent, W.P. Defoe: How to Know Him. Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1916. Vickers, Elsa. Defoe and the New Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Warner, John M. Joyce’s Grandfathers: Myth and History in Defoe, Smollett, Sterne, and Joyce. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957. Zimmerman, Everett. Defoe and the Novel. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975. Zweig, Paul. The Adventurer. New York: Basic Books, 1974.

394

Index

An Account of the Conduct of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford (1715), 183 Act of Uniformity (1662), 3 Addison, Joseph, “The Campaign,” 107 The Spectator, 89, 317 The Tatler, 92 “The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley: or, A System of Stock-Jobbing” (1719), 145 satiric attack on stock jobbers, 147–9 Anne, queen of England (1665–1714), ix, 4, 11, 39, 65, 122–3, 127–8, 176, 180–1, 302, 339 Annesley, Dr. Samuel, 3, 4 “An Answer to a Question that No Body thinks of, viz. But what if the Queen should die?” (1713), 134 relentless, non-ironic, 138–40 An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1714–15), vi, 10, 15–16, 17, 19, 26, 341 Applebee’s Weekly Journal, 235, 302, 342–3 Arbuthnot, Dr. John, 357 “An Argument, Shewing that a Standing Army . . . is not Inconsistent with a Free Government” (1698), 73, 74–5, 76 Armstrong, Nancy, 383n Atterbury, Francis, Bishop of Rochester, 182

Augusta Triumphans: Or, The Way to Make London the most Flourishing City in the Universe (1728), 338, 350–1 digressive and associative method of writing, 351 establishing a university in London, 350 “immethodical” writer, 349 musical academy, 350–1 “A Brief Explanation of a Late Pamphlet, entitled The Shortest Way with the Dissenters” (1703), 21, 46, 47 Austen, Jane, 297 Backscheider, Paula R., vi–vii, 10, 16, 26, 47, 55, 125, 338, 340, 363–4n, 376n Baine, Rodney M., 377n Baker, Henry, Defoe’s son-in-law, 337, 359 Bakhtin, M.M., 200, 204, 205, 207, 225–6 Bastian, Frank, 3, 10, 387n, 388n Baxter, Richard, 4 Behn, Aphra, 289 Bender, John, 237–8 Bentinck, Hans Willem, Earl of Portland, 12, 61 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 58–60, 67 “Prince Arthur” (1695), 58–9 “Satyre upon Wit” (1700), 58 Blake, William, 270, 361

395

Index Blewett, David, 264, 385n Boardman, Michael, 298 Boswell, James, vii bourgeois Public sphere, 70–2, 88 biographical method of this book, viii–ix “A Brief Reply to the History of Standing Armies in England” (1698), 73, 74–6 Brydges, James, 1st Duke of Chandos, 325 bubonic plague, 302 Bunyan, John, 361 Burnet, Thomas, The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), 153 Butler, Samuel, influence on Defoe’s verse, 55 Caledonia: A Poem in Honour of Scotland and the Scots Nation (1706), criticism of Scots for their poverty, 116–17 Camus, Albert, 385–6n Captain Singleton (1720) [Of the Famous Captain Singleton: Containing an Account of his being set on Shore in the Island of Madagascar . . . with an Account of his many Adventures and Pyracies with the famous Captain Avery and others], 225–33 cross-African trek, 227–9 dialogues between Singleton and William Walters, 231 piratical career, 229–31 prosaic and fantastic in African trek, 228 proto-Bildungsroman, 225 unity in group narrative, 227 William Walters, Quaker pirate, 229–31 Castle, Terry, 275–6 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote (1605), 185, 214, 274 Chalmers, George, vii–viii “The Character of the Late Mr. Samuel Annesley, By Way of Elegy” (1697), 4, 57–8 Charles II, King of England, 151

Churchill, John, 1st Duke of Marlborough, Defoe’s panegyric on, 55–6, 107, 123, 130, 343 Churchill, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 123, 181 Collier, Jeremy, 143 Colonel Jack (1722) [The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col. Jacque Commonly Call’d Col. Jack Who Was Born a Gentleman, put ‘Prentice to a PickPocket . . . and is now abroad compleating a Life of Wonders, and resolves to dye a General.], 257–67 gentility, innate or acquired, 257–8 juvenile criminal counter-culture, 269–70 marital adventures, 266 Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack, 267 overseer of slaves in Virginia, 261–3 pick-pocketing trade, 258 privacy and disguise, 264 proto-Bildungsroman, 261 roman à thèse, 257–8 sentimental hero, 258–9 service in foreign armies, 264–5 Compleat English Gentleman (1890), The, 5–6, 7, 258 Complete English Tradesman, in Familiar Letters Directing him in all the several Parts and Progressions of Trade, 2 vols. (1726–7), The, 10, 11, 155–6 biographical resonances, 156 mythologizing of the merchant, 155 psychological and moral dangers of commerce, 155–6 “The Conduct of Parties in England” (1712), 130 Consolidator (1705), The, 104, political satire and imaginary voyage, 110 Conjugal Lewdness; or, Matrimonial Whoredom, A Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed (1727), 269, 275, 351–7 celebration of wedded love, Miltonic, 351

396

Index death notice in Grub-street Journal, 361 debt and bankruptcy laws, 36–7 debtors’ prison, 140–1 disguise and secrecy, 115 dissenting academies, 6–7 dissenting background, 3–4 Dryden’s, Rochester’s, Butler’s, Marvell’s influence on his verse, 55 early years, 1–3 earnings from his writing, 337–9 economic motive for writing narratives, 174–5 education at Charles Morton’s school, 4–8 Enlightenment values, 83–4 European balance of power, discussed, 77 family life, 9–10 film versions of Robinson Crusoe, 379n Finch, Daniel, Earl of Nottingham, and Defoe, 22–3 fluency and fecundity in writing, 127 freedom of speech, 73 “freeman” of the City of London, 71 imprisoned in Newgate, 23, 141 last days and death, 359–60 Leslie’s attack on Defoe, 49 lobbying in Edinburgh for the Union, 117–18 marriage to Mary Tuffley, 9 Mercantilist economic theories, 144–5 merchants as modern heroes, 9 “moderation” as political code term, 78 Monmouth’s Rebellion, Defoe’s participation, 10 moralist, 144 opinion of dissenting academies, 7 panegyric vs. satire in his verse, 56 parents, 2 patrons, 122 persona in the Review, 28–9 personality, viii physical description, 21–2 picaresque tradition and Defoe’s narratives, 237 pirate myth varied and adapted, 231–3

dialogues, like Family Instructor and Religious Courtship, 353 Juvenalian satiric drive, 353–4, 355 limits of sexual satire, 355–6 mercenary motives for marriage attacked, 352 mortification and Popery, 354–5 most powerful moral polemic, 351 satiric and reactionary rhetoric, 352 sex and marriage like commerce, 354 Curll, Edmund, 184 The Daily Post, 302 Dampier, William, 175 Damrosch, Leopold, 380n “The Danger of the Protestant Religion Consider’d from the Present Prospect of a Religious War in Europe” (1701), 80–1 Davenant, Sir Charles, Essays upon Peace at Home and War Abroad (1703), 79 Davis, Lennard, 236 Defoe, Daniel Andrew Moreton, persona in didactic works, 338 Applebee’s Weekly Journal, Defoe’s contributions, 343–4 anti-clericalism, 58, 63, 111–12 anti-theatrical views, 143 arrested for The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, 21–2 attacks on his learning, 5–6 autobiography in poems, 67–8 bankruptcy, 16–17 birth, 1 brick and tile factory, 17–18 burial in Bunhill Fields, 361 business ventures, 8–9, 10–11 canon of his works, disputed, vii changes name from “Foe” to “Defoe,” 18 clerical vocation, 6–8 columnist in the Review, 76, 84–5, 102 criminality and individualism in his heroes, 234–5 crisis of faith as a young man, 7

397

Index Defoe, Daniel (cont’d ) public sphere and Defoe, 71–2 pugnacity as journalist, 90–1, 92 railing as rhetorical mode, 73–4 religion and kings, 82–3 religious and biblical frame of reference, 121 risks of ironic pamphlets in 1713, 134 Robert Harley and Defoe, 13, 26–80, 84–5, 113–16, 126–7, 140–2, 180–4 satirist, 34, 56–7 Scotland, writing to Harley from Edinburgh, 115–22 secret agent for the Tory government, 26 secular and religious motives, 8, 100–2 self-referentiality in political writing, 130 sentenced to stand in the pillory, 23–4 Standing Army controversy, 72–8, 81 stock jobbing, Defoe’s contempt for it, 146–7 style, 35–6, 95–6 Swift’s disparagement of Defoe, 35 travels in southwestern England for Harley, 113–16 verse, fluency in, 55 Whig mole in Tory periodicals in 1714, 339–41 William III and Defoe, 12–13, 21 writing his own life by rhetorical projection, 29–30, 80 De la Faye, Charles, 339–40, 342 “A Dialogue between a Dissenter and the Observator, Concerning The Shortest Way with the Dissenters” (1703), 17, 47–8 Dickens, Charles, Hard Times, 144 Dickson, P.G.M, 375n Dijkstra, Bram, 384n “The Dissenter’s Answer to the HighChurch Challenge” (1704), attack on Charles Leslie, 49–50

dissenters in England legal restrictions on, 3 percentage of English population, 4 “The Dissenter Misrepresented and Represented” (1704 or 1705), 52 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 297 “The Double Welcome” (1705), panegyric on the Duke of Marlborough, 55 Downie, J.A., 38, 80, 86, 88, 126, 180, 183, 184, 372n Drake, James, “The Memorial of the Church of England” (1705), 53 Dryden, John, influence on Defoe’s verse, 55–6, 106, 338 All for Love, quoted by Defoe, 74 Due Preparations for the Plague, as well for Soul as Body. Being some seasonable THOUGHTS upon the Visible Approach of the present dreadful CONTAIGON in France (1722), 302–8 compared to A Journal of the Plague Year, 308 fictionalized narratives, 303–5 incongruity between material plenitude and spiritual fear, 304, 308 moral dialogues, 306 physical environment of the plague, 307–8 sermons, 303, 305–6 Dunton, John, The Athenian Mercury (1691–97), 87 Dyer, John, 339 “The Dyet of Poland” (1705), anti-Tory political satire, 110–12 Earle, Peter, 77, 145 “An Elegy on the Author of the TrueBorn Englishman” (1704), 27, 67, 68 “Eleven Opinions about Mr. H[arle]y” (1711), 130 “An Enquiry into Occasional Conformity, Shewing that the Dissenters Are no Way Concern’d in it” (1702), 40, 41–3

398

Index “An Enquiry into the Occasional Conformity of Dissenters in Cases of Preferment” (1698), 21, 39–41 An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions: Being an Account of what they are, and what they are not; whence they come, and whence they come not. As also How we may distinguish between the Apparitions of Good and Evil Spirits, and how we ought to Behave to them. With a great Variety of Surprizing and Diverting Examples, never Publish’d before (1727), 169, 278 practical guide to dreams, 171 reality of spirits, 171–2 “An Essay on the Late Storm” (1704), 67 An Essay upon Projects (1697), 18, 31–7, 145–6 original proposals in, 31–3 projectors, 33–4 “An Essay upon Publick Credit” (1710), credit as process, 152 Every-body’s Business is No-Body’s Business; or, Private Abuses, Publick Grievances (1725), 302 An Essay on Projects comparison, 348 authoritarian reform proposals, 348 women servants attacked, 347–8 Faller, Lincoln, 235, 382n, 384–5n Family Instructor in Three Parts; I. Relating to Fathers and Children II. To Masters and Servants. III. To Husbands and Wives (1715), The, 161–2, 174–5, 306, 341 casual domestic life rendered, 163 dramatic and narrative form, 162–3 response to social and moral breakdown, 162 Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), The, 213–22 adventure-capitalist, 215 “Author’s Preface,” 213 compared to Don Quixote, 214, 215 fully-formed character, 214

moral revulsion, 219 Siberian sojourn, 220–1 Feiling, Keith, 27 Fielding, Henry, 217, Tom Jones (1749), 274 Financial Revolution in Britain, 149 Finch, Daniel, Earl of Nottingham, 22, 53 Flaubert, Gustave, 241 Fletcher, Andrew, “A Discourse Concerning Militia’s and Standing Armies” (1697), 73 Franklin, Benjamin, 192 “The Free-Holder’s Plea Against StockJobbing Elections of Parliament Men” (1701), 146 Furbank, P.N., 44, 176, 180 and W.R. Owens, vii–viii, ix, 38, 178, 341, 359, 366n, 378n, 382n, 386n, 389n Garth, Samuel, 58 Gay, John, 1 Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), 23–4 The Beggar’s Opera (1728), 231 General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, and also Their Policies, Discipline and Government (1724), A, 231–3 Captain Edward Teach, “Blackbeard,” melodramatic villain, 231–2 Captain Bartholomew Roberts, gallant and stylish pirate, 232 utopian pirate community in life of Captain Misson, 232–3 George I, king of England, 126, 128, 339 “Giving Alms No Charity, and Employing the Poor A Grievance to the Nation” (1704), 144 Gladfelder, Hal, 384–5n Godolphin, Sidney, 1st Earl of, 26–7, 53, 86, 121, 123–5 Goldsmith, Oliver, The Citizen of the World (1762), 345

399

Index Great Law of Subordination Consider’d; Or, The Insolence and Unsufferable Behaviour of Servants in England duly enquir’d into (1724), The, 345–6 England as moral jungle, 345 fictitious foreign observer in England, 345 narrative illustrations of social disorder, 346–7 Green, Martin, 216–17 Greg, William, spy for the French in Harley’s office, 123 Gregg, Edward, 124 Grub-street Journal, 361 Guiscard, Antoine de, attempted assassin of Harley, 124 Habermas, Jürgen, 70–2, 88 Harcourt, Sir Simon, Sacheverell’s lawyer, quotes the Review, 89, 124 Harley, Robert, Earl of Oxford, vi, 15, 26–7, 44, 78, 80, 122–8, 177–8 friend of Swift and Pope, 26 imprisoned in the Tower, 128, 178 master strategist, 182 resignation and fall from power, 180–1 Hayton, D.W., 118 Haywood, Eliza, Idalia: or, the Unfortunate Mistress (1723), 269, 289 Healey, George Harris, 23, 26, 342, 388n, 389n “The High-Church Legion, or The Memorial Examined” (1705), response to James Drake, 53–4 History of the Kentish Petition (1701), The, 15–16 History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), The, 22 History of the Union of Great Britain (1710), 119–21 dangerous rioting in Edinburgh, 120 sermonizing in, 120 vivid narration, 120–1 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, 193 Holmes, Geoffrey, 89

Hunter, J. Paul, 310 Hyde, Edward, Lord Clarendon, 3 “A Hymn to the Pillory” (1703), 24–5, 35, 64 “A Hymn to Victory” (1704), tribute to Queen Anne and the Duke of Marlborough after the battle of Blenheim, 55 Jacobitism, 117, 120, 128, 131 James II (1633–1701), king of England, 11, 14, 39, 43, 131, 137, 342 James, Henry, 236 Johnson, Samuel, vii, 1 Dictionary, 31 Journal of the Plague Year (1722), A, 3, 301–2, 304 compared to The Spectator, 317 compared to Due Preparations for the Plague, 308 empirical narrative stance, 313 heroism, tale of three men from Stepney, 321–2 London as subject, 315–16 motives of the narrator for staying, 318–19 narrator as subject of the book, 309, 315 narrator’s character, 309 narrator’s theories about the plague, 309 poor as villains, 322–3 popular superstition, 312 spiritual autobiography, 310–11 statistics, 320–1 suppression by Defoe of his fractious persona, 308 wavering narrator, 311, 313 Joyce, James, 185 Jure Divino: A Satyr in Twelve Books. By the Author of The True-Born Englishman (1706), 55, 103–10, 115 comic and satiric qualities, 108–9 didactic weakness, 108 Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel” and “Mac Fleknoe” echoed, 106

400

Index form, 105 Milton’s influence on the poem, 107–8 panegyric on Marlborough, 107 public credit, 150 strengths and weaknesses, 105 Juvenal, quoted by Defoe, 67, 105 Kahn, Madeleine, 382n Keeble, N.H., 4, 364–5n, 368n Kentish Petition, 15 Keppel, Arnout Joust van, Earl of Albemarle, 12 Landa, Louis A., 304, 386n Lee, William, 340 “Legion’s Memorial” (1701), 15 “A Letter to a Dissenter from his Friend at the Hague” (1688), 39 Leslie, Charles, 21, 43, 44, 83 Review’s audience characterized, 88 The Wolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Clothing (1704), 49 Licensing Act of 1662, 72 Locke, John, 225 Louis XIV (1638–1715), king of France, 13–14, 39, 72, 77–8, 149 depicted in Minutes of Monsr. Mesnager, 176–7 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 82 Mandeville, Bernard, 144, 259, 374n Manley, Delarivière, Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality, of both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean (1709), 130, 176, 269, 378n Marana, Giovanni, Letters from A Turkish Spy (1684), 345 Marvell, Andrew, influence on Defoe’s verse, 55 Mary of Modena, James II’s queen, 342 Masham, Abigail, lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne, 123, 181 McKeon, Michael, 380n McVeagh, John, 97, 103, 145–6, 372n

Meditations (1681), 7–8 Meier, Thomas Keith, 375n Mercurius Politicus (1716), 339 Mere Nature Delineated: Or, A Body without a Soul. Being Observations upon the Young Forester Lately brought to Town from Germany (1726), 87, 357–8 attack on Swift, 368n Milton, John, influence on Defoe’s verse, 55, 107–8; 338, wedded love, 351 Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr. Mesnager at the Court of England, Towards the close of the late Reign. Wherein some of the most secret transactions of that time, relating to the interest of the Pretender and clandestine separate peace are detected and laid open. Written by himself. Done out of French (1717), 176–80 based on inside knowledge, 176 Defoe inserted in the text, 179 self-justification, 180 vivid and intimate depiction of Louis XIV, 177 Mist, Nathaniel, proprietor of Mist’s Weekly Journal, 174, 339; arrested and made to stand in the pillory, 342 Mist’s Weekly Journal, 302, 339, 342 “The Mock Mourners, A Satyr By way of Elegy on King William” (1702), 64–5 Moll Flanders (1722) [The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders . . . Written from her own MEMORANDUMS], 235–57 casuistry, 239 comic-picaresque, 251, 256–7 criminal career, 250–3 Defoe’s opinions and Moll’s, 241 facts vs. moral interpretation, 240–1 freedom and necessity, 251 incest, 246–9 materialism, 244–5 morality, 238–9

401

Index Moll Flanders (cont’d ) Newgate Prison and its novelistic effects, 253–5 personality and contemporary circumstances, 241–2 politics and tactics, 245–6 repentance, 255–6 self-expressive narrative, 237–8 sexuality, 236 urban space and crime, 252 women and the novel, 236–7 Moore, J.R., vii, 25 Moore, John, Bishop of Norwich, A Form of Prayers, Used by his Late Majesty, K. William III, when he Received the Holy Sacrament (1704), 82 “More Reformation. A Satyr upon Himself ” (1703), 64, 67 “More Short Ways with the Dissenters” (1704), attack on Sacheverell, 50–1 Morton, Charles, 4–6 Moyle, Walter, and John Trenchard, “An Argument Shewing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government” (1697), 73 Nabokov, Vladimir, viii “A New Discovery of an Old Intreague: A Satyr levell’d at Treachery and Ambition” (1691), modeled on Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel,” 56–8 New Family Instructor (1727), A, 161 “A New Test of the Church of England’s Honesty” (1704), 51–2 “A New Test of the Church of England’s Loyalty: or, Whiggish Loyalty and Church Loyalty Compar’d” (1702), 43–4 New Voyage Round the World, By a Course never Sailed before. Being a Voyage undertaken by some Merchants, who afterwards proposed the setting up of an East India Company in Flanders (1724), A, 175, 222–4 fantasy of accumulation, 223–4

origin in Patagonian settlement project, 222–3 Novak, Maximillian E., vi, 7, 8, 10, 21, 124, 145, 174, 235, 310, 338, 340, 346, 349–50, 366n, 373n, 374–5n, 377n, 382n, 389n October Club, Tory back bencher club, 126 Ogg, David, 4 Oldmixon, John, 11 “The Original Power of the Collective Body of England, Examined and Asserted” (1702), 78–9, 80 Owens, W.R., 46 and P.N. Furbank, vii–viii, ix, 38, 178, 341, 359, 366n, 378n, 382n, 386n, 389n “The Pacificator” (1700), war of the wits, 58–61 Parker, Sir Thomas, Lord Chief Justice, arrests Defoe, 141; recommends Defoe for government service in 1718, 339 Paterson, William, 22, 26 Penn, William, 23 Pepys, Samuel, 310 Plan of the English Commerce (1728), A, 156–60 audience, 158 decline in coherence and structure, 157 encyclopedic ambitions and difficulties, 156–8 pedantry, 159 Pocock, J.G.A., 151–2 Political History of the Devil, as Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts (1726), The, 169–71 demystified picture of the devil, 171 skeptical and modern view of the devil, 169–70 supernatural as irrelevant category, 173 Pollack, Ellen, 248 Pope, Alexander, 1, 29, 35, 57 “Windsor Forest” (1713), 140

402

Index “Epistle to a Lady” (1735), 236 “The Rape of the Lock” (1714), 281 translation of first volume of Homer’s Odyssey (1725), 343 The Present State of the Parties in Great Britain: Particularly An Enquiry into the State of the Dissenters in England and the Presbyterians in Scotland (1712), 7 The Protestant Monastery: Or, A Complaint Against the Brutality of the Present Age, Particularly the Pertness and Insolence of our Youth to Aged Persons (1727), 349–50 biographical resonances, 349 satire and moral alarm, 350 Rader, Ralph, 383n Rand, Ayn, 144 Rawson, Claude, 45 “Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover, with an Enquiry how far the Abdication of King James, supposing it to be Legal, ought to affect the Person of the Pretender” (1713), 134–7 comic and folksy humour, 135 dangerous ironies, 135–8 “Reasons Why This Nation Ought to Put Speedy End to this Expensive War” (1711), 128–9 argues with the Review, 129 Rees, Christine, 380n “Reformation of Manners, A SATYR” (1703), 64, 65–6 Religious Courtship: Being Historical Discourses, On the Necessity of Marrying Religious Husbands and Wives Only (1722), 161, 306 proto-sentimental narrative, 166–7 qualities of dialogue, 165–6 social and psychological quality of religion, 164 Review, 3, 6, 14, 16, 28–9, 52, 54, 76, 82, 83, 84–103 advertisements in the Review, 104

“Advice from the Scandalous Club,” agony column in the Review, 87, 89 anti-theatrical, 143–4 change of title from A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France to A Review of the State of the British Nation, 28, 97 circulation of the Review, 88–9 credulity and skepticism, 167–8, 168–9 Daily Courant, quarrel with, 96 digressive manner, 95–7 educational project of the Review, 92, 95 independence in the Review, 93–4, 126 Lady Credit, 151–2 The Little Review; or, An Inquisition of Scandal; Consisting in Answers of Questions and Doubts, Remarks, Observations and Reflection, anticipation of later fictions, 89–90 Mackworth, Sir Humphrey, Defoe’s attack on his work-house proposal, 99–100 marketplace for print and the Review, 95 merchant class exalted, 387n money and its power, 154–5 novels and the Review, 103 “Mr. Review,” Defoe’s persona, 92–3 plague, warnings against, 302 public credit, 150 quoted in Sacheverell trial, 89 retail credit and “luxury,” 153 Scottish edition, 126 secular vs. religious in the Review, 100–2 stylistic variety in the Review, 97–9 trade, Defoe’s favorite topic, 145, 153–4 travels in the western counties, 114–15 Union of England and Scotland, enthusiasm for, 118 violence and the Review, 102–3 Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa (1747–8), 166, 217, 370n

403

Index Richelieu, Cardinal, Louis XIV’s prime minister, 85, 180 Richetti, John, 384n Ridpath, George, 97, editor of The Flying Post, 138, 141 Rivero, Albert J., 383n Robinson Crusoe (1719) [The Life and Strange, Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner], 175, 184–212 appropriation of the island, 192–3 autobiographical curiosity of narrator, 187 Crusoe as archetype, 185 deliverance in two senses, 211–12 dialogism, 207 dialogue of secular and religious, 200 discovery of the footprint, 201–2 enumerations and inventories, 190–2 experience and character formation, 196 figural realism, scriptural explanations, 199–200 formal realism, 185–6 identity formed, 205, 206–7 nominalism, 191 novel of ideas, 203–5 providential explorations, 193–6, 197–9, 208–9 secular and religious tracks, 188–9 transformation of Crusoe, 210–11 travel literature’s influence, 175 Rogers, Pat, 19, 324, 328, 363n, 386n, 387n Roper, Abel, editor of The Post Boy, 138 Roxana (1724) [The Fortunate Mistress or, a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, afterwards called the Countess of Wintselheim in Germany Being the Person known by the Name of the Lady Roxana in the time of Charles II], 236, 268–300 accumulation of wealth, 277–8, 283–5 amatory novel, 269 anonymity and secrecy, 286–7

delight in disguise, 292–3 heroine’s assertion of moral superiority, 274–5 improvisation and action, 276–8 manipulation of the natural, 281 masculinized heroine, 289 mistress-servant dialogue, 274 most distinctive character, 268, 271, 300 moral ambiguity, 270–1, 272–4 novelistic qualities, 291, 298–9 past and its persistence, 288–9, 294 performance, 278, 279, 280–3 reunion with Susan, her daughter, 296–8 scandal chronicle, 269 shift in chronology, 298–9 similarities with Moll Flanders, 295–6 Sir Robert Clayton, financial advisor, 283 “Royal Religion; being some Enquiry after the Piety of Princes” (1704), 82–3 Sacheverell, Henry, 21, 46, 50–1 popular Tory hero, 123–4 trial for seditious sermon, “In Perils Among False Brethren,” 89, 123–4 St. John, Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke, 122, 124, 126, 128, 141, 176, 178, 182–3 Schonhorn, Manuel, 78 Scott, Walter, 234 “A Seasonable Warning and Caution Against the Insinuation of Papists and Jacobites in Favour of the Pretender. Being a Letter from an Englishman at the Court of Hannover” (1712), 134 Secord, Arthur Wellesley, 28, 87 “The Secret History of the October Club: With some Friendly Characters of the Illustrious Members of that Illustrious Society” (1711), 130–3

404

Index compared to Manley’s New Atalantis, 130–1 satirical-political pamphlet, 130 Secret History of the White-Staff, Being an Account of Affairs under the Conduct of some late Ministers, and of what might probably have happened if Her Majesty had not Died (1714), The, 180–3 tabloid evasiveness, 181 idealized version of Harley’s conduct, 180–1 Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff, Purse and Mitre (1715), The, 183–4 attack on The Secret History of the White-Staff, 183 auto-critique of his own political writing, 184 effrontery and self-promotion, 184 Seidel, Michael, 380n Selkirk, Alexander, 175, 377n Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. With His Vision of the Angelick World. Written by Himself (1720), 168–9, 186–7 allegorical meaning of story, 186–7 providential presence in daily life, 168 sophisticated view of the devil, 169 vision of the angelic world, 169 Sherman, Sandra, 151–2, 375–6n Shinagel, Michael, 338 Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), The, viii, 20–1, 38, 40, 44–7 Sill, Geoffrey, 178, 179, 378n Socinianism, 81 “Some Reflections on a Pamphlet Lately Publish’d, Entituled, An Argument Shewing that a Standing Army is inconsistent with a Free Government” (1698), 73–4 “Some Remarks on the First Chapter in Dr. Davenant’s Essays” (1704), 79–80 South Sea Company, 149–50

Starr, G.A., 237, 239, 384n, 385n Steele, Sir Richard, The Tatler, 92; The Spectator, 317; interview with Alexander Selkirk, in The Englishman (1713), 377n Stubbes, Philip, 43 Sutherland, James R., 3, 8, 9, 15, 16, 96, 122, 127, 134, 341, 343, 361, 371n Swift, Jonathan, 1, 5, 125 “An Argument to prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England . . . (1708), 138 Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Book IV, 357 “A Letter Concerning the Sacramental Test” (1708), 35 “A Modest Proposal” (1729), 31 A Tale of a Tub (1704), 42 A System of Magick; or, A History of the Black Art (1727), 169 credulity satirized, 172 Talbot, Charles, 1st Duke of Shrewsbury, 178, 179, 182 Taylor, Charles, 205 Taylor, Jeremy, 354 Thomas, Dalby, 17–18 Thrale, Hester Lynch, vii Toland, John, Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), 81, 343 Tory election victory in 1710, 124 A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), 9, 323–36, 344 actuality prized above didactic, 335–6 attacks on predecessors, 327–8 dynamic plenitude, 325–32 commercial gentry celebrated, 327 culmination of Defoe’s writing career, 324 cycle of growth and decay, 328–9 Defoe as connoisseur of architecture, 325 dynamic plenitude, 325–6 elegiac sentiments, 329–30 hyperbole as main rhetorical figure, 328 lead miners in Derbyshire, 334–5 London’s inexhaustible quantities, 332–3

405

Index A Tour thro’ (cont’d ) natural and social process, 326–7 origin of A Tour, 328 Roman roads in Britain, 330–1 satire, 331–2 South Sea Bubble, 329, 330 vision of Britain, 324 Townsend, Lord Charles, 339 Treaty of Utrecht, 149 Trenchard, John, and Walter Moyle, “An Argument Shewing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government” (1697), 73 Triennial Act of 1694, 72 True Collection of the Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman (1703–5), A, 13, 18, 20, 55, 66, 115, 338 True Collection of the Writings of the Author of The True-Born Englishman, A, Volume 2, preface, 52 “The True-Born Englishman” (1701), 12–13, 21, 35, 61–4, attack on the poor, 144, 187 Tutchin, John, 5, 12, 47, 97 “The Foreigners” (1700), compared to Defoe’s “The True-Born Englishman” (1700), 61–2 “The Two Great Questions Consider’d. I. What the French King will do, with Respect to the Spanish Monarchy. II. What Measures the

English Ought to Take” (1701), 77–8 “The Two Great Questions Further Consider’d” (1701), 77–8 Union of England and Scotland, 115 “The Villainy of Stockjobbers Detected, And the Causes of the Late Run Upon the Bank and Bankers Discovered and Considered” (1701), 145, 146–7 Wall, Cynthia, 386n Watt, Ian, 185–6, 237 Watts, Isaac, 361 Wesley, Samuel, 67 “And What if the Pretender Should Come? Or, some Considerations of the Advantages and real Consequences of the Pretender’s Possessing the Crown of Great Britain” (1713), 134, 137–8 Whitman, Walt, 156 William III (1650–1702), king of England, ix, 11, 12, 39, 57, 59, 65, 72–3, 77–8, 116, 176 borrowing from Bank of England to finance war, 149–50 Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester, influence on Defoe’s verse, 55, 106, 338, 371n Zimmerman, Everett, 237, 268–9

406